Leif's 11th Birthday - Honolulu, Hawaii - January 28, 1986 - Age 11

Leif's eleventh birthday we spent at home again, at our townhouse on Eucalyptus Place at the Aliamanu Crater Housing Area. These photos were taken in our dining area. You can see that Leif is maturing quickly and getting even taller. He looks happy, gleeful.

The remote-controlled tank was, I think, his first "real" radio controlled vehicle, which he was delighted with. He was not only always interested in military vehicles, but was fascinated with RC toys. I think this was the beginning of a many-year hobby, which I've already written about. It started with this tank and progressed to the RC vehicles he built himself from kits, modified, and even used for science fair projects.

At this age, Leif was in fifth grade and it was our last school year in Hawaii. It would be a long time before he'd get to wear shorts on his January birthday again.

Happy Birthday, Leif!

Leif - Graduation from Junior High School

It's that time of the year for graduations. Since I've been writing about Leif's junior high years, here are two photos of him posing in his bright red NJHS gown. His playful spirit was going strong. It was a milestone he looked forward to, and the day we took these photos, we also took a lot of other funny ones horsing around. NJHS in Highland Park, Illinois, was good for him. It was one of the few places that not only stretched his mind but offered students a selection of assignments that they could choose from, allowing him to find something that really engaged him.

I do remember one language arts class that didn't provide as much choice, and he was required to read books he didn't care for at all, one being the award winning, "The Witch of Blackbird Pond," and he hated having to speculate about characters' motivations. He just wanted to enjoy a good story.

It's a shame he didn't like math, because he had a truly outstanding scientific mind, and if he had been motivated to overcome the math aversion, he would probably have been a lot happier if he had gone into science.

Leif's junior high years weren't all happy, though. He suffered from a bad case of acne and some nasty kids called him "pizza face." I didn't learn that until many years later when he was an adult and told me that he was still hesitant to try to meet women because that had so damaged his self image.

He had friends in junior high, particularly Chris and Robert, but wasn't a popular kid. It's often hard for highly intelligent kids to find friends. Other kids are often intimidated, jealous, or think they are weird. Luckily Leif did have two good friends and they lived close to us on our street, so that unlike some kids who don't get to see their friends often outside of school, Leif found it easy to get together with Robert and Chris. They participated in Leif's radio-controlled car adventures.

It was in junior high that Leif also tried skate boarding, though he never became adept at it and I have no photos of him on the board.

He liked computer games, back in those days of simpler games and no internet. We had two computers, an Apple II+ and an Atari 1040STf. We had a large number of games on floppy disks, and he loved playing car racing games, sci-fi games, maze games, some role-playing games, and some fighting games. One was a very silly sword play game in which the objective was to lop off the head of the opponent. It sounds violent, but it was so silly that it was funny. Leif never lost his love of computer games and became more and more interested in them and role-playing games.

All told, Leif's junior high years at NJHS were good ones. He blossomed there, and set the stage for success and good looks in high school.

Leif's Junior High School Science Fair Projects

Leif found a way to combine his fascination with radio-controlled model cars with science experiments in seventh and eighth grades. He first designed an ingenious way to test the effect of different tire treads on battery life and the distance the car would travel on a charge. He had several different types of tires with vastly different tread patterns. It would be interesting to see how this kind of research would translate into today's world with real cars and find out how a variety to tread patterns would affect gas mileage.

In eighth grade, he got even more sophisticated, designing an experiment to measure the effect of gear ratios on speed and battery life. The RC-10 was a versatile car that could be modified in many ways, and there were many parts available to do that with. One was the gear system that tranferred the motion from the drive shaft to the wheel axle. By changing gear sizes, a different torque would be created.

Leif was a student who always insisted on doing his own work, and although there were times he did the minimal amount to get by, when he had an interesting assignment that challenged his incredible mind, he got deeply involve and produced outstanding work. Unfortunately, he was not a lover of academics and always maintained that he hated school. Actually, it wasn't school so much that he hated. It was mindless assignments and homework. Learning in class he often enjoyed, and assignments that caught his interest led to terrific work. He was fortunate at Northwood Junior High in Highland Park, Illinois, to have science and language arts teachers that really engaged his mind and he did some of his best work there.

The gear ratio experiment was selected to go on to the state science fair in Illinois, where it received a very high rating.

Preludes to the RC-10

Yesterday I started out with the "king" of RC cars, Leif's RC-10, but that's not what he started with. These are the first and second cars he got, fun, but nowhere near as fast and sophisticated as the RC-10. These pictures were taken in late fall 1987, near our house at Fort Sheridan, Illinois.

That's the black leather Members Only jacket he wore so much.

Leif's "First Car" - the RC-10

When Leif was in junior high school in Highland Park, Illinois, he was too young to have either a car or a driver's license, but too old for the Matchbox cars. That's when he discovered radio-controlled cars. He save his allowance and gift money to spend on them. The first kit he bought was made in China and in those days (about 1986) the "English" instructions were nearly unreadable. With his mechanical skills, he figured out how to put it together and soon had it racing up and down the street.

Of course, typical of Leif, he had to have a better one . . . and a better one. The top of the line in those days was the RC-10. It was expensive and it took him awhile to save up the money, but boy, was it fast and sleek! Not content with the "out of the box" version, he spent what seemed to be an endless amount of money on different gears, wheels, bodies, and then modified the body. You can see in this photo that he drilled numerous holes in the aluminum chassis to make it lighter and therefore faster.

The RC-10 proved to be his ticket to two outstanding science fair projects. First, in seventh grade, he designed and carried out an experiment on how different tire treads affected battery life and the length the car could go on a single charge. In 8th grade, he went all the way to the Illinois State Science Fair with his intricate and excellent experiment on how different gear ratios affected speed and distance. Perhaps in the next couple of days I'll post photos of him with his science fair displays.

The obsession with radio-controlled cars had an added benefit. Leif had always maintained he didn't like to read, and getting him to read school assignments and books for book reports usually was an unpleasant chore. However, he loved reading about model cars, sports cars and radio-controlled cars and subscribed to several magazines about them, which he read avidly.

Actually, it wasn't that Leif didn't like to read, just that he didn't like the kind of reading he was required to do. Hand him the "right" book, like Orson Scott Card's Ender series, beginning with Ender's Game, and he couldn't put it down.

One amusing thing about his subscriptions was the other mail he got because of them. Evidently the profile for someone subscribing to Car and Driver magazine, for instance, must have been for a yuppy, or at least a young man with some cash, and of age. Leif got frequent credit card offers at the age of 13 or 14. We had no success in stopping the flood of them until one night he sat down and filled out one of the applications . . . truthfully, stating his occupation as "junior high school student," and his income as his meager allowance, etc. To bad we couldn't have seen the face of whoever opened it.

I don't know what happened to his RC-10. I think he had it at least until he went into the Army in 1998, maybe even after that.

Among his things when he died was a radio-controlled car. Still having fun. Now his nephew will enjoy playing with it.