Letter to Wayne

Letter to Wayne by Pamela Carman

Wayne,

I enjoyed meeting you this past week at the high school. You said something during our meeting that set me to thinking. You mentioned that you are a genius, and ever since then, I have been thinking about what this word "genius" actually means.

If you will indulge me for a brief time, I would like to tell you the story of two geniuses- one named O’Neal, and the other named John. Although you have not met, nor heard of, either of these men, their contributions have touched your life.

O’Neal was born in the early part of the 1900s to a poor Alabama family. Early in his life, it became obvious that he was gifted, but this gift was also a burden. His parents began to abdicate their responsibilities and rely on their child’s decisions in family matters. O’Neal was the first child in his family, and his younger brothers and sisters grew up asking O’Neal for permissions and decisions that properly should have been made by his parents. Perhaps having this level of responsibility thrust upon him at such an early age is a factor that contributed to O’Neal’s lifelong propensity to dictatorship. As an adult, control was an obsession with him.

O’Neal was born before the era of child labor laws. So, he had barely completed second grade when he had to quit school to work in a textile mill in order to help support his parents and siblings. He worked a full shift, just as the adults did, even though he was only eight or nine years old. But O’Neal did something the adults didn’t do. He never just went to work. He learned. Whatever job he had, he determined to know more about it than anyone else did.

Textile mills worked three eight-hour shifts a day. By the time O’Neal was a teenager, he worked his own shift, then worked the following shift for a fellow employee. O’Neal had a strategy. He would decide what job he wanted to learn next, find an employee who had that job, and offer to work the employee’s shift while letting the employee keep the pay. This earned him a reputation as a bit of a fool; working a second shift for an employee who had clocked in and who, then, went home, but by the time O’Neal was in his twenties, there was not a single job in the textile mill, save the office positions, that O’Neal did not know. But more than that, he knew every piece of machinery down to its smallest nut and bolt. He could walk into a weave room with fifty looms running- a deafening sound- and pick out the sound of a malfunction in one loom when the loom’s operator had not even noticed the aberration.

Understanding the mechanics of every piece of equipment in a textile mill was no small accomplishment, but O’Neal had gone far past this level and had mastered the principles of textile manufacturing. He began to design and develop new techniques for a variety of textile processes. And all during this time, O’Neal read and taught himself the basic educational skills he would have learned had he been able to stay in school. By the time he was in his 40s he was the youngest textile mill manager in the country. He wrote a textbook for the textile engineering school at Georgia Tech. He invented the machine that makes brush denim, the fuzzy denim that feels like suede. He developed the weaving technique that keeps the side seams on jeans from twisting. You are too young to remember the old jeans, but the first time you washed a pair, there was no way to ever again get the seams straight. The side seams would twist to the front or back of the leg. They looked awful like that, and they were uncomfortable to wear.

The number of plant management techniques O’Neal developed are too numerous to mention, and would mean nothing to someone not familiar with the textile industry, but O’Neal became known as the world’s leading authority in the textile industry. You cannot put on a pair of blue jeans today without benefiting from some of the inventions and processes O’Neal developed. He lived to be 95 years old.

John lived barely half of O’Neal’s lifetime. He died this year, just over 50 years old. But John accomplished a lot in his too-brief life. He was always a serious child; quiet, and kind of nurdy. Come to think of it, he looked sort of nurdy as an adult, too. He had a penchant for wearing bow ties, and he had these really thick glasses that made him look like he ought to be reading a book, even when he didn’t have one around, which wasn’t often.

John’s parents were both doctors, and John received an excellent education from his earliest years. He graduated from Oberlin, and went to medical school. Somewhere along the line of his medical career, John acquired a patient whose medical treatment required that the patient stop smoking. But the man couldn’t. He tried; he really did, but he just couldn’t quit. His addiction to cigarettes was greater than that of some of John’s patients who were heroine addicts. John began to wonder why. And when John began to wonder, he began to research the problem. And the more John tried to research, the more doors he found slammed in his face. John dug deeper. And what John discovered was an insidious conspiracy by the tobacco industry to lace cigarettes with chemicals that make them more addictive, thereby guaranteeing the industry life-long customers. It didn’t matter to the tobacco industry that the customer’s life might be cut short by the effects of their product.

As a doctor, John was distressed by this information. As a humanitarian, he was outraged. He decided that nicotine, an addictive drug, ought to be regulated by the Food and Drug Administration. His colleagues told him he was fighting a losing battle, that one doctor could not go up against the tobacco industry with all its lawyers and lobbyists. John said he didn’t plan to do it alone; he planned to educate others so that they would support his efforts. So, he educated others, and he and some others wrote The Cigarette Papers, in which they outlined the evil going on in the tobacco industry. John’s work was instrumental in bringing the tobacco industry to its knees. But John didn’t stop there. He began to work to stop the tobacco industry from developing advertising to lure young people into smoking. He began collecting promotional items and advertising put out by the tobacco industry. His collection, called Trinkets and Trash, is the world's largest collection of cigarette promotional gadgets, gizmos, and lures. He founded an organization to help prevent teenage smoking. John became one of the most admired and revered physicians at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. You could write a book about his lifetime achievements.

Well, so now we have two men, both geniuses and tops in their fields-- but that is where the similarities end. O’Neal achieved his goals by managing his company and his textile town like a mini-dictator. You see, O'Neal knew that he knew the best way things should be done. He didn’t have time to put up with people of lesser abilities and foresight. They just slowed him down and got on his nerves. His control didn’t end with his business life. It extended to his family. He attempted to make every decision for his family, just as he had learned to do as a child. There were no family discussions. O’Neal announced what was to be, and that is what was. If you wanted to know just how smart and accomplished O’Neal was, you had only to ask him. He was his own favorite subject. He could tell you about his travels around the world as a textile consultant, drop names of senators and Presidents like they were golfing buddies, which they were. Odd, then, that when he died, not one neighbor, not one member of his church, not one acquaintance, came to offer condolences to the family or to attend his funeral. In fact, his own pastor didn’t even contact the family or attend the graveside services. Not one person sent flowers. There were no sympathy cards, no regrets for his passing, apparently, by the people who knew O’Neal.

John, on the other hand, never mentioned his accomplishments. If you asked him what he did for a living, he wouldn’t even say he was a doctor. He would just say, “I do research in the area of drug and tobacco addiction.” He would never show you his photo taken in the White House with the President or with the Surgeon General. John didn’t talk a lot about himself, but he was always interested in others. He was never too busy for others, from Presidents to first year college students. Each received John’s full attention. When John and some of his associates traveled to Washington to testify in the tobacco hearings, everyone except John stayed at the fancy hotels. John chose a small, plain, out-of-the-way hotel because it was the only hotel in Washington that was smoke free. See, to John, a principle was a principle, not just in theory, or in the laboratory, or in a thesis paper. It had to become part of your life. Quiet-spoken, unassuming, a gentle genius was John.

When John died, two memorial services were held; one in Princeton, where he lived, and one in Atlanta. Over 30 pages of sympathy messages were posted on the Internet. All of the messages talked not so much of John’s outstanding accomplishments in the medical field as they did of his humanity. The memorial services in both cities were filled with a Who’s Who assortment from the fields of medicine, education and the arts. No one would have been more surprised than John himself to see the outpouring of love these people had for him. They came not because he was a great doctor, but because he was a great person.

So, the question is, what is real genius? Great problem-solving ability? Great scientific, medical, engineering or technical accomplishments? Maybe. Sure, I guess that is part of it. But I tend to think, and I become more convinced the longer I live, that real genius lies in the ability to inspire others to greatness. That was John’s great genius, aside from his medical accomplishments. It was the reason he was so admired and loved.

When you think of it that way, you realize that real genius lies not in your brain, but in your heart and soul.

Intellectual genius that tries to stand on its own merit is like a half-baked cake. Great ingredients, but never fully done.