I had a delightful impromptu brunch with Jack Stocker yesterday. Stocker, 82, is retired from the University of New Orleans. He is an ACS Councilor and was one of the scientists featured in the Nov. 21, 2005, C&EN issue that dealt with the results of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. Readers may recall that Jack was pictured on the cover standing resolute in front of what was left of his New Orleans home.
I was just finishing up a late breakfast at the Hilton in Atlanta when Jack walked into the restaurant. I asked him to join me, and the fun began. “Once a year, you should be able to enjoy something you like and have as much as you want of it,” Jack said. And this was to be the day. For Jack, the something is bacon. “You usually get a couple of strips, but you want more,” he said. At the buffet, he loaded his plate with bacon—and some corned beef hash and potatoes plus a good batch of fruit. We were there two hours as he happily worked his way through this decadent meal.
[Jack Stocker (right) and Dick Hanley catch up with each other in Atlanta. Photo by Linda Raber.]
Jack has become a bit of a celebrity at the ACS meeting in Atlanta. While we were chatting, people kept coming up to the table to say hello and ask him how he is. He says he finds the attention kind of puzzling, but certainly doesn’t mind. He loves talking to people about most anything.
How is he doing? He is living in the French Quarter in New Orleans in the same building where one of his sons lives. He says his place is “an upper graduate-level apartment,” and he loves it. His son and friends furnished it for him so that he could move into a “ready-made nest.” For this, he says he is eternally grateful.
He is also in his element. The street in front of the apartment building is the staging area for many of the parades that pass through New Orleans. Of the tall, narrow old house across the street, complete with a balcony, he says: “All you have to do is look at it and you can hear Stanley Kowalski shouting ‘Stella!’ I knew I was home.”
While happily ensconced in his new apartment, Jack hasn’t had the best luck when it comes to his old home. Readers of the “Faces of the Storm” issue of C&EN know that Jack lost everything when the levees broke following Hurricane Katrina. This included a collection of more than 20,000 science fiction books that he treasured.
He wanted to salvage as much as possible, so he signed an agreement with a nonprofit group to move some sofas and other large objects that had been blocking the doorways but nothing else. He insisted, and they agreed, that he would be present when the removals were taking place. He had to wait until January.
Jack thinks it’s kind of spooky that his son’s girlfriend was having nightmares about the house in mid-January and insisted that she be driven over to see it. She found it gutted to the studs. Absolutely everything was gone and hauled away. Jack was devastated again. But he’s coping.
When the going gets rough, Jack says he likes to play Pollyanna’s glad game. He explains that in the story by Eleanor H. Porter, Pollyanna, whose father is a missionary, is sent a barrel with some crutches in it at Christmas instead of the doll she wanted. Pollyanna, relentlessly optimistic, finds something to be happy about and is joyful because she doesn’t need the crutches. Jack has coped by trying to find Polyanna’s spirit.
He tells me that the good things that have happened as a result of the hurricane are that he has an apartment in the French Quarter—a lifelong aspiration—and that Katrina blew all the mosquitoes away, so there isn’t as much West Nile virus. He has also been in touch with many friends and colleagues who contacted him as a result of the C&EN article.
After about an hour, our conversation drifted to science fiction and never really came back to Earth. I am a fan of this underappreciated genre, and Jack is the man to talk to. He offered recommendations for my reading pleasure and even suggested that scientists could use science fiction as a way to bring people into the sciences. “You don’t go to annual reports for your sense of wonder,” he says.—Linda Raber, filed at 8:28 AM
