Memories of Joe Bruman

Born May 19, 1922 in Washington, DC. Died suddenly March 30, 2003 at home in
Sherman Oaks, California, after a long struggle with Parkinson's Disease.

A 1944 graduate of California Institute of Technology, Joe worked in the
aerospace industry and enjoyed hiking and astronomy. He founded the Citroen
Car Club in 1956.

Joe is survived by his sister Pauline McKim of Aptos, his son Ray Bruman of
Berkeley, and his daughter Janet Bruman of Monterey.

No services are planned. In lieu of flowers, donations may be made to The
Parkinson's Institute, 1170 Morse Avenue, Sunnyvale, CA 94089-1605, or
Descanso Gardens, 1418 Descanso Drive, La Canada, CA 91011.

Neither Joe nor his wife Marian ever expressed any interest in formal
services for themselves, although they recognized that services do comfort
the bereaved. When Marian passed away in 1994, Joe placed a bench in
Descanso Gardens, a place they both loved, but it is not marked in any way,
in keeping with the policy of the Gardens.

Joe and his family moved to 3527 Cody Rd in Sherman Oaks in 1956, expecting
to stay only a year or less before moving to northern California. As John
Lennon said, "Life is what happens while you were making other plans."

Add to the memories

Joe loved photographs and the stories that go with them. He wrote a great
deal, some of which was published. The best memorial for Joe is to collect
and share photos and stories. If you have any to contribute, send them to:

Ray Bruman (510) 549-1509
2929 Lorina St.
Berkeley, CA 94705-1806
[log in to unmask]

Joe liked hosting and attending parties but he never sought to be the center
of attention. Nonetheless, one of his Parkinson's Disease support groups has
already had a meeting to commemorate Joe. If any other group of people feels
like organizing such a gathering, please contact the address above for help
with names and addresses.

Childhood

Joe was born in Washington, DC in 1922. His parents were recent Jewish
immigrants from Odessa, Russia, on the shores of the Black Sea in what is
now called Ukraine. The name "Bruman" is a little unusual, possibly a
variant of the German "Brauman" (brewer) and probably it dates from the
settlement of the region encouraged by Catherine the Great when she expanded
the Russian empire. Joe's father, Abram Josefitch Bruman, came through Ellis
Island in 1916. He didn't know a word of English, although he had French and
German in school and spoke Yiddish and Russian at home. He thought the
occasional sign "To Let" he saw in house windows indicated the availability
of a toilet as a courtesy to passers-by. He worked his way up through a
series of menial jobs and sent money to bring his sweetheart Yevgenia from
Odessa. He earned a Bachelor's degree in agronomy and a Master's degree in
plant pathology, and was working for the U.S. Department of Agriculture when
Joe was born. In 1938 he accepted a job with a philanthropic organization
set up to resettle European Jews in Costa Rica. He taught himself Spanish,
drove a jeep from New York City to San Jose, Costa Rica, and shipped it up
the river to a 50,000 acre hacienda so remote that it had never even had a
motor vehicle. He managed the hacienda until 1950. Meanwhile, Joe moved to
Los Angeles with his mother and younger sister Pauline, finished high school
(at Fairfax, class of 1939) and enrolled in LA City College. His mother
taught piano and performed, mostly as a concert accompanist. Joe's passions
at this time were photography, amateur radio, and building hot rods. He
moved into his own quarters before he even finished high school, and set up
workshops for his many projects.

College Days

At LA City College in 1939, Joe joined a social club called The Jabberwocks,
led by O.D. Richardson, an eccentric professor of English known to everyone
as "Teach." They played records, had parties and performed Gilbert &
Sullivan, and occasionally Teach would lead a whole caravan out on a camping
expedition as far away as Death Valley or Tuolomne Meadows in Yosemite. Joe
made lifelong friends there and was introduced to hiking, climbing, and
camping in the Sierra Nevada. Most of the Jabberwocks were unconventional
people.

Joe went on to the California Institute of Technology (Cal Tech) for a
bachelor's and a master's degree in aeronautical engineering  (class of
1944). In later years he loved attending the annual class reunions,
especially when he attained the Half-Century mark, and he joined the
Athenaeum Club. He worked at JPL, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory run by Cal
Tech, doing wind tunnel data collection.

One evening at a party he was smoking a cigarette alone on a terrace when
Marian Maben, a UCLA student with a Master's degree in Social Welfare,
introduced herself. They were married in June 1944 and were together nearly
50 years.

War Years

Immediately after he was married, Joe joined the Navy and wound up serving
on the USS Patterson, a destroyer assigned to protect aircraft carriers in
the Pacific Theater.

The Baby Boom

Joe's son Ray was born August 22, 1946 in Los Angeles, part of the first
year class of the Baby Boom generation. His daughter Janet was born August
3, 1948. Joe was eager to start a family at an early age, and
characteristically decided to design and build his own house. He bought a
lot on Golden Avenue in Hermosa Beach, and began commuting there on weekends
to pour concrete and erect cinder-block walls. He used many ideas that were
avant garde at the time, such as a picture window in the large living room,
radiant heating driven by hot-water pipes in the slab floor, and a large
corner fireplace as a social area. He was very proud of the house, though he
admitted to lots of beginner's mistakes. He lived in it only a year.

The Playboy Philosopher

From the beginning of the 1950's Joe was interested in almost every aspect
of the culture that was later recognized as "hip" or avant garde. He was
already working in the aerospace industry, with a crew cut like most of his
colleagues, and with the expanded international awareness that came with
World War 2. Joe joined sports car clubs and hosted cocktail parties. He
bought a brand new 1953 Citroen because of its front-wheel drive (excellent
for rally driving) and its stylish flared fenders and detached headlamps. He
asked the dealer about other customers and formed the Citroen Car Club to
share technical information and help with the (many) repairs.

Joe liked the emerging West Coast school of cool jazz, and drove down to The
Light House to hear it. He liked foreign films and went to all the art-film
houses like the Nuart to see Alec Guiness, Alistair Sim, and Jacques Tati
comedies instead of Abbot & Costello, Martin & Lewis or Hope & Crosby. He
went to Japanese restaurants when they had the most exotic cuisine to be
found in America. If you remember, at this time Italian (really Sicilian)
was pretty "foreign" and if you didn't live in a really big city the only
Chinese restaurant featured "chop suey" and had a name rendered in "fake
Chinese" type. He got interested in skiing in the early 1940's, when it was
an unusual sport, and took the whole family to Mammoth Mountain when it had
only one chair lift. He loved motorcycles, especially dirt bikes.

It became a family joke that Joe got interested in things that later caught
on big, like the cartoons of Jules Feiffer, Pogo, Peanuts, MAD Magazine and
B. Kliban and Tom Leherer's records. He got Danish modern furniture when it
was hip, and it came from a European mail-order firm called IKEA that very
few Americans had ever heard of. He was a great admirer of the designers
Charles and Ray Eames, and even made a boomerang-shaped coffee table with a
mosaic tile top for the living room. It almost goes without saying that he
was an early subscriber to Playboy, the self-appointed guide to the hip
1950s lifestyle. Once, for a costume party, he persuaded Marian to dress as
a Playboy Bunny waitress, while he made a cardboard bunny head for himself
to wear, along with a sack suit, skinny necktie and a martini glass.

He bought a war-surplus 16 mm movie camera and began taking home movies by
about 1950. Since he had the projector, he borrowed a number of films from
the LA public library system, and we began a tradition of showing them once
a week, inviting neighborhood kids in to see them. This sort of made up for
the fact that he had no interest in TV and refused to have one in the house
until both his kids were in college. It's a little strange that he showed no
technical interest in TV after its very early days, when he helped a wealthy
hobbyist build a TV before they were widely sold. Joe built radios and
cameras, but no TVs. He had zero interest in spectator sports and the
broadcast material TV offered.

A Quirky Traveler

When air travel to Europe became affordable, Joe took his family. But rather
than the usual summer tours, he chose to go in the winter (of 1960) to buy a
new VW bus in Hannover, drive it to the ski areas of Austria and
Switzerland, use it for travel and then ship it home. Years later he made a
point of visiting Spitzgbergen, the northernmost place that is inhabited
year-round. In 1973 he climbed Mount Kilimanjaro and witnessed a total
eclipse of the sun from the shores of Lake Rudolph in Africa.

A Car Nut

Joe had a scrapbook of photos, and the owner's manual for every car,
including the Cadillac V-16 he bought from a junkyard (September 1940) and
turned into a hot rod with a Ford Model A frame and a sleek chopped-down
roof line. There were eight intake ports, and a cheap effective carburetor
was the Ford model 97, used on early V8s. The foot pedal was stiff, but it
worked. It did an official 100.4 mph!

He built a two-seater genuine hot rod out of a 1941 Ford frame and running
gear, with a 1954 Chrysler V8 engine (331 cubic inches) and a home-made body
formed from sheet metal with single-curvature bends. He modified several
family cars to take the 4-person family camping, but he was never keen on
trailers. So he was very interested when Volkswagen brought their Kombi bus
to America in 1956, and he bought one that year. When he converted it into a
camper, it was such a novel idea that several magazines published articles
about it. He later bought 1960 and 1969 models, with ever-more elaborate
improvements.

Flying Lessons

Since he already had a master's degree when he was discharged from the
military, Joe decided to use his VA educational benefits to take flying
lessons between 1950 and 1956.

Amateur Astronomer

In the late 50's Joe developed a real interest in astronomy, and toyed with
the idea of getting a degree in it. He built a series of telescopes of
increasingly sophisticated design, and joined others at "Star Parties" in
places like Mount Pinos, well north of the light pollution from Los Angeles.

Rocket Scientist

Joe spent five years each at North American Aviation and JPL, a year and a
half at Lockheed flight-testing their X-17 high-altitude research rocket,
and five years at Systems Development Corporation as staff planner for the
SAGE air defense system. He got in a lot of trouble for pointing out that
the entire SAGE system was vulnerable to early sneak attack, rendering it
useless. In 1957, he was part of a team at the Lockheed Aircraft Missile
Systems Division proposing to launch an artificial satellite to orbit the
earth, and was puzzled when various agencies showed no interest. When the
Russians launched Sputnik on October 4, 1957, it was revealed that the U.S.
already had such a program under way, and they launched in 1958.

Security Clearance

Some of the work Joe did was highly classified. There were times when he
could not even tell his family the actual name of his employer or the number
of employees. He was investigated especially thoroughly by the FBI because
both of his parents were born in Russia and had living relatives in the
Soviet Union. Joe studied technical Russian and one of his favorite jobs was
not classified. It consisted of publishing a monthly report on the Soviet
efforts at planetary exploration. Joe did his research with open sources,
interviewing scientists at conferences and studying publications.

Advanced Thinker

People usually noticed that Joe was bright (he always did the New York Times
crossword puzzle with a fountain pen) but they often vigorously disagreed
with him.

Escalation in Vietnam

In the early 60's at RAND Corporation, Joe predicted that the US would
eventually put 500,000 troops into Vietnam. His colleagues scoffed.

Mountain Bikes

Joe wasn't the first to ride a bike off the paved road, but he took to the
idea early. He wrote later that a friend told him in 1968 about seeing a few
guys trying 10-speed bikes on a hiking trail Joe realized from experience
with his Honda 250 Scrambler that trails would require a very sturdy
bicycle, so he built one with a specially sprung front fork, low gear, and
modified seat, tires and brakes. He dated a photo of this bike as 1967, so
the exact year is uncertain. He tried it on many trails and roads in the
mountains near LA. Marian went along with him for a trial run high in the
White Mountains east of the Sierra Nevada, waiting in the camper in case he
got stranded. One of the workers from a University of California research
station nearby told her he'd seen the strangest thing on the trail - a track
that looked like it had been made by a bicycle, but how was that possible at
this altitude? She explained that it was just her husband trying out a new
idea. Years later, when "mountain bikes" appeared and became ever more
popular, Joe was amused once again.

Ice on the Moon

Joe told the American Astronomical Society in 1968 that lunar features were
probably formed by ice. The opposing conventional wisdom (vulcanism) held
sway for decades before changing.

Inventor

Scientific American's "The Amateur Scientist" column for August 1969 is
devoted to Joe's method of taking accurate color photos of astronomical
objects by chilling the film with liquid nitrogen. While working at JPL, Joe
conceived of a novel kind of motor, based on the idea of taking many tiny
steps. He built a model that resembled a snake, which could use each scale
on its belly in turn, to make a tiny push against the ground. Then he
thought of miniaturizing it, using the tiny expansion/contraction that some
materials perform in response to an electric field, called the
"piezoelectric effect." JPL filed a patent application and described the
device in NASA Tech Briefs (April 1987, page 68) as a "Piezoelectric Driver
for Incremental Motion."

Writer

In 1964, Joe wrote and self-published a small (53 page) booklet,
"Observational Astronomy for Beginners."

When Joe's mother's estate was delayed in probate for several years, he
researched the topic so thoroughly that he undertook to take his father's
estate through probate, and wrote a small book on the whole process.

Joe explored the entire San Gabriel mountain range and wrote his own
guidebook "106 Tops," then published it himself in 1982 and sold it by mail
order.

When Joe was diagnosed (in late 1993) with Parkinson's Disease, he began
researching all the literature on it. Eventually he wrote a monthly report,
Current Science Reviews, summarizing all the research news he could find,
and published it over the Internet for several years. It can still be found
using search engines.

A Complicated, Contradictory Man

Most people have paradoxical, contradictory traits, but Joe had some extreme
examples. He was smart, but also did some dumb things. He had a great sense
of humor, but collected a vast amount of very dark humor (Charles Addams was
an early favorite) and could be relentlessly negative and pessimistic. On
the other hand, he loved Felix the Cat, who was the eternal optimist, and he
sometimes displayed cheerful slogans or symbols. The kitchen clock was a cat
with oscillating eyes and a tail as a mock pendulum. At his breakfast table
he had a framed copy or R. Crumb's famous "Keep On Truckin'" poster (he once
owned an original that would be quite valuable now, but unfortunately he
gave it away to a teenager when he cleared out one of his offices) and he
took that slogan to heart.

Like most smart people, he had sharp opinions, and he could rant tirelessly
and tiresomely about politicians, automobile regulations, car-pool lanes,
traffic lights, asbestos law suits..., the topics seemed endless. He really
did write letters to the Editor, although he loathed the LA Times and was
unaware of its major editorial changes over time. Many people rant, but Joe
kept an elaborate computerized list, for years, of egregiously stupid
quotations from public figures. (He often used words like "egregious,"
"gratuitous," and "disingenuous.") He could be extremely courteous or rude,
thoughtful or hurtful, athletic or sedentary, brash or shy. His professional
career took a number of bad turns because he was unable or unwilling to keep
quiet or be diplomatic.

This all may come as a surprise for people who didn't know him for years,
and it may seem inappropriate to mention. But if it isn't mentioned, people
may not understand that there were people who ended up having no use for
Joe, and they had their reasons.

Joe's Project Book

Joe took real pride in his own projects, and in his later years compiled
descriptions and photos of them. Here is a selected list.

A portable radio, built into a typewriter case (1938).

A ham radio station (1938)

A truly tiny steam engine, with a piston measuring 1/8 inch bore and stroke,
that ran at 15,000 RPM off either compressed air or the steam line aboard
the USS Patterson.

A backpacking bellows camera with an aluminum body so sturdy that no case is
needed.

A glassed-in sun room (1954).

A one-wheeled platform trailer that allowed a family of 4 to go car-camping
with a 1953 Citroen 4-door sedan.

Astronomical telescopes using a war surplus photo-reconnaissance lens, FL
36" f:6.3 on a series of mounts; equatorial, modified "Springfield"
equatorial, altazimuth, all built without access to a machine shop. He set
them up for direct viewing, still photos with a Hasselblad camera, and
time-lapse 16 mm movies of lunar or solar eclipses.

A Goretex rain suit that converts to a bivouac bag. Joe also designed a ski
parka because he wasn't satisfied with any he could buy. He insisted on
having no external pockets. He became as skillful with a sewing machine as
with an oxyacetylene welding rig.

Bookshelves, stereo cabinets, patio furniture, work benches, and endless
modifications to houses, vehicles and appliances.

A complete doll's house with working double-hung windows and 1920's style
furnishings, built in the style of Marian's childhood house in the Highland
Park area of Los Angeles.

Just Do It Yourself

Joe inspired many people by showing them that if you wanted to do something,
you could probably learn the skills or knowledge you needed. He learned how
to use computers, work with fiberglass and casting resin - whatever the
project required. When he wanted to make handsome metal badges for the
Citroen Car Club, he make a prototype, had it reproduced, and learned how to
do cloisonne enameling in a little hobby furnace in order to put a beautiful
glaze between the raised part of the design. He tried his hand at wood
carving, water colors, and many other crafts, and even attempted to learn
how to play the banjo.

When the law prohibiting home-brew beer was amended and brewing supplies
began to be sold openly, Joe took to it enthusiastically. This was not one
of his successes. Instead of real brewing yeast, he insisted on using
baker's yeast, which makes cloudy beer with a truly vile flavor. He timed
the bottling of the beer using a crude hygrometer intended for urinalysis.
Its inaccuracy led to the end of the experiment. One day Marian heard a
series of explosions in the garage, and called Joe at work. He warned her
not to go in the garage, and when he got home he put on his motorcycle
jacket, gloves, and goggles before entering the garage himself to remove the
surviving bottles. It was really spectacular to watch him (through a window)
open them in the back yard. The entire quart of beer expanded almost
instantly out the top of the bottle, making a glorious geyser that left only
about a quarter of an inch remaining at the bottom. A few days later a
neighbor visited during the day, sniffed, and asked Marian "Have you been
baking bread?"

Near the end of his life Joe hoped to use enlargements of MRI images to put
together a transparent model of his own brain. He didn't complete this
project but he did get as far as securing the transparencies he needed. This
project seems to have some special significance, but it was just one of many
things he was working on.

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