Free as in Freedom - Sam Williams (read this if .TXT) 📗

a horrible temper,” Stallman says. “He never screamed, but he always found a way to criticize you in a cold, designed-to-crush way.”

 

As for life in his mother’s apartment, Stallman is less equivocal. “That was war,” he says. “I used to say in my misery, `I want to go home,’ meaning to the nonexistent place that I’ll never have.”

 

For the first few years after the divorce, Stallman found the tranquility that eluded him in the home of his paternal grandparents. Then, around age 10 his grandparents passed away in short succession. For Stallman, the loss was devastating. “I used to go and visit and feel I was in a loving, gentle environment,”

Stallman recalls. “It was the only place I ever found one, until I went away to college.”

 

Lippman lists the death of Richard’s paternal grandparents as the second traumatic event. “It really upset him,” she says. He was very close to both his grandparents. Before they died, he was very outgoing, almost a leader-of-the-pack type with the other kids.

After they died, he became much more emotionally withdrawn.”

 

From Stallman’s perspective, the emotional withdrawal was merely an attempt to deal with the agony of adolescence. Labeling his teenage years a “pure horror,” Stallman says he often felt like a deaf person amid a crowd of chattering music listeners.

 

“I often had the feeling that I couldn’t understand what other people were saying,” says Stallman, recalling the emotional bubble that insulated him from the rest of the adolescent and adult world. “I could understand the words, but something was going on underneath the conversations that I didn’t understand.

I couldn’t understand why people were interested in the things other people said.”

 

For all the agony it produced, adolescence would have a encouraging effect on Stallman’s sense of

individuality. At a time when most of his classmates were growing their hair out, Stallman preferred to keep his short. At a time when the whole teenage world was listening to rock and roll, Stallman preferred classical music. A devoted fan of science fiction, Mad magazine, and late-night TV, Stallman cultivated a distinctly off-the-wall personality that fed off the incomprehension of parents and peers alike.

 

“Oh, the puns,” says Lippman, still exasperated by the memory of her son’s teenage personality. “There wasn’t a thing you could say at the dinner table that he couldn’t throw back at you as a pun.”

 

Outside the home, Stallman saved the jokes for the adults who tended to indulge his gifted nature. One of the first was a summer-camp counselor who handed Stallman a print-out manual for the IBM 7094 computer during his 12th year. To a preteenager fascinated with numbers and science, the gift was a godsend.Stallman, an atheist, would probably quibble with this

description. Suffice it to say, it was something Stallman welcomed. See previous note 1: “As soon as I heard about computers, I wanted to see one and play with one.”

By the end of summer, Stallman was writing out paper programs according to the 7094’s internal

specifications, anxiously anticipating getting a chance to try them out on a real machine.

 

With the first personal computer still a decade away, Stallman would be forced to wait a few years before getting access to his first computer. His first chance finally came during his junior year of high school.

Hired on at the IBM New York Scientific Center, a now-defunct research facility in downtown Manhattan, Stallman spent the summer after high-school graduation writing his first program, a pre-processor for the 7094

written in the programming language PL/I. “I first wrote it in PL/I, then started over in assembler language when the PL/I program was too big to fit in the computer,” he recalls.

 

After that job at the IBM Scientific Center, Stallman had held a laboratory-assistant position in the biology department at Rockefeller University. Although he was already moving toward a career in math or physics, Stallman’s analytical mind impressed the lab director enough that a few years after Stallman departed for college, Lippman received an unexpected phone call. “It was the professor at Rockefeller,” Lippman says. “He wanted to know how Richard was doing. He was surprised to learn that he was working in computers. He’d always thought Richard had a great future ahead of him as a biologist.”

 

Stallman’s analytical skills impressed faculty members at Columbia as well, even when Stallman himself became a target of their ire. “Typically once or twice an hour [Stallman] would catch some mistake in the lecture,”

says Breidbart. “And he was not shy about letting the professors know it immediately. It got him a lot of respect but not much popularity.”

 

Hearing Breidbart’s anecdote retold elicits a wry smile from Stallman. “I may have been a bit of a jerk sometimes,” he admits. “But I found kindred spirits among the teachers, because they, too, liked to learn.

Kids, for the most part, didn’t. At least not in the same way.”

 

Hanging out with the advanced kids on Saturday nevertheless encouraged Stallman to think more about the merits of increased socialization. With college fast approaching, Stallman, like many in his Columbia Science Honors Program, had narrowed his list of desired schools down to two choices: Harvard and MIT.

Hearing of her son’s desire to move on to the Ivy League, Lippman became concerned. As a 15-year-old high-school junior, Stallman was still having run-ins with teachers and administrators. Only the year before, he had pulled straight A’s in American History, Chemistry, French, and Algebra, but a glaring F in English reflected the ongoing boycott of writing assignments. Such miscues might draw a knowing chuckle at MIT, but at Harvard, they were a red flag.

 

During her son’s junior year, Lippman says she scheduled an appointment with a therapist. The therapist expressed instant concern over Stallman’s unwillingness to write papers and his run-ins with teachers. Her son certainly had the intellectual wherewithal to succeed at Harvard, but did he have the patience to sit through college classes that required a term paper? The therapist suggested a trial run. If Stallman could make it through a full year in New York City public schools, including an English class that required term papers, he could probably make it at Harvard. Following the completion of his junior year, Stallman promptly enrolled in summer school at Louis D.

Brandeis High School, a public school located on 84th Street, and began making up the mandatory art classes he had shunned earlier in his high-school career.

 

By fall, Stallman was back within the mainstream population of New York City high-school students. It wasn’t easy sitting through classes that seemed remedial in comparison with his Saturday studies at Columbia, but Lippman recalls proudly her son’s ability to toe the line.

 

“He was forced to kowtow to a certain degree, but he did it,” Lippman says. “I only got called in once, which was a bit of a miracle. It was the calculus teacher complaining that Richard was interrupting his lesson. I asked how he was interrupting. He said Richard was always accusing the teacher of using a false proof. I said, `Well, is he right?’ The teacher said, `Yeah, but I can’t tell that to the class. They wouldn’t understand.’”

 

By the end of his first semester at Brandeis, things were falling into place. A 96 in English wiped away much of the stigma of the 60 earned 2 years before. For good measure, Stallman backed it up with top marks in American History, Advanced Placement Calculus, and Microbiology. The crowning touch was a perfect 100 in Physics. Though still a social outcast, Stallman finished his 11 months at Brandeis as the fourth-ranked student in a class of 789.

 

<Graphic file:/home/craigm/books/free_0306.png>

 

Stallman’s senior-year transcript at Louis D. Brandeis H.S., November, 1969. Note turnaround in English class performance. “He was forced to kowtow to a certain degree,” says his mother, “but he did it.”

 

Outside the classroom, Stallman pursued his studies with even more diligence, rushing off to fulfill his laboratory-assistant duties at Rockefeller University during the week and dodging the Vietnam protesters on his way to Saturday school at Columbia. It was there, while the rest of the Science Honors Program students sat around discussing their college choices, that Stallman finally took a moment to participate in the preclass bull session.

 

Recalls Breidbart, “Most of the students were going to Harvard and MIT, of course, but you had a few going to other Ivy League schools. As the conversation circled the room, it became apparent that Richard hadn’t said anything yet. I don’t know who it was, but somebody got up the courage to ask him what he planned to do.”

 

Thirty years later, Breidbart remembers the moment clearly. As soon as Stallman broke the news that he, too, would be attending Harvard University in the fall, an awkward silence filled the room. Almost as if on cue, the corners of Stallman’s mouth slowly turned upward into a self-satisfied smile.

 

Says Breidbart, “It was his silent way of saying, `That’s right. You haven’t got rid of me yet.’”

 

Impeach God

 

Although their relationship was fraught with tension, Richard Stallman would inherit one noteworthy trait from his mother: a passion for progressive politics.

 

It was an inherited trait that would take several decades to emerge, however. For the first few years of his life, Stallman lived in what he now admits was a “political vacuum.“See Michael Gross, “Richard Stallman: High School Misfit, Symbol of Free Software, MacArthur-certified Genius” (1999).

Like most Americans during the Eisenhower age, the Stallman family spent the 50s trying to recapture the normalcy lost during the wartime years of the 1940s.

 

“Richard’s father and I were Democrats but happy enough to leave it at that,” says Lippman, recalling the family’s years in Queens. “We didn’t get involved much in local or national politics.”

 

That all began to change, however, in the late 1950s when Alice divorced Daniel Stallman. The move back to Manhattan represented more than a change of address; it represented a new, independent identity and a jarring loss of tranquility.

 

“I think my first taste of political activism came when I went to the Queens public library and discovered there was only a single book on divorce in the whole library,” recalls Lippman. “It was very controlled by the Catholic church, at least in Elmhurst, where we lived. I think that was the first inkling I had of the forces that quietly control our lives.”

 

Returning to her childhood neighborhood, Manhattan’s Upper West Side, Lippman was shocked by the changes that had taken place since her departure to Hunter College a decade and a half before. The skyrocketing demand for postwar housing had turned the neighborhood into a political battleground. On one side stood the pro-development city-hall politicians and businessmen hoping to rebuild many of the neighborhood’s blocks to accommodate the growing number of white-collar workers moving into the city. On the other side stood the poor Irish and Puerto Rican tenants who had found an affordable haven in the neighborhood.

 

At first, Lippman didn’t know which side to choose. As a new resident, she felt the need for new housing. As a single mother with minimal income, however, she shared the poorer tenants’ concern over the growing number of development projects catering mainly to wealthy residents. Indignant, Lippman began looking for ways to combat the political machine that was attempting to turn her neighborhood into a clone of the Upper East Side.

 

Lippman says her first visit to the local Democratic party headquarters came in 1958. Looking for a day-care center to take care of her son while she worked, she had been appalled by the conditions encountered at one of the city-owned centers that catered to low-income residents. “All I remember is the stench