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Excerpts from Cracking the Corporate Code

For Cleve Killingsworth up on the west side' of Chicago, however, the lessons of race were very painful, especially since he believed his natural "orientation" toward science and math protected him. "My sisters talked about the race thing, but I was always kind of ambivalent about it. Frankly, what happened in physics and math was more interesting and more true to me than what happened with societies."

The sad irony is that his love of science is what forced him brutally out of that zone of safety. "When I was a kid, I used to go to the planetarium on the bus from my house. I rode it by myself, all the way to the end, by the Lake. I wandered around in the dark with the stars, looked in the gift shop at the meteor fragments. I just loved it all. So I decided to build my own telescope.

"I ground the lens on an old water-filled drum my father brought home. But there comes a point in the process where you have to do something called 'figuring,' so it's not lopsided. I knew the planetarium had a shop with the machine to do the figuring, because I had looked through the windows and watched them do it. I remember being very nervous about going, I was only 11 or 12. 1 wanted to put the lens in a brown bag, and my father wanted me to put it in a briefcase. I felt awkward with the briefcase because 1 was only a kid, but in his mind, I should present it a different way. So I got there and knocked on the door. I still remember the guy glaring at me. I didn't see a sympathetic eye the whole time. They kind of told me how to do the figuring, and when I didn't get it quite right, they pointed at me and were very mean about it. I don't think I ever got it done properly. I just wanted to get out of there."

All these years later the pain is still intense. The place he loved became a hostile environment, but he completed his telescope and went on to develop more projects, this time with a purpose. He became a Science Fair expert, winning many awards, and later a computer expert.