Sun-Chaser: Marvin J. Vann, an American Life
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Chapter 3: Butterflies & Headhunters
Heading West
Marvin mustered out of the U.S. Navy in San Francisco. Even before he had left Packard for the armed services, Marvin and Ronnie had sometimes talked about moving to the west coast and leaving Michigan winters behind them. After the war, an enlightened U. S. Congress made that decision easier by passing the G. I. Bill, which gave substantial cash benefits to veterans wishing to pursue higher education. Before leaving Okinawa, therefore, Marvin had decided that he would use some of the G.I. Bill's education money to learn to fly in an attempt to cure chronic airsickness. The rest he would use to attend graduate school. He applied to Stanford University and was accepted by the department of psychology. His young family now would need a nearby place to live. Ever a man of action, and wishing to surprise Ronnie with a fait accompli, Marvin went almost directly from shipboard to house hunting in Palo Alto. Many others seemed to have made similar decisions, for only two houses were listed on the Palo Alto market. The one he thought he liked best, judging from its exterior appearance, was not available for inspection during the single day he had allotted for house hunting. He therefore appointed a friend, George Galster, as his agent, bought the house sight-unseen, and boarded a train for Michigan.
During the three-day rail trip, Marv's agent spoiled Ronnie's surprise. To complete the purchase on the Vanns' behalf the friend needed information that only Marvin or Ronnie could provide, so he perforce called Ronnie Page 38with the news and sent her a floor plan. Many, perhaps most, wives would doubtless consider themselves hard done by if their husbands undertook the purchase of a home without consultation. As in many other situations respecting her married life, however, Ronnie proved an exception to the rule. She was utterly delighted. She had always dreamed of living in California, and now her dream was about to become a reality.
Arriving in Comstock, Michigan, Marvin stepped off the train to find Ronnie, Michel, and Barry awaiting him. Shyly, Michel approached his father and said, "We like each other, don't we?"
"We sure do!" Marvin replied, gathering his eldest son into his arms.
Ronnie's first words to Marvin were a delighted "You bought a house!"
Reunited, the little family packed up its belongings over the next week in a flurry of activity. They loaded the still serviceable Chevrolet and a small trailer and headed west. The trip took two weeks with a good deal of sightseeing on the way. Except that the tongue of the trailer broke miles from nowhere on a Sunday, the trip went pretty smoothly. Marvin recalls crossing the Mississippi River and rinsing out baby diapers at the hot springs by the Old Faithful geyser. (Disposable diapers were not yet invented.) He also remembers acts of meanness and kindness by persons he met along the way: a restaurateur who refused to cash a check for a veteran still in uniform and a sheriff who was glad to.
Both Marvin and Ronnie felt a little nervous about what they might find on the inside of their new home. On their arrival in Palo Alto, however, they found that the two elderly sisters who had sold them the home had maintained the house to perfection. Everything was as clean and serviceable and as delightful as they could wish, though the house was instantly tiny for a young family of four.
Installed in the house, Marvin settled in to the first semester's graduate work, once again opting to focus on psychological measurement and testing. He recalls with pleasure his work with Dr. Hildebrand, the department chair, and with Dr. Nancy Bailey, Professor of Child Psychology. He confesses some retrospective disappointment that he didn't learn much more about psychological measurement and testing than he had already mastered as an undergraduate.
Page 39The academic work went well, but Palo Alto was expensive. Even with the G. I. Bill, money was tight, and before the year was out, Ronnie announced herself expecting once again. Marvin did not hesitate. Though he finished his current semester, taking the advice of his department chair, he withdrew from the master's degree program and started job hunting. The Vanns' only daughter, Lindsay, would arrive in August, 1952.
On the Job Market
His first California job was as a detail man for Upjohn Pharmaceutical Company. Essentially an outside sales job, it necessitated Marvin's calling on physicians and distributing free samples. It also required Marvin to travel more than he felt he should, given the demands of family life. Besides that, the travel took time away from his pursuit of his interest in astronomy. He therefore explored possibilities with the Veteran's Administration and landed a job in the personnel department of the Veterans Hospital in Palo Alto. Before he did so, he accepted some stopgap employment. He also supervised newsboys as district manager for the Palo Alto Times, and worked at the Eastman Kodak Processing Lab on the printer maintenance staff.
Eventually he decided to move on from the hospital and to try his luck in the fledgling aerospace industry. His technical background and process engineering experience at Packard eventually landed him a research engineering position in the Infra-Red Research Division of Lockheed Corporation. This division built missile-tracking equipment designed to study the heat signatures of rocket exhaust plumes and was associated with the Midas and the Spy-in-the-Sky programs. The Lockheed job required, among other duties, his observing missile launches at Vandenberg Air Force Base. There he met Don Johnson, a high-level sales representative for the Barnes Engineering Company. The two discovered that they lived near one another and began sharing rides to work. On one of these trips, Johnson asked Marvin if he could recommend anyone to serve as a technical liaison person between Barnes and Lockheed. Never one to miss an opportunity, Marvin replied: "Yeah, how about me?"
Once again his employment and military histories stood him in good stead. Helped by Barnes' good offices, Marvin landed the job, spent a few Page 40months being trained in Stamford, Connecticut, was granted a top-secret security clearance, and returned to California to assume his new duties.
"From a salary perspective," Ronnie recalls, "That was the best job we ever had." Ronnie's "we" in that observation is neither editorial nor royal. For the first time, really, the couple had a little more disposable income than they had expenses. Ronnie set about learning how to invest the money and took over the family finances, sometimes spending the greater part of entire days in the offices of Merrill Lynch with a savvy friend who taught her the finer points of day trading, and how to identify quality securities and which to hold.
"Not only," Marvin smiled in his 86th year, "was she always a better athlete than I, she's also smarter. We really owe our comfortable retirement to her financial management. I still wonder that I was able to convince her to marry me."
As Barnes Engineering's liaison engineer with Lockheed, Marvin was on twenty-four hour call. If anything seemed to be going wrong with a missile launch, and if the components affected seemed connected with the guidance system, Lockheed rousted Marvin out to address the problem. Once, he recalls, he was urgently summoned to Vandenburg Air Force Base, some 350 miles distant when the countdown for a rocket launch was well advanced. Something in the guidance system seemed to be malfunctioning, and if Marvin couldn't isolate the cause and rectify it, the entire launch would be scrubbed to the tune of over a million dollars of Lockheed's (and ultimately the tax-payers') money.
Marvin burned out a piston in his pet 1956 Ford Thunderbird racing to try and help save the launch. Once at the launch pad, Marv quickly analyzed the problem. The tomato-can shaped horizon sensors, he thought, were the most likely culprits. Examining them, he found mis-wiring in the mixer box that transmitted the signals from the sensors to the guidance mechanisms. He replaced the mixer-box subsystem, and the tests showed the problem resolved. The countdown resumed, the rocket launched pretty much on schedule, and the taxpayers got what they paid for. On another occasion, Lockheed called him from his bed, this time rather peremptorily.
"The bird," they said (meaning the missile) "is flying and wobbling." The flying part was good, but the wobbling represented potential disaster, Page 41not only for that particular mission but also for the relationship between Lockheed, the prime contractor, and its subcontractor Barnes. On this occasion, there was really nothing to be done but analyze the flight tracking data after the fact. This Marvin did, but he remained mystified by the rocket's erratic behavior. On a very short cycle the rocket kept making small, unpredictable course changes.
As he had personally been over the guidance system before the launch with the proverbial fine-toothed comb, Marvin was at a loss to explain this malfunction until a thought struck him: What if some foreign object was fooling the sensors into thinking it was the horizon? He asked to see the motion pictures that were routinely taken of every launch. Watching carefully, Marvin identified the problem. A large, nylon shroud line that was supposed to detach at launch had remained with the rocket and was visible waving back and forth across the horizon sensors. The sensors, as Marvin had suspected, interpreted the rope as if it were the horizon and altered the rocket's course each time the line whipped past the sensor's eye. Barnes was not the culprit.
Throughout these early California years, Marvin's interest in astronomy and telescope building continued unabated, and he had helped found the Peninsular Astronomical Society. He felt, however, that the skies above Palo Alto were too often obscured for the best viewing. Besides, the family was growing, and there was really no need to remain in Palo Alto since he had given up his plans for grad school.
Casting about for a lot at a higher, more remote location in the foothills, where they could build a house in a place that would better serve their family's needs and Marvin's passion for astronomy, in 1968 the couple discovered and bought a large, cul-de-sac lot in an old development in the Los Altos hills south of Palo Alto.
"We'll Build a Nest"
Marvin designed the house himself. It would be over 50 feet long, a ranch-style house, and essentially one room wide for most of its length. The lot acquired, the plans drawn and approved by the city inspector, and the building permit issued, Marvin and Ronnie set about building the house themselves with assistance from the boys, as they were able to help.
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As the house got past the framing stages and the siding and the roof went on, Ronnie feels sure the neighbors, who often watched in fascinated astonishment, thought the new arrivals must be crazy. Some of the neighbors later confided that when Marv and Ronnie staked out the house, folks in the neighborhood thought they must have been going to build a motel.
"Every evening and weekend," Ronnie says, "we took the two smaller little kids with us, carried them up the ladder and onto the roof and tethered them there so they couldn't fall off while we nailed shingles." To get the heavy, redwood shakes on the roof Marvin constructed skids and a pulley system. He attached the pulley Page 43to his car on the other side of the house and hauled the shingles up.
Once the walls were up and the roof was on, the dauntless couple turned their attention to the inside. Marvin designed and built an in-floor, radiant heating system. He also drew up plans for an Arizona flagstone fireplace, and Ronnie remembers Marvin's hoisting stone after stone into place until the color matches met with her aesthetic approval. Then the two would set the stones in cement and, while it dried, work on other interior tasks.
As soon as (according to Marvin) and even before (according to Ronnie) the house was livable, the family moved in. At about the same time, Marvin began what, somewhat to his surprise, would prove to be a long-term relationship with Foothill Community College. The effect of this, as we shall see, was to shift Marvin's attention away from completing the house and in the direction of more telescope building. Ronnie observes that the house never did get completely finished until, years later, the Vanns decided to sell it when they at length retired and moved to Arizona.
In the intervening decades, however, Marvin had a living to earn, a young family to help rear, and both new and abiding interests to pursue. The abiding interest, of course, was astronomy. But community service and imaginative and dedicated fatherhood also claimed Marvin's attention and ingenuity and spurred him to enter new fields.
Parenting for Ronnie and Marvin was always a serious business. And the family grew. First Lindsay had come along; then Tim did. As in so many arenas of their family activity, and as was the norm for their generation, they arrived by silent consensus at a division of labor based on gender. Marvin devoted his attention principally to the boys, and Ronnie lavished hers on their daughter, Lindsay. This arrangement didn't hold exclusively, both did their duties vis-à-vis all the children, and none suffered parental neglect.
Scouting and Parenting
Mike and Barry, the elder two sons, early interested themselves in scouting. Accordingly, Marvin became a scout leader, training not only his own two elder boys but also the other members of Troop 39 in the wilderness and survival skills they needed for extended experiences in the mountains and deserts of the southwest. The high point of the scouting year, Marvin recalls, was the troop's special, two-week hiking and camping trip in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. Troop 39 had a reputation for outstanding success in helping its members earn merit badges and achieve the rank of Eagle Scout. Marvin credits a team of committed leaders that, apart from Marvin included Howard Kirschbaum, August Keto, Dave Ellsworth, and Keith Schader. Convincing this group of leaders that a boy qualified to participate in the big, 75-mile hike to the Sierras required hard work, and only the best prepared fifteen boys in the troop made the cut. Marvin remembers that, once the fifteen were selected and the final training began, it became evident that the leaders' fears that some of boys might not be able to keep up proved utterly groundless. The leaders were the ones who slowed the pace of the hike.
During training, the leaders sometimes played practical jokes on the scouts by sneaking bricks into their packs. Once on the trail, however, the leaders began discovering heavy foreign objects in their own packs and decided that perhaps their notion of fun had been misguided.
The itinerary through the Sierras was daunting. It involved dangerous trails up cliffs, a route covering some seventy-five miles, and fairly careful rationing of provisions. Supplies, the leaders hoped, might be supplemented with fish caught along the way. At first that plan worked well. The scouts caught a number of fish. The leaders noticed, however, that some of the boys did not want to clean the fish and consumed their tinned provisions instead. Spotting a lesson in the making, the leaders asked for the unwanted fish, which they prepared and enjoyed.
The combination of altitude and exercise sharpened the scouts' appetites, and some of them began consuming two meals' rations at a sitting. With five days still to go, some of the scouts had exhausted their food supplies. At first they begged food from the other boys. But those with food had just enough for themselves and were reluctant to part with much. Finally, Page 45the boys shared their quandary with the leaders. Phase two of the lesson kicked in. The leaders reminded the boys of the fish and told them that they were willing to sell them food for a stiff price. Several paid. Others, however, knew their leaders too well and sniffed out what they were up to. Marvin's son Michel was one of those.
"Dad," he asked, "You aren't really going to charge for the food, are you?"
Marvin's answering smile told him all he needed to know, and within the hour the scouts knew that those who had paid would soon have their money back. They didn't get it, however, until after an evening pow-wow around the campfire where their leaders emphasized the benefits of planning and restraint. Both scouts and leaders pooled their remaining food stocks and rationed it out to all based on the number of meals for the remaining four Page 46days. No one went hungry (or at least no one went hungrier than anyone else), and the lesson struck home.
For daughter Lindsay, who had come along in 1952, it was Brownies and Girl Scouts, tennis and swimming lessons, with Ronnie, an antecedent of the soccer moms of the early 2000's, playing both chauffeur and supervisor. Ronnie had herself been a varsity tennis player in college, and she encouraged Lindsay to excel. As a child, Marvin had himself excelled as a swimmer. So he was pleased at Lindsay's interest in competitive swimming. Ronnie hauled her hither and yon throughout California, and Lindsay became a star at speed swimming over short distances. To this day she holds the national title for the twenty-five-yard breaststroke—a race now dropped from competition. Unless the race is re-instituted, her time will never be bettered.
The upshot of such experiences for Barry and Michel was their respectively becoming Life and Eagle Scouts, a mark of achievement that their father boasts of to this day. Timothy, however, even though he too joined another troop, at first proved less interested in scouting than his brothers had been. He instead evinced an early interest in outdoor activities like fishing and in insects, especially in butterflies. Largely on his own, Tim learned to collect and mount them. Marvin felt that he had spent a lot of time in scouting with the older boys, and he needed to do something with Timothy. A television nature program that focused on African and South American butterflies provided the inspiration for what father and son might do together. Timothy became fascinated with the Blue Morpho butterfly. Convinced by his own history that the best education resulted from pursuing one's passions, and devoted to the notion that a good dad should also participate wholeheartedly in his children's interest, that television program prompted Marvin to suggest taking Timothy on a butterfly viewing and collecting expedition in the Amazon basin to the home of the Blue Morpho. "Okay, Tim," he said impulsively, "let's go down to South America and see 'em. One thing, though, you've got to earn the money to do it."
Butterflies, Missionaries, Headhunters
Tim, only 10 years old, instantly set about raising the cash for his part of the journey. He washed cars; he mowed lawns; he did odd jobs. When Page 47the neighbors heard of the project, they cooperated by hiring Tim for any services he could perform. One neighbor in particular kept Tim busy washing cars and doing yard work. Marvin was amazed at the speed with which Tim accumulated the necessary funds. When it became clear that Tim would succeed, Marvin set about making the requisite arrangements. Planning the trip with Tim, Marvin happily recalls, provided a major portion of the fun of the adventure.
In 1961 this journey was not simply a matter of calling one's travel agent. To go where the largest and most colorful butterflies could be found along the Amazon, one had to travel where few non-indigenous persons had ever ventured. Instead of consulting the sort of travel professionals who cater to tourists, therefore, Marvin found it both necessary and, through a serendipitous contact, possible to ask the Wycliffe Bible Translators for help. This missionary group, named for John Wycliffe, the fourteenth-century translator of the Latin Bible into English, devotes itself to making the Christian scriptures available in native languages to far-flung aboriginal peoples around the world. Some of their efforts are the stuff of legend.
Marvin fondly recalls one of their founding linguists, for instance, the late Kenneth Pike, who spent half of each year at the University of Michigan as a professor of linguistics. The other half he worked in the field, learning and documenting South-American Indian languages, some of which had only a few hundred speakers. Not only was Pike equipped with a superb intellect, his inborn capacity for language acquisition, apparently, had never shut down in early childhood as do most people's. Thus the Wycliffe group's travel service, the Missionary Air Fellowship, would drop Pike off in an isolated jungle clearing near a village. For many of the Indians with whom he worked, Pike became their first contact with a non-native person. Once in the clearing, a bolt of cloth under his arm to stimulate interest in trade, Pike waited for the locals to approach him, hoping that curiosity rather than hostility would characterize his reception. Fortunately, that always proved to be the case. Once in the village, the gifted Pike possessed the amazing ability to master a new language in about six weeks. After he had learned and transcribed the language and analyzed and recorded its structure, his colleagues in the society set about studying the language and translating the Scriptures into the hitherto undocumented tongue, and their missionary Page 48teachers sought and regularly obtained permission to live in the villages, to provide rudimentary medical care and suggestions concerning arrangements for sanitation, and to teach literacy so that the newly translated Scriptures became accessible to the villagers.
While casting about for a way to take Timothy where the best butterflies lived, Marvin attended a lecture by Dale Keatsman, an associate of the Wycliffe entourage. Speaking with Keatsman following the lecture, Marvin introduced him to Timothy, who impressed Keatsman with his knowledge of bugs and with the dedication the child had shown by earning the money for the trip. Keatsman agreed to help arrange a jungle adventure for Timothy and Marvin.
The pair made elaborate preparations, acquiring all the camping equipment they imagined they'd need for their expedition. Marvin also paid special attention to procuring good but compact motion picture and still cameras and a high quality, though bulky, tape recorder with which to document their experiences; it had occurred to him that he might subsequently base a series of travel lectures on the journey and recoup some of the expense.
The first leg of trip took Marvin and Tim to Caracas, Venezuela. There, Marvin had scheduled a layover, some touring, and the first of several butterfly-collecting expeditions. There too, Tim had his first encounter with third-world poverty. Marvin also managed to arrange a visit to a newly constructed observatory and discuss with its staff his own interest in developing a solar prominence telescope that would for the first time enable direct observation of those prominences. Both Marvin and Tim were impressed with the fact that the flags in the Venezuelan capital flew at half-mast in honor of the recently assassinated American President John Fitzgerald Kennedy.
Following their brief visit to Caracas, Marvin and Tim boarded a Pan American World Airways plane bound from Caracas via Trinidad to Belem, Brazil, at the southern mouth of the Amazon River. In those days it was not unusual for passengers to leave the plane at stops along the way to their final destination, and Marvin and Tim deplaned at Trinidad to stretch their legs and use the airport's facilities. There, in the men's room, Marvin left the small black toiletries case containing all his cash and both passports. Page 49Happily, on board the aircraft Tim looked his dad over and asked where the missing case was. Asking the pilot to wait, Marvin raced back and found his case where he had left it. Re-boarding, Marvin gave the pilot a thumbs up. Tim observed that, if his father had not made it back before take-off, Tim would have had to become a shoeshine boy in Belem. Though the travelers didn't know it, this relatively minor contretemps augured worse to follow.
True to his word, Dale Keatsman arranged to have a British missionary couple, Paul and Dorothy Moran, host Marvin and Timothy in Brazil. When Pan American's Catalina Flying Boat deposited them at Belem, at the southern mouth of the Amazon in the State of Amazonias, Paul was on hand to meet them. Their host's first task was to shepherd the two North Americans through Brazilian customs. There matters turned sour. The customs' official who inspected their papers and carry-on luggage focused on the tape recorder that Marvin was lugging. "What's that?" the officer asked rather haughtily and, as it seemed to Marvin, covetously.
In Marvin's opinion, the inspector knew perfectly well what it was. Moreover, the attitude of the inspector, which Marvin interpreted as insolent, Page 50provoked Marvin to initiate a pissing contest. Instead of answering, therefore, he set out to demonstrate the machine's function as if the officer didn't know it. "See, it works like this," he said, pushing a series of buttons.
The inspector perceived that Marvin was pulling his leg and was not amused.
"You'll have to pay duty on that," he announced.
"But we aren't leaving it in the country," Marvin objected.
"It doesn't matter, you'll have to pay the duty, or I'll have to confiscate the machine."
Marvin argued briefly and appealed to Paul Moran. Paul knew that Marvin was right in principle, but could also see where the conversation was tending. One way or another, Marv was going to have to pay an unscheduled entry fee. Privately, however, Marvin had begun to think that bringing the heavy tape recorder had been a mistake. Carrying it on and off the plane had already proved burdensome.
"Pay duty? I don't think so," said Marvin, and with that, to the officer's evident chagrin, Marv smashed the recorder.
Fortunately for Marvin, Paul Moran intervened at that point, and the customs' official knew Paul's high standing with the government. Doubtless the officer also was convinced that Marvin, if not totally loco, was at least potentially dangerous. Moreover, the official knew he had more tricks up his sleeve than the Yankee could successfully counter. He stamped the Vanns' passports and disdainfully waved them through toward the checked luggage carousel.
There another disappointment awaited the travelers. After all the other passengers' luggage and the Vann's suitcases were off the aircraft, the crate containing their camping equipment did not appear. Marvin had packed the camping supplies in a large, naval cruise box that he'd painted fluorescent orange for easy identification. When it failed to surface, Marvin looked around, and far across the tarmac he saw the crate being trundled into a warehouse on a hand truck.
"There it is," he exclaimed to the person in charge of inspecting the checked baggage.
"I'm sorry, Señor, that building is off limits to unauthorized personnel," explained the functionary. And that was the only answer Marvin ever got. Page 51One way or another, entry required a payment. At that point, the score of Marvin's contest with customs seemed to be Marvin, one; customs, at least five. In the event, however, the loss of equipment and tape recorder proved a blessing. The Vanns discovered that they needed none of the vanished supplies. Customs had relieved them of a burden. Moreover, Pan American eventually reimbursed Marvin for the value of the lost goods. He considers the final score to have been at least two to one in his favor.
Officially inside Brazil, the Vanns' luck improved. They accompanied Paul Moran to a floatplane landing. There they stowed their remaining gear and boarded a Catalina Flying Boat, the local up-river shuttle, and took off for Manaos, the Morans' home. Along the way they stopped at Obidos and other riverside communities, disembarking and embarking passengers at each stop. Everyone who was continuing toward Manaos spent the night at Santarem. Today a relatively bustling river port that even boasts a main paved road, in 1961 Santarem was an impoverished relic of the once lucrative rubber industry. Situated at the confluence of the Rio Tapajos and the Amazon, the town then offered minimal tourist accommodation and another lesson for Tim in third-world living standards and economics.
The travelers' hotel was a bamboo structure on stilts. Windows were simply unglazed openings, and the door to their room had been made from bamboo canes lashed together. As it boasted no hinges, one simply propped the door in place. Both Tim and Marvin were ravenous, and the hotel's restaurant looked pretty good, they thought, though the black tablecloths seemed a bit unusual. As they approached their table, what they thought was the cloth rose dramatically in a swarm of flies. The only beverage the restaurant offered was water. As it came bottled, Marvin assumed it would be safe until, after having consumed one bottle, he glanced in the kitchen and saw the staff filling and capping more. The Vanns demurred when offered a second bottle. Happily, the food proved good, and they suffered no ill effects.
A post-dinner stroll through Santarem's muddy streets and along the quay side brought Tim face to face with a sow and a brood of eight piglets. Intrigued, Tim started to approach them more closely when a man nearby shouted a warning. The sow, he said, would attack. Tim stopped dead in his tracks as the sow, much too close for comfort, sniffed the air assertively, then Page 52apparently satisfied that Tim represented no threat to her family, retreated and led her offspring under a pier. Later, in the company of a young priest whom Paul Moran introduced, the Vanns toured the site of an abortive church building that had been under construction for a decade. The priest explained that work could only proceed when the congregation had cash in hand, and cash in hand for building was always very scarce. In part, the scarcity resulted from the priority assigned to the very successful program the Church ran for orphaned and abandoned boys. The priest took them on a tour of the program's facilities and introduced Marvin and Tim to some of the boys, who proudly displayed the model boats they had built. The priest also turned out to be an amateur entomologist. Discovering Tim's enthusiasm for insects, he shared with the lad some duplicate beetle specimens. His generosity, of course, pleased Tim very much.
The next morning, along with Paul Moran and other passengers, the adventurers reboarded their plane and continued upriver. Learning that Marvin had a pilot's license, the captain gave Marvin a chance to fly the Catalina. Marvin did, though he did not accept the captain's invitation to try a river landing. The generous captain even gave Tim a turn at the controls. With respect to air travel, the early sixties were still a part of the age of innocence.
Deeper into the interior they flew, past the confluence of the Amazon with the Trombetas and that with the Madeira. At the confluence of the Amazon with another great stream, the Rio Negro, they reached their next major port of call. This was Manaos, the once fabled rubber capital of the Amazon and the home base of the Moran family. In Manaos, Paul and Dorothy Moran treated the Vanns like family. They led them on touristy excursions of the lovely old city and its famous opera house. They also undertook to train Marvin and Timothy in jungle survival skills, teaching them what they should be wary about, how to handle and prepare the food they would encounter, and what to expect and how to behave in their encounters with the indigenous population. After a week of this sort of indoctrination, the Morans pronounced the Vanns ready.
From Manaos, the Missionary Air Fellowship had arranged for a pilot named George Insley to ferry the Vanns in another Norseman upcountry along the Rio Negro to the Manaos River and to a jungle region inhabited both by Blue Morpho butterflies and the Parentintin Indians. Up until two years prior to the Vann's arrival the Parentintin had been active headhunters. Under the careful guidance of a trio of Wycliffe Society missionaries however, as the Morans assured Marvin and Timothy, the Parentintin had recently given up their traditional and unnerving head lopping and shrinking practices.
Aboard Insley's Norseman, a twenty-four-hour trip upriver featured several daylight landings on the water for butterfly viewing and collecting and an overnight, riverbank camping experience. On the second day, the Vanns arrived among the erstwhile headhunters. At the Parentintin village the father-son team discovered, contrary to Marvin's expectations, that Page 54the three Wycliffe Society missionaries who had so notably succeeded among the Parentintin were female. His automatic assumption that they would be male reflects the cultural shift that has occurred in sex-role expectations during the past forty or so years.
The village children and Timothy immediately took to one another. Moreover, the Parentintin kids proved to share Tim's enthusiastic interest in butterflies, and they excitedly mounted a collecting expedition in his honor. With a fearless Timothy in tow and with no adult supervision a group of them very shortly set off up a tributary stream in a dugout canoe. Marvin recalls his mixed emotions as Tim's canoe disappeared around the first bend. He felt pride in his son's passion and courage, but he also experienced a nagging concern that some accident might prevent his ever seeing Tim again.
Marvin also recalls his respect for the Parentintin, for their dignity, hospitality, and beauty. His experience among them made him a devotee of the causes of indigenous Americans everywhere, and the trip up the Manaos became the first of many journeys to learn about and live among peoples whose traditional ways had, after 500 years of European contact, still not been totally overwhelmed by industrialized society and its handmaidens.
The villagers nevertheless found Marvin's supply of first-world gadgetry fascinating. Marvin demonstrated his battery operated electric shaver. This seemed a minor wonder among the Parentintin men who tried it out until it ran out of power. The shaver then became a kind of metaphor for technological progress viewed in the long term. Once the batteries died, Marvin found the low-tech but skillful village barber to be a perfectly satisfactory replacement.
The butterfly collecting proved enormously successful, and Tim mounted numerous specimens that he and Marvin still display. In the intervening years, however, Marvin has become convinced that life is sacred and inviolate in all living creatures. He regrets the deaths of the butterflies and would now only observe them, not collect them.
Tim and his Parentintin buddies returned in high spirits, and once the insect specimens were stowed the villagers invited Tim and Marvin to join them fishing. Fishing involved spreading a net from the riverbank, over the reeds in the shallows, and into the main stream itself. That done everyone waited, and then all the available muscle power was employed in the laborious process of drawing the fish-laden net back through the reeds to the riverbank. Among the fish so snared was a number of piranha. One of these, a sizable specimen, Tim plucked from the net and held aloft for the benefit of his father's still and motion-picture cameras. For a bit the fish patiently Page 56endured the indignity, but suddenly it made a last effort to save itself and, snapping, tried to swivel free. Tim fortunately had a firm grip, and the piranha's last-ditch attempt failed. Marvin always seemed willing to let Tim run risks in the interest of his growth and education.
After their smashingly successful jungle adventure, Marvin and Tim bid the Parentintin and their three resident missionaries good-bye and headed home by a route that took them via Peru, Guatemala, Panama, and Mexico back to their California home. For Tim adventures continued the entire way. He got another chance to fly, piloting the Norseman on the first leg of the return trip.
That first leg was a long hop to Iquitos where after a night in a hotel, another butterfly collecting expedition was on the next day's agenda. A full day in the field under the tutelage of local guides, Franco and Marco, left both travelers and guides exhausted. Franco excused himself and went home, but Marco accompanied Marvin and Tim to a saloon where, while Tim sipped soda, the men began drinking the very tasty local beer. It came in liter bottles and had an alcoholic content in the eight-percent range. Ever creative, Marvin began to lay plans for returning to the Amazon and guiding tourists on a real jungle experience. The tourists would come up the Amazon by houseboat—one Marvin planned to buy. Then, at Iquitos, they would go up a branch of the Ucayali to a campsite where, under Marco's leadership, the North Americans would spend some time in native housing and do some jungle exploration. Marco's enthusiasm for the notion led him to drink more than he could comfortably handle, and, on a trip to the men's room, he slipped and fell on the floor. Aside from needing a change of clothes, he suffered no damage, and took the visitors home for dinner and even more of the local beer, which Marco assured them was "the best in South America."
In the morning the next hop took the travelers about 400 miles to Pucallpa. There friends of pilot George Insley took them by Land Rover to the Missionary Air Fellowship's maintenance and repair center at Yahrina Cocha, Peru, on the eastern watershed of the Andes. There, while Marvin inspected the machine shop and its capacities, Tim hunted butterflies with the children, swung on a rope and plunged into the near-by river, which was cooled by run-off from the Andean snows. The following day they toured Page 57the river by motorized canoe, observed life on the banks, and watched native alligator hunting where the locals probed deep spots with long poles in their search for prey. With local children, Tim visited a termite nest as tall as he was. After taking him on a moon-light insect collecting expedition, the children presented Tim with a live Rhinoceros Beetle named Brutus who, at over four inches long, lived on wood bark for six months after the Vanns returned home. Brutus memorably scared the bejeepers out of a chambermaid in a Panamanian hotel when he briefly escaped from his box. His remains now grace Tim's private insect specimen collection.
Following several days together, the missionaries returned the Vanns to the airport at Pucallpa, and from there, father and son hopped the Andes in an un-pressurized airplane. This experience was, as Marvin recalls, very hard on Tim. Marvin had endured similar experiences during the war, so he suffered less. Fortunately, Tim was distracted during some of the flight by the interest a distinguished Peruvian gentleman took in a little boy with such an intense amateur interest in entomology. Fluent in English, the Peruvian spent a portion of the flight in animated conversation with Tim. Tim's new acquaintance proved also to be a collector, and at the end of the journey he invited the Vanns to visit his home and view his collections.
At their host's home in Lima, memories of the flight's discomfort soon faded as Tim and Marvin viewed the admirably mounted and displayed insect specimens. South of Lima the next morning the pair visited an Inca burial site where Tim had the memorable experience of being spat upon by a Llama. From Lima, they continued to Panama City.
In Panama, father and son paid the customary visit to the locks. That monument to human ingenuity, persistence, and engineering, Marvin found awe-inspiring. The travelers spent Christmas Day watching the cruise ship Donizetti being tugged through the Mira Flores locks by electric mules.
Page 58After a final butterfly-collecting jaunt in the Panamanian countryside, the pair boarded their flight for home. After lengthy wait in Guatemala for a TACA airliner (they were told jocularly by ground staff that TACA stood for "Take a Chance Airlines"), they connected with Pan-Am in Mexico City, and Tim's seat partner proved to be a female consular official who was carrying, as she thought, a dozen rare yellow frogs in a basket as a gift to a scientific colleague in the States. "Ordinarily," she explained, "exporting these frogs is illegal, but I am exempt from this prohibition." She showed the frogs to Timothy.
"But there are thirteen frogs in here," said Tim.
"Really?" she responded, "If there are you can have one."
A careful count proved Tim right, and, as good as her word, his newfound friend gave him the thirteenth frog. In Tim's care it enjoyed a long life, and when it died it joined the biological specimen collections of Foothill Junior College.
Upon his return to California, Marvin later found a way to express his gratitude to the missionaries of the Wycliffe Bible Translators on a continuing basis. At that time, 1962, Marvin was employed by Barnes Engineering as a liaison engineer with Missile Division of the Lockheed Corporation. In that capacity he regularly was sent to Vandenburg Air Force Base to observe missile launches and to monitor the performance of the missiles' horizon sensors that Barnes had manufactured. Every launch was recorded by several giant cameras, each containing a 400-foot role of color motion-picture film. Marvin discovered that, usually, only about half the role was used in recording each launch, after which the film was developed. It was uneconomical to reload the unused film in the camera, so Marvin sought out the man responsible and asked if, instead of simply developing 200 feet of unexposed film, Lockheed would be willing to allow him to salvage it and send it to the missionaries to record their work. The chap agreed Page 59enthusiastically, and for a number of years Marvin would re-spool the film and send it to missionaries whom he had met or others who requested it. In due course, they returned the exposed film to him. He would have it processed and return pictures to his correspondents. So for a long time Marvin expressed his thanks to the people who had treated him and Timothy so kindly. Occasionally though, a missionary went missing, and Marvin was never able to trace the person. He prefers not to speculate about the causes of the disappearances.
For Timothy, the journey proved formative. Once the Vanns' photographs had been processed, Tim presented a lecture to his science classes at school. He did such a good job, and his pictures evoked such interest that word of the eleven-year-old wunderkind spread rapidly throughout the Los Altos area. Tim was much in demand as a speaker all through the district. Today Tim teaches junior-high science in Birmingham, Alabama.
Although neither Tim nor Marvin fell victim to any of the wasting diseases endemic to the Amazon basin, Marvin did become infected with an incurable case of wanderlust whose frequent outbreaks and recurrences determined a major focus of the rest of his working life.
