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. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- To sign-off Parkinsn send a message to: mailto:[log in to unmask] In the body of the message put: signoff parkinsn