The truth comes out

The moment I discovered I would never be a scientist came in fourth grade.

It didn't come at the start of fourth grade.

That fall, Paul Macklin was my teacher at Judge Haynes Elementary School, and his classroom was full of snakes and hamsters and science projects.

But the other thing that happened that fall, in October, was the launching of Sputnik.

And Sputnik changed everything.

Suddenly, America needed scientists and engineers. The Soviets were ahead of us in the race for space, and that created a tremendous amount of Cold War anxiety.

Where do you look for scientists and engineers? Elementary school, of course.

The pressure may have been subtle, but it was there. All of America was looking at science curriculum, and good students were being nudged in that direction.

The big nudge came from the science fair. As far as I know, there had never been a science fair in Jay County before Sputnik.

Even in that fourth grade year, Judge Haynes didn't have one. Instead, all area elementaries, junior highs, and high schools were now urged to encourage students to develop projects to take to the regional science fair at Ball State Teachers' College, as it was still known at the time.

At least half a dozen of us in Mr. Macklin's class had projects. One or two were miniature volcanoes, one of which was so volatile it was banned from Ball State and had to have a carefully monitored "eruption" later in the all-purpose room with custodian Homer Hummer standing at the ready with a fire extinguisher.

For reasons lost in memory, I hit on the idea of a weather station. Maybe I'd seen something on Mr. Wizard on TV. Who knows?

Whatever the impetus, it wasn't long before my buddy Mike Trobridge and I were trying to put the thing together.

To say it was primitive would be an understatement.

There was a store-bought thermometer, a handmade and inefficient weather vane to tell which way the wind was blowing, an equally ineffective thing with cups on it that would rotate to give a rough estimate of wind speed, and a barometer whose key ingredient was, as I recall, water with food coloring in it.

The barometer was homemade, of course, and to the best of my knowledge never worked.

All of this was attached to a pole which was affixed to a tripod base from an old music stand.

The real attraction of the weather station was that once a day Mike and I would get to leave the classroom and haul the thing outside. There we were supposed to record temperature, wind direction, and whatever the colored water in the barometer was doing at the time. We were also supposed to look at the clouds.

From all this, we were supposed to make a forecast of the next day's weather.

We would have done better if we'd been equipped with a dartboard and some darts.

Somewhere along the line, Mike dropped out of the project. My guess is that Mr. Macklin caught on that the two of us were having too much fun goofing around outside when we were supposed to be behaving like scientists.

At any rate, I think I was on my own when the whole thing was hauled, along with poster boards with Magic Marker scribblings on them, to the Teachers' College.

And that's when I discovered I was not a scientist. My approach to the whole thing had been that it was something to mess around with. I knew absolutely nothing - with the exception of the difference between cumulus and cirrus clouds - about the weather. I barely knew enough to come in out of the rain.

And suddenly these people, science fair judges, were asking me questions.

And it wasn't just the judges. The real moment of truth came when some kid - probably a fifth grader - from a Muncie school came up and started quizzing me about hail.

It took him roughly 30 seconds to expose me as a fraud and imposter. Certainly not a meteorologist. And definitely not a scientist.

It stung a bit. And the kid was smug about my ignorance. I remember wondering if he was going to rat me out to the judges.

But when I think about America's need to catch up in the space race and how little I could have contributed, perhaps it was all for the best.[[In-content Ad]]