The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy

IN MARYLAND, she allowed herself to acknowledge her secret talent. At night, when the women who performed the calculations were at their leisure, they entertained themselves with cards and songs and talk. One evening, not long after the group was assembled, one of the women said, “You know what we are, don’t you? Doing what we do? We’re a bunch of calculating women!” They took the name. ... Get fu...

In The Analytical Engine, Jeremy Bernstein outlines the project that Lorna described to Herb and Ella: IN 1943, the Moore School and the Aberdeen Proving Ground, in Maryland, were conducting a joint project involving the computation of artillery firing tables for the Army. The Moore School contingent . . . used a Bush analog computer and employed a hundred women to do hand computations as a necess...

     “You know,” Edwin interrupted, “a few months ago I built my daughter a sandbox. I had to figure out how much sand to get for it. Simple problem. Nothing to it. But a question popped into my head: how many grains of sand do I need? Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe

BEFORE THE WAR, the best slide rules had come from Germany. Now the need for slide rules — for calculating artillery trajectories, plotting courses, calculating wind drift, figuring time to target, and the like — was great and pressing. The production of slide rules became a defense industry, and domestic slide rule manufacturers scrambled to meet the nation’s computational needs. ... Get full acc...

IN DECEMBER, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. Buster Leroy enlisted in the navy. Everyone tried to convince him that he could do his duty just as well in the Coast Guard, but among young men in Babbington and many another seacoast town, the Coast Guard was considered a refuge, easy duty. If you were willing to put yourself to the test, you joined the navy. ... Get full access to The Personal Hi...

ELLA AND BUSTER AND BERT were great chums throughout their last years in high school. Ella was in love with both of the boys, and they were both in love with her, and they seemed quite content to have things stay just as they were. Herb and Lorna even thought that there was probably some safety in this arrangement, since Ella wasn’t likely to go to bed with either of them as long as she loved both...

     “Lorna,” whispered Herb. “Lorna, are you all right?” He stood at the end of the hall. “Oh, Herb,” she said. “I’ve had a wonderful idea. Look at these — oh — ” She wished she could tell him, right then, tell him that there was something about her that made her extraordinary. ... Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substac...

     That night, Lorna lay awake recalling the evening. When she closed her eyes she saw Buster’s face, his grin, his wink. She couldn’t get to sleep. She got out of bed. Herb was sleeping soundly. She put her robe on and walked down the hall. The bookcase that led to Mrs. Stolz’s room was closed. The door to Ella’s room was open. She was asleep, hugging her pillow. ... Get full access to The Pers...

EVERYONE was relieved when Ella fell in love with the Leroy brothers, no one more than Lorna. Ella brought the boys home one day after school, and surprised Lorna and Mrs. Stolz, who were in the kitchen. “Oh, my,” said Lorna. “Oh, my.” She wiped her hands on her apron. They were the handsomest boys she had ever seen, a pair of tall, sandy-haired guys with wide smiles and shining eyes. ... Get full...

     “Well, we wouldn’t want to interrupt them,” said Herb. As soon as the words left him, they sounded to him like part of an off-color joke, and he reddened in the dark. “I mean — ” he began, and he realized that he’d only make things worse by explaining himself, so he just stopped. ... Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.s...

     Herb and Lorna and Mrs. Stolz sat in uneasy silence for a few minutes, and then Herb said, with great calm, “She probably won’t be long. She’ll be back in a while.” A couple of minutes passed. “It could take as long as an hour, I suppose,” said Lorna. “Really?” said Herb. “Do you think it’ll take that long? To learn the parts of the frog?” ... Get full access to The Personal History, Adventur...

     Dudley began helping Ella with her schoolwork. He was more intelligent and better informed than any of her teachers. He did a better job of explaining what she was required to know, and he did more than that: he took her beyond what the school taught her in every subject. Ella thought that Dudley was fascinating (“dreamy”) and extraordinary (“a man in a million”), and she fell in love with hi...

IN THE SPRING of Ella’s sixteenth year (Herb’s forty-first, Lorna’s thirty-ninth), when Ella began to look more like a pretty young woman than a pretty young girl, Dudley Beaker, a bachelor for whom this was the spring of his twenty-eighth year, bought the house next door. Dudley was, for the neighborhood into which he had moved, something of an exotic. ... Get full access to The Personal History,...

     After a while, not even Herb really had any objection to Mrs. Stolz’s living with them. The ménage was a happy one, and he wouldn’t have done anything to disturb it. Within the first year, he had the den in habitable shape; Mrs. Stolz moved in, and Ella was able to sleep in the room that Herb and Lorna had intended for her. It took Herb another eight years to finish the den completely, but fi...

     Except for Lorna’s work in the cellar, Mrs. Stolz found that Lorna behaved as if she were as normal as anyone else. Mrs. Stolz considered this a miracle. Every night since her return, she had fallen to her knees beside her bed and prayed for Lorna’s sanity, and it seemed to her that her prayers had been answered — at least there were no screaming fits or mad scenes. Mrs. Stolz tried not to gi...

HERB BEGAN work on the new room at once. He persisted in referring to it as “the den,” in the hope — which he never expressed in any other way, not through any dropping of hints, not through any irony or the slightest ambiguity in his tone of voice — that before he had actually finished the new room Mrs. Stolz would have decided that she’d really rather return to the River Sound Hotel, and the roo...

     Mrs. Stolz was settled in her favorite chair, wrapped snugly in her old robe, eating, in small, luxurious bites, a chocolate cream from a box on the table beside her. A copy of Life was open in her lap, but she had stopped reading to watch the raindrops run down the window pane, and she was thinking how pleasant it was to be in such cozy quarters, in a place as snug as her old robe, a place t...

     That night Lorna and Herb lay awake in the dark, each thinking about the house, trying to remember it precisely, imagining life there, and trying to be still about it, in order not to wake the other, but neither was breathing like a person asleep, and finally the thought of crocuses coming up in the little lawn in the spring became so vivid in Lorna’s mind’s eye that she giggled from the plea...

     In the western part of Babbington, the part they had first entered on that rainy night when they arrived from Chacallit, they found a house that suited them. It was on an unnamed street off Bay Way, the road that led from Main Street to the bay. At the corner of this unnamed street was a sign, erected by the Babbington Department of Public Works, a sign with a temporary look, not the job of a...

     A coolness, a distance, had developed between May and Garth that made life at May’s less than pleasant. Lorna and Herb were always, awkwardly, in the middle, listening to the confidences of one or the other, trying to offer the right advice, trying to bring back the happiness that had been in the house not so long ago. ... Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Obs...

IN TIME, prosperity, at least relative prosperity, returned. The new management at Studebaker strengthened the company by eliminating weaknesses. They gave up on their unprofitable line of small, economical cars named for Knute Rockne, the football coach at Notre Dame, and sold the Peirce-Arrow company, which Studebaker had owned since 1928. By 1935, Studebakers were selling well again, and the co...

ON THE FIRST of July in 1933, Albert Erskine, who had been president of Studebaker when it went into bankruptcy, killed himself. The news sent a shudder through Garth, who imagined, unrealistically, that he might have felt driven to such an act if Herb hadn’t halted his downward slide. Herb and Garth heard the news about Erskine while they were in Boston, picking up a supply of coarse goods from U...

     Lorna and Herb sat up with May and listened to the whole horrible tale. “This is the end,” May said. “It really is. I can’t do anything for him, he won’t let me do anything for him, and he won’t do anything for himself. There’s nothing that can be done, nothing.” ... Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subsc...

     May was determined not to give up on Garth, but one frightening visit nearly drove her away from him. She had tried romance as a lure before and failed, but she had run out of ideas and so tried again, hoping that something, anything — a difference in the weather or the phase of the moon — would change her luck. She brought candles and wine and a good dinner to the cottage. She brought her fi...

THE YEARS that followed were difficult ones. The Studebaker Motor Company began clawing its way back. The Babbington dealership reopened, for three days a week, with a staff of two: Herb and Old Randolph. Herb was working on straight commission. Garth Castle did not come back. He lived at the beach, avoiding the company of anyone who made him feel that he ought to shake off this setback, pick hims...