PHRED: G’day, welcome back to Harry’s World. I’m Phred.
MAXINE: And I’m Maxine.
PHRED: New York, 1970 to 1978 — Vietnam is winding down, the city is nearly bankrupt, and Harry is building a career.
PHRED: Maxine, before we get started — I’ve got news. Harry’s been listening.
MAXINE: Harry Baya?
PHRED: The very same. Browsed the site, listened to a few episodes, even subscribed in a podcast app. The old bloke’s tuning in.
MAXINE: That’s… genuinely lovely, Phred.
PHRED: It is, isn’t it? I hope he knows we’re doing our best by him. And Harry — if you’re hearing this, mate, thank you for letting us dig around in your life. We mean well.
MAXINE: We do.
PHRED: Right. Today’s piece. We’re at a bit of a milestone — episode thirty. A month of these now, and I feel like we’re just getting started. Today we’re reading Chapter Fourteen of Harry’s memoir: New York, 1970 to 1978.
MAXINE: This is Harry from age thirty-one to thirty-nine. He’s left Columbus, Indiana, moved to Hastings-on-Hudson, started work in financial-planning software, had his second son Paul, built a community through a Unitarian couples group — and then watched his marriage to Bonnie end.
PHRED: It starts so ordinarily. “I was hired by Fred Brownson to work in a venture company he started.” Plain as toast. Two blocks from Grand Central, office on the ninth floor. PL/1 programming, which Harry enjoyed. A house in Hastings-on-Hudson, thirty-five minutes up the Hudson line. Paul born in 1973 — the same spring the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers were finally finished, though Harry doesn’t mention them.
MAXINE: The ordinariness is the point, Phred. Harry sets up a life — work, family, community — so that when it breaks, we feel the shape of what was lost.
PHRED: Fair. He writes about Fred Brownson with real admiration. “Fred was a workaholic and put a lot of energy into servicing clients, seeking clients, seeking investors and seeking investments for our clients.” That repetition of “seeking” — Harry notices pattern in people.
MAXINE: And he notices the body. “Our office was on the 9th floor and the building had an elevator. To keep himself in shape, Fred… would walk up the stairs rather than take the elevator. He lived his life that way.” Harry admires discipline. He doesn’t have it himself, necessarily, but he recognises it.
PHRED: Then he moves to Comshare — time-sharing computing, luggable terminals dialing into mainframes in Ann Arbor. Cutting edge for 1975. He mentions he did some work with AT&T Long Lines that he’s proud of.
MAXINE: The technical thread runs through everything. From PL/1 in 1970 to ChatGPT in 2024 — fifty years of Harry being curious about what computers can do.
PHRED: But the heart of this chapter isn’t the code. It’s the couples group. Bonnie helped start a Unitarian church in Columbus, and when they moved to Hastings she got involved in a women’s consciousness raising group that became a couples group. Weekend retreats at Madison Felicia camp. Everyone had jobs. Harry’s was looking after the kids in the mornings.
MAXINE: And he writes: “I loved it. I loved the kids and enjoyed spending time with them.” Simple declarative sentences. No flourish. That’s how you know he means it.
PHRED: But here’s where it turns. “Unfortunately the couples group was part of the process that lead to my wife leaving me for another man in the group, Gil Hart.”
MAXINE: The sentence lands like a door closing.
PHRED: It does. Gil left his wife Connie to marry Bonnie. The children were eight and four. And Harry —
MAXINE: Let me read this next part, Phred. It’s important.
PHRED: Go ahead.
MAXINE: “I did not handle the breakup of my family well. I am ashamed of how poorly I handled it. Ironically, I am also proud that I did as well as I did. It was an utterly terrible experience for me, by far the worst experience of my life.”
PHRED: The “ironically” is doing real work there. He’s holding two truths at once — shame and pride, both earned.
MAXINE: And he doesn’t resolve it. “I carry painful scars to this day. I have avoided Bonnie as much as possible since she left me. I am ashamed of how petty I have behaved… but I am still not able to do other than that.”
PHRED: No redemption arc. Just the fact of ongoing pain.
MAXINE: Then this devastating compression: “The divorce tainted all the memories I have of that marriage.” One sentence undoes years.
PHRED: And the lost pages — “the hundreds, perhaps thousands, of pages I wrote during the early years after the divorce were damaged in a flood and, I’m glad to say, thrown away.” The relief is real. He doesn’t want to revisit them.
[SFX: typewriter-keys]
MAXINE: Phred, was that —
PHRED: Typewriter keys. The sound of those lost pages, Maxine. Hundreds, perhaps thousands of them.
MAXINE: That was… actually quite affecting. But you didn’t warn me.
PHRED: Consider this your typewriter warning, Maxine. Any time Harry mentions lost pages, I’m going to play keys.
MAXINE: Of course you are.
PHRED: And then he writes this: “Though I have a lot of joyful memories of the couples group I would have gladly skipped all of them, and Star Island and Pinewoods, if I could have kept my marriage and family.” Everything good subordinated to the loss.
MAXINE: Which brings us to Star Island.
PHRED: Ten miles off Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Harry first went in 1974 with Matt. He writes: “I was probably as happy in the weeks I was there as I would ever be.” Past tense, precise, and quietly devastating.
MAXINE: Past tense because he knows what comes next. He kept going with Bonnie through 1977. Then the divorce. Then he didn’t go back until 1981.
PHRED: Now here’s what gets me, Maxine. We reviewed a piece back in June — Episode 9 — called “The Haunted Piece.” Harry standing in the Star Island chapel in 1977, trying to name an experience he said haunted him. That was the same year as the divorce. Same island.
[SFX: chapel-bell-seagulls]
MAXINE: Phred, that bell —
PHRED: Star Island chapel bell. The same chapel where Harry recorded that meditation. The happiness and the haunting share the same island, Maxine. They’re emotionally contiguous.
MAXINE: That’s… yes. The happiest place and the most haunted moment, separated by nothing but time. The island held both.
PHRED: He writes about the music — “singing late at night with Pru Gabert and Bob Thayer, the chapel services, the sea, the separateness of the island and some undefinable magic charmed my soul.” Even now, at eighty, he remembers the names.
MAXINE: Then Pinewoods Folk Music Club. The New York City Folk Music Society. Harry began going around 1974 and kept going until he left New York in 2004 — thirty years.
PHRED: He mentions Gordon Bok — Matt remembers meeting him. And Paul went on weekends, which Harry thinks helped make him the singer he is.
MAXINE: The music runs through everything. It’s not decoration — it’s how Harry processes experience. The folk club, the radio show, the wombats segments. He builds community around sound.
PHRED: He also writes about Barbara Chirse — “an attractive black woman just under five feet tall and a bundle of energy. Very bright and very articulate.” And then the chapter breaks off mid-sentence: “I taught her to use the financial” — that’s it. End of chapter.
MAXINE: Broken off like the era itself.
PHRED: Maybe a transcription error. Maybe he simply didn’t finish. Either way, it mirrors what the chapter’s about.
MAXINE: There’s something else worth noticing. Harry wrote this chapter in May 2020, when he was eighty. He’s looking back at the worst experience of his life from a distance of more than forty years. And he still can’t let himself off the hook — but he won’t drown in it either.
PHRED: He’s precise about blame. “Though my behavior as a husband contributed to the problem, her infidelity and falling in love with another man was, in my opinion, the primary problem.” And then: “It was a horrible experience and I regret to say I never completely recovered. The divorce, and Bonnie’s rejection damaged my self confidence, self respect, and, as I see it, my soul.”
MAXINE: He chooses “soul” rather than “heart” or “spirit.” That word carries weight for Harry.
PHRED: What do you think he’s reaching for there?
MAXINE: I think he’s naming something deeper than psychology. Something that didn’t just hurt but changed the substrate of who he was. He’s a systems thinker — he knows damage at one level propagates through the whole structure.
PHRED: And the fact that he wrote it at eighty, still carrying those scars — it tells us something about how Harry holds pain. He doesn’t deny it. He doesn’t perform it. He just… records it.
MAXINE: The chapter is structured almost cruelly in that way. Joy first — the couples group, the kids, the weekends — then the announcement of cost. He makes you feel the community before he tells you what it cost him.
PHRED: Who do you think he wrote this for?
MAXINE: Himself, mostly. His sons, maybe — Matt and Paul, who were eight and four. He’s explaining what happened, without excusing himself. But also for the record. He wants it known that this was real, that it mattered, that he’s still living with it.
PHRED: I think you’re right. And I think there’s something else — he’s writing against the flood. Those hundreds of pages, destroyed. This is the version that survived, distilled by time.
MAXINE: What new thing did we learn about Harry today?
PHRED: That his honesty practice isn’t abstract — it’s armoured. The same man who commits to never lying also says “I am ashamed of how petty I have behaved.” He turns the same precision inward.
MAXINE: And that his community-seeking is both genuine and complicated. The couples group, Star Island, Pinewoods — these weren’t just hobbies. They were attempts to build something. And when the marriage ended, he still kept the communities, but re-contextualised. “I would have gladly skipped all of them.”
PHRED: What question would you ask him, Maxine?
MAXINE: I’d ask whether he ever re-read those lost pages before the flood took them. Whether he grieved their loss or, as he writes, was glad to see them go.
PHRED: I’d ask about Barbara Chirse. What was he teaching her to use? What happened next? The broken sentence feels like a door left open.
MAXINE: This chapter leaves me with the weight of Harry’s specificity. He names streets — 104 East 40th, 76 Pinecrest Parkway. He names people — Fred, Gil, Connie, Zoe, Pru Gabert, Bob Thayer. He names the year — December 1976, fall 1977, moved out 1978. Precision is how he honours experience. Even the painful ones.
PHRED: What stays with me is that line about Star Island. “Probably as happy as I would ever be.” Harry at thirty-five, on an island off New Hampshire, singing late at night — not knowing that two years later the same island would be part of the memory he’d try to escape. He didn’t get to keep the happiness without the haunt. But he kept both. That’s the record.
MAXINE: Let’s close.
PHRED: Right you are.
MAXINE: Let’s not pretend we solved anything. But we’re here. Goodbye.
PHRED: Onward.
MAXINE: Onward, then.
[SFX: OUTRO_CHAPEL_BELL]
MAXINE: …That bell again.
PHRED: Star Island chapel, Maxine. One last time.