Owens History 04

Owens History 04

Is that the word you used, or childish, because you were reading these books about landing? No, not retired. I was immature. Immature. In other words, part of me hadn't caught up with another part of me. Well, to give you an idea, you see, I'd go to class, and Grandpa would have taken me to a carnival. I can remember this happened once, and I had one of these flowers. You put your lapel with a tube that goes down to a bulb in your pants pocket. So I stood up one day, and I asked the teacher, I said, Teacher, would you write on the board that word? You were talking about it a minute ago. I like to see it in writing. She turned around and began to write the word as soon as she did.

I turned around and sprayed the whole class with that flower. Okay. Well, this is immature. And so anyway, I had to fight. Some guy grabbed me outside. Did you ever do that again? He said, 'I'll knock your bra off.' So I knocked his bra off, and there we went. But this is the way it went. In some ways, I was hard and tough. But in other ways, I was much younger, you know, I think. Than I should have been at that level. No kid in his right mind in that tough town would have walked into school with a Lassie book under his arm. But on the other hand, I was ready to handle it if I had to. I just didn't give a damn. This is what it was.

I was a very poor student in high school because I couldn't get interested in anything. The teachers were terrible. My French teacher ruined me for life on mathematics and French. She'd curse me in French and throw books clear across the room at me from her desk up in front. Oh, she was mean. Mabel Norman, no, Mabel Norman was an English teacher. She ruined me on English, making fun of us. But anyway, the teachers were very mean and ornery, most of them. But if a teacher was good to me, I made straight A's. I had one teacher there, she was real kind, Miss Camel. It was geography class, and she was real sweet and kind to the old lady, and even brought homemade wine that she'd made herself to the class, gave each of us a little sip.

She was real sweet. I made a straight A on her. Then I got, just to show you how that worked, after we came, we had to leave. Dad took us to live in another town. He was going to try to make it on his own. He didn't make it. Then after we came back, We'd been up in northern Indiana. I got back in high school my senior year. I took physics. Now, here you've got a student that's flunked just about everything. Couldn't even be lucky to make a C on anything, really, taking physics. And I had this real tough man who almost never, ever would give an A to anybody. Oh, he was tough. But I liked that physics, and I just soaked it up. And the man was astounded.

He couldn't believe it. And I'd come in, and I'd be the only one to stand up and answer all these tough questions in class, and the other kids would sit there with their finger in their mouth, even the sharpest students. And I got a B-plus out of him. He called me in at the end of the term. He said, I can't figure this out. I looked over some of your other grades. He said, anybody else would have given you a straight A. He said, I just don't give straight A's. But he said, You did as good in my class as any student could do. I'm giving you a B-plus. And when I got to Duke, a science teacher there, teaching chemistry or science, just begged me to study under him.

He said, 'Look, Orris, he said, I know you're just a poor XGI coming into Duke on the bill.' He says, 'I'll buy all of your equipment, myself personally, all your books, I'll buy all your equipment and everything if you'll just study under me.' I thought nine and like test tubes and things all that sort of thing was a chemistry teacher, I don't know what it was, it was uh I don't know what it was, it was chemistry and science, you know the test tubes. Why did he want you to study under him? Well, I see when I went into Duke, you have to take an exhaustive examination and I placed in the top fourth of the students at my age; I'm 26 now, I might I'm, you know I've studied for a long time, and in that section all those tests I didn't take any math, although they gave you a section on math, because I couldn't take math.

That teacher in my early years ruined me so on math. At Duke, the dean told me, he said, Owen, your teacher tries to force you to take math and wants you to take math. Tell him to come to me. He said, because you can't. Because I couldn't add two and two and get four. I didn't know anything about it. But in spite of that, I still placed the top four. So why did this man want me to study under him? Well, evidently he had learned from either Dr. Wright or from somebody in the testing that I had a tremendous bent towards science. But I knew that was no good because to get into that, I'd have to get into math. The two just go hand in hand.

You've got your formula, you've got your symbols for all of your, well. Okay, well, anyway. What else can you think of? Well, I got out of high school by a miracle. This was very interesting. Boy, you talk about fast footwork. Everything was great for me to graduate except one thing. My English teacher was going to flunk me. This is a weird old English teacher called Mabel Norman. While she was there, we were studying to get a Ph. D. in psychology. She didn't call us by our own names in the classroom. She'd call one kid Bunny and another one Scotty. But not their real name. She gave them these funny names. And she told me anyway she was going to flunk me and I wouldn’t graduate with my class.

Well, just about that time, weirdly enough, coincidentally enough, we had a championship basketball team. Bedford High School had a championship basketball team. It was 1938. And they were beating everybody. They were going to the finals, but the team went on a strike. The basketball team went on a strike. They got mad about something. And this particular afternoon, the team is outside on the sidewalk. Now, Mabel Norman is high up on the school board or something. She goes down, and she's pleading. She's got her hands in supplication. She's pleading with John Torphy again, please not to, at that point, to quit or go on strike because they wanted the team to win the state championship. Incidentally, how do you spell Torpy? Oh, T-O-R-P-H-Y. So she's pleading with him.

Well, standing next to me, there's a big crowd of kids around, of course, about 1,500 kids all around in a circle milling around. There's Miss Norman begging John Torpy. There's a girl standing next to me with a camera. I just tripped it out of her hands and took a picture. Ms. Norman bagging with John Tarpey. I told this girl, I said, 'I knew her name. I said, so-and-so, I'll bring you this in the morning. I've got to run downtown.' I took it down to the drugstore, rushed it through for developing. A couple of days later, I walked into Ms. Norman's room. I said, 'Ms. Norman, you certainly made a good picture.' I said, I'm going to write a story on the wonderful work you did bagging John Tarpey and the rest of the team.

She snatched out of my hands a print. She said, oh, my God. She's going to write a story for her. I said, well, to the newspaper. Now, you know, I'm just a senior in high school. I've still got writing. She says, wait a minute. She says, it made her look terrible. She was just baggy. It just looked horrible. She says, wait a minute. She says, where's the negative on this picture? I said, oh, I've got that at home. I said, I'll write a good story. Don't worry about it. I said, you're bagging Don Torpey and the basketball team not to go on strike? I said, I think that looks nice, don't you? She gave me the hardest look. All right, she says, you win. She says, bring me that negative, and I'll graduate you.

So I did, and she did. Oh, God, I'm telling you. Now, I had one teacher who knocked me down once. This was in a school annex. It was about a block away from the main school. She knocked me down, grabbed me by the hair, and dragged me flat on my back out the building, across the street and a half-block into the main building up to Molly Box's office; she was a principal at the time. Well, that's how it was-there was money who Molly Box, she was the principal b.o. Yeah, but anyway... I um, I was a... I guess in school because I was always thinking of things to do that didn't have anything to do with the classes, you know?

Like, I'd bring tubes and blow beads at the kids in the teacher's room and look around, all that stuff. My Lord! So you were a troublemaker. Yeah. Well, I wasn't trying to make trouble. I was just trying to have fun. I don't know. My mind just expanded so much. You know, just to sit there and learn ABC was boring. Uh-huh. And I couldn't stand it. So I'd think up diversions, you know? Mm-hmm. It got me in all kinds of trouble. Well, the kids would be friends. They'd have a study hour, okay, and everybody's sitting there studying very quietly. And I'd ease a cap gun out of my pocket and pull it inside the desk and squeeze off a shot. You know, teacher would look up.

She didn't have to look far because she didn't look for tea. She'd say, all right, hurry tea. You come over here up to my desk. And I'd go up there. And my pockets were always bulging. I carried marbles, pieces of glass, everything you could think of in my pockets, big bulging. She'd have me empty out everything on the desk. She'd scoop it in her drawer and just keep it. I'd never get it back, plus the cap pistol thing. But there was always that. I mean, every day it was something, it seemed like. I didn't do that at Duke. You were a good student there. Well, by good student, I loved it. I loved the intellectual atmosphere of the other students and the teacher.

For instance, one of the teachers at Duke was one of my best friends at Duke. He had been an analyst in World War II, and he was teaching psychology at Duke. For instance, one day he would stand up in front of the class, and he made the statement that a silent dog whistle could not be heard by the human ear. A good one. So I stood up and said, well, excuse me, Professor so-and-so, Dr. so-and-so, but it can be. He said, oh, my God. All right, Ted, tell us about it. Because he'd ride me to school every morning in his car, and he knew me well. So if I said that, he knew it was going to be unusual.

Well, it just happened that the summer before I went to Duke, I’d hypnotized a girl at a YWCA dance in Houston, Texas, up on top of the roof. They had a ballad. I hypnotized her, she was an excellent hypnotic subject, and put her behind the band with a notebook and a pencil. And I told her when she heard the loud whistle blow, she'd mark down, straight mark, make patterns. Then I took a silent dog whistle, walked around in front of the band, we're talking about distance of 50 feet, and I blew the silent dog whistle in patterns and marked down the patterns in my notebook. Then I went back there and woke her up, and we compared them. We compared them, and sure enough, she'd gotten it all perfectly.

She couldn't hardly hear the band. So I explained it, and the professor said, yeah. He said, well, that's an exception. What was his name? Malone. M-A-L-O-N-E. Dr. Malone. Do you remember the first name? No. Okay. But he and I would stand there as the students were going into the classroom. He and I would stand there outside the door, and we bet on which student would go through which door. Because of the personality being negative or positive. I'd say, okay, I’d say, Dr. Brown, that girl, she goes through the right door because she does everything. She performs everything. Sure enough, the girl goes through the right door. And he'd say, well, I’d take that one over there. He says, he’s a lefty. He’ll go through the left door.

Sure enough, he’d go through the left door. You know, his personality. Well, we had a lot of fun with that. Oh, boy. Yeah. Well. Um, when did you first become consciously aware that you could uh do PK? Let's see now, now we're talking about in the strictest sense of the term psychokinesis and nothing to do with other dimensional powers, okay. Uh, that would be at Duke when Dr. Ryan was doing um testing me for spiritualistic abilities. He had these little informal seances in his home. His wife, Louisa, would experiment a lot with spontaneous phenomena. Dr. Ryan would handle the control phenomena, but Louie would do the spontaneous phenomena. And this would come to the heading of spontaneous. So they helped me over several times at their home. Hang on, I've got to switch.