Abstract
Jearl Walker is a professor in the physics department at Cleveland State University, joining the faculty in 1973. Walker is originally from Fort Worth, Texas and attended MIT in Boston for his undergraduate studies. After graduation he enrolled at the University of Maryland where he earned his PhD and landed a book deal for his technical report titled, The Flying Circus of Physics. Walker became well known for his unorthodox teaching techniques that have involved walking on hot coals, dipping his hand in molten lead, and lying on a bed of nails. He has appeared on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson and was featured in the Smithsonian Magazine. He was a long time writer for Scientific American and currently is in charge of editing the most widely used physics textbook in the United States, Fundamentals of Physics. In this interview Walker chronicles his time at Cleveland State including both his personal life aside from teaching and his experiences in teaching Physics 201. Of particular note is his discussion of appearing on The Tonight Show and his perspective on the major events in Cleveland State's history including the unionization of the faculty in the early 1990s and the split of the College of Arts and Sciences in the early 2000s.
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Interviewee
Walker, Jearl (interviewee)
Interviewer
Wickens, Joe (interviewer)
Project
CSU at 50
Date
10-1-2014
Document Type
Oral History
Duration
45 minutes
Recommended Citation
"Jearl Walker Interview, 01 October 2014" (2014). Cleveland Regional Oral History Collection. Interview 500045.
https://engagedscholarship.csuohio.edu/crohc000/700
Transcript
Joseph Wickens [00:00:01] My name is Joseph Wickens. I’m here with the Center for Public History and Digital Humanities at Cleveland State University. I’m conducting this interview as part of Cleveland State’s 50th anniversary commemoration effort. You want to state your name and spell it, please?
Jearl Walker [00:00:12] It’s Jearl Walker, J-E-A-R-L W-A-L-K-E-R. And today’s date is October 1, 2014.
Joseph Wickens [00:00:23] Alright, how about we start off with getting a little bit of your background? Where are you originally from? Where were you raised? Things of that nature.
Jearl Walker [00:00:31] Grew up in Fort Worth, Texas, went to undergraduate school at MIT in Boston, went to graduate school at University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland, then came here as an assistant professor.
Joseph Wickens [00:00:43] All right, what you said you went to MIT. What other schools were you considering? Any other schools? What was your college, I guess, picture looking like as you started to consider where you wanted to attend?
Jearl Walker [00:00:55] I was naive as a high school student. I didn’t really know where to go. I just applied to MIT on a lark. I applied to other schools, too, applied to Caltech, but I apparently didn’t get the address right, so the letter bounced back to me. And I was accepted at MIT. Perhaps the token Texan or something like that. Ended up at MIT for four years. Really regretted every moment of it. Thought it was a terrible school. Terrible school to get an education at. Really great for research, but terrible to get an education. We weren’t allowed to talk to the professors. The only thing I think I learned there was how to teach myself physics.
Joseph Wickens [00:01:36] So then, Maryland, how did that become an option, or how did that come about?
Jearl Walker [00:01:42] I was largely attracted by a particular experiment at Maryland, the detection of gravitational waves. And there was a fellow there, Joe Weber, who had a gravitational wave detector he was working on. He did not like my background, so he didn’t choose me. I felt very lucky in retrospect, because that project was an utter failure. He did not detect gravitational waves, though he announced it shortly after I got there, and I’m very glad I didn’t go into gravitational waves. I would have never gotten a job anywhere, and certainly not here at CSU.
Joseph Wickens [00:02:20] Can you tell me what you’ve, I guess, foreshadowing a bit, can you tell me about your TA-ing experience while at Maryland?
Jearl Walker [00:02:27] Then in my second year at Maryland, there were so many graduate students had been drafted to Vietnam that they were short of TAs. So they made me and a few other people full-time teaching assistants. We were given faculty status. We were making called junior fellows, and we could even vote with the regular faculty in the meetings. But the downside was, or the good side was, that I had to teach full-time while also going to grad school full-time. So I slept very little for about two years there. But that introduced me to teaching, and that’s why I’m here, is because I got turned on to teaching. At that point, my grades went from low in the class to A’s in most of my classes, simply because I had a purpose and I wanted to be a teacher.
Joseph Wickens [00:03:24] And you became one immediately. I mean, you graduated in ’73, and then that was when you started at Cleveland State. How did Cleveland State happen? I guess, what brought you to Cleveland?
Jearl Walker [00:03:35] When I was a graduate student, I wrote a technical report called the Flying Circus of Physics. By the time I was graduating, I had already had a book contract and was writing the book, the Flying Circus of Physics. The people here at Cleveland State had heard about the technical report, had gotten a copy from me and offered me a job on the basis of that alone. It was very unusual for a graduate student to have a book contract in hand. So they offered me the job and I came here. I was very lucky because most of my fellow students looked for another one to three years for a job, and the best they could get is a temporary job where they knew they were going to be fired after one or two years. And here I had a chance for tenure. So there were only two such jobs in the entire country when I was graduating from Maryland. And so I was really lucky to get this job here.
Joseph Wickens [00:04:33] First impressions when you arrived in Cleveland?
Jearl Walker [00:04:36] Well, the week before I interviewed here, I interviewed somewhere in North Carolina. I went in there in spring had already sprung, and there were flowers and there were students and lots of beautiful women lying around on the grass. And the faculty was really, really nice to me. And the next week, I came here to Cleveland to interview at CSU, had to ride the train in from the airport. Spring had not come. There was still snow on the ground. It was dirty snow, it was gray snow. It was depressing as everything. Rode the train in, got in, and it turned out that many of the faculty were opposed to my being even interviewed because they wanted to hire somebody, a friend of theirs, out of Case that was losing his job there. So most of the faculty was kind of openly hostile to me, very unfriendly. But in those days, there was not a democratic vote on hiring the chair, and the dean made the decision, and they both strongly wanted me. So I was hired in spite of, I think, the faculty vote. I think the faculty vote was eleven to three against me. And so I did not feel warm and fuzzy about coming here. But it worked out.
Joseph Wickens [00:05:49] Yet it didn’t deter you either.
Jearl Walker [00:05:51] It did not. I decided this was a better school for advancement than the school in North Carolina, in spite of the beautiful women lying on the grass there. There were no one lying on the grass around CSU because we have concrete, but I was used to that. MIT is concrete, so there you go. And so I really value that I made the decision to come here. It was a good choice, and it’s been a good career here ever since. They promised to leave me alone. That’s the thing that really enticed me. I wanted to do things my way, and I think if I had gone to a larger school like Ohio State or something like that, I think I would have just ended up being fired and not being given tenure. But CSU left me alone, and I went off and did other unusual things, inventive things, and not the primary research path that most young professors take.
Joseph Wickens [00:06:47] Well, I think we might touch upon a couple of those as we move along. I wanted to ask, where was the department? Like, if there was a department, where was your office? Where were you teaching courses at when you first came to Cleveland?
Jearl Walker [00:07:00] I think my first office was this very room here. I’ve been moved around a lot since then, but I think this is the first office, and I had to share it with another young professor at the time. It’s the only difference. I got it to myself. Now, the classes, my memory is I taught a lot in Stilwell. Main Classroom was existing, and I taught in there. In fact, my second year here, I had teach my first large class, about 130 people, in MC 201. I had taught at Maryland, only small classes, about 25 students. My first year here, I taught about 25 students in a class. And now I had to entertain 130 people. So I had to radically change the way I taught. You have to be entertaining, you have to be engaging. You have to do that for an hour. And most teachers know that a student’s attention span is roughly about eleven minutes. So it was a challenge to go for 50 minutes or 65 minutes, whatever we were teaching in those days.
Joseph Wickens [00:08:08] Well, one of the ways that, one of the people, I guess, that characters that entertained the students was Julia Grown-up and her cohorts, I guess, would be how I would describe it. Can you tell me about, I guess, Julia and the others?
Jearl Walker [00:08:24] I’d forgotten that I did Julia. That was after Julia Child. And I started doing videos to show in class and would put on costumes and put on squeaky voices and things like that. Just, you know, three minutes of video just to wake the students up. But it had to be to a lesson plan. We had to get across some message. So I did Julia Child, I did Irma, the cheerleader, though I did that live in class. I would set the class up. We would be talking about the spreading of sound through small openings, something called diffraction. And I would say, you know, she was supposed to be here. The CSU cheerleader, Irma, she promised she would be here. I don’t know where she is. And I would do that for several times for the first 30 minutes of class. And I said, you know what? Give me a minute. Let me go look for her. I dash across the hall into a stockroom. I’d put on my little white pleated skirt - really nice skirt, still got it - and I would put on a CSU t-shirt. I’d put on a wig, and I’d come back in with a cheerleader megaphone, and I would speak in a high frequency voice like this, and I would talk to the class about the diffraction of sound through the megaphone. Why does the cheerleader use a megaphone? Is because if she speaks through her mouth, it’s such a small opening that the sound really spreads left and right. It doesn’t beam out to the audience. But if you speak through a megaphone, there is less spreading, and the sound goes pretty much in the forward direction. Therefore, the audience in a football game might be able to hear the cheerleader. And I would do that. It was outrageous. In fact, you know, I pick a t shirt that was too short, so my belly would show. Hairy belly would show, and my. Of course, my legs were hairy. And as one student put it, it’s the grossest thing she’s ever seen in her life. But it’s a lesson plan she will never forget.
Joseph Wickens [00:10:24] Well, I guess along the same lines of outrageous, the way I’ll phrase this question is, how important has vapor layers been to your career?
Jearl Walker [00:10:34] When I first came here, I was pretty much into writing the Flying Circus book, and one of the subjects, there was something called the Leidenfrost Effect. I remember exactly where I was in the library at University of Maryland when I came across a paper. I was searching journals, page by page, looking for ideas. I came across a paper on the Leidenfrost Effect, and briefly, what this is, if you throw a water drop down on a fairly hot skillet, the water drop sizzles away in one to two seconds. But if the skillet is even hotter, the water drop, paradoxically, lasts for a minute or two, and that’s because as it approaches the skillet, the bottom side vaporizes, and then you have a layer of vapor supporting the water drop, holding it away from the hot metal and prolonging its lifetime. And I saw this, wrote it up for Flying Circus. And then, almost at the same time, I came across a description in an old physics book of a stunt in sideshows or carnivals, where a stunt person would wet his fingers and stick them into molten metal. And I said, oh, that’s got to be the Leidenfrost Effect. The water partially vaporizes, puts up a vapor layer that briefly protects the skin from contact with the molten metal. So I decided to do that stunt for my class. But we tried it here in the department. First. We melted down some lead or a flame and wet my fingers. And it was so stupid that the first several times I tried it, I kept missing the pot of lead, and my brain would not let me put my fingers in. I finally touched the lead and realized there was no sensation of heat. A brief touch, and then I plunged my fingers, and again, there was no sensation of heat. And therefore, that was the birth of the stunt that I grew to be famous about. I did it in front of the class. I’ve done it all across the United States and Canada in the Flying Circus talks. I did it on my television show for PBS, Kinetic Karnival. I wrote about it in the Scientific American articles that I started writing columns for them for 13 years. And I think that was– I think that was my second column for them. A very popular column that was. I got a lot of mail on that one, and there are still burn marks on some of the furniture here in the department for where the molten lead splashed and burned. I was hurt several times by the molten lead. Now, if I briefly go in, my fingers are protected, but the splash can splash molten lead onto my arms, and I’ve been burned doing that. I was once tricked by the National Enquirer and being interviewed for them. The guy told me he was working for a Swiss newspaper chain, and I agreed for him to come in. He said I would do one stunt for him. Came in on Sunday with about, I think, six cameras, high-speed cameras, really professional. And I did the stunt over and over again, about 30, 35 times for him, so I could get a good photograph of it. At one point, he said, you know, I’m getting glare off your glasses. Can you take your glasses off? I took the glasses off. I did the stunt. Molten lead splashed up into my eye socket. Luckily, it hit the eyelid and not the open eye. No. You know, I think it must have cooled on its, in its flight because I did not get badly burned on the eyelid. But it sure woke me up. About two weeks later, I got a call from a Detroit television morning show. Hey, can you come be on our show and do that molten lead thing you did? How did you know about me? How did you know about me? And they said, oh, you’re in the National Enquirer this week. And I just gulped. I thought to myself, oh, my gosh, what did they find out about me? I could see my marriage dissolving. I would lose tenure. I would be homeless on the street. I raced across to the old Barnes and Noble bookstore, the old location. They had National Enquirer on the shelf. I bought the last copy. I went through it hurriedly, page by page, went to the last page, and it was photographs of me. That guy had lied to me. He was working for the National Enquirer. And that’s where my photographs ended up. It was a good, solid article. I really liked the photographs. I didn’t like being told a falsehood there, but it was good.
Joseph Wickens [00:15:15] So you’ve mentioned Flying Circus life afterward, published in ’75 immediately, I guess. What happened? What did you expect and what ended up happening?
Jearl Walker [00:15:28] I didn’t expect anything to happen. I was surprised I’d even got a book contract when I was a graduate student. And then I finished up the book after I got here. It was reviewed in Scientific American and really, really took off. And it was eventually has been translated, I think, into twelve or thirteen languages, something like that. It’s worldwide. The second edition came out in 2006. It took me a long time to get around to writing the second edition, but it’s probably the thing that’s most associated with me these days. There’s a Flying Circus website, I think I looked last night, and for September, we had 6,000 unique visitors. So it’s popular. It’s looked at all over the world. And it’s been a lot of fun. It’s curious things in the everyday world that just catch my attention. It’s just things you might find in the kitchen, on the road, in the sky at night, things like that.
Joseph Wickens [00:16:33] Well, it eventually led to you contributing, and you mentioned earlier contributing to Scientific American. How did that come about? And I guess, what was the process? If you’re working here as a faculty member at Cleveland, Cleveland state, what was the process? What was the oversight to the articles that you were writing?
Jearl Walker [00:16:50] I guess the book editor at Scientific American, the guy who originally suggested to me when I was a graduate student, hey, you should write this as a book. He reviewed the book. Very nice review. And then when the fellow that was writing the Amateur Scientist column happened to die, the book editor suggested to the main editors that they hire me to replace that column writing. So I was hired. My first article was on how to see multiple rainbows from a single drop of water that’s being shined with a beam of light. And I just wrote for him for 13 years. It was really, really hard work to come up with 5,000 words every month about a different topic. And I had something like 2 million readers in English language alone, according to their surveys. And I was translated into six or seven other languages. So I was read worldwide. So I could not make a mistake. I had to be really accurate. And that was really, really tough work every month to make that deadline.
Joseph Wickens [00:18:00] The other thing that you’ve also mentioned earlier was Kinetic Karnival. And before I understand that you worked with one of your colleagues, and I’d like to ask about him, Dr. Karl Casper. Did he help you with that? Work with him, or how did that. What was that relationship?
Jearl Walker [00:18:19] We tried to write a textbook together that lasted for about a month. It didn’t work out too well. And that’s the only thing that we did together. He was the person who got the technical report from me when I was a graduate student, and who suggested to the chair and to the dean that I be hired here. So it was very instrumental in bringing me here. But thereafter, we didn’t work together except for that brief time.
Joseph Wickens [00:18:46] Alright, so then Kinetic Karnival, who approached who?
Jearl Walker [00:18:50] WVIZ producer approached me. He had seen the tech, the Flying Circus book and thought that maybe we could work together to do a series, a six-part series. And so they came out, I said, okay. And we did the six-part series that I thought was kind of tough because I had to work in front of a live audience. I had to time it to within 30 seconds of being 28 minutes long. But there was no clock in the room, so I had to really, really concentrate on being funny and explaining things and moving ahead and meeting that 28 minutes deadline. But it worked out. Most of it was done in front of a live audience. We did shoot some stuff on location, like the Harbor Inn in the Flats, and in my bathtub. The opening of one show, the film crew discovers that I’m taking a bubble bath. I got a little bit of trouble for that show after it got aired, because I had in one hand a bottle of beer, in the other hand a cigarette. And some people thought that was being a little bit outrageous, but I thought it was Saturday Night Live type humor.
Joseph Wickens [00:20:05] Absolutely. And I believe it resulted in an Emmy.
Jearl Walker [00:20:08] I got a local Emmy for the show, the one where I walked over hot coals and stuck my fingers in molten lead and poured liquid nitrogen into my mouth. Didn’t swallow, but poured it into my mouth. This all involves vapor layers, the Leidenfrost Effect, the vapor layer protecting me. I won an Emmy, and the best thing about that, we went to my wife and I went to the Emmy awards here in town, and I was up against Kathy Brugette, who was doing an entertainment show. She was absolutely beautiful and extremely talented and had come to interview me at one point, and I was up against her, and I won. And after I got back off the podium, she came up and gave me a big hug that meant more to me than the Emmy statue itself.
Joseph Wickens [00:21:00] Well, just before they aired and shot Kinetic Karnival, I guess, back with Cleveland State, Science Two finished in ’81. What did that do for the department? What did that translate to?
Jearl Walker [00:21:16] The Science Research building? It did not affect us in Physics because we don’t have any offices over there, but it did move off a lot of the Biology and some of the Chemistry people off into a new area, so we weren’t so cramped. That was a really nice construction. We also saw the old student center being built. It’s now been torn down and replaced. But that was a really nice feature because prior to that being opened, it was just kind of like Fenn College, you know, just. Just had Fenn Tower and Stilwell, and we had some old buildings, and we were surrounded by slums. I remember looking out of the old cafeteria toward the west, and it was just the back end of slum apartments over there. So the environment has greatly improved.
Joseph Wickens [00:22:11] So all this is going on with you and with the university is building buildings, and you’re writing books and shooting shows at the same time. You are starting to gain in popularity. I’ve read from 500 to 800 people would be trying to get into a class with 200 openings.
Jearl Walker [00:22:30] The old Flying Circus of Physics class, there was 232 seats in MC 201, and I would get about four to 500 requests. We would actually look for handicapped students because they would bring their own wheelchairs and wouldn’t take up a seat. That was extremely popular. That was the toughest class I’ve ever taught. I mean, I teach calculus-based physics to engineers right now, but the Flying Circus class was really tough because you had to go in there and be really entertaining as well as get across something that most people don’t want to know about physics. So I had to really work on every lecture. So I built up the costumes, the characters, the videos, did a lot of slideshows in there, tried to find things in the everyday world that these people would see later that day or later in life so as to reinforce the physics I was trying to get across. And that was extremely draining, but also very popular. I still get people coming back, showing up at the door saying, I was in your class, in your Flying Circus class back in the seventies. You’re not going to remember my face or name, but I just want to tell you how much I thought of your class. Now, the bad thing about that is very often they bring by their children who are now enrolling at CSU, and I suddenly realize how old I really am. What I’m dreading is if one of those former students brings by their grandkids as they’re enrolling at CSU, then maybe it’s time for me to call it quits. We’ll see.
Joseph Wickens [00:24:08] Fair enough. Well, how did your colleagues, I guess, respond to the immense popularity of that course, or-?
Jearl Walker [00:24:14] Yeah, I think the people that like what I do, when I first came here, those three people really appreciated what I was doing for the enrollments here. I’m not sure the other people really liked it, though. They eventually gave in to it. It’s ironic that the person who opposed me most when I applied here and in my early years, I ended up being chair and his boss. I was very nice to him. I would not do anything vengeful. But I remember in one department meeting, the people who liked me and the people who did not like me were actually yelling at each other at the top of their voices with me hiding in a corner. I wasn’t going to participate in that, but they were arguing about my teaching techniques. So we resolved the conflict by having the people oppose me, teach the same course at the same time, and we would let the students decide. And when all the students migrated to my classroom, the vote was in and the arguments stopped. At that point, they realized that I was doing a good job.
Joseph Wickens [00:25:22] You mentioned department chair. When did that happen?
Jearl Walker [00:25:27] I’m trying to suppress my years as department chair. Let me see. It was the late 1980s. I was chair for four years. As I say, it was one of the top three mistakes of my life, and I will not tell you the other two, but it was an extremely unpleasant experience. As department chair, you don’t have any power. What people do is they tell you to clean up the mess, and you have to clean up squabbles and personality defects, and you have to deal with the dean’s office and a lot of paperwork, and it just was not fun at all. So I could have gone another three years as chair, but I wanted to go back to full-time teaching. So I quit as chair after four years, and I’ve been a full-time professor ever since.
Joseph Wickens [00:26:21] I wasn’t sure I remember seeing that myself, but I wasn’t sure you mentioned it, so I was just going to ask about it along with 201. Was there TA competition then? I mean, if it was that much, if it was that, did you have TAs for that course, and were they competition to get into there as well, along with the enrollments of the regular students?
Jearl Walker [00:26:40] No, we’re not like a large school like Ohio State. We really don’t have TA’s that help professors. We have TA’s who will run labs associated with a class. So I’ve never had any graduate students working for me at Maryland. I was a graduate student, or TA, working for other professors, but they have lots of money at Maryland, and we never did have that much money at CSU.
Joseph Wickens [00:27:06] My other question for that is, with all this, I guess, notoriety was gaining all this sort of recognition from Circus and then making these appearances in the writing. Were you getting other offers? Were you ever considering or anything? Did it ever even become an idea for you? Is this where I want to be, or is there something else out there?
Jearl Walker [00:27:29] I never questioned about staying here. I wanted to stay here. I liked the school. I liked the students a lot. I found a niche for myself, and the school officials did leave me alone, and I got promoted, you know, I got tenure and eventually full professor. So I was rewarded. If I had gone to another school, and I think I could have gone to a lot of different schools, I would have been strapped down with, you know, the traditional professor responsibilities, and I just didn’t want to do that. I wanted to write and teach.
Joseph Wickens [00:28:02] Fair enough. That was one of the things that I had to think anyway, was happening. Mentioning that the Smithsonian magazine, you mentioned you had to run out and buy the Enquirer. Did you have a subscription to Smithsonian prior to ’86?
Jearl Walker [00:28:18] No, I did not. The Smithsonian magazine interview, which was, made me larger than life, was just a fluke. I got a call one day from a writer in Cleveland Heights who would write small pieces for national campus newspapers or magazines, and he said, hey, would you do me a favor and come over? I only live two blocks from you. Would you come over and do the bed of nails and we could photograph it? I could write up a little description and I could maybe sell it somewhere. I said, alright. So I went over there and I posed for him, and he talked to me about the physics of not being punctured when I’m sandwiched between two beds of nails. Well, it turns out that once he published that in the national newspaper or magazine, I never saw it. The photographer for the Smithsonian saw it and pitched the idea to the Smithsonian and the Smithsonian writer. They asked if they could do an article about me in my teaching. And I said, sure. They came here for two and a half days. I think the photographer shot about 1,000 shots. It was a very strenuous effort. And they published that article and that just really got me a lot of attention. One of the people who saw the magazine had a subscription to it was the person who ran the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. She called me up, said, hey, how would you like to be on the show? I said, no, I don’t think so. She called me four times and I said, no, four times. The fifth phone call, I was so embarrassed about being scared. I said, okay. And I went on. I practiced in my basement. I had seen Johnny Carson my entire adult life. I would practice the scene in my basement. I would practice what I would say. I would practice what he would say. You know, I couldn’t guess what he was going to say. So I have variations in my practice. And we went out there, my wife and I, they were extremely nice. I had to do the molten lead trick and we were having trouble keeping the lead molten. If I go into lead and it’s not quite molten, I can lose my fingers. I would get my fingers encased in the lead. Well, there was such a strong breeze across the backstage there in the studio that the flame was being blown off to one side. I couldn’t reposition the burner because it had me, for safety reasons, wired in place. So I had a handheld blowtorch that you can buy in hardware stores. And I was trying to keep the lead hot. And as Ed McMahon was saying my name, I handed the torch to a stagehand. I said, you keep this flame on that lead or I’m going to lose my fingers on camera. And I went out. I was nervous for about five seconds. If you ever see the video, you can see my eyelids go up and down about 10,000 times. But I kept my voice steady and I didn’t relax because Johnny Carson was so nice. He was real. He was exactly in real life like he was on camera. And we talked and we laughed and the audience laughed. And turns out, when we got to the molten lead, it came out from backstage, and it was still, I looked at it. It was molten. I didn’t know if it was really, really hot, well above melting point. But I took a chance and it worked. I didn’t lose my fingers on camera, which would have horrified my mom. So it was nice.
Joseph Wickens [00:32:04] Was there any other guests on the show? I mean, usually they book more than one, right?
Jearl Walker [00:32:08] There was two other guests. The, what was his name? Michael Landon, perhaps? I think that was it. No, it was– The guy I can’t remember is a famous actor on a television series from Dallas, I believe. Yeah, it was Dallas. Patrick Duffy. Yes, Patrick Duffy. I remember seeing, yes, he was on there. He came out after me. I was the first guest out, and things were working so well that they kept me on longer than they anticipated. And they brought up Patrick Duffy, and then they were supposed to bring out a comedian, but they had to bump the comedian to some other time because they just didn’t have enough time. Then Patrick Duffy was backstage in the green room, and he had watched my segment. So when he walked out, he walked out with bandages around his right hand. So he had tried the molten lead himself.
Joseph Wickens [00:33:10] That’s awesome. That really is. So that happened. That appearance on the show took place in ’87. And then I guess Cleveland State was still going on, though. You didn’t sell out for showbiz.
Jearl Walker [00:33:26] Nope, I didn’t sell out for showbiz. I’m still full-time teacher. The only thing that happened thereafter that I said no to, that I really regret was the next week, the Hollywood Squares TV show called me and asked me to be on for about a week or so, and I said no. And I really wish I’d done that at that time. In the center square, Alf, the big puppet from the Alf TV show, was sitting. And I could have sat next to Alf, and that would have been great to show my kids, my students, you know, and after I have the stroke and I’m looking up in the nurse’s eyes, she could play that just for laughs, you know, on the monitor.
Joseph Wickens [00:34:12] I was actually, I actually had a stuffed Alf when I was, when I was growing up.
Jearl Walker [00:34:18] Now, that next week, David Letterman Show called also and asked me to be on, but they didn’t realize I had just been on Carson. So when I told them that, they lost interest. They did call about five years later and asked me to be on the Letterman Show. But by then, I had heard some bad things about how Letterman regards his guest. There was actually the physicist that they asked after I turned them down. Came out of University of Texas and has the same publisher as I do. So I learned this. He was treated very rudely, both on camera and off camera by Letterman and the others, and was spitting mad by the time he got back home. So I’m kind of glad I never did the Letterman Show.
Joseph Wickens [00:35:02] Yeah. So instead you said stuck on at Cleveland State. From a historian’s perspective, one of the things that’s really interesting is in the early nineties, I guess, the faculty situation at Cleveland State, what was that atmosphere like? I mean, ultimately, I believe it was in ’93, they moved to unionize. What was like, sort of what was going on during that time?
Jearl Walker [00:35:25] I didn’t really pay much attention to the administration. Still don’t. I go to great pains not to pay any attention to the administration. I feel better about life that way. In those days, in the 1990s, the administration had done some really irresponsible things and really upset a large part of the faculty. And the faculty finally got the motion to unionize. I never did join. I’m not a big joiner or union-type person, but I could understand at the time why they had to become a body in order to oppose the actions of the administration. Now, we eventually got to Michael Schwartz as president, and that was the golden era. We just really had a great atmosphere. We really missed him when he was going to retire with a big celebration in his honor. We had never had anything like that for a previous president of the university. But Michael Schwartz was really nice. Now, if Michael Schwartz had been in charge in the 1990s, I don’t think the faculty ever would have formed a union. Things could have been worked out.
Joseph Wickens [00:36:38] Well, instead of joining the union, you signed on to edit Fundamentals of Physics.
Jearl Walker [00:36:45] I got a phone call in 1989. Ironic. Here’s a textbook that I use as first year student at MIT. It wasn’t the assigned book, but it’s the one I picked up to actually learn from. I couldn’t learn from the assigned book. And in 1989, Resnick called me up and said, hey, Halliday and I are getting elderly. We want to stop working on the textbook. How would you like to take it over? They had apparently been reading me in Scientific American for the last 13 years. And the thing that flashed through my head when he was telling me this is, do I admit to him how I struggled with his homework problems when I was a first year student? I thought, no, I think I’ll keep that to myself. And so I just said, okay. And so I resigned from Scientific American. And took on the next edition of the textbook. And those two, Halliday and Resnick, fully retired. And I had the textbook to get out. I went from the frying pan to the fire, so to speak. I thought meeting deadlines every month at Scientific American was tough, but writing a textbook means you work about 80 hours a week and then you go teach. So I really worked extremely hard to get out the next textbook. I think I’ve gone through seven editions now, something like that. But it’s been very successful. It is the number one book in that market in the United States and North America and in the world. It is in, I think, twelve or thirteen languages. I’ve actually lost count. And so it is extremely well-received. So I guess I’m glad I said okay when he called.
Joseph Wickens [00:38:31] Well, I was interested. I’m just personally curious. How does it feel to be the one approach to answer the really tough questions, like why is Snow White about the flight of a football, the validity of proverbs and roller coasters, physics, those types of questions. You’re the guy that they come to that asks these questions. How does that work? You just get called up and what do you think?
Jearl Walker [00:38:56] Well, people do call me when they just have everyday questions, especially old students. They might have a question about, why does this work this way? My colleagues and I are talking about it and arguing about it. Can you answer it? So I do my best. In the past, people who write newspaper columns would call me up, the strange but true column that ran in the PD [Plain Dealer] and was syndicated nationwide. Those writers are nearby, and they would call me up with questions like that. And I used to do a radio show on CBC network in Canada every month, every week, as a matter of fact, called quirks and quirks. I would do the last five minutes, and you’re supposed to be humorous. Jay Ingram, the host, and I would kind of get in trouble with each other, and I would answer questions about everyday physics. We’re trying to make something funny out of it. So that’s what I’ve been doing for ever since I started Flying Circus of Physics when I was in graduate school.
Joseph Wickens [00:40:00] Well, you mentioned just a little bit ago about Michael Schwartz coming to Cleveland State, and that was a golden era. One of the things that he did, I think, that probably directly impacted you was he split up. Arts and Sciences.
Jearl Walker [00:40:13] Yeah, we had a disastrous situation with the Dean of Arts and Sciences. I think she was eventually let go. I don’t think you can use the word fired, but I, she did some outrageous things. And the faculty of Arts and Sciences. Hey, this is enough. The college is just too large for one dean. We have to split it. We have to have our own science dean here. For us scientists and engineers. No, for scientists. And so we split up the college, and that’s worked out really well. The first dean of College of Science was Mary Jane Saunders, and she was wonderful. She gave us an esprit de corps. We had never had that previously. It was one person against another person, always one department against another. She brought us together with an esprit de corps. It was just wonderful atmosphere for her time as dean. I really missed that atmosphere. The one, one story I can tell you about the dean that was eventually let go by Michael Schwartz was that one year the department chair, he always had to go up and make a report, an annual report to the dean, the activities in the department. He went up and said to the dean, Jearl’s got the number one textbook in the United States and in the world. And her response was, well, in that case, I’m going to increase his teaching load. And so I was punished in her eyes for having been successful. I wrote her a letter saying, you know, I don’t feel that this is right, that I’m being punished by increasing my workload because I’ve been successful. And she wrote back saying, don’t think of it as punishment. Think of it as opportunity. And at that moment, I realized I must be reading Animal Farm, where the words take on their opposite meanings from what they usually mean. And so I was punished by an increased teaching load for, I think it was two and a half years now. I didn’t really mind it all that much because I really enjoyed teaching. The only reason the punishment stopped was I went on sabbatical for one semester, and when I came back, I guess she forgot that I had to have an extra teaching load. And so I went back to normal teaching load. And then shortly thereafter, she got really upset with her staff and showed up with water guns one day and repeatedly started squirting everyone and refused to stop until one of the associate deans put a blanket over her and lowered her to the sofa. And the next day she was relieved of her duties by Michael Schwartz. And I think there was a lot of law work after that, but she eventually left.
Joseph Wickens [00:43:09] Well, I think if she wanted to justify increasing your teaching load, she would just say that you’re a great teacher and that it’s a benefit to the university, because in 2005, you received the outstanding teaching award, the first recipient of that award. What did that mean for you when that happened?
Jearl Walker [00:43:29] Well, when Mary Jane Saunders told me that they were going to start this teaching award and they were going to, it was going to be in my name, not only was I going to be the first recipient, but it was going to be in my name, I said, absolutely not. Absolutely not. I cannot possibly do that. And she said, no, we’re going to do it. And the reason we’re going to name it after you, because I know that that’s the only way you’re going to show up. And she was right. I would not have shown up, but I felt obligated, and I showed up, and there was a large number of people there from all over the college, and it was very gratifying. A professor from OSU came up and gave a talk during the luncheon. It was very, very nice. And I was just really embarrassed because I don’t think of my teaching as being anything special. I think if people come to my classroom, you will see usually I’m competent. I will say that, but I don’t think there’s anything super or great about it. But the reputation seems to have taken off. These days, we still call it a teaching award with my name associated with it, but it’s because in the first year, my publisher paid for the luncheon and all the expenses, and ever since then, I’ve paid for it. So it’s like naming a sports stadium after whoever pays the money for it. And I guess maybe the that justifies my name still being associated with the award that I pay for it every year.
Joseph Wickens [00:45:01] Okay. That brings us to ’05. And you said you’ve been perpetuating that since in your name. Do you want to add anything? Do you have anything that maybe you thought we would talk about that we didn’t, or anything that you’d like to sort of end with? Because I know you’re gonna get going here soon. I didn’t wanna force you to.
Jearl Walker [00:45:23] I can’t think of anything else. I mean, a lot of things have happened to me, but I’m not sure history needs to note them. Uh. No.
Joseph Wickens [00:45:37] Okay. Well, you know what? This is fabulous. Thank you.
Jearl Walker [00:45:41] Sure.
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