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I was there for a couple of months when I got this call from my sister that Stefan... I had to do something about bringing Stefan down. Ted had set me up in near Mullica Hill, and that’s how Stefan came down and grew up as a country boy. And he has never... that impacted his life forever. He hung out with all these farmers and mechanics and so when we moved and I got married to Winnie, we moved over to Swarthmore in order to get, have a much more academic preparation, you know, because we wanted the kids to go to college. And it was a disastrous decision in Stefan’s case, because he was always a very mischievous kid, and he had been hanging out with all these farmers and mechanics, and he just liked to fool around and went out hunting. We had a stream right near the house where we had this big log cabin that we lived in, and out in the Thorofare to New Jersey, and he, when we moved to Swarthmore, Pennsylvania, he never could adjust to the academic. You know, these kids are all 90% going to college in Swarthmore, that is what you can imagine, and where he had gone to school down in Mullica Hill, it was probably just the opposite, 10% went to college. So, by the time he was about 14, I think it was, he’d had it and he ran away from home and went to live with his aunt in California, that’s his mother’s sister, and he grew... spent the next several years living with her. She was married to a black man, so he was living in a, you know, black neighbourhood and getting exposed to the civil rights movement and all that sort of thing. She was very much involved in that sort of thing. He then participated in... I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of a CORE? They had a demonstration at the Cadillac car agency and I think they were protesting at the fact that they didn’t hire blacks, or whatever it was, and there were dozens of them got arrested. They were doing a sit-in or something like that. And Stefan was brought before a judge and they were given a choice, you can either join the army or you can go to jail. So, that’s how he got in the army. And from there within 6 months he was in Vietnam. He had signed up for a regular 3-year hitch. And I think I mentioned before that when he got wounded in Vietnam he... I couldn’t get there for some reason, I wish I could remember the reason why, but Ralph Shaw went to visit him. Now, what that does remind me, because I just came visiting Stefan in Florida, when... I don’t know if you remember Mel Weinstock... Mel and I, you know, lived together for a while and we shared an apartment at Society Hill Towers. Mel was a guy that never went to sleep. I mean, he claimed he could deliver on 4 hours sleep. Of course, when you were working with him, you would notice that he would doze off in the middle of a conversation. He used to hang out at the Middle East restaurant because he knew all these women who were belly-dancers and so forth. It turns out that most of the women who were doing these exotic dances were... housewives with kids who would support with an extra job. And when Mel... Mel was a very funny guy, great musician, he played a beautiful French horn, he played in the Haddonfield Symphony Orchestra. And so I went over there a few times. One time I was in the Middle East restaurant, and the guy who owned it was this fellow Tayoun. I don’t know if you remember but later on he was sent to jail for getting involved in some kind of maybe murder rap, but definitely corruption of some kind. But while I was there Mel introduced me and he said his son is in Vietnam, and somehow he said he likes baklava, which Stefan had had, I think, at some point, I had gotten him some baklava. And Tayoun says, 'Oh'. A couple of months later I get a letter from Stefan, I probably still have it, Tayoun had sent him in the mail a huge baklava in a round tin, and he said when he received it they hadn’t eaten for a couple of days, they were almost literally starving, but the mail was delivered even though they weren’t getting any food, and they ate that whole baklava in one night, him and his buddies. You can imagine the amount of calories that there was. And Stefan still tells that story gleefully. But Vietnam was not a great experience for any of them, I guess, and when he came back... he was wounded twice, and then finally he was transferred, when he finished in Vietnam he was transferred to Germany, and then he was in the tank corps, I think, in Germany. Stefan had, you know... he knew some German, he had spent the summer... I sent him to stay with a friend of mine that I knew in Munich for the summer and he learnt to speak German. To this day he still speaks to people in German. And also when he meets people who speak Yiddish he uses German to speak Yiddish. That was a by-product of moving to Swarthmore.
Eugene Garfield (1925-2017) was an American scientist and publisher. In 1960 Garfield set up the Institute for Scientific Information which produced, among many other things, the Science Citation Index and fulfilled his dream of a multidisciplinary citation index. The impact of this is incalculable: without Garfield’s pioneering work, the field of scientometrics would have a very different landscape, and the study of scholarly communication would be considerably poorer.
Title: My son Stefan
Listeners: Henry Small
Henry Small is currently serving part-time as a research scientist at Thomson Reuters. He was formerly the director of research services and chief scientist. He received a joint PhD in chemistry and the history of science from the University of Wisconsin. He began his career as a historian of science at the American Institute of Physics' Center for History and Philosophy of Physics where he served as interim director until joining ISI (now Thomson Reuters) in 1972. He has published over 100 papers and book chapters on topics in citation analysis and the mapping of science. Dr Small is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, an Honorary Fellow of the National Federation of Abstracting and Information Services, and past president of the International Society for Scientometrics and Infometrics. His current research interests include the use of co-citation contexts to understand the nature of inter-disciplinary versus intra-disciplinary science as revealed by science mapping.
Duration: 7 minutes, 5 seconds
Date story recorded: September 2007
Date story went live: 23 June 2009