Good chance is beneficial
John E. Peterson, Special to the Gazette
Thursday, October 29, 2009
Chance often happens to all of us. Some of it is good for us. Some of it is not good. I think that we tend to remember the good chance incidents and forget the bad ones. At least, that is the way it seems to work with me. Since this is my story, that is the way it will be. That is, of course, because I get my way with what I write.
What is chance? My dictionary has about two inches about it. There are eight definitions plus a variety of other comments. I shall bother you with only the first three definitions. They are the ones which make the most sense to me. Here are those three.
• Chance is a happening; fortuitous event; accidental circumstance.
• It is the way things happen to turn out.
• It may be an apparent absence of cause or design; fortuity; luck. There, then, you have some idea of what we mean by chance. To me, chances are things that just happen, but which have some effect on us, both good and bad.
Now, let us get to come of the chance experiences I have seen. We would certainly do that, if I had my way.
I wrote one of these columns about Paul Johnston finding part of a skeleton of a prehistoric sloth. That experience for Paul was full of chance. Two men were gathering clams from the river when they found an unusual bone. That was chance. A second chance was that the son of one of the men took the bone to school and his teacher happened to have taken Paul’s class the summer before.
Because of that, she suggested that the men get in touch with Paul about what the bone was. They did and that chance led Paul to the spot in the river and to finding the skeleton. So, you see, it seems to me that this series of chances led Paul to having the skeleton in the ESU Johnston Museum.
I wrote another column about my experiences with my research. It was full of chance. I found slime bacteria while studying another organism. That chance led to my doing my doctoral thesis on slime bacteria, on writing papers and giving presentations about them and on my becoming the world authority on them. Nobody really cared about slime bacteria, however.
Another chance changed that. The chance was that some Canadian microbiologists found a bacterium they thought was one of my slime bacteria. They used the name in two publications in which they described its possible useful effects. They were wrong in what the organism was, but the name they used was great for me and my future.
The Canadian error was a big chance for me. It led to my being contacted by pharmaceutical companies and given big money to support my research. It was a big chance for me that they came up with that name for the organism they had found.
So much for the chance in the columns I have written. No doubt, there are other chance possibilities in other columns, but let me now tell you about other chances.
The most important chance in my life went like this. I graduated from Northern Illinois State Teachers College in 1942. We were at war and most of my friends were already gone. I was only 20 years old and had a very low draft number, so I got to graduate.
I decided I would try to get into naval officer training. They accepted me into the program, but I had to have a year of college mathematics and I could go back to college that fall and take two more math courses.
I did that. That same fall, a girl came to NISTC after two years at a junior college in central Illinois. We met, we dated, we married. She has been my lovely wife for 64 years. That chance of my having to go back and take those two math courses was one of the biggest events of my life.
One other chance experience. After two years in the Pacific as a naval officer, I was given a 30-day leave in the summer of 1945. After the leave, I was assigned to the Great Lakes Naval Station, north of Chicago, to help train sailors. The war ended soon after that.
Armistice Day, now known as Veterans Day, came on Nov. 11. I was assigned the duty of taking 1,000 sailors-to-be down into Chicago to march in the parade. Of course, I did that and marched in front of the 1,000 men.
As soon as the parade started, a big dog came beside me and went the full distance at my side. That dog chance got a picture of me and the dog on the front page of a big Chicago newspaper. I became rather famous for a short while.
See how chance gets into our lives? You certainly would, if I had my way.
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