CHAPTER 5
Awe of the Stars

• He studies hard,
• And recites easy.
• No matter what’s up,
• He’s always busy.

Poem about BOB GREENLEAF
from the 1921 WILEY HIGH
School yearbook, The Red Pepper.

When Bob’s Aunt and Uncle Parkhurst visited Terre Haute again in 1917, they took a renewed interest in their 13-year-old nephew, and invited him to ride back to Marengo, Illinois to spend the summer. He immediately accepted, and this time he got to ride in a “modern” automobile that carried him north to exposure to another universe:

John Parkhurst, a man widely admired by fellow astronomers, was a healthy role model for his nephew. One of his favorite sayings was, “There are a thousand wrong ways of doing a thing, and only one right way.”² His notebooks of celestial observations were meticulous, and his published papers—averaging three per year—were concise and lucid. He drove a spotless car at a steady twenty miles per hour and kept it in top mechanical condition. “The car was a ‘consecrated’ one, at the service of the whole neighborhood,” according to a eulogy in Popular Astronomy magazine.³ As a youngster, Parkhurst was ill with tuberculosis and spent years on crutches. “One likes to imagine that this quiet lad had thought things through, had seen that life held little for him if he wasted his resources as did his companions…” wrote astronomer Storrs B. Barrett. “He could hardly be drawn into giving an opinion not backed by previous careful consideration.”⁴ These traits mirrored those of his brother-in-law George Greenleaf and his nephew Bob. Throughout his life, Bob Greenleaf would be concerned with doing things the right way, and would not waste time with activities he considered trivial, like card games.

Yerkes observatory was on high ground overlooking Lake Geneva. At the foot of the hill, on the shore of the lake, stood College Camp, a major conference center owned by the YMCA College in Chicago. The camp could accommodate 1,000 people, although most were required to sleep in tents. Greenleaf would later work at College Camp for three summers.

During that summer of 1917 young Bob was living in a peaceful cocoon, isolated from a world ablaze in The Great War. He was allowed to peer through the big 40-inch refracting telescope at Yerkes, watch astronomers take pictures with their bulky 8 × 10-inch negatives, and learn to drive.

The summer ended too soon. Bob returned to Terre Haute to finish the eighth grade and found it difficult to readjust to the mundane ways of Indiana. The Parkhursts, through their genuine interest in this young 57 nephew and their willingness to introduce him to the wider world, had set forces in motion that would eventually lead Bob to separate from his home on the Wabash and his loving father. George Greenleaf sensed this sea change well before his son did:

In the fall of 1918, Bob entered Wiley High School. It was a large school for its time, with an enrollment of nearly 1,100 students. “School was an awful bore until I got to high school,” he recalled years later.⁶ In high school, he was Committee Chairman for the Hi-Y Club, a member of the Sophomore Executive Committee, a writer for the school paper, The Pep Staff, Treasurer of his junior class, and President of his senior class. He was happy, admired, and accepted by his peers:

The principal of Wiley High School was an older man named Orville Conner, a person of serious and severe disposition who walked with an uneven step. Bob and the other students called him “old step-and-a-half.” Principal Conner learned not to venture onto the wooden floors of the hallways during classes because hundreds of toes would pick up the cadence of his offbeat gait. By all accounts, he was not loved. 58

Then, a remarkable thing happened, something that taught Bob the power of affirming people rather than judging or ridiculing them. It all came about because of a big jovial Irish boy named Jerry Fitzgerald, whose father owned a bakery in Terre Haute. Bob always remembered Jerry’s lesson:

The dedication page in the 1921 yearbook, The Red Pepper, does indeed show Professor Orville E. Conner with a slight smile on his face.

Bob did not grow up with many books around him at home. The family owned a set of the Encyclopedia Britannica, which his mother never consulted, and a few books of poetry, mostly by Burns and Scott. His father loved poetry, though, and often quoted Burns from memory. Wiley High School expanded his literary exposure. The curriculum strongly emphasized the basics: mathematics, science, English grammar, reading, and writing. The Red Pepper yearbook devoted much space to award-winning short stories and poems written by students. Bob left with a solid grounding in reading, writing, and arithmetic. The school also reflected the changes in society following World War I. Bob’s senior year, for example, was the first for a girl’s basketball team. “A call was issued for candidates and about 50 real, live girls responded,” reported the yearbook.⁹

Always inquisitive, Bob found his world enlarged by exposure to the working world. As a freshman, he began working on Saturdays in a downtown store that sold men’s clothing and a full line of shoes. The store was owned by the Kohn brothers—Joe, Louis, and Eddie—who gave 59 Bob his first look into Jewish family life, something he later recalled as a valuable part of his early experience.

Early in his work life, Bob showed a shrewd but quiet sensitivity in serving the needs of others. One Saturday in the fall of 1918, a small, elderly man entered the store complaining that he could not find shoes that fit. His feet were small, and all the men’s shoes were big, stiff, and heavy. His clerk was 14-year-old Bob Greenleaf.

Bob disappeared into the back room and returned with a pair of very light, soft shoes with flat heels and wide toes. They were wonderful. Each year for the next six years, the man sought out young Bob to fit him with a new pair of shoes. What the man did not know, and what Bob never told him to protect his pride, was that he was wearing shoes designed for old women.¹⁰

For a different kind of work education, George Greenleaf found his son a summer job as an apprentice at Buettuer & Shelfrugue Machine Company, a firm of about 100 employees. “He wanted me to get educated which, of course, I wanted also. Yet he wanted me to have a taste at least of the benefits of his way of growing up.”¹¹ Bob was able to work with various craftsmen in this versatile little company that did machining, forging, electrical work (mostly motor and control rebuilding), and foundry. While he never acquired high skills in any of these areas, he appreciated the experience. “I really had an exposure to the work of the world which few of my age and generation received,” he wrote later.¹² “I think I learned what [father] valued.”¹³

The summer after his high school graduation, Bob again worked at College Camp at Lake Geneva. This stint kept his relationship with the Parkhursts alive and also gave him time and distance to think about what he would do next. His sister June had just graduated from Indiana State Teachers College in Terre Haute and was headed to Columbia Teachers College in New York. Rose Polytechnic was a possibility for Bob. Years earlier, his Uncle John had graduated from there and, of course, the school was his father’s employer. Bob did not have the money to go away to school and had no clear aim for his life, so he decided by default to return to Terre Haute and attend Rose Poly. He enrolled in the electrical engineering program.

Rose Poly was a small but rigorous school. There were only about thirty seniors out of two hundred fifty students in the student body, reflecting a brutal weeding-out process. In this demanding environment, 60Bob again scored in the top ten percent academically, in spite of his struggles with a drafting class. He soon realized he did not want to be an engineer but still had no clear direction. At Rose Poly, he joined in few school activities. “There were fraternities, but I did not join one. I have never had much attraction for exclusivity, something I learned from Father.”¹⁴

In his freshman year, Bob learned a lesson about leadership. He was part of a group of students who got rid of the Rose Polytechnic president and the chair of the school’s board of trustees. Over sixty years later, Bob remembered the excitement:

The coup at Rose Poly showed Bob the value of solid information, strategy, timing, and consensus in effecting organizational change. He 61 may not have considered himself a revolutionary, but many years later the president of AT&T would call him the company’s “kept revolutionary.”

Excitement of a different kind awaited during the summer and fall of 1923. Bob got a job as a dishwasher at the YMCA camp in Wisconsin next to Yerkes Observatory. Shortly after Bob arrived, his Uncle John invited him to go with a group of Yerkes astronomers to Catalina Island off the coast of California to observe a total eclipse of the sun. In return for helping as a handyman, all expenses would be paid. The price was right, so the adventure was set.

Catalina Island was lovely, but the eclipse was a bust. It rained all day on September 23, the first time that had happened in memory. Bob made some useful contacts during the experience however, including two astronomers from Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota, who had arrived a few weeks before the eclipse.

On the way home, Bob spent a day in the “monastery” at the observatory atop Mount Wilson, the world’s largest observatory, where he was able to look through the 100-inch mirror of the big reflecting telescope. He wasn’t expecting a primal religious experience, but that is what he had when he focused on a great nebulae. “What a sight!” he said. “I shook with awe and wonder at the majesty of all creation. This primitive unstructured feeling, the powerful sense of awe and wonder, is to me the source of religious feeling at its greatest depth.”¹⁶ The spectacle and the feeling remained with him to the end of his life. In typical Bob Greenleaf fashion however, he was not content to leave his literal “mountaintop experience” on a mental shelf. From that mystical Mount Wilson event, he extracted practical guidance on how to act in the world. In the last decade of his life he wrote, “Experimentally, I have found that my own sense of ethical sureness follows from an intensity of this feeling. (I submit as the ultimate test of the efficacy of religious feeling whether it nourishes the insight and the resolve that are the root and ground of creative ethics. Does one, because of it, act responsibly and with greater rightness and determination in the outside world?)”¹⁷

Bob met several world-class astronomers at Mt. Wilson. Like him, these men were thrilled by the infinite beauty of the heavens, yet they were also practical scientists—dreamers and doers, cosmologists and prag-matists. Astronomy was a field that continued to lure young Bob, a natural introvert who was given to both cosmic reflection and practical outcomes. 62

From California, he traveled alone and stopped to see the Grand Canyon. By the time he got back home, his outlook had broadened far beyond the bounds of Terre Haute, Indiana. It would take only one more push to move him away for good, and it came during the 1923 Christmas break when Bob attended the ninth quadrennial International Convention of the Student Volunteer Movement in Indianapolis. The Student Volunteer Movement was organized in 1891 as an offshoot of the YMCA and YWCA clubs. Bob joined 7,000 Christian student leaders from more than 1,000 colleges, universities, and seminaries in the United States and thirty-nine foreign countries to hear the speeches, sermons, and business sessions in Cadle Auditorium.

Bob grumbled that this was a “pretty conservative bunch” but reveled in the intellectual stimulation and exposure to students with divergent ideas. Years later, he could not even remember the focus of the conference. Whatever the stimulus, his response was to make a fateful decision:

When Bob announced his decision, his father was stunned and saddened. He had expected his boy to live and die in Terre Haute, near his parents. As Bob later put it, “He knew that this was probably the end of that dream, and it was.” ¹⁹ Bob did not yet know what school he would attend or what he would study there. He could live with those uncertainties. For now, he was comfortable knowing that he was responding to a prompting of spirit and intuition.

In February Bob started a job with North Ruffin’s Construction Company, which was building a new stadium on the old Vigo County fairgrounds. The site was on East Wabash Street at the edge of town, close to the Greenleafs’ home. Bob was a generalist for the company: time keeper, office man, surveyor, and general roustabout. He was immediately thrown into the realities of life in a tough union town. Late in the spring the carpenters struck, and all the trades but bricklayers went out with 63 them. Bob’s company decided to go ahead with non-union help to complete the stadium and got away with it, but not before they were threatened and occasionally sabotaged by angry union members. During this six-month job, Bob saw first-hand both the violence and touching humanity of working men:

Bob was impressed by the people he came to know and admire on this job, but the management role he occupied dulled any remaining ambitions he had to “run things.” Years later he reflected on the irony that, even though he became director of management research for the world’s largest corporation, he thought he was a lousy manager. (People who worked for him disagreed.) He was hard-wired as a “conceptualizer” who enjoyed the big picture, not an “operationalizer” who saw to daily details.

During the spring of 1924, Bob kept in close contact with John Parkhurst. Bob chose to at least explore astronomy. After he reached that decision, Uncle John recommended Carleton College in Minnesota because it had one of the best undergraduate programs in astronomy at that time. Carleton conducted research and published the Journal of Popular Astronomy. Furthermore, two of the school’s professors had been at Catalina, and a third was a close friend of Bob’s Uncle John. Through these connections, a job as a “computer” in the observatory was arranged. (In those days a “computer” was not a machine but a person who made mathematical calculations.)

Bob picked up several summer credits at Indiana State Normal School (now Indiana State University). Finally, the day arrived for him to leave his city and his family. It was a bittersweet parting:

Bob got on the train still not knowing exactly where he was going in life, a seeker without a goal. He was fortunate to be taking with him a Hoosier identity, and the experiences and inner resources given by a remarkable father.