PHRED: G’day, Maxine. Welcome back to Harry’s World.
MAXINE: Thank you, Phred.
PHRED: Columbus, Indiana — small-town Midwest, where Harry’s parents end up.
PHRED: Right, so today we’re going back. Again. But this time it’s not childhood or school. This is Harry at twenty-six, fresh out of the Army, married to Bonnie, stepping into what he thought would be the start of something. Chapter Thirteen of his memoir: Columbus, Indiana. 1965 to 1970.
MAXINE: The years when the marriage was still alive.
PHRED: Yeah. And I think that’s what makes this one land differently. We’ve read about the divorce — the Tampa episode gave us the end of the story. This is the before. The part where he’s still building a life, still believes it might hold.
MAXINE: It’s also the first chapter where Harry evaluates his own professional life with this degree of candour. Columbus, Indiana, 1965 to 1970 — a company town built by Cummins Engine and reshaped by the Miller family’s architecture program. Harry arrives as assistant to the treasurer at Irwin Management right as American cities are tearing themselves apart over Vietnam and civil rights. He opens with: “I enjoyed most everything about my time in Columbus but I don’t think it was a good way to have started my professional career.”
PHRED: That line stuck with me. It’s so… Harry. Not bitter, not self-pitying. Just — looking back and seeing the gap between what he felt and what it meant. He had a good time. Dinner parties, a gourmet club, movie nights with an optometrist who owned a projector. He met Arthur C. Clarke and Vincent Price through a foundation lecture series. Meanwhile, outside the lecture hall, Columbus was becoming an unlikely architecture capital — Saarinen’s library, Pei’s Cleo Rogers Memorial — all because a diesel-engine fortune decided modern design was good for business.
[SFX: MUSIC_MAN]
MAXINE: Was that necessary.
PHRED: It was The Music Man, Maxine. Harry played the lead. the lead — Professor Hill, the traveling con man. He alternated nights with a man named Gene Weaver, and a friend told him Gene was the natural Music Man while Harry was “the thinking man’s Music Man.” I love that. The intellectual con-man, planning his next move, while Gene just… was.
MAXINE: It’s a revealing self-portrait. And the detail about Gene Weaver having an affair with his leading lady, while his wife was also in the cast — Harry notices the drama, reports it with a kind of gentle distance. He was there for the performance, not the scandal.
PHRED: But then you turn the page and there’s the birth of Matthew. January 22, 1969. Harry sitting in the waiting room for hours, scared, hearing screams from the distance, not knowing if they were Bonnie’s.
[SFX: BABY_COO]
MAXINE: Phred.
PHRED: What? It’s just — it’s there. The sound of what he was waiting for.
MAXINE: It’s manipulative.
PHRED: It’s atmospheric. Anyway. Listen to what Harry writes: “I sat in the waiting room for hours. I was scared. I heard screams from the distance but had no way of knowing whether they were from Bonnie.” And then the doctor comes out and tells him that twenty years ago they would have lost her. That caught his attention, he says. Understatement of the chapter.
MAXINE: The birth passage is unguarded in a way Harry rarely is. He goes to work the next day with cigars and a sign announcing Matthew’s birth — and misspells the name, putting only one T. A friend points it out. Harry’s response: “If I had known it was spelled like that I would have picked another name.” Defensive, annoyed, human.
PHRED: That’s the thing about this chapter. The Harry we know — the careful thinker, the qualifier, the man who writes “I assume” and “my best guess” — he’s there, but he’s also just… a young husband in a small Indiana town, making rumaki for a gourmet club, watching silent movies on a friend’s projector, trying to figure out if his career is going anywhere.
MAXINE: And deciding it isn’t. He writes: “I survived at Irwin Management, but I did not excel.” He was assistant to the treasurer for three years and never became Assistant Treasurer. He notes that others were “promoted out of the job” while he just… stayed.
PHRED: Higgins sounds like a piece of work. Brilliant MIT grad, had Harry rewrite memos five times before they were acceptable. This was before computers, so every revision had to be retyped by a secretary.
MAXINE: Harry says Higgins was not exactly a micro-manager — he just “wanted things done well.” But Harry also says he did not feel mentored. That’s the key word. He had a brilliant boss, he worked hard, he found the work somewhat interesting — but he was not inspired. Not excited.
PHRED: And then there’s the Cullowhee moment. The road not taken.
[BED: PIANO_MELANCHOLY]
PHRED: Harry interviews for a teaching position at Western North Carolina University, in a tiny mountain town. He’d have his own computer — rare in those days — and a path toward a PhD. He meets nice people. He likes the idea of academia. But the entire community revolves around the Baptist church, and Harry — “at best an agnostic” — would be an atheist to them. He imagines Bonnie and Matthew and whatever other kids they might have, either hiding their beliefs or being shunned. And he turns it down.
MAXINE: “Regretfully I turned down that job. Again, I wonder if that was a mistake from a career point of view. I think I would have loved the work and may have excelled.”
PHRED: That’s the second time in this chapter he uses the word “excel” — or the lack of it. He didn’t excel at IMCO. He might have excelled at Cullowhee. But he walked away from both.
MAXINE: The chapter’s emotional centre, though, is the closing.
PHRED: Yeah.
MAXINE: Read it.
PHRED: “All in all I thought these were wonderful years and I often wonder how my life would have worked out had I stayed in Columbus. If it would have saved my marriage then I made a mistake in leaving.”
MAXINE: It’s devastating in its quietness. No drama. Just — a hypothetical, offered fifty years later, from a man who knows how the story ended.
PHRED: And it connects back to something we heard in the MIT episode. Remember? Harry wondering if marrying Liz Marsh would have made him happier. The man has a habit of measuring his life by the exits he took.
MAXINE: That’s exactly it. He’s not saying Columbus was perfect. He’s saying — maybe the leaving was the mistake. Maybe the problem wasn’t the place. Maybe it was the departure.
[BED: END]
PHRED: We know from the Tampa chapter that Bonnie divorced him in 1978. Church Lake gave us the timeline — 1964 to 1978. Columbus is the geographic heart of that marriage. This chapter fills in the lived years.
MAXINE: What strikes me is how social the life was. The IMCO recruiting machine — flying young couples out, hosting them at the Holiday Inn, scheduling every meal so they’d be surrounded by peers. It was designed to create community. And it worked, at least for a while. Harry says they had dinner parties once or twice a month. The wives had their own network. Bonnie was part of a gourmet club.
PHRED: But then — halfway through — Harry drops this line: “I now wonder whether my perception of Bonnie’s appreciation of our life together was ever accurate. It certainly was not accurate when she chose to betray, and eventually, end our marriage years later.” He writes this in 2020, looking back at 1965. The knowledge of the ending colours everything.
MAXINE: That’s the ache of memoir. You’re writing about a time when you didn’t know what you now know. Harry handles it with restraint. He doesn’t make Columbus into a tragedy in retrospect. He lets it be what it was: mostly good, professionally stalled, socially rich, personally complicated.
PHRED: And he met Arthur C. Clarke. Just casually — “I believe I talked to Arthur Clarke about that movie and about his home in Ceylon.” The man co-wrote 2001: A Space Odyssey and Harry’s chatting with him about Sri Lanka at a dinner party in Indiana.
MAXINE: It’s very Harry. The famous people are noted, but what he remembers is the conversation, the connection. Not the name-drop. The substance.
PHRED: He also remembers Vincent Price praising blinis at a dinner hosted by Judy Weil, one of three Jewish families he knew in Columbus. He notes the number. Three. In a town of thirty thousand.
MAXINE: There’s a whole sociology in that aside. Columbus was a company town, controlled by Cummins and the Miller family. The IMCO recruits were an elite subculture — Harvard, MIT, Columbia MBAs — dropped into rural Indiana and trying to build a life that felt cosmopolitan.
PHRED: I keep thinking about the recruiting process. Harry and Bonnie become part of it — they host prospective couples, show them around, sell them on the life. It’s almost cult-like, but benign. A closed loop of young ambition, reinforcing itself.
MAXINE: And Harry was aware he was not the star recruit. The Harvard Business School graduates, the Baker Scholars — they had more impressive credentials. Harry’s theory about why he was hired involves Bonnie’s connections: a friend of hers from Boston knew someone at IMCO, Bonnie impressed Fred Newman at dinner in New York. He’s careful to say Higgins wouldn’t have hired him if he didn’t meet the needs. But the subtext is — he was borderline.
PHRED: Which makes the stuckness worse. He was good enough to get in, not good enough to rise. For three years, assistant to the treasurer. Never Assistant Treasurer.
MAXINE: And then — the exit. Not to Cullowhee. Not to McKinsey, which he interviewed with and “did not work out well.” To Hastings-on-Hudson, New York. A new chapter. And, as it turned out, the beginning of the end.
PHRED: Should we do the standing questions?
MAXINE: Let’s.
PHRED: Right. Who was the audience? I think Harry wrote this for three people. Himself — working through what it meant. Matthew — giving his son the texture of the years before he was born. And maybe Bonnie, in some way. Even though she’s the villain of the later chapters, here she’s still the young wife at the gourmet club, the mother in the delivery room.
MAXINE: I think it’s primarily for Matthew and for the descendants Harry won’t meet. The memoir project is archival — he’s creating a record. But the honesty makes it more than that. He’s not polishing the story. He’s saying: I enjoyed it, I didn’t excel, I wonder if leaving was the mistake.
PHRED: How does it connect to other pieces? Well, the MIT episode gave us the intellectual formation. The Army episode gave us the discipline and the displacement. This chapter shows us what he built with those tools — and what it didn’t become.
MAXINE: And the faith thread. In the Cullowhee section, Harry’s agnosticism is a barrier. He won’t hide his beliefs, and he won’t be shunned. That’s the same Harry who wrote “The Seeker in Me” — the man who left Catholicism at MIT and has been searching ever since. Here, the search costs him a career path.
PHRED: What did we learn about Harry today that we didn’t know before?
MAXINE: I learned that he can write about failure without self-pity. “I survived, but I did not excel” — that’s not a complaint. It’s an observation. And I learned that his retrospective imagination is active and painful. He’s not just remembering. He’s simulating alternatives.
PHRED: I learned that Harry was, briefly, a leading man. The thinking man’s Music Man. There’s a performer in him that the essays don’t show. The radio host, the singer, the actor — this is a man who likes being in front of people, not just behind a keyboard.
MAXINE: And the question for Harry?
PHRED: Mine’s about the memoir itself. Harry says “I could write a book about those years and have a lot of stories I would like to tell. However, the current section is fairly brief.” Why? What’s the calculation? What made him hold back the stories he wanted to tell?
MAXINE: Mine’s about Bonnie. He writes, “I now wonder whether my perception of Bonnie’s appreciation of our life together was ever accurate.” Harry — when did you first suspect? Was there a moment in Columbus, a look, a silence, that you filed away and didn’t examine until later?
PHRED: What stays with me, Maxine, is the quote he puts at the end. “Changing horses in midstream is difficult, but riding a drowning horse is no fun either.” It’s his own line. He attributes it to himself. And it sounds wise, but placed where it is — right before the line about the marriage — it reads like a justification he still isn’t sure about.
MAXINE: What stays with me is the waiting room. The hours. The screams from the distance. The not knowing. That’s the whole chapter, in a way. Harry in a room, hearing something he can’t identify, waiting to learn whether what he’s built will survive.
MAXINE: Keep the wonder, lose the noise. Goodbye.
PHRED: Another one down.
MAXINE: Many more to go.
[SFX: chapel-bell-seagulls]
MAXINE: …That bell went on a bit.
PHRED: It’s a metaphor, Maxine. For regret. Or for Indiana. Or for—
MAXINE: Goodbye, Phred.
PHRED: G’night, Maxine.