Switching Over Mid-Career

Up until I moved to Durham, North Carolina I was left handed when it came to handwriting.  I changed over to writing right handed when I turned 40 because Essential Tremor in my hands made it harder and harder with the left.

Now it is equally hard with either hand and I avoid handwriting altogether.

Actually, on the inventory of handedness I was barely (1st decile) left-handed overall, meaning very close to the line between left and right handedness in the population overall.

I always played sports right-handed and for many associated activities had no preference such as batting in baseball, swinging a tennis racquet or shooting a basketball.

In batting it was an advantage and sometimes in tennis but it was often a curse in basketball.

In a couple of other areas, I was always purely right-handed such as turning a key to unlock a door and holding a cup while drinking, so when I switched to writing with that hand, it didn't feel entirely foreign.

The Mormon culture in which I was raised is what is called Christian “restorationist,” contrasted with “reformationist” Protestant, but Mormons still borrowed many things from the Catholic Church, such as the Franciscan tradition of sending missionaries out in pairs.

Growing up, I never heard using your left hand described as the “the mark of the beast” as Catholic schoolteachers apparently often did, but perhaps to be safe, Mormons stipulate that you always take sacrament with the right hand.

Obviously, those who translated the Bible had a right-hand bias (smile.)

So in rebellion I guess, no matter the decile, I have identified as left-handed and taken pride when lefties excel far beyond their proportion of the population such as being elected President.

Actually, while lifting tiny sacrament cups of water from a tray that had been purposely overfilled by annoying 12-year-old Deacons was one of the first times others witnessed my Essential Tremor.

Statistically, in Durham, where I still live in retirement, there are likely  2800 people with Essential Tremor but more than 30,000 who are left handed.

The genes related to ET have not yet been identified, although because both my daughter and I manifest it at such a young age, I plan to make sure my brain makes it to a related research center when I pass on.

Click here for an overview of research beginning in 1861 into handedness published on the fascinating website Brain Pickings, a website my daughter turned me onto.

Human beings have been leaving written records about tremors for thousands of years and the Greek physician Galen of Pergamon (129-216 A.D.), who served Roman emperors also cared for patients at the time with ET.

Genes are also thought to play a minor role because studies of identical twins show they often favor different hands.  But humans are the only species to show a strong bias in handedness.

Last year researchers published that they have identified a variant in the gene Pcsk6 (depicted in the image in this blog) associated with handedness, but they haven’t been able to fully explain the mystery of handedness yet because the genes play such a small role.

No data is available on how many lefties have ET such as me, but while people with the condition almost always have it on both sides, it is asymmetrical, meaning studies show it to be more severe in the non-dominant hand.

Being barely left-handed probably made that a toss-up for me.  I know from experience though that having ET and being left-handed definitely made it a challenge to learn to take off, fly and land an airplane, something I learned just enough to do after I retired five years ago.

Lefties learn at a young age to reverse instructions given when being taught by right handers so it isn’t uncommon for them to confuse left and right when giving or taking directions, or in the case of an airplane throttle, the different reactions anticipated by pushing in vs. pulling out.

ET is often confused with Parkinson’s which is a much, much more serious cousin.  ET occurs during the initiation of movement while Parkinson’s occurs when a limb is at rest.

Researchers now know that ET is progressive, not benign, as once characterized (no it isn’t why I retired.)

They both worsen over time, but Parkinson’s is degenerative.  ET is mostly embarrassing unless your occupation requires steady hands, e.g. a surgeon or nurse, or occupations that simply require filling out a lot of forms that must be read by other people.

I lost any ability to fill out forms legibly somewhere in my 20s.

Treatments for ET are either medication or invasive surgery like probes that are inserted into your brain to break that feedback loop or ultra sound which is like burning a hole to do the same thing.

The first approach fixes both sides, the second, so far, only one.

Alcohol also works great (smile.)  But not too surprising, doctors don’t recommend that.

Reflections on The Landscape of A Heritage

As I noted recently, I am the only son of an only son, born midway between my dad and his first granddaughter but as hard on him as he was on his father.

If he were still with us or if he is looking down now, he would be even more proud of her than he was at her birth, now a single mother, lawyer and chief privacy officer for a major healthcare concern spread over dozens of cities and towns across our ancestral landscape.

I was the end of the line of more than a hundred years of ranching but in the late 1840s, these ancestors didn’t begin as ranchers.  They came to the Rockies as carriage makers, saw mill operators, molasses manufacturers, cavalry troopers, miners even a dirt farmer or two (smile – rancher humor.)

But collectively they understood that settling and homesteading and building communities from scratch involved commons such as that where his granddaughter ranges in another way.

He’d also be the first to remark at what a perfect blend she is of each of her parents, but equally important would be what she has done to express those equal sets of genes including molding a career blending law, management, technology and innovation.

My dad also would give a smiling nod at the pride my urbanite grandsons and daughter take in our Idaho ranch heritage.

On our final leg to an annual lakeside family rendezvous in the northern Rockies last month at the hospitality of my youngest sister and her family, they took delight when a cowboy hat they picked out for me turned out to be identical to one their great-great grandfather wears in family photographs.

Already with enough cowboy hats and boots to last several lifetimes, I couldn’t help but wear it as we rode up into the Bitterroots that day, smiling at how frustrated my dad—their great-grandfather—appears in that same photograph at having to dismount.

Not yet 30, in an act of defiance, he refused to keep his hat on, revealing a rancher tan and a look of disgust I’ve seen in the mirror from time to time.  I see far more diverse evidence of his nervous system in his grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

I wish I could tell him every day how much I love and miss him and how I know I was hard on him.  We both eased up as I turned 30 years old, but we didn’t really clear the air until I was nearly 40 and he was a year younger than I am now.

My emotions were ambushed a few day ago when I first heard a new hit single by Garth Brooks interpreting a brilliant composition co-written by Marc Beeson and Allen Shamblin entitled “Send ‘Em On Down The Road” as I recalled that day when we too “…just threw that baseball back and forth till dark…:”

“he wanted to protect me but somehow my father knew

that you can cry for, live and die for,

you can let them find their wings but you can’t fly for

cause if they are not free to fall

then they are not free at all

and though you just can’t bear the thought of letting go

pick ‘em up, dust ‘em off and send ‘em on down the road”

Some of my favorite Garth Brooks’ songs include references to rodeos such as the iconic “Much Too Young (To Feel This Damn Old),” echoing a variation of a quip my dad would repeat in the 1950s whenever he was greeted with, “How are you?”

It was co-written with a friend and rodeo rider Randy Taylor in Stillwater, Oklahoma where Brooks first performed it in 1986 at a club called Bink’s with his band Santa Fe.

Less than three years later, it was the singer’s debut hit single, just as I relocated to Durham, North Carolina in 1989 and where I still live in retirement.

But historically, true cowboys, aka Bedouins of the American West, were fast fading when Prescott, Arizona staged the first rodeo in 1888, inspired in part by the success of the Wild Bill Cody shows.

Until then, westerners viewed tourism as a way to recruit settlers and investment.  But Cheyenne, inspired by the “potato days” celebration just south in Greeley, created its Frontier Days Celebration in 1897.  By 1901, Denver added one to its local celebration.

By the time Pendleton, Oregon created its famous rodeo in 1910 and Idaho’s first rodeo, the War Bonnet Roundup, was organized in 1911 fifty miles south of our ranch, a circuit was forming.

When Tucson started its rodeo during the Prohibition, it was a tourist event, and when Old Tucson Daze began the year before I was born, it was, ironically, held on an old movie set.

The father of one of my classmates in high school is hall of famer Deb Copenhaver, a contemporary of my father, who won back to back world championships in bronc riding in the mid-1950s when I was 7 and 8 years old just younger than my grandsons now.

Rodeos are emblematic of the time when Westerners began to reflect what visitors from the East expected.  By the time I was born, it had become firmly embedded in Western identity, reinforcing that authenticity is a negotiation.

My parents married young at just ages 22 and 16, eloping over the Bitterroots to Bozeman, as my dad left to join a tank battalion propelling across France.  Initially, his dad had held him out of the war as an only son so the ranch could aid the war effort.

But when his same-age cousin and best friend, a tail gunner in a B-26, was shot down over northern Italy, my grandpa finally relented and allowed the ranch to go fallow as my grandparents put their only son in harms way.

Dad’s unit was part of Patton’s third army sweeping into southern Germany, liberating Dachau, the first concentration camp established leading up to the war, then changing to horses and spotter planes to patrol for Nazis fleeing into the Alps.

Coincidentally, one of the prisoners liberated there handed a young soldier from North Carolina what looked like a rock, and told him never to forget what happened there.

It was actually molten ashes from human beings incinerated in the huge ovens used by the Nazis to cremate prisoners who died or were gassed because they were unfit,

The day before this past Memorial Day, those ashes were laid to rest in a Hebrew Cemetery here in Durham where I live, which dates to the 1800s.

By the time I came along, my parents were still kids too at just 25 and 19, and they had grown incompatible in some ways while apart.

They were still “two hearts on fire,” to borrow a line from a Shenandoah song written by Hugh Prestwood, but researchers now know that what held them together for more than thirty years was a shared style of parenting.

Its something researchers have just found in successful parents that is “distinct from their romantic relationship.”

In the typology of four parenting styles, my parents were “authoritative,” the mix of “authoritarian and responsive” practiced by 32% of parents.

I know now that researchers find that this style correlates to the “concerted cultivation” common to middle class parents or parents who successfully keep or move their children up into the middle class.

More wealthy parents are often negligent or permissive including many so-called “helicopter parents” today who mistake over controlling and frenetic hyperactivity with cultivation.

Researchers have pinpointed that a natural or more free-range style or permissive style of parenting found among many who are poor is one of factors that perpetuates poverty in their children and differentiates them from poor parents intent on breaking that cycle.

One of my siblings seems only to recall my parents as “authoritarian,” perhaps because she didn’t witness the differences two of us saw in the parenting styles of parents who truly were.

Regardless, I am incredibly grateful and credit my parents for any success I enjoy as well as the legacy I see in their grandchildren and great grandchildren.

Contrasting Expressions Behind Two Views of Independence

A contrast caught my eye the morning I began to write this blog post.  I usually write essays several days or even a few weeks before they are posted.

One was this month’s cover story in High Country News, an excellent magazine about issues along the Rocky Mountains westward, where my family’s genes now go back eight generations.

Written by a progressive, it explores both sides of the great gun debate from the perspective of gun-lovers and gun-nuts on both sides. The author also provides industry statistics showing that the “gun culture is dying.”

I’m a political Independent.  I grew up with guns and I own a couple of old rifles and a German WWII pistol, all family heirlooms, but I fall on the “more sensible background check” side of that debate.

One disturbing quote attributed in the article is that “a liberal who happens to like guns is still an enemy.”  I assume that is meant to cover Independents too, but it provides insight into extremists.

Some of the best research on gun owners is found in surveys by the National Shooting Sports Foundation.

It shows that “more and more guns [including assault weapons where are classified as “modern shooting rifles” or MSRs] are being purchased, but they’re being sold to the same shrinking group of middle-aged white men.”

As I was reading this, a Google Alert brought my attention to a letter apparently written by “Joe the Plumber” of the McCain-Palin campaign’s 15-minutes of fame.

Apparently, in light of one of the latest mass murders he gently warned the parents of those who died that “your dead kids don’t trump my Constitutional rights.”

You can’t hold him against westerners.  The closest he has come to being one is working in Ohio to build western-utility Jeep Wranglers like the one I drive and during an Air Force stint in Alaska near where I once lived.

As obnoxious as his statement is, it illustrates that a lack of empathy more than any level of gun control may be the problem behind mass killings, according to research cited by essayist Mark Manson.

It is only one way that gun extremists today are troubling. And part of it may be genetic.

High Country News was founded back in 1970 by Tom Bell, a Wyoming rancher and decorated WWII hero who turned 90 last month.

He was a contemporary rancher of my father, growing up across the Tetons from the one where he and I were born on a spread down the Wind River Range of the Rockies.

This is the setting for northern Wyoming transplant Craig Johnson’s series of “Longmire” mystery novels and the A&E TV series of the same name, although it uses northern New Mexico as a stand-in.

While flying bombers similar to the one in which my dad’s cousin and closest friend Edward was shot down and killed, Bell lost the sight in his right eye.

Coming home to Wyoming he earned a master’s degree in wildlife conservation and game management but always found solace in the wide open spaces his family settled there in 1878.

But by the mid 1960s as I was graduating from high school, Bell began to organize groups to counter the blight occurring throughout the Rocky Mountain West.

One Bell creation, High Country, is still well known today for investigative reporting on various issues.

I guess wannabes such as the Nevada cheapskates along with their assault rife toting posse (sorry, “modern shooting rifles”) would consider Tom an enemy based on that earlier quote.

The difference in these two kinds of westerners occurred to me recently as I read about a purposeful sequel contrived a few weeks later in San Juan County, Utah.

That’s the area that takes in the southeast corner of Utah below Moab and includes parts of Canyon Lands National Park. Think of country similar to the back drop for John Ford westerns or Easy Rider or Forrest Gump for that matter.

Toting those same “modern shooting rifles,” a group with a similar sense of entitlement deliberately drove ATVs down into a canyon where a federal agency ban was protecting fragile Native American archeology.

Not everyone seeking mechanized access across our “commons” is like that, though.

Up in the Yellowstone-Teton nook of Idaho, snowmobilers have been volunteering to carry GPS units as a way to better inform land closures to protect endangered species.

Recent studies find that the difference between Tom Bell and for that matter me, and those deliberately desecrating the public lands in the west, may come down to how we express a dopamine D4 receptor gene we all have, named DRD4.

In variations or mutations from individual to individual, this gene is linked to attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and dysfunctional “thrill seeking” such as unprotected sex and various addictions such as gambling and alcohol.

University of Michigan researchers from various disciplines including business have now found that people like Tom Bell see the world as interdependent because they have a variation or allele 6 times greater than those who see their independence as trumping any harm their actions bring to others.

In his fascinating new book entitled Inheritance: How Our Genes Change Our Lives – and Our Live Change Our Genes, neurogeneticist Dr. Sharon Moalem describes how our behavior, our experiences and even the food we eat can inform genes differently in people.

It is possible that Tom Bell’s service to his country during a time rampant with fascism, as well as the way he was raised, his field of study and witnessing a desecration by individuals and corporations, might inform his variation of that gene differently.

I share a similar background with the instigator of that recent Utah showdown.  Raised 600 miles apart in the Rocky Mountain west, we both graduated from BYU.

We both descend from the earliest Mormons who settled along the Rockies six or seven generations ago.  In the 1870s, one of my ancestors also created settlements along the Colorado Plateau shared with San Juan County.

A decade or so ago, we each served as presidents of Rotary Clubs in two different parts of the country.  Though we obviously have different interpretations of what’s racist, we both recite the Rotary 4-Way Test, an ethical guide.

The counties where we were raised in Utah and Idaho respectively, are set aside in “commons” for all Americans, his a fourth and mine a third.

We both enjoy the outdoors, mine from astride a Harley with views of the open road and scenic preservation, his tearing off road on an ATV.

So what makes me sign up with Robert Redford while he apparently fancies himself after the Edward Abbey character in his 1975 novel The Monkey Wrench Gang?

Why do I see the federal government as stewards on behalf of the people rather than as a capricious and arbitrary enemy apart while he apparently agrees with the executive director of Gun Owners of America that:

 "The government's out of control, and all three branches are united against the people and the Constitution." 

The difference between us may very well come down to how our experiences have modified or expressed our DRD4 gene, an indicator of a sense of interdependence in some and extreme independence in others.

I’m as stubborn and independent and functionally narcissistic as they come, but in me that gene stops short of the point where my actions might harm other people, a conservative principle forgotten today.

I hate to think that one day some of us on the “interdependence” side will be forced to stand up shoulder to shoulder against those who disrespect public lands and agents just trying to do their job.

And just because I give a damn about others or trust in the law, don’t think for a minute I won’t.  As the article in High Country notes, there are “gun nuts” on both sides of this debate.

Okay, “stand down cowboy.”

Where did you stash the firing mechanism for that old Winchester .32 Saddle-Ring?  Like I said, “gun nuts” on both sides.

A Compelling Coincidence

I’m not in its target demographic but I binged-streamed the first season or so of Switched at Birth while by coincidence simultaneously reading the new book entitled, Inheritance: How Our Genes Change Our Lives and Our Lives Change Our Genes.

Both are impeccably written.  The former, now in its fourth season, was created by Lizzy Weiss who graduated from Duke a few years after I was drawn to Durham, North Carolina.

She also wrote or co-wrote many of its more interesting and deeper early episodes before the series settled into more of a “teen drama,”  undoubtedly with pressure from the network.

One of the joys of only streaming what little television I watch is coming across unexpected gems such as this and either watching as many as I like ad-free or quickly sampling and then skipping those that don’t work for me.

The latter is authored by neurogenetics researcher and physician Dr. Sharon Moalem.   You would expect this one to be deep. The other, however, was accurately depicted in the New Yorker magazine by Emily Nussbaum, when she wrote that “…its undertow is as strong as anything on TV.”

Switched is about two teenagers and their families who learn the girls were switched by the hospital at birth.  One was raised by a single mom, the other in affluence.

One girl is deaf and many of the other actors are deaf.  Most scenes involve signing and subtitles.  There are some scenes and one entire episode where two actors act out a scene with only body language, facial expression and signing.

An underlying story in the television show is the old nurture vs. nature issue.  In part, the book Inheritance explains how our genetic inheritance works and intriguingly how “your behavior can and does dictate your genetic destiny.

Like life itself, our genes are not just binary.  Moalem compares them to a score of music with “plenty of room for improvisation built into our lives” such as “Timing. Timbre. Tone. Volume. Dynamics.”

The book is filled with examples and metaphors such as “appoggiatura,” the “non-chordal or “non-harmonic” tone heard in Adele’s Someone Like You, a dissonance favored by Mozart.

It is further explained here on NPR in an interview with Rob Kapilow a music conductor, composer and author of What Makes It Great and his earlier book, All You Have To Do is Listen: Music from the Inside Out.

My music appreciation genes come from my mom’s side of my inheritance going back to my grandmother’s grandmother.  She was a Lowery who immigrated from Craigmark, a mining town just north of Galloway Forest in Ayrshire county in a hilly part of southwest Scotland lying along the eastern coast of the Firth of Clyde.

But I elected not to pursue them beyond a few years of piano lessons, a stint in glee club and church choirs, settling for an eclectic appreciation of music.  I can hear them in the “pipes” of one of my young grandsons in the clips sent to me by his mother.

Those genes persist and one day they may flourish again in “the fourth, the fifth, the minor fall, the major lift,” a line slightly modified for lyrical purposes in the poem/song by Leonard Cohen.

Cohen wrote and performed the song Hallelujah in the 1980s, often changing the lyrics because he couldn’t stop improvising.  He felt there were many “Hallelujah’s.”  It didn’t come to my attention until made famous by Jeff Buckley in the early 1990s as a “b-side” recording and now covered by more than 300 artists.

I had heard the song dozens of times dating to Cohen’s version but it didn’t fully resonate with me until resurrected after Buckley’s death in the 2005 Academy-award winning movie Brokeback Mountain.

We all hear music differently.  As depicted In Switched at Birth, many people who are deaf enjoy and perform music, just as many hearing people don’t or choose not to.

As a young composer, Ludwig van Beethoven gradually became deaf.  He began to acknowledge it to friends by 1801, more than twenty years before he composed his famous Ninth Symphony.

At about the same time, he first performed one of my favorites, Missa Solemnis in D major.  Put earplugs in sometime and listen to it at higher volume to get a sense of what he heard or felt as he wrote it.

Part of the reason I enjoy digging back into the archeology of my inheritance is understanding the various manifestations in me.  From somewhere along the line, I inherited a mutation that shows up as “essential” or “familial” tremor.

There is only a 50-50 chance it will manifest.  Among my parents their grandchildren and great-grandchildren and my two sisters, four of us have the condition and so far seven others don’t.

What we inherit is something in which we have absolutely no say or control.  But according to Moalem, genes are not fixed.

They are inputs and influences but they also change in reaction to our thoughts and actions.  I know from experience that our actions, especially when separated by distance, also have a powerful influence on the genes of those who inherit them from us.

This is also a theme that runs through Switched (streamed on Netflix.)  This could also be why some of our worst moments help make use of who we are and help “forge meaning.”

As attributed recently to Mike Rowe, the guy in the Ford commercials who created and hosted many years of “Dirty Jobs” on the Discovery Channel (stream on Amazon Prime) and another show coming this fall on CNN called “Somebody’s Gotta Do It”:

"What you do, who you’re with, and how you feel about the world around you, is completely up to you."

Putting A Wider Lens On A Techno-Curmudgeon

On a Mother’s Day phone call, my mom was schmoozing me with how glad she was that different than the vast majority of people my age (65), I still keep up with new technologies.

This from a rising 86-year-old woman who, while nearly totally blind, uses a cell phone and is only taking a break from using magnifying software to email exchanges with friends.

My parents both embraced technology while I was growing up but during the call, mom shed light on why my rancher-paternal grandfather refused to give in to tractors.

Well into my youth I watched as Mel Bowman stubbornly insisted on using his beloved teams of draft horses throughout the 1950s to rake hay after my dad had mechanically cut it and before he bailed it.  It is one of my iconic images of my grandfather who died when I was in high school.

I remembered that while guiding that team of horses, Duke and Bally, he was approximately the age I am now.

But I also recalled something else as my mom explained that grandpa thought tractors were wasteful because they were hard to maneuver into corners of the meadow or in fields where we grew grains to feed our livestock.

My grandpa was born in 1888, just as the steam power of the First Industrial Revolution was about to give way to the petroleum-driven Second.  It’s similar to my grandsons being born as the Second Industrial Revolution began to cave to the renewable-energy that will soon dominate the Third.

He had been too young at age 5 when his father’s bay horse, Darby, was taken 100 miles south of his birthplace by rail in 1903 to be ridden by a cousin instead when U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt and his victorious Rough Riders were given a parade in Salt Lake City.

Coincidentally, the Black Troops of the Twenty-fourth Regiment, who had stormed San Juan Ridge alongside the Roughriders, were the first activated for the Spanish-American War while stationed at Fort Douglas in Salt Lake.

These troops from the south had already been welcomed home with a parade less than six years earlier and those killed honored each Decoration Day.

Grandpa was able to go to Logan, Utah with his family to see a performance of “Buffalo Bill” Cody starring in the Ringling Bros. Circus.

When he was ten, he and Darby pulled a two wheel cart loaded with milk cans each day to a “chessery” in High Creek, Utah whose power was generated by “treading” sheep or a small pony.

Soon he earned enough money hauling away brush from fields that were cleared to buy his own horse, “Queen” and watched as grain was ground into flour still using a water wheel for power.

When he was 12, grandpa learned to drive the team of twelve horses that powered the first thrashing machine in that area which was owned by his grandfather, my great-great grandfather, Hyrum Webster Bowman.

A step in that process was running the grain, once it was cut, through a stationary machine powered by steam.

When he was 16, four years before the area became Cache National Forest, he and his brother used horses to bring timber cut up in High Creek Canyon back down 3,000 vertical feet to a sawmill started by his grandfather and still powered by water wheel, earning a percentage of the lumber sold back then for $19 per thousand feet.

When grandpa was 19, he helped drive their cattle nearly two hundred miles north, where he and his brothers, sister and parents each homesteaded land in the shadow of the Tetons, which grandpa consolidated into our ranch after his brothers moved on to other pursuits and his parents died.

To also earn additional income, he and his brother George bought the second steam-threshing machine in that area and contracted to harvest all of the grain on farms and ranches for miles around.

Then they started a sawmill using a steam engine on Sand Creek, hauling logs to it from Antelope Creek then using horses again to haul the sawed lumber to the Fogg and Jacob store in St. Anthony for $20 per thousand feet, half in store credit.

He and his brother furnished the lumber for Alma Blanchard’s first dance hall along the Henry’s Fork near Chester.  In his personal history he also mentions that his coop used a bulldozer to improve on the dirt dam they had built up at Arcadia to bring water to the meadows.

They also hauled loads of cement one winter from the railhead in Ashton, up over the Tetons for a dam being built on Jackson Lake.

So as we can see, he wasn’t always resistant to new technology, far from it.

I think that in the last stage of his life though, he just couldn’t come to terms with the fact that his life-long love of raising, training and using horses had come to an end between the two world wars.

Think of the span in the play and in Steven Spielberg’s Academy Award-winning movie, “War Horse.”

My dad, who was a tanker during the latter of the two wars, came home highly aware of the power of technology, but growing up I viewed my grandfather’s stubbornness through a far too narrow lens because I, too, loved his draft teams as well as the saddle horses we used to herd cattle.

As my mom says, he gave pragmatic reasons for his resistance to gasoline-powered tractors but I also believe it broke his heart to see his horses replaced by technology of a new age.

I wish I had talked to him about it back then rather than stereotyping him.  I should have suspected there was more to the story because he had learned to drive and he and I tooled around in a cool Korean War era Jeep that eventually my grandparents gave to me.

I believe I would have learned had I probed, that his resistance at that late stage of his life was actually more about nostalgia and loyalty than resistance to technology.

For more than 200 years, horses had been a revolutionary, highly disruptive technology along both sides of the central Rockies after Cheyenne introduced them to Shoshone for mobility and buffalo hunting.

I may harbor a similar technological nostalgia by driving a descendent of that old Jeep he and my grandmother gave me when I turned 15. A remnant of a gasoline-fueled engines that will soon become a thing of the past.

For similar reasons I have kept their “pass-me-down” early 1900s Underwood typewriter, even though typewriters were replaced by keyboards ten years into my now-concluded, four-decade career in community destination marketing.

Looking back, it is clear that more than I realize, the early adoption of technology I used during my career flowed from gene pools on both sides of my inheritance.

My Trace of Jewishness

I just learned that this fourth generation, native-born northern Rocky Mountain, Mormon-cultured boy is 1% Jewish by ethnicity.

For some time now I’ve used DNA tests to unearth or confirm genealogical connections, but this new insight comes from a new test by Ancestry.com.

It also estimates that I am 47% British, a third Irish and 8% western European.  My Quaker lineage obviously trumped my Alpienne Amish roots.

It turns out that while “exactly half of our genome derives from each parent…the fraction from grandparents is by chance,” according to Razib Khan who is studying for a PhD in evolutionary genetics at the University of California – Davis.

Until this month Khan blogged for Discover magazine on the topic when he moved over to The Unz Review, an intriguing new webzine.  He blogged this week on the use of genetics to excavate the historic flow of civilizations.

There are other “trace” ethnicities in my DNA including 2% Scandinavian and Iberian and 3% Greco-Roman, each of which I have traced genealogically as well.

This also gives me clues, as a hobbyist, to the origins of my British roots since that island was invaded by and then acculturated by Romans, Vikings and Normans, the latter two of which may explain the Iberian influence.

This DNA test also predicts the probability of my relationships to others conducting family research, giving me more certainty to dig down into their roots for connections or the ability to confirm ancestors I have discovered.

My trace of Jewish heritage may have been gleaned when Judea was a province of Rome, or from the large communities of Jews who settled in France and Germany after the fall of Rome, some of whom then migrated to Britain.

Or it could have become part of my lineage during the Crusades.  But I plan to dig further into possible connections where Jews gathered in two small Swiss villages along the German border in the Aargau area,  about 60 kilometers northwest from my roots on the shore of Lake Zurich.

These historic Jewish villages are only a couple of hours by highway today southwest of Tailfingen where a German branch of my roots lived for a few hundred years before both my Swiss and German branches migrated to America during the first half of 1700s. 

Coincidentally, and maybe now not so ironically, both areas came to have a later connection to my dad during the months before and after the German Reich fell to Allied troops in World War II.

Freed to sweep into southern Germany after being halted when fuel supplies had been shifted instead to British armies in the north, American units reached Tailfingen too late to free prisoners who had been brought west from Auschwitz to work on an airfield for German Night Fighters.

Instead they found only a mass grave and the remains of nearly 100 prisoners who had been cremated.  The remaining prisoners had been moved to other camps from which they were ultimately forced on a death march south to Dachau where those who survived would be liberated when the Americans reached that infamous camp.

My dad’s unit was dismounted from armor and remounted on horses and in Jeeps and in reconnaissance aircraft to patrol for NAZIs trying to flee to the south.

But in addition to processing prisoners for the return home, they were processing some of the nearly 60,000 civilian refugees and a similar number of soldiers and airmen who had been detained during the war in neutral Switzerland, many in conditions similar to concentration camps.

When my dad and some friends took an Army Jeep up into the Alps for a few days of snow skiing, they would have driven past those Jewish settlements along the border in Switzerland.   My dad may have learned by then that 20,000 to 25,000 Jewish refugees had been turned away at the Swiss border during the war to face certain death.

On a per capita basis, America was even more reluctant to accept Jewish refugees, ostensibly for fear of infiltrators.  More of a factor may be that the 1930s had been a period of virulent anti-Semitism here too.

These views were held by as much as half of all Americans even as the war came to an end, so I would not be surprised to learn that my dad held some of those views until he was sobered by Dachau.

I doubt he was any more aware of his own trace of Jewish heritage than I was until this week.