Four half-pages, written on an unlined sheet of letter-sized paper folded in half.<\/p>\r\n
Undated. I originally guessed late 1978 or early 1979, but evidence from a January 1980 letter from Peter makes clear that this was written not long before that, so I\u2019ve moved this to late 1979.<\/p>\r\n
\r\nDear Folks<\/p>\r\n
It\u2019s 12:30 - I\u2019m drowning in stuff<\/u> \u2014 feeling very sad that we haven\u2019t got thank-you\u2019s off yet - nor even finished the presents - I have kids\u2019 stories, poems & photos for you, and photos for rest of family - and I haven\u2019t made the stuffed kittys yet nor Jay\u2019s present. And now trying to work as well. Got lost in carlessness, bad cold, flu (everybody) and billions of errands - and renting the 2 rooms which I\u2019m still working on - sealer, paint, baseboards, window glass replacement, glazer\u2019s points, fabric to cover plastic ceiling - washing machine parts (it\u2019s Fixed - hallelujah!) and on and on - an infinitude of errands \u2014 boys belts & shirts, doctors, food, bread somewhere else \u2014 oh, dear, on & on. Working for Ken (the space peace-keeping project) at $6 an hour, but he wants me to type and it\u2019s sending me up the walls - even on his lovely selectric I\u2019m no typist.<\/p>\r\n
The point is, I\u2019m seeing a chiropractor\/nutritionist, who has liberated so much energy thru his treatments and lots<\/u> of food supplements, that I\u2019m actually managing to do all this and not collapse.<\/p>\r\n
But by the time I get to stop I\u2019m so lost in the whirl or the dreams that I don\u2019t write letters. Please know that I love you a lot and wish we could see you - and will get the pix, etc, off before too long. Peter is working 11am-8pm and it\u2019s making things rilly wird..... at least one car is running \u2014 and we haven\u2019t drownded yet.<\/p>\r\n
Much love,<\/p>\r\n
Marcy<\/p>\r\n<\/blockquote>\r\n
Notes<\/h2>\r\n
\r\n
- Jay<\/dt>\r\n
- Refers to my cousin Jason, who was about three years old by this point.<\/dd>\r\n
- \u201cspace peace-keeping project\u201d<\/dt>\r\n
- Ken (who had been subletting rooms in our house with his wife and daughter) was the founder of an organization that he called the World Security Council, which was dedicated to creating a space-based laser system for shooting down nuclear weapons. Yes, he came up with something similar to the Star Wars\/SDI program, but five years earlier.<\/dd>\r\n
- The main difference between the WSC\u2019s project and the SDI was that the WSC plan involved the US and<\/em> the USSR working together to build and deploy the space lasers. For more details, see the text of a 1984 Noe Valley Voice<\/cite> article<\/a> about Ken and the WSC.<\/dd>\r\n
- The most interesting paragraph of that article to me is this:\r\n
\r\nA major accomplishment of the World Security Council is a 2,730-page analysis of the threats, vulnerabilities, and safeguards of space weaponry entitled \"New Military Technologies and the Prevention of Nuclear War.\" Eventually Largman sees the document, now in its first draft, as expanding into an encyclopedia.<\/p>\r\n<\/blockquote>\r\n<\/dd>\r\n
- That paragraph interests me because that document (or a predecessor of it) was my first programming job, probably around 1980. IIrc, Ken had a numbered list of safeguards, and a long list of threats\/vulnerabilities. For each threat there was a set of numbers indicating which of the safeguards applied to it. I think my job was to write a program that replaced each number with the full text of the corresponding safeguard, so that for each threat, there were several paragraphs of text instead of several numbers.<\/dd>\r\n
- IIrc, I wrote the code on a Logical Business Machines (a.k.a. Logical Machines Corporation<\/a>) computer, in Logical\u2019s programming language (called \u201cEnglish\u201d); Peter was working at Logical at the time. (But again, that was a couple years later than this letter.)<\/dd>\r\n
- \u201cI\u2019m no typist\u201d<\/dt>\r\n
- This line puzzles me. Marcy had been writing letters on typewriters since 1964<\/a> or earlier; she was a perfectly good typist, and made few errors. Maybe she just meant she wasn\u2019t a very fast typist?<\/dd>\r\n<\/dl>\r\n\r\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A thank-you-and-we\u2019re-super-busy note from Marcy. \u201cWorking for Ken (the space peace-keeping project) at $6 an hour, but he wants me to type and it\u2019s sending me up the walls – even on his lovely selectric I\u2019m no typist.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2318","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-from-marcy","category-palo-alto"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/pmjj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2318","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/pmjj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/pmjj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/pmjj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/pmjj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2318"}],"version-history":[{"count":16,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/pmjj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2318\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2431,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/pmjj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2318\/revisions\/2431"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/pmjj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2318"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/pmjj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2318"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/pmjj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2318"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}