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.