Stories
The story of
the Stevenson family
See the stories on the left about growing up in Neosho, Missouri.
My values came mostly from my mother and father, as we had a close family of five throughout those years, including my sister Connie and my brother Jim who were 2 and 4 years younger than me, respectively. Our parents taught us curiosity about books and the arts and sciences. They both worked as social workers and taught us to seek truth (see Diogenes) and respect for others as our equals, which came in the face of the strong racism of the Ozarks. On annual summer vacations, they gave us a wonderful taste of the variety of America and a love of travel that has stayed with me to this day.
As my father had been an anthropologist and was now an amateur astroner, he had a subscription to Science News, and I read each issue avidly when it came to the house. As soon as I could write (about 7 years old), I sent a long handwritten letter to Mr Watson Davis, the editor of Science Service, telling him of my interest in science and enclosing a little drawing of moss. I was thrilled to receive a response. In the fifth grade, I astounded my teacher with my knowledge of how to make an atomic bomb and was taken to the sixth grade to lecture them about it. Although I was something of a prodigy (one report card in the third grade told my parents that "David needs to be more patient with the other kids"), I managed not to be alienated from the other kids.
Typical of the boys around me, our heroes were sports heroes, especially baseball (Mickey Mantle and the Boyer boys grew up near us) and we were St. Louis Cardinal fans (my mother as well). And whenever I could I played football or basketball or baseball and ran and did pushups to get into shape. In the back yard I shot baskets for hours at a time during the winter and threw baseballs through a tire during the summer. However, my working away from home interrupted my baseball career and when I got onto the high school basketball team as one of two junior high players, I was so exuberant that I broke my foot giving a dropkick to a big cake of ice! I settled for running, which would remain a passion throughout my life.
Early on I started working away from home, first on farms in California and Missouri, and then with Dwight Rogers on Cape Cod.
I still have a copy of a diary that I kept in 1955, from the end of January to the end of August. It is filled with the latest numbers to indicate improvement in my running or jumping skills or pushup skills. Years later, like most runners, I would still keep track of my times in races. It also recorded my active life in the local church, singing in the choir, even giving a sermon one Sunday on "Our Responsibilities as Christian Youth," and at school where I edited the newspaper.
The diary also records my summer working on Cape Cod and several days in New York where I fell in love with the city (I would later choose to go to college there).
I was an avid reader, encouraged by my mother, with whom I often read, either out loud or in parallel. When I read Look Homeward Angel by Thomas Wolfe, I decided that I had found my calling. I would be a novelist.
At the same time, however, I continued developing my interests in science, although the one neighbor I had shared this with, Bill Stevenson had moved away after a few years. I took part in science fairs and in my senior year I entered (and won) in the National Science Talent Search. It was the Sputnik era and the newspapers announced a national priority on the training of young scientists.
Despite my apparent independence, having worked away from home each summer for five years already, it was not easy for me to leave the family in 1957. Full of emotions from my victory in the National Science Talent search and falling in love with Vee, I cried on saying goodbye to my mother in May before going once again to Cape Cod to work for the summer before college. And on the Cape, I tried to commit suicide, the first of what would be a life-long dialectic of success/failure/new success and breakdowns when the stress was too much for me to bear.
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Stages
1986-1992
Fall of Soviet Empire
1992-1997
UNESCO Culture of Peace Programme