I stay in email and phone contact with my cousin Helen, daughter of my father’s brother Wentworth. She wrote me this:

He has quite a following….who knew!  I don’t think we had any idea as children that this facet of his life would receive such recognition.  I once asked him how he got the ideas for his science fiction (he had a character in one of his later works who was a girlie-girl –whom he told me was based on something I came up with…cloudy-clouds).  His explanation to me at the time was that he had very strange dreams when he had been under anesthesia in the past and that he turned those dreams into his science fiction. 

I asked her if I could use that in the blog, and she kindly said yes and added this:

When we (your dad, Genevieve, Marcia, me, and Erica Lindsey) all traveled by car to Mexico (I was 14 at the time), we often had to entertain ourselves  because the radio didn’t offer anything more than static in certain areas of the country.  One of the songs I sang was Home on the Range.  Instead of singing "where the skies are not cloudy all day" instead I sang "where the clouds are not cloudy all day."  When your dad asked me what in the world a cloudy cloud was — I explained that it was a gray, dark cloud.  A normal cloud was a white, puffy cloud.

Erica Lindsay was about our age too, daughter of a good friend of my father’s. I wasn’t along on the trip because I had my first summer job, for young people who showed promise as scientists. It was a very interesting job, being part of a research team that came up with an estimate of how many people the world could support. I forget what number we came up with, but I think it was smaller than the current total. I didn’t pursue science as a career, but it may have influenced my becoming a librarian later.