Ebook rtf mathematics Feynman, Richard Surely You’…

afraid
to go up to 
him and ask him anything; he had too much dignity. He was a furnace man. So nobody ever had the nerve to ask 
this
Indian, and they decided it must 
have been 
him
. (I was pleased to find that they had discovered such a typical Indian, such a wonderful Indian, that I might have been. It was quite an 
honor to be mistaken for this man.) 
So the fella who'd been talking to me was just checking at the last minute--husbands always like to prove their wives wrong--and he found out, 
as husbands often do, that his wife was quite right. 
I got pretty good at playing the drums, and would play them when we had parties. I didn't know what I was doing; I just made rhythms--and I got 
a reputation: Everybody at Los Alamos knew I liked to play drums. 
When the war was over, and we were going back to "civilization," the people there at Los Alamos teased me that I wouldn't be able to play 
drums any more because they made too much noise. And since I was trying to become a dignified professor in Ithaca, I sold the drum that I had 
bought sometime during my stay at Los Alamos. 
The following summer I went back out to New Mexico to work on some report, and when I saw the drums again, I couldn't stand it. I bought 
myself another drum, and thought, "I'll just brin g it back with me this time so I can 
look
at it." 
That year at Cornell I had a small apartment inside a bigger house. I had the drum in there, just to look at, but one day I couldn't quite resist: I 
said, "Well, I'll just be very quiet . . ." 
I sat on a chair and put the drum between my legs and played it with my fingers a little bit: 
bup, bup, bup, buddle bup
. Then a little bit louder--
after all, it was tempting me! I got a little bit louder and BOOM!--the telephone rang. 
"Hello?" 
"This is your landlady. Are you beating drums down there?" 
"Yes; I'm sor--" 
"It sounds so good. I wonder if I could come down and listen to it more directly?" 
So from that time on the landlady would always come down when I'd start to drum. That was freedom, all right. I had a very good time from then 
on, beating the drums. 

---

Around that time I met a lady from the Belgian Congo who gave me some ethnological records. In those days, records like that were rare, with 
drum music from the Watusi and other tribes of Africa. I really admired the Watusi drummers very, very much, and I used to try to imitate them--not 
very accurately, but just to sound something like them--and I developed a larger number of rhythms as a result of that. 
One time I was in the recreation hall, late at night, when there weren't many people, and I picked up a wastebasket and started to beat the back 
end of it. Some guy from way downstairs came running all the way up and said, "Hey! You play drums!" It turned out he 
really
knew how to play 
drums, and he taught me how to play bongos.
There was some guy in the music department who had a collection of African music, and I'd come to his house and play drums. He'd make 
recordings of me, and then at his parties, he had a game that he called "Africa or Ithaca?" in which he'd play some recordings of drum music, and the 
idea was to guess whether what you were hearing was manufactured in the continent of Africa, or locally. So I must have been fairly good at 
imitating African music by that time. 
When I came to Caltech, I used to go down to the Sunset Strip a lot. One time there was a group of drummers led by a big fella from Nigeria 
called Ukonu, playing this wonderful drum musie--just percussion--at one of the nightclubs. The second-in-command, who was especially nice to me, 
invited me to come up on the stage with them and play a little. So I got up there with the other guys and played along with them on the drums for a 
little while. 
I asked the second guy if Ukonu ever gave lessons, and he said yes. So I used to go down to Ukonu's place, near Century Boulevard (where the 
Watts riots later occurred) to get lessons in drumming. The lessons weren't very efficient: he would stall around, talk to other people, and be 
interrupted by all kinds of things. But when they worked they were very exciting, and I learned a lot from him. 
At dances near Ukonu's place, there would be only a few whites, but it was much more relaxed than it is today. One time they had a drumming 
contest, and I didn't do very well: They said my drumming was "too intellectual"; theirs was much more pulsing. 
One day when I was at Caltech I got a very serious telephone call. 
"Hello?" 
"This is Mr. Trowbridge, Mahster of the Polytechnic School." The Polytechnic School was a small, private school which was across the street 
diagonally from Caltech. Mr. Trowbridge continued in a very formal voice: "I have a friend of yours here, who would like to speak to you." 
"OK." 
"Hello, Dick!" It was Ukonu! It turned out the Master of the Polytechnic School was not as formal as he was making himself out to be, and had a 
great sense of humor. Ukonu was visiting the school to play for the kids, so he invited me to come over and be on the stage with him, and play along. 
So we played for the kids together: I played bongos (which I had in my office) against his big tumba drum. 
Ukonu had a regular thing: He went to various schools and talked about the African drums and what they meant, and told about the music. He 
had a terrific personality and a grand smile; he was a very, very nice man. He was just sensational on the drums--he had records out--and was here 
studying medicine. He went back to Nigeria at the beginning of the war there--or before the war--and I don't know what happened to him. 
After Ukonu left I didn't do very much drumming, except at parties once in a while, entertaining a little bit. One time I was at a dinner party at 
the Leightons' house, and Bob's son Ralph and a friend asked me if I wanted to drum. Thinking that they were asking me to do a solo, I said no. But 
then they started drumming on some little wooden tables, and I couldn't resist: I grabbed a table too, and the three of us played on these little wooden 
tables, which made lots of interesting sounds. 
Ralph and his friend Tom Rutishauser liked playing drums, and we began meeting every week to just ad lib, develop rhythms and work stuff out. 
These two guys were real musicians: Ralph played piano, and Torn played the cello. All I had done was rhythms, and I didn't know anything about 
music, which, as far as I could tell, was just drumming with notes. But we worked out a lot of good rhythms and played a few times at some of the 
schools to entertain the kids. We also played rhythms for a dance class at a local college-- something I learned was fun to do when I was working at 
Brookhaven for a while--and called ourselves The Three Quarks, so you can figure out when 
that
was. 
One time I went to Vancouver to talk to the students there, and they had a party with a real hot rock-type band playing down in the basement. 
The band was very nice: they had an extra cowbell lying around, and they encouraged me to play it. So I started to play a little bit, and since their 
music was very rhythmic (and the cowbell is just an accompaniment--you can't screw it up) I really got hot. 
After the party was over, the guy who organized the party told me that the bandleader said, "Geez! Who was that guy who came down and 
played on the cowbell! He can really knock out a rhythm on that thing! And by the way, that big shot this party was supposed to be