I wrote to them on March 17 to ask for a reversion of rights, which they granted. On April 2, in New York, I had lunch with Ann Beneduce and Chancy Bennetts of the Juvenile Department of World Publishing.

  Chancy had once been a copy editor for Doubleday and I had met her in that capacity. She had done a particularly good job on one of my manuscripts and I got to tell her so.

  Since that occasion, I had discovered that Chancy was a cousin of Janet Jeppson, since Janet mentioned her in her letters. Chaucy was as tall as I was and in her younger days had been remarkably beautiful.170

  I showed them the manuscript and they suggested some minor changes. I made those changes, and by April 17 World Publishing had accepted it, so that The Best New Thing gained a new lease on life.

  25

  Things come in bunches. On April 8, I had lunch with Emilie McLeod of Atlantic Monthly Press. She was rather the opposite of Chaucy in appearance—tall, thin, and angular, but she was also lively and intelligent.

  Emilie wanted nonfiction rather than fiction, but also for grade-school children. I promised a children’s book on What Makes the Sun Shine?, which was the actual title proposed, but warned her that it might be quite a while before I would have a chance to start.

  26

  I was back in New York for the Lunacon. John Campbell was attending and I spent more than an hour with him and with Peg in their room, along with some others. We all talked, or rather Campbell talked and the rest of us occasionally interposed. It was quite like old times, and I could almost smell the old pulp magazines. I hadn’t had such an extended time with Campbell for at least a dozen years.

  Even better was spending some time the next day with Evelyn del Rey and getting to tell her how much her remark about me being the field had encouraged me and how much it had made it possible for me to continue writing science fiction.

  She and Judy-Lynn persuaded me to have a grasshopper and then, when I showed signs of wanting a second, they encouraged me to have that. After two grasshoppers, though, the signs of drunkenness became so marked that they did exactly what everyone always did under such circumstances—they banned all liquor from the table.

  27

  We had made friends with a Muriel and Howard Hirt, both of them teachers and both very fond of traveling. They had been to India several times, were fascinated by it, and, in fact, when we visited them, an Indian meal was invariably served.

  They were planning to go to Great Britain in the coming August and they suggested that Gertrude and Robyn go with them. (It meant flying, so there was no use asking me.) It seemed like a good idea all around, especially since neither Gertrude nor Robyn had ever been to Europe. On April 18, I sent in the money for a down payment on the travel fare.

  That same day, I was interviewed under what, to me, were the most flattering circumstances yet. A reporter from the New York Times wanted the background for a feature story on myself and my writing habits for the Book Review Section. The reporter was Lewis Nichols, an older, portly man getting on toward his retirement. He was efficient at his job; he asked intelligent questions quietly and took down the answers briskly. I enjoyed the interview, and I don’t always.

  28

  I drove down to Philadelphia with Gertrude and Robyn on April 21, when I was slated to give a talk at the University of Pennsylvania. “The talk was a screaming, howling success,” with a standing-room-only crowd, according to my diary.

  What made it most interesting, though, was that for the first time in a quarter century, I met some of my Navy Yard friends. Bernie Zitin was in the audience, along with his wife and son. His son looked so like him that, for a moment, I thought it was Bernie himself, miraculously unchanged over the decades, till I noticed the real thing, with iron-gray hair, standing next to him.

  Even more astonishing was Leonard Meisel, whose nose was unmistakable, but who was no longer bone-thin. Indeed, he was almost plump.

  I couldn’t believe it; I had always thought his excessive thinness was glandular and not subject to change. He seemed to enjoy my surprise and told me that his mother had steadily complained about his thinness until the day came when she began to complain steadily about his fatness.

  “I don’t recall,” he said, “that there was ever a day when she caught me en route and said, ‘Lennie, today your weight is just right.’ ”

  The next day we visited TV Guide at Radnor, Pennsylvania, where the editors crowded around to see my beautiful, blue-eyed, blond-haired daughter and to admit my description was accurate. We had lunch with them, and then, in the evening, had dinner at the Zitins’, with Meisel as another guest.

  On the twenty-third, we left Philadelphia, deliberately choosing a route that would lead us past Wingate Hall, which we had left twenty-four years before. Although downtown Philadelphia was built up and aglitter with glass-and-aluminum skyscrapers, West Philadelphia had deteriorated badly. Wingate Hall was still there, however, and we located the windows of our apartment as we passed. Robyn stared curiously at this place where her parents had lived a decade before she was born.

  We drove on farther to the Pennsylvania Dutch country, where we stopped at a restaurant that featured home-style meals. That is, you sat down at a meticulously clean wooden table with strangers. Introductions were made all around and then platter after platter of food was placed within reach and everyone helped himself ad lib. One of the platters was pork and sauerkraut and I nibbled at it cautiously, never having tasted sauerkraut and having avoided it deliberately because of the sound of its name. I discovered it tasted like coleslaw, only far better, and in no time I had devoured a gallon or so.

  The next day we drove to Poughkeepsie to visit the Fonoroffs, where they were now located since Bernie had a job with IBM—and then home. All in all, it was one of the most successful trips we had made as a family.

  29

  I had been called by a faculty member of Boston University to ask if I could give an address at the forthcoming initiation of new Phi Beta Kappa members.

  It touched a sore spot, which I thought I had long since conquered. Certain honors had eluded me in my school career. I had not made the Arista in high school and I had not made the Phi Beta Kappa in college.171 I had not thought of it for years but suddenly the prospect of cheering on new Phi Bets got to me.

  I said, coldly, “I’m sorry, but that might be embarrassing since I’m not a Phi Beta Kappa myself.”

  “Bless you,” said the faculty member, cozily. “We don’t mind.”

  I said, still more frigidly, “You don’t understand. I’m the one who minds.”

  Later that day, she called me back to tell me that at an emergency meeting of the council, I had been voted in as an honorary member. Well, that would do. It amounted to blackmail, I suppose, but I wasn’t going to be choosy in my method for gaining what I believed to be a just end. I agreed to give the talk.

  On May 2, 1969, I showed up on the main campus in order to be initiated. It turned out to be a little more embarrassing than I had counted on. Pecks and bushels of bright young, downy-cheeked collegiates were standing around in scarlet robes, and there was I, the only ancient, in a black robe—an old crow trapped amid a flock of tanagers.

  There was some secret material delivered only to the initiates, with all parents and other visitors banned, but I have forgotten it all, including the secret handshake by which one Phi Bet was to recognize another (during periods of oppression, I suppose, when open avowal of membership might lead to a concentration camp).

  Then, when the visitors returned, we went up on the stage one by one to be invested and to get our Phi Beta Kappa symbol. As I came up, grinning broadly, the woman who handed me the tieclip with symbol attached, whispered, “I’m dreadfully sorry. Dr. Asimov, but after the ceremony, please give it back and we’ll get you another one with your name spelled correctly.” I looked at the symbol handed me and there was my name—Isaac Isamov.

  “That’s all right,” I said. “I’ll keep it.”

  She found out why when I gave my talk to the new members, a talk that was full of phrases like “We Phi Bets . . .” and “. . . a Phi Bet such as myself.”

  In the talk, I told exactly how I had become an honorary member, with some humorous exaggeration, right down to being handed the misspelled symbol, and then gave my reasons for insisting on keeping it.

  “It will come in handy,” I said. “Naturally, a Phi Bet like myself is, above all, modest, and I would never think of thrusting forward my Phi Betitude in the faces of those less fortunately situated. Still, when I am wearing my tieclip, I can always point to it and say in an aggrieved tone, ‘Look at how my name is spelled on this thing.’ They will look and say, ‘That’s terrible. What is it?’ And I will say, ‘Oh nothing. Just an old Phi Beta Kappa symbol. Pay no attention to it.’ ”

  There followed the best laugh of the evening, one that was well worth the misspelling.

  Of course, it has turned out that I never wear the darn thing. I just wanted to be a Phi Bet for my own satisfaction. As far as others are concerned, just being Isaac Asimov (correct spelling) is enough, I guess.

  30

  Someone at Western Publishing had the idea of doing an anthology of science-fiction stories that could be useful in science classes. Stories would be chosen in which interesting scientific points were made (or violated). Each could be discussed by the editor, and topics for further discussion could be suggested.

  It struck me as a good idea. Although I found anthologies a drag, this one seemed to be in a good cause and to offer me an interesting opportunity to talk about science. I agreed.

  On May 4, when I attended the annual MIT picnic, I made an arrangement with some of them to make Xerox copies of particular stories from the magazines they had in their science-fiction library. They would send me the Xerox copies and I would do the rest. The anthology that resulted was eventually to be called Where Do We Go From Here?

  31

  On May 9 I was in New York, having lunch with Beth Walker. Apparently she was highly pleased with ABC’s of Space, for she insisted I do an ABC’s of the Ocean in the same format. I finally agreed, but with markedly less enthusiasm than I had in the first case.

  Later that day, I went down to Brooklyn to talk at Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute. I had been driven down to Brooklyn for the occasion, but I was willing to take the subway back to Manhattan. I agreed to do that with the casual self-confidence of the person who was brought up in New York and to whom subways were a home away from home.

  Alas, I had not used the subways in two decades and they had changed enormously. The lines had been shuffled around, and the maps were especially designed for incomprehensibility even when they weren’t covered with graffiti. I managed to get lost, to overshoot my mark, and to have to ask my way back.

  It was incredibly embarrassing and I have rarely used the subways since.

  32

  David arrived on a weekend’s visit on May 16, and on the eighteenth, I took him to a NESFA meeting in Somerville. He had not been with us the previous month, when we had seen our old apartment in Philadelphia, so this time I drove him past our old apartment in Somerville, which I myself hadn’t seen since we left it eighteen years before. It was the apartment in which David had been conceived, after all, so he stared at the building curiously as we passed.

  33

  On June 1, we were in Binghamton, where I gave a commencement address at Harpur College, a branch of the State University of New York. It was the first commencement address I ever gave, and as I sat on the stage in full academic regalia, and watched innumerable students advance to get their diplomas, I thought rather wistfully of my refusal to attend my own commencements, even that for the Ph.D., twenty-one years before.

  Now here I was, going through the same foolishness where I was not personally involved. And it was only the first. Since then, commencement seasons have never passed without my being in academic robes on some platform or other.

  29

  Farewell to My Father

  1

  The Hirts, who were looking forward to their trip to Great Britain with the female portion of the Asimov family, had suggested another trip in combination, but on a far smaller scale, and one in which I could join them.

  Their idea was that we visit the Concord Hotel in the Catskills, an old-fashioned but very elaborate Jewish resort. I did not really want to go, since I would much rather be home where I could work on the last stages of my Shakespeare book, but that seemed insufficient reason to deprive Gertrude, so I didn’t argue the matter.

  We left on Friday, June 6, with Howard Hirt driving and myself rather in a state of melancholia at what I was convinced would be a wasted weekend.172 In a kind of hectic reaction to that I began to tell jokes, more because any resulting laughter might perhaps ease the compressed ball into which my stomach had tightened than for any other reason.

  Muriel Hirt enjoyed herself tremendously and said, “Isaac, why don’t you write an Isaac Asimov Jokebook?”

  I laughed and said, “Who’d publish it?”

  She said, “I should think anything you write would get published.”

  In a way, she was right. I thought about it and a marvelous idea occurred to me. I could pass the weekend writing jokes. While everyone around me was going through all the horrifying ritual of vacationing, I could be managing to work.

  The Concord Hotel was as dreadful as I feared it might be. It was as gigantic and impersonal as a Manhattan apartment complex, and all its “vacation” appurtenances were crowded into uselessness. Nor were my fellow vacationers to my liking. At our table there was a couple who had read Portnoy’s Complaint and were astonished that I had not.

  “How can you not read a book,” they demanded, “that is on the top of the best-seller list?”

  “For the same reason,” I said, “that I didn’t read Mein Kampf, even though it was on the top of Germany’s best seller list.”

  After that, there was no conversation at the table.

  However, I borrowed a fistful of hotel stationery, and all that weekend I scribbled down jokes. Even while at the nightclub (the largest in the world, they said, and certainly the most brainless and noisiest) I saved my sanity by scribbling. I think some of the people near me thought I was an FBI agent taking notes, but I didn’t care.

  By the time I got home on Sunday evening, I had quite a sheaf of papers with handwriting all over it. The next day I typed it all up and went on to type additional material as well. It was not only jokes I was writing, but commentary as well. The commentary was not only on the jokes themselves, but also on my notions concerning the nature and function of humor, and on the techniques of telling jokes successfully.

  2

  On June 10 I had lunch with Bill Boyd. He had long since been divorced. He had a new companion whom he was planning to marry, and with her, he would leave Massachusetts permanently for a warmer climate.

  It meant that I would, quite possibly, never see him again, and that was a matter of regret to me. It had been twenty-two years before that I had first met him face to face. It was through him that I got my post with the med school and it was with him that I had done two books and gotten my entree into the world of nonfiction books.

  3

  I took my collection of jokes to Austin on June 12. It was only first draft and only a small portion of what I was planning to write, but I wanted him to get some idea of what I was doing.

  He looked a little uneasy when I began to tell him how I came to be writing a jokebook, but he was far too polite to say nasty things. I suspected he would, in the end, take the book—and he did. Muriel Hirt’s casual remark in the car thus came to fruition and, indeed, when the book was published, I dedicated it to her.

  4

  Carl Sagan was a patient at Massachusetts General. It didn’t seem as though he were in any particular danger at first, and when I visited him on June 18, we joked easily and made arrangements to have dinner, all four of us, when he got out.

  Then complications set in and he remained in the hospital for weeks. I visited periodically and sat with a rather distraught Linda and did my best to keep her calm. He recovered completely, of course, but it did keep him from participating in the forthcoming attempt to land a man on the Moon.

  Things were even more ironic in another way. On June 24, I received a call from Judy-Lynn to the effect that Willy Ley had just died at the age of sixty-two. Willy had spent almost his whole life enwrapped in rocketry. He was the world’s leading writer on the subject and from his teens he had had the one overriding ambition to see human beings on the Moon—and he died six weeks before the attempt was to be made.

  5

  I went to a Boston studio on July 7 to participate in a panel show and found, a little to my embarrassment, that Al Capp was a fellow panelist. We talked together easily, however, and neither one of us made any reference to that one-day conflict the previous September.

  6

  On July 17, I did another panel show, in New York this time, with Rod Serling moderating. Rod Serling, who had entered the science-fiction scene with his popular “Twilight Zone” series on television, introduced me as the “Peck’s bad boy of science fiction.”

  I wasn’t sure what he meant by that, but I think he was influenced by my suave manner toward the young women attached to the studio. Also influenced by that may have been Fred Pohl, who was a fellow panelist, and who said (when the cameras were not on), “Isaac Asimov turned into a dirty old man at the age of fifteen.”