David’s father was thriving in his furniture-making business, so in about 1938 he decided to move his family to a new, more affluent area of Winnipeg, a neighborhood now known as Luxton. “When I was about 11 or 12, we moved from the immigrant neighborhood to a swankier nearby area,” David says. “We had servants in the house, and I had my own laboratory in the basement.” The environment, it seems, could not have been nicer. The family’s new home, at 18 Cathedral Ave., sat on a relatively large plot of land overlooking the Red River.
Moving house meant David also switched schools, leaving behind the parochial Yiddish school he had attended since he was a young child and joining St. John’s Technical High School, part of the public school system in Winnipeg. St. John’s was “marvelous,” he says, not least because it offered robust programs in both science and music. “We spoke mathematical languages. We could understand Newton’s law in high school.”
David especially credits two of the teachers at the school with providing a foundation for much of the work he would later pursue. Mr. Johnson taught him about heat and thermodynamics, for example, as part of the physics curriculum at St. John’s, giving him a strong theoretical grounding in phenomena that had intrigued him since he was a child. And Mr. Silverberg gave him the necessary background in math to tackle the many physics problems he would encounter both at St. John’s and later in life.
Inspired by the teachers, he would conduct all manner of experiments outside of school as well. He recalls, for instance, filling a glass pipe with water and a small mass and dropping it from Redwood Bridge in Winnipeg into the Red River below. A couple of guys in a boat on the river took photos of the pipe as it fell, capturing the effects of weightlessness inside the pipe. “It was a very early space experiment,” he says.
High school life wasn’t only about the sciences, though. David belonged to a chess club at St. John’s, and he played violin in the school orchestra. Early on, he and his friends developed a love for the comic operas of Gilbert and Sullivan, so they were delighted when the school staged a performance of H.M.S. Pinafore.
Overall, he says, in terms of both academics and extracurricular activities, he could not have been happier during his high school days.
Still, he was eager to move on, to learn more, especially about physics, an area he wanted to pursue as a career. When he was 16, he decided he was ready to go to college, a year or two earlier than he might have otherwise—then, as today, Canadians typically started college at 17 or 18. His father felt he was too young to be on his own, though, so he told him to attend a local university and live at home. “So, I was forced to go to the University of Manitoba,” David says.
David had never been close with his father, not least because of their divergent views on the value of an education. His father saw education mostly as a means to an end, a stepping stone on the way to establishing a trade and earning a good living. David, with his insatiable curiosity about how the world worked, saw it more as an end in itself. In short, he wanted to be an academic. Disagreements over attending the University of Manitoba had underscored their differences and further strained their relationship. And yet, as high as tensions were when David started classes, things were about to get worse.
During his university years, his father suffered a heart attack and had to stop working, spurring yet another difficult conversation. “He said, ‘I want you to leave school and take over the family business,’” David recalls. “I told him I had no interest at all in doing that. And he said, ‘What? I’m offering you a small factory and you can be in charge if it.’” David remained unmoved, though. In the end, his father sold the factory and retired.
David thinks his parents were hurt and even resentful because he didn’t want to take over the family business. Certainly, he says, “things occasionally got unpleasant.” But they did eventually come around. When David moved on to graduate school, they helped him with tuition and even came to visit him. “They didn’t quite understand what I was doing,” he says, “but they knew something good was happening. It was the best I could have asked for—they recognized the value of what I was doing and how much it meant to me.”
First, though, he had to be accepted into graduate school. Back in Manitoba, he applied himself to earning the best marks possible to position himself for life beyond that university. Still, when a friend who had gone to the University of California, Berkeley, suggested he apply there, he scoffed at the idea. He couldn’t imagine Berkeley, “one of the finest physics schools in the world,” accepting a student from an agricultural school in western Canada.
He must have underestimated the value of his experiences thus far, and not counted on the praise in the reference letters from his instructors in high school and at the University of Manitoba. When he finally applied to Berkeley, he was accepted, and was even awarded a scholarship to attend.
