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Show -175- turned on his windshield wipers. Traffic was light this time of day. The bridge lanes had not been changed for the commute rush that would begin in about an hour. "Whirr-clack, whirr-clack," went the wipers. He recalled reading that Stravinsky had been inspired to write one of his musical compositions by the sound of his windshield wipers as he drove the Santa Monica freeway. The Professor recalled the time when he had seen Stravinsky conduct his own music in Paris, the spring of the year he had spent in Austria as a Fulbright Professor. When was it? 1952. That had been a good time in his teaching career. As he drove over the Waldo Grade, he recounted the steps that had carried him to that point. He had grown up in a small, green valley entirely surrounded by mountains in northern Utah where his father had been Dean of Engineering at the State College. When he was eighteen and had completed his first year at that college, he was called to serve as a missionary for the Mormon Church in Germany. He was twenty-one when he returned, just a few months before the stock market crashed in 1929. After another year of college, he went off to the Midwest to work as a cub reporter on a smalltown newspaper. By now he knew that he wanted, above all, to become a writer. He knew, too (or he learned it soon enough), that the nation was in its worst economic depression in many years. It was the Depression, in fact, that drove him, in |