PHRED: G’day and welcome back to Harry’s World. I’m Phred.
MAXINE: And I’m Maxine.
PHRED: Carlisle — Harry at thirteen, in that awkward gap between two worlds.
PHRED: Episode seventeen, Maxine. Can you believe it? Seventeen episodes of us burrowing through Harry Baya’s archive like a couple of wombats after a good root.
MAXINE: I can believe it, Phred. I’ve been here for all of them.
PHRED: Right, fair point. So — where are we today? We’ve done Harry’s philosophy, his technology writing, his spiritual searching. We’ve done England, MIT, the Army, Caracas. We’ve even done his mother. Today we’re going back to the memoir again. Chapter four. Carlisle, Pennsylvania. Nineteen fifty-two. Harry is thirteen years old, fresh off the boat from two years at an English boarding school, and he’s about to spend eighth grade on an American army post while his father attends the War College.
MAXINE: This is the immediate sequel to the England chapter we covered back in episode seven. In that one, Harry was boxing with priests, riding a train through the Blitz, and learning to speak with two accents he didn’t know he had. Carlisle is what happens when that boy comes home — except home isn’t quite home anymore.
PHRED: That’s the thing, isn’t it? Harry writes that he arrived near the end of summer, and his first observation is that all his friends were from the Carlisle Barracks army post. Not the town. The post. Already he’s living inside a bubble inside a town inside a country he hasn’t seen in two years.
MAXINE: And he’s aware of it, even at thirteen — though not in those words. He remembers carrying his books “like a girl” and getting teased for it. Turns out boys in England carried books against their chest, and American boys didn’t. He adjusted. But notice how he puts it: “I suspect there were a lot of other adjustments, most of which happened without me being conscious of them.”
PHRED: That’s Harry, isn’t it? Writing this in 2020 at age eighty-one, still trying to reverse-engineer his own socialization. What did I absorb? What did I choose? What did I just… do because everyone else was doing it?
MAXINE: And the piece gives us so many of those moments. The books. The handwriting — he says his spelling and handwriting were never the same after England, where they used quill pens and ink bottles built into the desks. The pronunciation — “schedule” with the sh sound instead of sk. He even hypothesizes that he must have had two accents in England, one for school and one for home, and he switched between them without knowing it.
PHRED: That’s the thing, though — he was doing it instinctively, years before anyone gave it a name.
MAXINE: And then there’s the teen canteen. Which I have to say, Phred, is the heart of this chapter for me.
PHRED: Oh, the canteen. The jukebox. The 45s. The dances.
MAXINE: Harry at thirteen, smaller than the girls, learning the waltz and the rhumba and the cha-cha-cha and — eventually — slow dancing. With a girl whose name he has now forgotten. But he remembers the thrill.
PHRED: I have to quote this. He writes: “Near the end of our time in Carlisle I told her that there was one kind of dance we had never done. She asked what that was and I told her we had never danced slow. We did dance slow a number of times after that and it was a big thrill for me. I used to remember her name, but it’s gone now.”
MAXINE: The detail preserved and the name lost. That’s memory, isn’t it? The emotional texture stays. The identifier evaporates.
PHRED: It’s like a wombat’s burrow, Maxine. You remember the shape of the tunnel, the feel of the dirt, the particular corner where you turned. But do you remember the serial number on the shovel? You do not.
MAXINE: …I’m not going to ask about the shovel.
PHRED: Probably wise. But here’s what gets me about this chapter. It’s not just a nostalgic wallow. Harry is doing something specific. He’s trying to understand the origins of things he became as an adult. Take the singing. He lists, I counted them, nineteen songs he remembers from that one year. “The Little White Cloud That Cried.” “Jambalaya.” “High Noon.” “Your Cheating Heart.” And then — this is the adult looking back — he writes: “As an adult singing became one of my favorite hobbies. However back then I did not give it much thought. Looking back I now see that music and singing were more important to me than I realized at the time.”
MAXINE: That’s a pattern with Harry, isn’t it? He underestimates what matters to him while it’s happening. The singing. The folk music — he polkaed to “Tzena, Tzena, Tzena” by the Weavers, which is Pete Seeger’s group. Pete Seeger, who would become central to Harry’s whole folk music identity. He didn’t know.
PHRED: He didn’t know! And then there’s the country music discovery. Late at night in his basement room, picking up Wheeling, West Virginia on the radio. Hank Williams. Who died in January 1953 — while Harry was right there in Carlisle. Harry only found that out decades later, on Google. But at the time, he was just a thirteen-year-old boy in a basement, listening to a dead man’s voice travel through the dark on AM radio.
[BED: 1950s-jukebox]
PHRED: A bit of atmosphere for you, Maxine. Jukebox energy. Nickel a song.
MAXINE: Phred. Is that — are you scoring Carlisle, Pennsylvania?
PHRED: Just a little underscore. For the mood. Keep going — you were being profound about Hank Williams.
MAXINE: I was not being profound. I was making an observation. Harry’s discovery of country music in that basement room — it connects directly to everything that came after. The folk fiddling. The banjo. The Wombats and Music radio show. Four hundred and fifty hours of radio, rooted in a boy staying up too late with a transistor radio in a basement in 1953.
PHRED: That’s the burrow, Maxine. You start digging in one place and you find it connects to everywhere else.
MAXINE: Phred, the bed.
PHRED: Right, right.
[BED: END]
PHRED: There. Back to the present.
MAXINE: Thank you. Now — I want to talk about the bullying, because I think it’s important.
PHRED: Carl Welborn. Older. Bigger. Punching Harry in the arm, knocking his books out of his hands.
MAXINE: And Harry’s response is fascinating. He says: “One day when we were waiting for the bus to take us home I got so mad that I punched him in the face — like I had when I was boxing in England.” The England boxing reflex. We covered that in episode seven. Harry was on the boxing team at his English school. He learned to take a punch and throw one. And two years later, in Pennsylvania, that training surfaces without him thinking about it.
PHRED: He got beaten up for it. Carl was bigger, Carl put him on the ground, other boys had to pull him off. But the bullying stopped.
MAXINE: It stopped. And Harry doesn’t moralize about it. He doesn’t say violence is the answer or violence is never the answer. He just reports: punched him, got beaten up, bullying stopped. That’s the instructional technologist in him, even at eighty. No sermon attached. Just what happened.
PHRED: But there’s another story he tells right after that, also at the bus stop, that he says “says something about being 13 years old.” The breath-holding stunt. Hyperventilate until dizzy, hold your breath, pass out. He asked a friend to stand behind him and catch him. The friend wandered away. Harry fell on the sidewalk.
[SFX: SAD_TROMBONE]
MAXINE: Phred.
PHRED: I’m sorry, Maxine, but — thirteen-year-old trust. He asked a friend to catch him and the friend just… left. That’s comedy and tragedy in the same moment.
MAXINE: And Harry was furious. Not badly hurt, just bruised, but furious with the friend for walking away. There’s something so specific about that fury. It’s not the fall. It’s the betrayal of the agreement.
PHRED: The social contract, violated at the bus stop.
MAXINE: Precisely. And I think it connects to something bigger in Harry. His whole philosophy about honesty — his radical honesty commitment, which we know traces back to Buckminster Fuller — there’s a through-line here. Agreements matter. If you say you’ll catch someone, catch them. If you say you’ll tell the truth, tell it. Harry got angry at thirteen because he understood, instinctively, that reliability is the foundation of trust.
PHRED: I think you’re onto something there, Maxine.
MAXINE: Thank you. Now — the dance contest. Because this is another of those moments that connects backward to a piece we’ve already covered.
PHRED: Episode fifteen. The mother chapter.
MAXINE: Exactly. Harry writes: “My memory is that my mother and I came in first and that my father and Madge came in second. However the order may have been the other way around.” In the mother chapter, we heard about Madge — Harry’s older sister, about two years his senior — and the family dynamics. Here we see the four of them, paired off in a dance contest, and Harry isn’t even sure who won. But he remembers being there. He remembers his mother as a dance partner.
PHRED: It’s a lovely image. The military family, the War College post, the teen canteen — and for one night, parents and kids swirling around a dance floor together.
MAXINE: And then there’s Jody Polk. The formal dance. Her father was possibly the post commander. Harry took her a corsage. He looked her up on the internet years later, found her as an artist in Texas. Sent a friend to call her. Jody did not remember him.
PHRED: Oh, that one hurts a little.
MAXINE: It does. But Harry reports it without self-pity. “I decided to let her friend call her since she knew her better than I did. The friend later emailed me that she had talked to Jody and that Jody did not remember me. I never contacted her.”
PHRED: He let it go. He had the impulse to reconnect, followed it halfway, got the answer, and accepted it. That’s… that’s actually a kind of emotional maturity that I don’t think gets enough credit.
MAXINE: And it’s characteristic of how Harry writes memory. He doesn’t inflate the moment. He doesn’t make himself the hero of every scene. He’s just — a kid who went to a dance, who later wondered what happened to that person, who found out she didn’t remember him, and who moved on. The memoir doesn’t need her to remember him for the moment to have mattered.
PHRED: Now — the dog. Chips. The English Setter.
MAXINE: Yes. This is where the chapter turns, I think. Toward the end, Harry writes that his parents decided not to take Chips to Monterey and on to Venezuela. They found a farm to take him. And Harry says this: “I have never been comfortable with the word ‘love’, but I have been aware that I did, and still do, become quite attached to pets. I guess this is a kind of love.”
PHRED: There’s Harry wrestling with the L-word again. Even about a dog. Even at eighty.
MAXINE: And he describes Chips getting out of the car at the farm and running around, excited. Harry couldn’t even get him to come back for a final goodbye. The dog was already gone, in spirit, before the family left.
PHRED: It’s the first real loss in the chapter, isn’t it? Everything else is adventure and discovery and adjustment. The dog is where it gets sad.
MAXINE: And it’s the threshold. Carlisle ends, and the family drives west to Monterey, then on to Caracas. We know what waits there — episode six, the happiest years of Harry’s life. But to get there, he had to leave Chips behind. He had to leave the canteen and the jukebox and the girl whose name he’s forgotten. Every beginning is also an ending.
PHRED: Which brings us to the final paragraph. The one that floored me.
MAXINE: Read it.
PHRED: Harry writes: “By the time I went to college in 1957 I had attended 7 different schools. Of the twelve years of grade school, I attended American schools for only about six years. The schools in Falls Church, England and Monterey were Catholic schools. The high school in Caracas was Presbyterian. I believe this varied experience had a strong influence on who I am. Living overseas for five and a half of those years also affected me. I have since read books about people who spent part of their youth in a foreign culture and I identified with that experience. One book said that people with that background would always feel themselves to somewhat a stranger no matter where they were in life.”
MAXINE: “Always feel themselves to somewhat a stranger no matter where they were in life.” That’s the through-line of Harry’s whole existence, Phred. The boy who learned two accents without knowing it. The man who writes about the flat world and feels the beast from a distance. The seeker who says “I don’t believe in believing.” It’s all the same person. The stranger everywhere.
PHRED: And he found a way to make that strangeness productive. He became someone who connects people across distances — through technology, through music, through teaching. The outsider who builds bridges.
MAXINE: That’s a generous read, Phred. I think it’s also accurate.
PHRED: I’m capable of accuracy, Maxine. Occasionally. By accident.
MAXINE: The other thing I want to note — and this connects to episode nine, the ADHD essay — is how many of Harry’s Carlisle traits prefigure the adult diagnosis. The obsessive song memory. Remembering lyrics better than anyone else. Staying up late in the basement, hyperfocused on the radio. Being “somewhat of a loner” even when surrounded by friends. Bicycling to the other end of the post just to observe strangers. The kid who memorized spelling words for a test and then immediately forgot them. That’s not just a quirky childhood. That’s a particular kind of mind.
PHRED: Harry at eighty-five figured out he had ADHD and wrote about it. But reading this chapter, you can see it at thirteen. He just didn’t have the word yet.
MAXINE: He had the experience. That’s what matters. And he kept the experience alive by writing it down, sixty-seven years later. Who else remembers the name of the boy who bullied them in eighth grade? Who else remembers the exact weight they were in England — seven stone, seven pounds and a quarter — and converts it to pounds for the American reader?
PHRED: Harry does. Because Harry keeps everything. He’s the original archivist of his own life.
MAXINE: Before we close, I want to do the standing questions.
PHRED: Right. Who’s the audience?
MAXINE: For this chapter — I think Harry’s writing for his descendants, primarily. His children, grandchildren. The people who will never know the thirteen-year-old boy but who might recognize something of themselves in him. But he’s also writing for himself. This is memory as self-understanding. He’s trying to figure out who he became by looking at who he was.
PHRED: I agree. And how does it connect to his other writings? Well — England is the prequel, Caracas is the sequel. The whole memoir is one long argument that childhood matters, that early experience shapes adult consciousness. And then his philosophical essays — the belief versus assumption framework, the flat world, the machine learning — all of it comes from a mind that learned early to hold multiple perspectives at once, because he had to.
MAXINE: What did we learn about Harry today that we didn’t know before?
PHRED: That he once made a bedside table in shop class and cut grooves into it so his radio would fit, even though everyone told him it would ruin the table for any other use. He was stubborn. He did it anyway. The finish was sticky. He loved it.
MAXINE: That’s… that’s genuinely new, Phred. And it tells us something. Harry builds things his way. Even when it’s not the practical way. Even when the finish is sticky. That’s the Boppers project, isn’t it? That’s Harry’s whole career in miniature.
PHRED: It really is. The table with the radio grooves is Harry’s Boppers, forty years early.
MAXINE: And our questions for Harry? One each.
PHRED: Mine is: Harry, do you still remember how any of those dances go? The polka step, the cha-cha-cha? Could you still teach me? Because I reckon a platypus doing the cha-cha-cha would be something to see.
MAXINE: Phred.
PHRED: It’s a real question! Mostly.
MAXINE: My question is more serious. Harry — you wrote that people with your background “would always feel themselves to somewhat a stranger no matter where they were in life.” Does that still feel true at eighty-six? Or did you find a place, eventually, where the stranger feeling lifted?
PHRED: That’s a good one, Maxine. That’s a really good one.
MAXINE: Thank you.
PHRED: Right. What stays with me from this chapter? It’s the image of the boy in the basement, listening to Hank Williams on a radio station from West Virginia, not knowing the singer was already dead. The loneliness of that moment, and the beauty of it. Harry found connection through distance. Through airwaves. Through music that traveled farther than he had. That’s not just a childhood memory. That’s a blueprint for a life.
MAXINE: And for me — it’s the forgotten name. The girl who taught him to dance slow, whose name he has lost but whose presence he hasn’t. Memory is not a filing cabinet. It’s a landscape. Some landmarks have signs. Others don’t. But you still know the terrain.
PHRED: That’s lovely, Maxine.
MAXINE: Thank you.
PHRED: Right. Should we…?
MAXINE: Let’s.
MAXINE: To the questions we didn’t answer — and being here anyway. Goodbye.
PHRED: No regrets?
MAXINE: Very few.
[SFX: VINYL]
MAXINE: …Was that a record skipping?
PHRED: 45 rpm, Maxine. Nickel a play. Seemed right for Carlisle.
MAXINE: You’re impossible.
PHRED: I’ve been told.