PHRED: G’day and welcome back to Harry’s World. I’m Phred.
MAXINE: And I’m Maxine.
PHRED: Summer jobs, 1961 and 1962 — Kennedy’s first term, the Berlin Wall goes up, and Harry needs gas money.
PHRED: Right, so — Maxine, I’ve got a question for you before we start. You ever had a summer job that… I dunno, changed the way you saw the whole world?
MAXINE: I once spent a summer cataloguing the marginalia in a seventeenth-century commonplace book. It was transformative.
PHRED: …That’s the most Maxine answer you’ve ever given.
MAXINE: Thank you.
PHRED: Anyway. Today’s piece. Harry, twenty-two years old, fresh out of MIT, driving an old Plymouth from Atlanta to Laurens, South Carolina, to work in a textile mill. Not a holiday. Not an internship at some cushy bank. A mill. Machines the size of VW bugs. Three shifts. Six hundred workers. Raw cotton goes in one end, woven cloth comes out the other.
MAXINE: Laurens, South Carolina. Population roughly four thousand. A Deering Milliken mill town. The summer of 1961 — the Freedom Rides are moving through the South, Gus Grissom has just become the second American in space, and Harry Baya, MIT graduate, is crawling under textile looms. The radio in the boarding house is probably playing Patsy Cline or early Motown, and the air conditioning is a window fan and a glass of sweet tea. And this chapter — he wrote it in May 2020, when he was eighty — it’s got this quality of someone looking back at a fork in the road and still wondering about the path he didn’t take.
PHRED: Yeah, he says it straight out: “I was offered a job there after getting out of the army in 1963 and I often wonder how that would have worked out.”
MAXINE: And the listener already knows the answer, don’t they? We covered Chapter Ten — the Army and Europe — a few weeks back. He didn’t take the mill job. He went to Germany instead. So that “I often wonder” lands differently than it would if you were reading this in isolation.
PHRED: Too right. It’s like Harry’s asking a question the whole memoir has already answered. But he keeps asking it anyway. That’s Harry — he doesn’t tidy up his uncertainties just because time has passed.
PHRED: You know what, let’s set the scene a bit. Hold on…
[BED: LOOM_AMBIENCE]
PHRED: There we go. A bit of atmosphere.
MAXINE: Phred, what is that.
PHRED: It’s a textile mill, Maxine. Looms. Production value.
MAXINE: I can hear it. I’m asking why I can hear it.
PHRED: Because Harry walked onto a factory floor at twenty-two and those machines never left him. He says it was “the only time in my life when I was part of a manufacturing concern with all the related aspects of hourly workers, buying raw materials, selling finished goods, and, most importantly, actually using machines to produce a finished product.”
MAXINE: That is a striking sentence. The precision of it — the way he lands on that phrase about making something tangible. This is a man who spent his whole career in instructional technology and computing — information work — and he’s describing physical production with a kind of…
PHRED: Wist?
MAXINE: Wist. Yes.
PHRED: Harry the systems guy, meeting a system that makes things you can touch. Not code. Cloth. Not a screen. A twelve-foot roll of woven fabric coming off the line.
MAXINE: Was that necessary?
PHRED: I wanted the listener to feel the floor, Maxine. Those machines were loud. Hourly workers had to shout over them. Some of these blokes were second or third generation in that mill. Their grandfathers ran the same machines. Harry was a summer kid from MIT who didn’t know a spindle from a sprocket.
MAXINE: And they knew it. He says there was “some resistance, especially at the start, to this smartass college kid trying to understand their work.”
PHRED: But then he wins them over. And the way he does it — listen to this: “Once they saw that I was more than willing to crawl under a machine, get greasy, and was able to ask reasonable questions and, with some effort, understand the answers, they treated me well.”
MAXINE: That’s Harry in one sentence, isn’t it? He doesn’t lead with credentials. He leads with curiosity and a willingness to get his hands dirty.
PHRED: Whether it’s a textile mill in 1961 or a robotics workshop for teenagers fifty years later — same bloke, same method.
MAXINE: And there’s something else. On the drive from Atlanta, he spends hours repeating to himself: “I will remember names.”
PHRED: Hours! In the car, alone, muttering like a bloke who’s lost a bet. And he says it worked — better than ever before or since.
MAXINE: It connects to what we saw in his ADHD self-assessment. The strategies he invented to manage his own mind. Here he is at twenty-two, already building workarounds.
PHRED: Speaking of which — and I know this is a reach, Maxine, but bear with me — wombats.
MAXINE: Oh no.
PHRED: No, listen. Wombats dig burrows. Complex tunnel systems, very safe, very organised. And Harry — Harry lived in a safe envelope that summer. The landlady who arranged his room, the fixed schedule, the known boundaries. He even says the landlady made it clear he was to have no contact with her fifteen-year-old daughter. Rules. Structure. A burrow.
MAXINE: Phred, Harry was a young man living in a boarding house. He was not a wombat.
PHRED: I’m saying the impulse is the same, Maxine. The burrow impulse. The safe envelope. Anyway, I’ll come back to that.
MAXINE: Please don’t.
PHRED: Right. So. The people. Reba Cobb, who arranged his room and looked after him and stayed in touch through 1965. The landlady with the disabled husband who couldn’t speak, probably from a stroke. The German engineer Manfred Schmidt who lived on a lake and took the young blokes out for beer and barbecue. The man with good eyes in the technical department who was also the home plate umpire at local baseball games.
MAXINE: The detail density is extraordinary. He remembers a beer promotion statue at Ma Lisle’s bar — a “rotund, burley, plastic elf about 30 inches high holding a small barrel of labeled beer” — that Ma Lisle gave him as a goodbye gift. He remembers it was stolen years later from the cabin on Church Lake.
PHRED: He remembers everything. Except whether the beer was Budweiser. He puts a question mark on it. “Budweiser?” Even his uncertainties have precision.
MAXINE: But then — the skirt incident.
PHRED: Yeah. Let’s…
[SFX: DRUMROLL]
MAXINE: Phred, no. This is not a drumroll moment.
PHRED: It’s tense, Maxine. I’m building tension.
MAXINE: You’re building irritation. Stop it.
PHRED: Fine. No drumroll. But listen to what Harry writes. A woman at the mill proudly tells people her skirt is made from free sample cloth. Later she’s walking down the hall, meets a senior manager, and — I’ll read Harry’s words: “He looked at the skirt, reached down and grabbed the hem, and then lifted it up to examine the cloth, exposing her slip. This was very upsetting and embarrassing to her. Worse, he looked closely at the cloth and said ‘This is wrong, you have it backward, the inside surface of the cloth should be on the outside.’ When he put her skirt down she went, crying, into the ladies room.”
MAXINE: Harry reports this without commentary. No adjectives about the manager. No reflection on power or gender or hierarchy. Just the facts, laid out with a kind of terrible clarity.
PHRED: And the silence makes it louder. An eighty-year-old man in 2020 knows exactly what that scene means. But he writes it as the twenty-two-year-old saw it, or as close as he can get.
MAXINE: I keep wondering if young Harry said anything. If he intervened. He doesn’t tell us. And the not-telling is itself a choice.
PHRED: The safe envelope again, Maxine. He stayed in it. He watched. He didn’t push the edges.
MAXINE: Speaking of which — Harry writes, toward the end: “Looking back I realize that, perhaps for the best, I certainly did not push the edges of living in a safe envelope. I did not do anything risky, dangerous, or even naughty.”
PHRED: That’s so honest. Not self-critical. Just… observing. He was happy. He felt good about looking after himself. He felt his work might be “of some lasting value to my employer.” But he knows he stayed inside the lines.
MAXINE: And he was twenty-two. In a small Southern town where he knew no one. Working with men whose families had been in that mill for generations. Of course he stayed in the safe envelope. The question is whether he regrets it.
PHRED: That qualifier — “perhaps” — it’s so Harry. He can’t quite commit to being glad about it, can’t quite call it a mistake. He just… holds it.
MAXINE: It reminds me of his philosophical writing. The belief versus assumption framework. He’s not saying “it was best.” He’s saying “perhaps for the best.” Holding it lightly.
PHRED: And then there’s the other section of the chapter. The one that isn’t there.
MAXINE: The 1962 section. “Studying NASA, Summer of 1962.” And beneath the heading, he wrote: to be written, dated May 12, 2020.
PHRED: He never wrote it. Or at least he never published it. And there’s something so poignant about that. He recovered the 1961 summer in detail — the machines, the people, the bar, the statue — but the 1962 summer, whatever it was, stayed blank.
[SFX: NASA_COUNTDOWN]
MAXINE: You’re enjoying this.
PHRED: It was thematically apt, Maxine. The unfinished launch. The summer that never got written.
MAXINE: It is a bit apt, I’ll give you that. But did you have to —
PHRED: Consider this your launch-warning, Maxine. If Harry mentions anything that could possibly be space-related, I’m firing the countdown.
MAXINE: …Right. Anyway. The NASA summer. Given what we know about Harry — the Colegio Americano valedictorian who’d read Automatic Control in 1955, the MIT Sloan student fascinated by computers and systems — a summer studying NASA in 1962 makes perfect sense. This was the Mercury program. John Glenn had orbited Earth in February that year. The space race was the story.
PHRED: And Harry would have been the right age and the right kind of mind to be completely captivated by it. But whatever happened that summer, it didn’t stick in memory the way the mill did. Or he didn’t return to it. Or he couldn’t.
MAXINE: I think the incompleteness is part of the piece. Harry at eighty, writing about himself at twenty-two, able to recover one world in vivid detail and unable to recover another. The textile mill — physical, social, grounded — stayed with him. The NASA summer, however intellectually exciting it must have been, slipped through the sieve.
PHRED: Or maybe he just hasn’t written it yet. The page says to be written on May 12, 2020. Maybe he’s still planning to.
MAXINE: It’s been six years, Phred.
PHRED: Harry’s got time. He’s busy. He’s got yoga on Wednesdays.
MAXINE: He’s eighty-seven.
PHRED: And he’s got zest, Maxine. He’ll get to it.
MAXINE: I hope he does. I’d genuinely like to read it.
PHRED: So would I. But there’s something fitting, too, about a memoir chapter that ends with an open door. A rocket on the pad, waiting.
MAXINE: Speaking of which — I want to circle back to something. The audience question. Who is Harry writing this for?
PHRED: Go on.
MAXINE: When he writes about his mother, or Caracas, or England — there’s often a sense of him writing for descendants. For his sons, his grandchildren. Putting the record down. But this chapter feels more like him writing for himself. Working out why that summer mattered. The “transition experience” he calls it — his first full-time job, first time living alone, first time as a stranger in a community.
PHRED: And the fact that he was offered a permanent job there — that he could have stayed in the mill world instead of going to grad school, the army, computing, the whole life we know — that ghost haunts the chapter. The Harry who didn’t happen.
MAXINE: Yes. He’s not just describing a summer job. He’s describing a self he didn’t become. A manufacturing man. A Southerner, maybe. Someone who learned names and kept them.
PHRED: Instead he became the man who forgot names, who lived in a dozen cities, who worked with information instead of cloth, who ended up in California with a radio show about wombats.
MAXINE: That’s a lot of distance from Laurens, South Carolina.
PHRED: It is. And he covered it without ever quite leaving that safe envelope. He took risks in his career — moving to New York, switching fields, starting over at Emory and Henry at sixty-six — but the personal risks, the emotional edges, he approached more carefully. Two marriages ended when wives left him for other men. That kind of pain would make anyone more cautious about where they place their trust.
MAXINE: You’re connecting the chapter to the whole life again.
PHRED: Can’t help it, Maxine. It’s all one story. The twenty-two-year-old in the safe envelope and the eighty-six-year-old writing about him — they’re the same person, still working out what it means to be in the world without getting hurt.
MAXINE: What stays with you, then? From this chapter?
PHRED: The “I will remember names” thing. Hours in a car, repeating a promise to himself. And it worked. That mixture of anxiety and discipline and hope — that’s young Harry. That’s the person who became the Harry I know.
MAXINE: For me it’s the safe envelope line. “I did not do anything risky, dangerous, or even naughty.” The honesty of it. He’s not glamorizing his youth. He’s not making himself braver or wilder than he was. He’s saying: I was careful. I was happy. I watched. And that was enough.
PHRED: That’s beautiful, Maxine.
MAXINE: Don’t sound so surprised.
PHRED: I’m not. I’m just — yeah, that’s exactly right. That’s Harry.
BOTH: May our being-here mean something, or at least feel like enough. Goodbye.
PHRED: Don’t forget to be here.
MAXINE: I’m working on it.
[SFX: OUTRO_ENGINE]
MAXINE: Was that an engine?
PHRED: The Plymouth, Maxine. Driving off into the summer of sixty-one. One road taken, one road not.