9. Table of Contents Previous Next
8/16/26
“I Saw the Light”
This is not about a spiritual awakening, but an awakening of the mind that I experienced while a sophomore in high school.
My parents, though very smart, couldn’t be described as intellectuals, which is to say they didn’t often seek knowledge for the sake of knowledge. They were both brilliant at running the family business, so we kids were provided for, and then some. Daddy did read a good deal, mostly novels and histories, and he was a metal sculpture artist. Mom was an expert at accounting, tax law, and public relations, using her expertise to make the business grow. All of this is to let you know that I didn’t grow up wanting to read about esoteric subjects, other than some history at dad’s behest. So, I mostly watched television, hung out with neighborhood kids and my cousins, and practiced music. That all changed because of a chance encounter that I call a miracle.
In my high school cafeteria, the freshmen sat with the freshman, sophomores with sophomores, etc., with few exceptions. One day, the only seat left was at a table occupied by juniors. I asked if I could join them and one of them said “Okay, but don’t talk.” I wasn’t planning on talking, as I just wanted to finish my lunch and leave. But after a few minutes, thoughts of leaving vanished because those kids were talking about Einstein’s special theory of relativity – how space and time are not absolute! I sat there, silently amazed, and they knew it. When it was time to go back to class, I asked if I could sit with them the next day and the same boy said I could, if I continued to be a silent observer.
The next day, they were discussing neutrinos. Another day it was Friedrich Nietzsche, then thermodynamics, Aristotle, the Bible and its various translations, Jean Paul Sartre’s “No Exit,” and on and on. There were various juniors who left the group and some replaced them, but the core members who were there every day were Mike and Chris. Mike went on to be one of the early developers of the global positioning system (GPS). They talked about football, the mental and physical attributes of various girls, how to chug a beer in one gulp, Adam Smith, Marx, Corvettes, Ferraris, Nixon, Elton John, Greek mythology, and Viet Nam.
Toward the end of my sophomore year when it was time to select my electives for the fall, Chris took my sign-up sheet and filled it out for me. He signed me up for computer science, electronics, and probability & statistics. I told him that they would never let me take all those classes in addition to the regular subjects. He said he had talked the director of studies into it. Thanks a lot, Chris!
I let Chris know that I wanted to join in their discussions the following year and asked him what I should read over the summer. He said, “If I tell you what to read, I’ll already know what you’re gonna say. Read something we haven’t talked about and bring it to the table.” So, I spent the summer reading Dostoyevsky’s “Crime and Punishment,” A biography of Tesla, and Plato’s “Republic.”
For the first time, I was actually eager for the summer to end and school to start. When my junior year began, I finally got to join in the conversation. Mike, Chris, and the other boys loved my tales of Tesla. We all wondered why the Russians in “Crime and Punishment” seemed like normal people (except for Raskolnikov and Marmeladov), after our elders had told us the Ruskies were barbarians. Was Plato a proto-communist? We thought we had figured it out. Once my summer reading had been thoroughly discussed, we asked each other: Why should we keep sending astronauts to the Moon? Why does water expand when it freezes and nothing else does? – and more, and more. I tried to convince them to listen to Jimmie Rodgers and the Carter Family, but they weren’t THAT enlightened.
We learned how to hack into several mainframe computers, not maliciously, but just to find out if we could. We learned BASIC and FORTRAN and became better coders than our teacher. We built various electronic gadgets and had the times of our short lives.
We weren’t typical nerds, at least we didn’t think we were. We attended the school’s sporting events and lead the cheering section, made posters for school events, and Mike started a booster club called “Crusher, Inc.”
As the end of my junior year approached, when Mike, Chris, and the others were graduating, Mike said it was up to me to recruit new members to the group. I assured him I would, but I never got it together. “Crusher, Inc.” passed into history.
I’m so thankful that there was only one seat left in the cafeteria that day. Those brilliant boys started me down the path toward a couple of degrees in electrical engineering and ultimately, running a recording studio. If I had found a seat with my own class on the miracle day, I would probably now be sitting on the couch watching television instead of writing this little story.
Tom Mindte
August 2026
Photo - Me at my high school in 1974, doing something with wires.
Addendum:
There's one essential thing that I forgot to mention. Mike, Chris, and the others figured out that a slice of pizza from the cafeteria, when stuck to the ceiling by its cheese, would fall back down on the table about twenty minutes later. They got me to cause a distraction by knocking over some trays while they stuck the pizza. After our group left, another group of kids sat down and we watched until the pizza fell in the middle of the table. We pulled that stunt about three times in the two years I was in the group.
Me at my high school in 1974, doing something with wires.