What follows 99,999?

—the ‘Range Rider’ knows—Los Angeles Times, March 22, 1976

I came across a true artifact not long ago while browsing through some old notes and textbooks.  It is, beyond a doubt, one of the oldest items I have from those days when school wasn’t synonymous with training for a job.

This relic, my 1953 edition of a third-grade arithmetic book, Range Rider: Adventures with Numbers, is older than my Boy Scout manual, my coin collection or my English racer.

In the two decades that have passed since I learned to add, subtract, multiply and divide, I have steadily advanced, climbing to such heights as trigonometry, calculus, differential and statistical analysis.  But no course, no text has provided the pleasure rekindled by discovering this 23-year old edition of Range Rider.

In degree of difficulty, it followed immediately after Busy Beavers and preceded Straight Shooters and Airplane Aces.  It was several courses removed from the more difficult Home Run Hitters and Cage Champions.

These titles, while quaint and possibly amusing, actually fail to describe just what the particular subject matter was. For this reason, I shall offer a quick rundown of what we learned in the third grade, thanks to Range Rider.

In the beginning—to paraphrase another author whose habit it was to delve into the past—there was reading and writing numbers up to 99,999. This was where third grade stopped and what an appropriate place to pause. Imagine the suspense of waiting all summer to find out what came after 99,999.

From this meager beginning we leaped ahead to multiplying and dividing. But the most exciting facet of Range Rider is not what it taught, but how it taught. After reading countless college texts, I am convinced that they purposely remove any colorful tidbit of information that might make the lesson the least bit enjoyable. Not so in the third grade, and definitely not so in my Range Rider. It was a veritable treasure house of vital but unfortunately forgotten information.

For instance, I have always thought the Mississippi to be our longest river. Not so! The Mississippi is only 2,486 miles long; The Missouri is 2,945. Simple subtraction, as explained on the same page, shows that the Missouri is longer by 459 miles. There is no excuse for not knowing this.

Likewise, I can only assume that I was daydreaming about recess or writing notes to Sally when the following valuable figures were presented, for I have no recollection of them at all. The crown of the King of England contains 2,783 diamonds and 277 pearls. It’s all there on page 3 under the heading, “More Big Numbers from Geography.” The obvious question—and the book asks it—is, how many more diamonds are there than pearls? But I’m not giving away any more answers.

It wasn’t until I reached page 40 that I made my most important discovery. It was there that I learned, after 20 years of working with numbers, that I have been doing one procedure all wrong.

What I misunderstood so totally was the chapter on “Ghost Figures,” which explained the process of carrying over numbers when subtracting a large number from a smaller.

In the example, 727 minus 269, I now realize it is necessary to borrow the 10 from the 2 to make the 7 a 17, resulting in the 2, which is really a 20, becoming a 10.  Simple enough—and yet I have never in my life worked out a problem in this manner.

For some mysterious reason I have always followed the practice of adding 10 to the top making the 7 a 17 by simply picking it out of nowhere. Of course, since I added 10 to the top, I naturally had to do the same to the bottom, and so, I made the 60 a 70. Again, I picked this 10 from out of nowhere.

How could I have gone so wrong?  Again, I’m going to blame Sally.

The authors of Range Rider conclude this section with a very important final message. It enables us to become accountants, engineers and bankers. It enables us to build spaceships and calculate bowling scores. It is the message without which the computer, large and small, could not and would not exist.

The message is simply: One “ghost” follows another.

This rule meant nothing to me because I wasn’t using “ghost” figures—at least I wasn’t using their “ghost” figures the way they were using their “ghost” figures. I was simply pulling numbers out of thin air—and I didn’t give them fancy names.

Of course, not everything covered in Range Rider was of such earth-shaking proportions.  Some of it was much lower keyed.

Page 277, for instance.  Here we find Bobby in his garden. The date is May 10, and he has just planted some carrot seeds. The package says the carrots will be ready to eat in 70 days.  Bobby does some quick calculating and runs into the house to tell his mother to plan on cooking carrots for supper on July 19. No need to worry about dry spells or cold spells. No down time, no margin of error, no calculated risk. Definitely no rabbit sneaking into the garden. If only life were so simple!

In college, I used a slide rule. My kids used calculators. Today, people use their iPhone to determine how big a tip to leave the waitress. Not only can they subtract 269 from 727, but they can do logarithms. They are all amazing tools. They have made books like the Range Rider obsolete. But they can never make doing math as fun as Range Rider did.

To misquote Doc McCoy from Star Trek, I’m not a mathematician, I’m a writer. So it’s time to put my Range Rider, Adventures with numbers aside and check in on the adventures of Sally, Dick and Jane.

Like the time when Jane poured Puff’s milk in the bowl and Spot ran into her, splashing milk all over her and Dick. Now there’s a tale worth telling.  

                                                         

Postscript: This is a minor re-write of the original article, because I didn’t have kids at the time of the original or an iPhone back then.

A Tall Tale about a Stellar Visitor

              —Were those Oregonians better ‘Believers’?—Los Angeles Times, October 20, 1975

                                                                                                     

I’ve been keeping up with the story of the 20 Oregonians who have left their state with stellar hopes. According to press reports, a mysterious husband-and-wife team paid a visit and enticed them to sell their belongings, then move to Colorado—in preparation, supposedly, for some future trip into space.

This would be a very hard story for me to believe, verging almost on the impossible, except for one thing. I met the same man—or someone like him—about three years ago in San Pedro. Now I know what you’re thinking but it just isn’t so. I’m no kook or spiritualist or fanatic. Let me just tell you what happened.

I had been sitting in a bar—oh, maybe 15, 20 minutes at the most—when this man entered and sat down on the stool next to mine. There was nothing extraordinary about him. He was an older man dressed in rather comfortable clothes. He ordered a beer and, for quite a while, the two of us sat there staring at our bottles without exchanging a word.

I was preoccupied with the music coming out of the jukebox and he seemed to be mildly interested in the pool game being played just behind us. Then, suddenly, he spoke to me.

“Do you know what the answer is?”

“The answer?” I said, thinking he might have had one beer too many (though I knew otherwise from casual observation).

“Yes, the answer,” he repeated. “Do you know what the answer is? You look like a bright young man.”

I acknowledged the compliment, but assured him I had no idea what the answer might be. Perhaps, I suggested, he could give me a clue or a hint—like, maybe, the question.

“Wouldn’t you like to know?” he said. For a moment, the only sound was the cracking of pool balls, then he resumed. “I can’t give you the question. You’ll have to find that out on your own. I’m just down here to observe. But you looked like a pretty bright fella, and I thought maybe you might have known it.”

“The question, you mean?”

“Yes, young man, the question. I was hoping maybe you had tried to figure out the question—”

“And then I would know the answer?”

“It’d be a start. You certainly could not expect to know the answer before knowing the question.”

He had a point. I didn’t want to appear totally dumb, so I decided to ask some question—any question—just so he would know I cared. “You say you are only down here to observe. Do you mind if I ask where you’re down from?”

“Certainly not. I would expect you to be curious about that. I’m from Alpha Centauri.”

“Oh,” I said.

“You are familiar with it?”

“Well, let’s say I know of it. I never really met anyone from there before. You’re the first. But I knew it was there.”

“Yes. Well, it’s been quite some time, you understand, since I was there last. Roughly a million years or so.”

“That long?”

“Give or take an era,” he said. The reason he had been sent here, he went on, was to observe earthlings in whatever form we happened to be existing in.

At this point, I didn’t know whether to take him seriously or not, but I decided to play along, and what happened next certainly surprised me. I mean, if I was going to go into a strange bar and come off as a celestial being, an interplanetary visitor, I would certainly take a holier-than-thou attitude. I mean, I would immediately profess bewilderment and distaste for such things as war and starvation and corruption. That would just be an easy thing to do, a very natural thing.

But this man—he never told me his name—was quite understanding toward earthlings. Even, it seemed to me, rather generous. Sure, as he pointed out, we had our problems, but we weren’t doing all that badly. “No worse,” he said, “than anyone else in the universe.

“A couple of your wars have escalated out of all proportion,” he admitted, “and human beings do have a tendency toward improper priorities. But, all in all, you’re doing OK. As well as can be expected.”

“As can be expected.” I repeated his words, aware that he was suggesting we could possibly be doing better.

“Well, of course, there are certain things which someone like myself could tell you that would help matters.”

“Like the answer,” I said.

“If I was asked the right question.”

“But no one knows the question.”

“Ah, but it’s there, young man. It’s there—just like the box.”

“What box?”

“The box with the solution in it to solve all of man’s problems. I have it back at my place.”

As I was thinking what to say next, he ordered us two more beers. I tried to pay for mine, but he insisted on buying because, he said, it all went on his expense account anyway.

I asked again about the box. Was it like Pandora’s?

“Hardly,” he said. “No, I wouldn’t think so. See, I already know what’s in the box. And I’m the only one who could open it. You wouldn’t even be able to find it. I suppose I myself would even have trouble—you know how things get lost. I’ve picked up so much junk over the years…but I could find it if I had to. The point is, I already know what’s inside, so there wouldn’t be any surprise.”

“And you say it’s the solution to all man’s problems?”

“All of them.”

For a moment, again, we didn’t speak. I sat there staring into my Schlitz, thinking of all kinds of magic potions and serums and herbs and spices and gadgets and famous quotes and …

“I got it,” I said at last.

“Got what?” he asked.

“Spinach.”

“What are you talking about, young man?”

  

“Spinach. You have spinach in the box. Your name is Popeye and you’re not really from Alpha Centauri and you’ve got spinach in the box and you think you can lick the world.”

“Are you making a fool of me?”

“Are you making a fool of me?”

“That’s the trouble with you human beings,” he said. “You always think you know it all. That’s what I’ve noticed over the years. No one else can ever be right. You’re very much the disbelievers of the universe. But you’ll learn—someday you’ll learn.”

With that, he collected his change and walked out of the bar. I never saw him again.

At the time, as he said, I was rather a disbeliever. Knowing he couldn’t be drunk, I thought he must be some sort of crank, even though he didn’t talk nonsense. Now, after reading about those 20 people from Oregon, I don’t know what to think.

But I hope they like spinach…

Phil Terrana lives in Long Beach. In a note accompanying this article, he described it as a fictional account of a factual event which may have been fictional from the start.

Postscript: This was my first free-lanced article, and ironically my best paying one. I was enrolled in the Teaching Credential program at California State University-Long Beach at the time. The girls living in the apartment next to mine put the article in a plaque. This probably had something to do with my bragging about it.

I showed it to a professor who was teaching a course on composition writing. He told me he had been trying to get published in the “Times” for the last ten years. I told him he probably wasn’t spending enough time talking to aliens in bars.