Two families, two worlds, a lifetime bond

One was born to Polish immigrants in New York City in 1915.

The other was born on a Tehama County sheep ranch in 1925.

The former earned his master’s and doctorate from Princeton University, where he later became an assistant professor. That’s also where he crossed paths with some guy named Albert Einstein, who had an office over in the mathematics building.

The latter left the farm at 18 and joined the U.S. Navy. By the time he turned 19, he was on a destroyer in the Pacific theater of World War II, narrowly avoiding death at the hands of kamikaze pilots who came so close, he swears he can remember their faces.

The former went on to become a Stanford University professor and nuclear physicist who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1961; his reputation in that field remains so other-worldly, creators of “The Big Bang Theory” bestowed his name upon their lead character. He and his wife, Nancy, raised three children, one of whom became a renowned professor in his own right and the author of nine books, the first of which won a Pulitzer.

The latter? He came home after the war, played guitar and sang at small-town honky tonks and dance venues, got married, worked at a mill, operated a dairy, ran the family farm, cut wood, plowed fields and baled hay all night after doing most of those other things during the day and raised two boys — one a well-respected teacher and coach in Yuba County, the other a journalist who ended up as editor of the Chico Enterprise-Record.

Their names? Robert Hofstadter and Elwyn Wolcott — and to say they have probably been the two most influential men in my life is a blessing I’ll never be able to adequately repay in this world.

They had nothing in common except perhaps their kind natures and a neverending interest in learning new things.

Really, that was all it took — and talk about a lesson we should all learn in this lifetime.

The Hofstadter family came into our life in the early 1960s by purchasing a good chunk of our family farm in the Flournoy area. Hofstadter was just a year or two removed from his Nobel speech in Stockholm when he went shopping for a farm, a peaceful place in the country where he could take his family for occasional getaways.

How lucky that he found us.

On any given day, I might be chasing chickens or shoveling manure one minute, then seated at the Hofstadters’ dinner table the next looking at photos from a NASA moon project. Or listening to Hofstadter patiently explain the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center and how he used it to study the scattering of high-energy electrons by atomic nuclei. (Yes, that line was copied-and-pasted from a biography, and no, I still have no idea what it means.) Meanwhile, his son Doug would be playing Bach on the family piano, a different kind of music from the equally classic Hank Williams and Ernest Tubb tunes my dad played so well.

Who had it better than me? Nobody.

And talk about patience. No matter how many times I approached these people with some sort of silly childlike question or comment, they never once acted too important or busy to speak with me. From gazing at the planets through their all-powerful telescope and stepping back to look at the world in ways I’d never imagined possible, the relationship for me — and all of my family — was the gift of a lifetime.

Of course, the opposite was also true. Robert Hofstadter, for all of his brilliance, initially knew nothing about cattle and even less about, shall we say, homespun humor and country life. Fortunately, by hiring my dad to run his ranch, he was never again in short supply of either. The look of astonishment Hofstadter got on his face listening to my dad’s stories — thus educating him just as much as the other way around — taught me that there’s not a person on this planet who can’t learn things from other people if they’d just pause long enough to listen.

We did our best to understand the complex work he did. He did his best to become a rancher. We were all better for the experience and, like his many friends from the Bay Area who’d come along for visits, got incredible glimpses into worlds we never knew existed.

One time, our sheep escaped through a fence and got onto a county road in the back corner of our ranch. Hofstadter had a few visitors from Stanford that weekend, and I’m talking people from the true upper echelon of academia.

Well, dad needed sheepherders. They were quick to volunteer. And to say they were in over their heads would be like saying our family was out of its league trying to explain gamma rays and energetic particles.

In no time at all, these brilliant men were stumbling and falling like fools, in general making a mess of an already-chaotic situation while chasing sheep up and down that country road.

That’s when a goodold-country-boy neighbor, Hugh Luce, pulled up. He saw these esteemed educators floundering as the sheep ran out of control along his fence line. And my dad said, loudly, “Hugh, you have NO IDEA how hard it is to find a good sheepherder these days.”

They laughed. We all laughed. It’s good to laugh at our shortcomings. They had theirs, and we certainly had ours.

Through it all, we bonded, and our mutual admiration and respect only grew.

Robert Hofstadter died in 1990, and we’ve all long-since sold our ranches, but our families remain close. Doug Hofstadter, now 78, and his sister Laura visited my parents just this week. My parents, ages 97 and 89, are struggling with many of the issues you’d expect of folks that age. But merely hearing the words “The Hofstadters are coming for a visit” lifted their spirits more than anything else I could have possibly come up with.

At some point, our conversation reached a place it always does: How two families from such different backgrounds met and forged a friendship that’s lasted 60 years and will continue for as long as any of us are alive. It’s truly humbling that, after all this time, it still seems to mean as much to them as it always will to us.

So if you ever wonder why the editor of the newspaper in our purple little town stubbornly clings to the belief that our world would be a better place if we approached differences with politeness and civility, a strong sense of curiosity and (especially) an ability to stop and listen and reflect upon what the other person is saying instead of automatically assuming the worst and reinforcing crude stereotypes … well, let’s just say I’ve seen the living proof of what’s really possible for a long, long time.

I wish all of you could be so lucky.