Smokey Bear Celebrates 70th Birthday and Reminds Americans … “Only You Can Prevent Wildfires” — Ad Council press release, August 7, 2014
Why me? Why am I the only one who can prevent wildfires?
Forest fires were burden enough. I’ve never even lived near a forest. Yet all my life, there he’s been: “Only you….Only you….Only you.” When I watched those public service commercials as a child, I remember thinking, What’s wrong with my parents, raising someone with my powers in a big city like Chicago? I was Superboy in Smallville, only in reverse. Superboy was killing time until he was old enough to move to Metropolis; I was waiting to relocate to Yosemite. I had to ask myself: What if Superboy had “forgotten” he could stop a speeding locomotive before it reached the crossing where Ma and Pa Kent’s car had stalled? Couldn’t I forget to prevent myself from leaving the stove on and tossing a match through the kitchen window?
Right now the ocean is glorious. In the evenings, even if the day hasn’t been too hot, you can throw yourself into the saltwater and float between the waves for a while without your teeth chattering.
About a year ago I sat in the Members’ Room at the Royal Society as Professor Judith Howard FRS, once a doctoral student of Dorothy Hodgkin’s, explained how crystallographers worked in the early days. She showed me how Dorothy would begin by calibrating the black circles in an X-ray diffraction pattern by eye, to begin the long process of assembling from the shadows cast by an X-ray beam the complex three-dimensional arrangement of atoms in the molecule. Hanging on the wall outside was a Henry Moore drawing of 
