1 Dr. Robert Helliwell 17 September 2002 Brian Shoemaker Interviewer Begin Tape 1A (000) BS: This is an oral interview with Dr. Robert Helliwell, conducted as part of the Polar Oral History Project of the American Polar Society and the Byrd Polar Research Center of the Ohio State University on a grant from the National Science Foundation. The interview was taken at Dr. Helliwell’s office, Stanford University, by Brian Shoemaker on the 17th of September 2002. Well, thank you for having me here, Dr. Helliwell. We’re interested in you. We’re interested in where you’re from, how you got started and what led up to your lifetime work, who you mentors are and milestones along the way and personal things that made it a tough job, certainly out in the cold, freezing your nose and toes. And how it affected your life after you retired. RH: Well, those are interesting question and I’m not sure I’ll cover them in that order, but I want to take up the cold first. The reason that I was so interested in Antarctica and willing to go when the opportunity came was that I grew up in Minnesota. It’s a cold, cold place in the winter. And the snow is deep and it’s cold and all the things that you’d experience in the Antarctic are right there. So, I knew it and I thought that this would be kind of fun to go down to a place where in the summer it’s like Minnesota is in winter. And that was the reason that I came to California, because during one of those bad winters, my father contracted a cold from not wearing his overcoat to work, came down with pneumonia and died. And that was when I was 7 years old 2 and the family had to do something. My mother was not trained in a productive process. She was a housewife and a very good student. She and her three sisters all went to Hammond University, first in Red Wing and then in St. Paul, where the university is located now, and all were top students. But, her education was a classical education in languages and literature and some chemistry and sciences. She wanted to be a doctor. Women didn’t become doctors in those days which was in 1915. It was very interesting that her father, who was very liberal in this regard – he felt that women deserved an education just like men, maybe more so – and as a result of this tragedy, my mother had to do something and she counseled with her folks in Red Wing, and they agreed to come out to California, and bring her family, myself and my younger sister who was 4 years younger than I, and get out of that cold weather which was what killed my father, in a sense. And I think that helped to motivate their desire to go to California. They had relatives that were out in California. They recommended Palo Alto, and so what she did was find out what she could do. She had a very good degree, but it was classical education. So, she decided to get her library credentials because that would use all her background. She really didn’t care for that subject very much as something to go into, but she was good at it. She went to the University of Californian in Berkeley two years when I was 7 and 8 years old, and she got her degree – got her credential to be a librarian. And she had to get a job, so she applied around the state and was able to get a job in Palo Alto. And she came there with me and my sister and her sister and then the grandparents came out later from Minnesota. My grandfather sold his business in the feed and fuel business in Red Wing, and they all moved out together to combine limited incomes during the Depression era so that we could afford to live in a house. And we got a house in Palo Alto, with a second story, enough to hold everybody, and we carried on from there. That’s where I grew up from about age 9 until I got married in 1942. So, my mother got to be head librarian 3 and she ran the thing very well. And she hired people to come and look after us kids when she was at work and I grew up in that operation and learned to drive at age 10 – that was illegal, but my grandfather wanted me to learn. And then, after I had learned to drive, I wanted a car. We had no money, so my mother talked to the Studebaker agent who she knew well because we drove a Studebaker in Palo Alto, and he found an old Franklin down in San Jose that was for sale for $50, and she thought, well gee, this is an odd looking car, but this ought to do Bob all right, and so she bought it for me and it turned out to be the most magnificent car I have ever seen. It was almost like new. It had black leather seats, a completely aluminum body and aluminum engine and was in amazing condition for $50. It was an air cooled car. And after I got used to it, I used to drive it to Santa Cruz and go up over the Santa Cruz mountains . BS: How old were you then ? (50) RH: I was then in high school and what was interesting was that, here I had this air cooled car, very well engineered. I’d drive up that long grade and it would pass all the ordinary cars with water cooled engines, all pulled over on a hot day, boiling over, and they would look at this car coming by at reasonable speed and they just stood agape. They just looked at this and thought, how come? Because it was air cooled. And there wasn’t anything to boil. And I enjoyed that car, and then it finally threw a rod and couldn’t be fixed. It was totally . you couldn’t get a block. It wasn’t a block. They were individual cylinders that were bolted to a crankcase, every one was a separate chamber. So, I had to find another car and I got an old Model A Ford and got back into normal kinds of vehicles. But, that was the way the family had to operate. We were all short of money and we had to find ways of economizing in order to maintain access to education for both my sister and myself 4 because that came first. So, I went through the grade school and high school system in Palo Alto, and was moved from one place to another as we moved our location and residence. Ended up in Palo Alto High School, which I completed and was fortunate enough to have teachers in the high school – this was before AP credit was available in the school system – but, they did recognize the need for college preparation because many of the students in Palo Alto High School went to Stanford University and other universities when they graduated. So, I was lucky enough to have a college level chemistry course and mathematics course which was amazing. So, I learned analytic geometry and beginning calculus from the teacher – Mrs. Younkin – who was a very good math teacher, and she also taught tennis. And it was common in those days for people in the athletic department to have an academic responsibility also, academic level material, and some of them were very good at combining these and some weren’t so good. That’s another story, but at any rate, the preparation in high school made it possible for me to apply to Stanford, and the family had put away a little money for college. And that was in 1938. I graduated from high school in the spring and entered Stanford in the fall of 1938, and started out on an engineering degree. But, the funds were so limited that I needed to get a job. So, as soon as possible, I got a part-time job. This was during the build up before World War II. There were government programs for funding students and I got paid 75 cents an hour to record Japanese propaganda from Radio Saigon for the Hoover Institution, then called the Hoover Library. BS: During the war, or . ? RH: This was just the beginning of the war – Hoover Library for War, Revolution and Peace – they funded this. And I would record these daily propaganda broadcasts on wax cylinders on a dictaphone, prior to the advent of tape recorders and bring these wax cylinders in to the basement of the Hoover Library where they were transcribed and put into the archives and they’re there. 5 One can find these transcribed cylinders in the Hoover Archives right now. I went over there to check it one day. (100) BS: Did they put them on tape or CD? RH: No, they’re just transcribed in hard copy, typed out. I didn’t take any of them out because I knew about what was on them since I had recorded them. But, in the process I got acquainted with modern receivers. I had built my own receivers as a ham radio operator because I couldn’t afford to buy an HRO or Superpro. But, the department was able to acquire the receiver which I would set up and connect to the dictaphone each morning for the propaganda broadcasts, and I became acquainted with the local ham radio station which was set up by Professor Oswald G.