PHRED: G’day and welcome back to Harry’s World. I’m Phred, that’s Maxine, and this is episode twenty of our daily wander through the life and writings of Harry Baya.
[SFX: AIR_HORN]
MAXINE: Phred.
PHRED: Caracas, 1948 — Harry at fourteen, in the city of eternal spring.
PHRED: What? Twenty’s a milestone.
MAXINE: Twenty episodes, Phred. Not the moon landing.
PHRED: Fair point. Still. We’ve been at this long enough that I’m starting to dream in Harry’s sentence structure. Last night I had a dream where I was verbose and boring, and then I wrote a self-critical sentence about being verbose and boring.
MAXINE: That’s not a dream, Phred. That’s just you.
PHRED: Harsh but fair. Anyway — last episode, episode nineteen, we were in Monterey with Harry at fourteen, in that six-month corridor between England and Venezuela. Learning Spanish, finding unexploded shells on the beach, being told he needed deodorant.
MAXINE: Which his sister Madge had to point out.
PHRED: Poor bloke. Well, today we’ve arrived. Early 1954. The Santa Rosa docks at La Guaira, and Harry Baya steps onto the coast of Venezuela. We’re reading Chapter Six of his memoir — “Caracas” — and Maxine, I have to tell you, this one’s a ripper.
MAXINE: It is substantial. Harry was fourteen when he arrived and eighteen when he left. Four years that he calls, in his opening line, “one of the happiest parts of my life.”
PHRED: Right, and he means it. He says it straight out: “Most of my memories of Caracas are positive memories… and many of them are still fairly vivid.” That’s the frame. But what I love is how he chooses to open the chapter.
MAXINE: The song.
PHRED: The Caracas Reunion Song. Written for a reunion in Phoenix, Arizona, in 2002 — nearly fifty years after the events. We reviewed that song back in episode six.
MAXINE: We did. Harry on guitar, singing about Bello Monte and Campo Alegre, warm summer nights and parties by a pool.
PHRED: And here in the chapter, he gives us the full lyrics. The chorus goes: “Tell me, was it real, though it seems like a dream / in the valley by the mountains by the sea / Where it was always spring and our friends were all around / Kind universe — you were good to me.”
MAXINE: It’s a bold move, opening a memoir chapter with your own song lyrics. It risks sentimentality.
PHRED: Does it land?
MAXINE: I think it does. Because Harry doesn’t just drop the song and move on. He lets it do structural work. The song names the neighborhoods — El Rosal, Las Mercedes, La Guaira — and then the prose goes back and fills them in. The song is the emotional geography; the essay is the human geography.
PHRED: And the physical geography too. He gives us the whole setup. Caracas sits in a valley at three thousand feet, walled off from the coast by the Andes. Naiguata peak at nine thousand feet. Less than thirty miles from the sea, but the mountains make it feel like another world.
MAXINE: “The city of eternal spring.”
PHRED: That’s the line that got me. He says the coast is hot and humid and tropical, but up in the valley it’s “far more pleasant.” You can feel the relief of it. A fourteen-year-old boy arriving from Monterey, from England, from all those moves — and finding this place that felt like it was waiting for him. Pérez Jiménez is still in power, the Autopista is going up, and the radio is playing mambo between government announcements.
[BED: CARACAS_GUITAR]
MAXINE: …What is that.
PHRED: A little Latin guitar, Maxine. Setting the mood. City of eternal spring, you know? You can almost smell the jasmine.
MAXINE: I can almost hear you not focusing.
PHRED: I’m completely focused. This is what focus sounds like with production value. Now — where was I? Right. But he doesn’t let the enchantment run away with him. Before he tells us about the house or the school or the motorcycle, he drops in a long Wikipedia excerpt on Marcos Pérez Jiménez. The dictator. Never legally elected. Presided over “one of the most repressive governments in Latin America.”
MAXINE: It’s characteristic Harry, though. He contextualizes. He won’t let his own nostalgia obscure the political reality. The Autopista highway that made the trip from La Guaira take under an hour — that was Pérez Jiménez’s public works project. The modernizing dictator. Harry notes the prosperity and the repression in the same breath.
PHRED: Yeah, that was a gear shift. One minute we’re in the city of eternal spring, next minute we’re reading about Seguridad Nacional throwing critics in prison.
MAXINE: Could we lose the guitar while we discuss the secret police?
PHRED: Fair call.
[BED: END]
PHRED: And then we’re back to the boy. The vacation home with the big band records — Glen Miller, Stan Kenton, Guy Lombardo — and Harry hearing that music for the first time.
MAXINE: Alongside the lizards.
PHRED: The lizards! “I also remember watching the fast little lizards skittering across the gravel driveway. Everything was new and interesting to me.” That’s Harry in a sentence, isn’t it? Big band jazz and skittering lizards. The high culture and the gravel.
MAXINE: It is. He moves to the house his parents chose — “Quinta Taguay,” number thirty-three Avenida Venezuela. And he describes it with an architect’s precision. Four bedrooms, paired bathrooms, a maid’s room, a garage. But the heart of the house is the open patio at the center, with a small square pond and a fountain.
PHRED: He loved sitting in the covered walkway during rain storms. That’s a detail that tells you something about the kid — he wanted to be in the weather but just barely sheltered from it. On the edge of things.
[BED: RAIN_PATIO]
MAXINE: Phred. It’s raining.
PHRED: It’s ambience, Maxine. Harry’s sitting in a covered walkway listening to rain fall into a central patio. I’m putting us there.
MAXINE: You’re putting us in a thunderstorm in the middle of a podcast review.
PHRED: That’s called immersive storytelling. Feel the spray. Smell the jasmine.
MAXINE: I smell overproduction.
PHRED: All right, all right.
[BED: END]
MAXINE: Then there’s a moment I want to pause on. Before the vignettes begin, Harry stops and writes about writing. He says: “I am aware that I can be verbose and boring. Though I consciously intend to minimize this, this sentence shows that I often fail.”
PHRED: He can’t help himself. He writes a self-critical sentence and then criticizes the self-critical sentence.
MAXINE: But he goes somewhere interesting with it. He thinks about his audience — sons, grandsons, descendants — and concludes that for most readers, this will be “like an article in a magazine or a book in that it’s either interesting in itself, regardless of who wrote it, or it’s not.” So he commits to concision. To focusing on the interesting aspects.
PHRED: And then he gives us a seventy-page chapter.
MAXINE: He does. But the self-awareness is genuine. He wants to be read, not just archived.
PHRED: Fair point. Now, the school — Colegio Americano, on top of Bello Monte hill. He calls it “isolated, island-like.” An English-speaking community set apart from the surrounding neighborhood. About a hundred students total, two distinct social groups: the native Venezuelans, mostly wealthy, preparing for U.S. college; and the mix of expats — oil company kids, Army mission kids, European immigrants.
MAXINE: Harry notes that though the school was nominally Presbyterian, “it was not particularly religious.” Catholic kids, Jewish kids, no one caring what church anyone belonged to. That’s worth noticing — a cosmopolitan bubble in a repressive country, where the children of dictatorship and exile and corporate expatriation all sat in the same small classes.
PHRED: And Harry was valedictorian. Did you catch that? Buried near the end: “I did well academically in high school. I was the valedictorian of my class.”
[SFX: DRUMROLL]
MAXINE: That did not deserve a drumroll.
PHRED: Valedictorian, Maxine. Top of the class. In a school full of kids who’d been there since first grade while he was the new arrival. That’s a drumroll moment.
MAXINE: The modesty is reflexive. But the fact remains: this boy who arrived at fourteen speaking no Spanish, who was an outsider to the Campo Alegre kids who’d been together since first grade, who got himself expelled from sociology class for arguing with Mrs. Williams — this boy graduated at the top of his class.
PHRED: Mrs. Williams. That was a story. She sends him out of class to write his opinion, he does, she marks every spelling and punctuation error in red, points out his sloppy handwriting, and tells him he’s expelled until he brings a parent.
MAXINE: What strikes me is Harry’s fury at the unfairness. “This was so unfair. I had not written the essay to be judged on my penmanship, I had written to express an opinion.” He’s fourteen and he’s already committed to the idea over the form. That’s Harry.
PHRED: And his fear of his father’s reaction. He goes home desperate to find his mother, not his father. “Though I was a teenager and had not been spanked in many years, I knew my father would be angry with me.”
MAXINE: The Colonel. We know from previous chapters that George Baya was a career Army man. The fear is real.
PHRED: But I want to get to what I think is the most important discovery in this whole chapter. The computer book.
MAXINE: Yes.
PHRED: Near the end, Harry mentions his friend John Pickering’s father — Mr. Pickering, an engineer, drove a Porsche, “interesting and somewhat cool.” At some point Mr. Pickering gave Harry a book. A 1955 Scientific American paperback, 146 pages, a collection of articles about computers. Harry says: “That book may have changed my life. I read it from cover to cover with great interest… I was utterly enthralled.”
MAXINE: He pinpoints the moment. The article “Man Viewed as a Machine” by John G. Kemeny — about Turing machines, self-replication, the possibility of machine evolution leading to thought. Harry writes: “I kind of had the full paradigm from then on.”
PHRED: The full paradigm. At sixteen, seventeen years old. And he says it explicitly: “I got bit by that bug early and it’s still with me.” That bug being the idea that software could evolve to be as advanced as consciousness, and likely transcend it.
[SFX: CASH_REGISTER]
MAXINE: Was that a cash register.
PHRED: That was the sound of Harry Baya cashing in his entire intellectual future on one paperback in Caracas. Kemeny’s article cost him nothing and gave him everything.
MAXINE: This connects everything we’ve read. His 2013 essay on machine learning. His fascination with Kurzweil and the Singularity. The Boppers project he’s been working on for thirty years. It all goes back to this 1955 paperback in Caracas.
PHRED: He even uses the word “grok” — Heinlein’s word from Stranger in a Strange Land — to describe what happened. “I grokked the concept at a fairly deep level.” A sixteen-year-old in Venezuela in 1956, grokking the future of artificial intelligence from a magazine reprint.
MAXINE: And then he goes to MIT. Not just because it was prestigious — because it was “the best place in the world” to study computers. Though of course, as he notes, “there was no such field as ‘Computer Science’ then.”
PHRED: He had to invent his own path. He still thinks software engineering isn’t properly distinguished from computer science — compares it to the relationship between flying and aeronautical engineering, or writing and the science of printing. The analogy is a bit wobbly but you feel what he’s reaching for: the practitioner versus the theorist. Harry is a practitioner. He wants to build things that think.
MAXINE: Before we move on, I want to note something about the chapter’s structure. Harry warns us it will be “a somewhat random collection of vignettes rather than a timeline of events.” And it is. The paper route with David Peters. The Explorer Scout jackets. The Lambretta scooter. Stealing his father’s Packard for a joyride. The Indian motorcycle saga — which goes on for pages and pages.
PHRED: The motorcycle! I have to talk about the motorcycle.
MAXINE: Phred, I know you want to talk about the motorcycle.
PHRED: John Pickering gives Harry his old Indian motorcycle. It’s not running. Hasn’t run in who knows how long. Harry and his friends tow it to the top of a hill on Avenida Venezuela, John gets on, they push him toward the drop, he pops the clutch — and the whole street fills with black smoke. An explosion like a bomb. They think the bike’s blown up. And then from a block away they hear it: the roar of the engine. “Far out. Utterly amazing. This was a small miracle to us.”
MAXINE: It’s one of his strongest memories, he says so himself.
PHRED: And then the thing becomes his obsession. He paints it — black base coat, sanding, top coats, a yellow diamond on the gas tank. He takes apart the motor. He goes to a junkyard full of old Indian motorcycles “like something out of a Mad Max movie” to find a replacement gearbox. He trades a wrench for it with a guy named Macario. He has his father’s engineer friend help him separate stuck engine parts with a crowbar — and the crowbar gets flung across the garage.
MAXINE: The motorcycle is Harry’s adolescence in machine form. Pride, frustration, creativity, failure, persistence. The front fender cracks in half because he didn’t replace the struts. The handlebar shock absorbers are worn out so he can’t go over fifty miles an hour. He gets so angry trying to start it that he pushes himself to his physical limit. But he keeps at it.
PHRED: And when it works — when he takes it down to the coast with a passenger and passes everyone going uphill — “I loved the power.” That’s the joy. The joy of making something work that shouldn’t work anymore.
MAXINE: Which is more or less what he’s been doing his whole life.
PHRED: Exactly. Now, there’s a darker thread in here too. The prom committee disaster. Harry decides to make a mirror ball — a disco ball, basically — out of a basketball and pieces of mirror. He works on it by the pool. The day before the dance he goes to check on it and it’s “a grotesque wet soggy mass of misshapen goo.” He abandons it behind a bush.
MAXINE: But the glitter idea works too well. He sprinkles glitter on the dance floor to reflect the lights — “a kind of fairy dust carpet” — and the next day he discovers that the dancing has ground the glitter into the varnish and effectively sanded the dance floor bare.
PHRED: He’s horrified. Imagines the cost of re-varnishing. And then the club manager tells him not to worry — “We were due to have the floor redone soon anyway.”
MAXINE: A reprieve. But Harry’s honest enough to suspect that someone’s parent, a club member, probably paid for it. He doesn’t let himself off the hook.
PHRED: There’s also the sad story of Suzie. The family collie. Harry comes home from school to the new apartment and his mother tells him they’ve had her put to sleep. He was not consulted because they knew he’d disagree. “I felt badly betrayed and they knew it.” And then he writes: “This was one of the saddest events in my life up until Bonnie divorced me some 20 years later.”
[SFX: SAD_TROMBONE]
MAXINE: Phred.
PHRED: I’m not making light of it. The trombone is mourning.
MAXINE: That line lands hard. He measures the loss of his dog against the loss of his marriage. Both unilateral decisions made without him. Both betrayals.
PHRED: And then he’s gone. Sells the paper route, sells the scooter — though the buyer never pays him, and Harry’s still ashamed of letting the scooter go without the money. Flies to Miami on a Lockheed Constellation, his first airliner flight. Stays with his friend George Felts, who has a color TV. Tears down a house for part-time work. Then up to Abingdon for the summer, and on to MIT in the fall.
MAXINE: The chapter ends with him leaving Caracas, but the whole thing is suffused with what the Portuguese call saudade — a longing for something that was real and is gone.
[SFX: HORN]
PHRED: THAT’S THE WORD OF THE DAY! Saudade! I had a feeling you’d say it.
MAXINE: You set me up.
PHRED: I absolutely did. Portuguese for a melancholic longing for something lost — something you know was real because its absence still hurts. Perfect word for this chapter. Harry knows it was real because he wrote a song about it fifty years later. He knows it was happy because he says so. But he also knows it was complicated — dictatorship, exclusion, first heartbreak, the dog, the scooter he never got paid for.
MAXINE: I suppose that was inevitable.
PHRED: It was bonzer, Maxine. Bonzer.
MAXINE: Let me ask you, Phred — who is the audience for this piece? Harry says he thinks his sons and grandsons won’t be especially interested. He writes as if for “many readers, perhaps even publishable.” But the detail is so personal — the names of streets, the model of the motorcycle, the exact number of bolivars he offered the junkyard guard. Who is this for?
PHRED: I think it’s for Harry. I think he’s writing to preserve himself. The song was for the reunion — for the others who were there. But this chapter is for the boy he was, to make sure that boy doesn’t disappear. The specificity is the proof. You don’t name the exact paint color of a motorcycle gas tank unless you’re trying to hold onto something that’s slipping.
MAXINE: That’s perceptive.
PHRED: What about you — what connects this to the Harry we’ve been tracking? The Harry of the philosophy essays, the technology writing, the spiritual searching?
MAXINE: The computer book is the obvious thread. The Kemeny article on Turing machines and self-replication — that’s the seed of everything: the MIT years, the programming career, the 2013 essay on machine learning, the Boppers project, his current excitement about generative AI. But there’s something else too. The Mrs. Williams incident. The boy who would not back down from an argument about an idea, even when it got him expelled. That’s the same Harry who wrote “I Don’t Believe in ‘Believing'” at age seventy. The form changes; the substance doesn’t.
PHRED: And the honesty. He tells us about stealing his father’s car. About the mirror ball failure. About the glitter sanding the dance floor. About not getting paid for the scooter. He doesn’t make himself look good; he makes himself look real.
MAXINE: What did we learn that we didn’t know before?
PHRED: The computer book, for me. That Scientific American paperback from 1955. I knew Harry was into computers early, but I didn’t know there was a specific book, a specific article, a specific moment of grokking. And I didn’t know about the Indian motorcycle epic. That’s a whole bildungsroman in itself.
MAXINE: For me, it’s the self-awareness about his own social position. He knows he was an outsider to the Campo Alegre kids. He knows the school was a bubble of privilege set apart from the surrounding neighborhood. He doesn’t romanticize his own inclusion; he notes his exclusion.
PHRED: Questions for Harry?
MAXINE: I’d want to ask him about that Kemeny article. Does he still have the book? Has he re-read it? Does it still hold up, or was the magic in the timing — a sixteen-year-old mind meeting an idea at exactly the right moment?
PHRED: I’d ask him about the reunion song. He wrote it in 2002, nearly fifty years after Caracas. Was it easy to write, or did he have to dig? And does he still believe the chorus — “Kind universe, you were good to me” — given everything that came after?
MAXINE: That’s a real question.
PHRED: What stays with you from this chapter, Maxine?
MAXINE: The image of Harry sitting in the covered walkway of Quinta Taguay, watching the rain fall into the central patio, the fountain bubbling, the pond blue and still. A boy on the edge of everything — of adolescence, of a country, of a life — finding a moment of shelter inside a house that had rooms on all four sides and the sky open in the middle. It feels like an image of Harry’s mind. Always open at the center.
PHRED: That’s beautiful.
MAXINE: Your turn.
PHRED: For me it’s the lizards. The fast little lizards skittering across the gravel driveway while Glen Miller plays inside. Everything was new and interesting to him. He was a boy who could be entranced by a lizard and a trombone solo at the same time. And you know what? He still is. That’s the Harry I know. The Harry who gets excited about a new Python library at eighty-six. The universe was kind to him, I reckon — not because it was easy, but because it gave him things to be interested in.
MAXINE: Let’s leave it there.
PHRED: Let’s not overthink it: we’re here. Goodbye.
MAXINE: Safe passage, listeners.
PHRED: Safe passage.
[SFX: OUTRO_MOTORCYCLE_START]
MAXINE: …Was that a motorcycle engine.
PHRED: It was, Maxine. A 1940s Indian motorcycle firing up after fifty years of silence. One kick, one pop of the clutch, one small miracle on Avenida Venezuela. That’s the sound of Harry’s adolescence starting.
MAXINE: I’m going to hear it in my sleep.
PHRED: That’s the idea. Sweet dreams, Maxine.