Informant38

John Gribbin-In Search of Feynman's Van {with an additional reminiscence by your editor concerning a Christmas afternoon long long ago} He offered to drive me over to find the van as soon as I'd finished at KPCC-FM, and seemed at least as eager as I was to make the pilgrimage. A couple of hours later, we were cruising around the location that Leighton had pointed us towards, stopping to call him on Shermer's car phone for directions each time we got lost. Just as the Sun was setting, we found the repair shop, parked, and walked around the back. There it was. Feynman's van, nose up against the wall, looking slightly battered but still with its decorative paintwork of Feynman diagrams. It had clearly been there for some time, and delicate spring flowers were growing up around its wheels. John Gribbin

{I was living in Pasadena lonely and somewhat bereft the winter of 72-73. I went down the street colorado Blvd it was to a toy store one of those places you could still find in those days full of little novelty items but lots of them and not all just shlocko but cheap and made in like Korea etc Japan etc and I was looking for a little nifty something or other for my ex-girlfriend who for a time had shared with me a collection of robots and anyway she was living at her parents and I was in the apartment we had shared for a few months and I went down to the toy store just before Christmas and I was looking through the aisles and they had these bins you know just chockablock with stuff dumped into em you know like rubber godzillas and and wind-up trucks and over there maybe boxes of roller skates and basketballs and you know on and on and in this one bin I was scratching around through for the perfect figurine and there was this THING. it was a nice deep shade of green. and it was made of some amazing plastic. and it had like a curved well wait it's impossible to describe that way. it was as though you took a circle and no it was as though you took two hemispheres and flattened them out and kept the circle at the equator but made the humps of the poles much flatter so you had like this perfectly round lip and these two sort of mounds and then if you divided that in half lengthwise and spun it half a turn and molded everything together you see I can't describe it but the neat thing was her brother was an engineer in aerospace design and he was amazed by it never seen anything like it it had unique properties and it was so wondrous and I had it a long time til some thug stole all my stuff. it was a gift from someone. who was that? where are they now? what happened?nobody in the store had ever seen it before. the manager was in charge of all the inventory they had and he had never seen it it was the only one in the store and nobody knew what to charge for it so they charged me what the bin price was for the figurines it was like 1.50 or something. I had it til like 76 or 77. I'll never forget that not until everything else is gone too}