I ran across some photographs of the author Robert Heinlein that I’d taken in 1969, most of which I’d forgotten completely about. As part of the Digitization of My Life project I’ll be working on until The End, I offer the pictures and a few words on how they came to be taken.

The University of California at Santa Cruz appears to have been founded on the Oxford model. That is, it comprises the general campus referred to as “UCSC,” but within that campus lie several individual colleges with distinct identities. For reasons I cannot remember, I ended up at Crown College, the focus for which was science. I was a philosophy major by the time I transferred to UCSC as a junior in the fall of 1967, the year Crown first opened to students.

Part of the requirements for graduation from Crown was the completion of a senior seminar. I don’t recall what choices we had, but mine was the seminar on utopias conducted by the founder of the campus, Dean McHenry. As I think back on this, it was an interesting coincidence. The late 1960s was a turbulent period in American history (for that matter, in Europe, too). I recall not only the general student protest activity that several times closed our campus, but at least one sit-in of our utopias seminar! On the one hand, we were engaged in a study of utopias, under the guidance of the very man who had conceived the institution in which we studied, and on the other, the specter of Vietnam (which had to be dealt with by each male in that seminar upon his imminent graduation) appeared to have been about as far from a utopian existence as anyone could imagine. And we did imagine.

For the most part, utopias are only interesting as subjects of study when they have been implemented. Or, I suppose, when you can seriously imagine so implementing a particular utopian concept. In the ten weeks of a quarter, we took at least one field trip to a working utopia. As I think about this, there must have been several around us in that Santa Cruz mountain setting, although the degree to which any one of them (i.e., the commune movement of that time) might have been founded upon particular principles is beyond my knowledge.

I vividly recall our visit to a community in Northern California that had been founded upon religious principles. I cannot equally vividly recall the principles, but I presume they were generally communistic. That is, that labor was shared, all for one, one for all, etc. What I remember so clearly was the wonderful man (and his son) who showed us around, and explained as much as possible. There were two disturbing trends in that community (but not unique to them): there were far more women than men, and the young tended to leave the community more often than stay within it. These facts had doomed the 19^th century utopian experiments of which we read in various course materials. The man and his son were so honest and forthcoming—he readily acknowledged these problems, and despite the assurances of the son (college age, at the time) that he would return to the community upon graduation, both clearly knew that it was not certain. Unlike the Amish, this man would never “shun” his son, should he choose not to come back. And, probably, they realized that even if their one case should prove an exception, the general trend would condemn the community after n number of years.

Perhaps, the big problem with utopias is that they require a complete understanding of human nature, on the one hand, and of the relevant utopian principles, on the other. In practice, the first condition appears to be most often deeply flawed, and the second to be insufficiently (impossibly?) developed.

Anyway. Dean McHenry had a special surprise for our last week. He was a friend of Robert Heinlein, whose book Stranger in a Strange Land was having a big impact on the latter part of the 1960s (although I notice that the book was published in 1961). He invited Heinlein to lecture our class, and then McHenry invited the class (and guests) to his campus home for dinner. Until I rediscovered the photographs, I had forgotten the fact of the class lecture. When I closely examined a couple of those pictures, what Heinlein had written on the board stirred an ancient memory or two.

But, really, I cannot remember much more about even the dinner than what these photographs suggest. Except for one thing. I was seated next to Heinlein at dinner. Always the sophisticate, I was determined to make intelligent conversation, and so opened with something like, “Say, Bob, I’ve read your book. Great job!” I remember Heinlein, obviously impressed with my erudition, slowly put his knife and fork back on the table. He then looked closely at me and asked, “Which one?”

Although the existence of at least one other camera in these photographs suggests that we all knew Heinlein was famous, I obviously knew very little about the extent of this (so, what else is new). I think I read Stranger with some of the feeling I had for reading most science fiction, that is, that I’d finished with that by high school. In my defense, I see that Heinlein was not really all that prolific. But Stranger was a really, really big book (and I’ve read that it still has a following), and its reasons for being so had evidently failed to penetrate my foolish brain.

I have no particular impression of Heinlein, the person. For example, I don’t recall whether he talked as a lecturer or whether he sought your view, too. But the encounter with Heinlein was a very appropriate way to end the idealistic course and undergraduate period of my life. Next on the agenda was Vietnam, but that’s a subject for a future Web topic…