24 ALWAYS EXPERIMENTING

My interest in electronics came from my older brother, who would probably be considered a terrorist now. He loved to take apart electronic devices and build new ones. His most passionate enterprise was to circumvent the phone company, tapping into their lines in the middle of the night with his home-built phones to make cost-free long-distance calls. I would accompany him on these nocturnal outings, but I managed to avoid capture—he did not. (He smoked and was caught lighting up.) We lived downstairs in a hillside house in Orinda, California, so we had our own private spaces behind our rooms that backed up into the dirt of the hillside. His space was filled with piles of electronics—mine was a dark room. We also mixed saltpeter, sulfur, and carbon (portions conveniently specified in the World Book Encyclopedia) to make explosives that sent tin cans flying in the back yard and loud echoes in the culvert down the hill. I don't think any animals died, but we shook up a few snakes. I was an experimentalist in the making.