What year?
Oh, this was 1931. I believe. So, you see. I had quite a background in interpreting to the public, and this, as I say, has been a lifelong effort. And I’ve enjoyed it every minute, up till about a year ago when I had a very bad accident and lost much of my hearing. Totaled my Volvo car and it’s hard to total a Volvo, you know. And I lay my life to the fact that I had my seatbelt on and it was a Volvo, not another car, because it rolled me several times.
I gave lectures, up till that time, on an average of two or three a mouth. I have a list in my autobiography of some 100 different titles that I’ve given lectures on to all sorts of organizations, from the City Club of Portland to Elderhostel groups. When I got back from a year in Pakistan on a sabbatical, I gave a talk to the City Club on “Johnny Can’t Read.” Do you remember they were talking about that a few years back? “Johnny Can’t Read,” but Muhammad Khan Reads and Speaks Three Languages!” In the area where I was teaching, at Peshawar, we had the tribes and they could speak only Pashto, and couldn’t speak Urdu, so they spent their grade school years learning to speak Urdu so they could go to high school and they spent their high school years learning to speak English so they could go to college because college was taught in English. So it was a very difficult situation there. And I thought it was fascinating and the City Club did, too.
Did you ever think of yourself as retired once you officially left in ’74?
No, heavens no. I’ve been busier… well, the main thing about being retired is you don’t get any holidays!
So you don’t ever take any time off?
I’m down here often on Saturdays and Sundays, until I got a little feeble in the last couple of years. I’ve had this asthma during the last six months, and that’s cut down on that work. And my desk begins to pile up, you know! But, I lay a lot of my ability to continue to produce on the computer. I got my computer way back in 1982, you see, and it is an antique now, it’s completely obsolete. It goes on CPM! But it’s perfectly all right for what I use it for.
