David Feldman ’71, Doctor of Humane Letters

David Feldman ’71 received an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters at Grinnell College Commencement 2011.

About David Feldman ’71

Acceptance

Transcript

Thank you so much.

I'm glad that you brought up the subject of curiosity because that's what I wanted to talk to you about today.

When we're little children, almost all of us are extremely curious.

"Mommy, why is the sky blue?"

"Daddy, why has the hair stopped growing on top of your head and started growing in the middle of your ears?"

A bad education will kill a child's natural curiosity, but a great education will not only encourage students to be curious, but provide them the tools to find the answers.

My problem as a college student was that many of the things I was curious about were not part of the traditional curriculum, and Grinnell College came to my rescue.

Two professors in particular, Charles Cleaver and Dennis Whelan, encouraged me to pursue what interested me, and the school was open-minded and open-hearted enough to let me be the first independent major ever at Grinnell, and to pursue studies in popular culture at a time ...

[applause]

— thank you — To be honest, it was a little bit of a gimmick because I wanted to study popular culture and Russian literature so we sort of looked at what I had studied and conjured up this major.

[President Raynard S. Kington laughs]

I didn't say that, did I?

[Kington] No, you didn't.

[Feldman] Okay. You already gave me the degree, there's little I can do. So my writing career began because of my curiosity. I was at a supermarket and I was on a diet, it was a Saturday afternoon, and I wanted to find a low-calorie cereal. And I started noticing on the nutritional panels that every cereal was 110 calories per ounce.

It didn't matter if it was cornflakes, or a so-called diet cereal like Special K, or a sugar-laden cereal like Captain Crunch, or even sugar frosted flakes, which I later found, and verified, are just regular cornflakes with sugar on them. All 110 calories per ounce.

I thought of the word "imponderables" at that point, to think about all these little mysteries that weren't important enough for us to answer, and I decided to make it my life's work to answer these ridiculous questions.

Before my agent sent out my first proposal, he called the ten editors he was planning to send the book to, and he said, "Hey, have you ever wondered why you never see a baby pigeon?" Well, about five of the ten editors met this question with dumbstruck silence and the other five said, "Yeah, why is that?"

Guess which five wanted the book?

So I owe my career to curious people.

The two most fun parts of my job are receiving Imponderables from curious people of all ages, and then contacting experts in every conceivable field and asking them questions that have no practical value to them. I mean, as an example, the president of research at Max Factor might have something better to do than ponder, "Why do women open their mouths when applying mascara?"

Or the gelato and sorbet maker for Mario Batali's burgeoning Italian food empire might have a better use of her time than to spend an hour with me talking about why you can't find grape ice cream. But the impressive people, the ones who are passionate about their work and the most learned are invariably the most curious and the most generous in sharing their time and expertise with me.

Curiosity shouldn't end when you get a degree, or when you've established yourself in a good job. Curiosity is the impetus for discovery and delight.

I'll never forget a conversation I had with a gentleman named Jim Cowen, president of Rockside International, the world's largest manufacturer of flyswatters. The imponderable was, "why do flyswatters have holes?" Now, I'd already talked to a couple of flyswatter experts, and they assured me that the holes were there to break wind resistance so you can swat faster, have a better shot at killing the fly.

So, I really called Mr. Cowen to just confirm this and make sure it was true. Well, he treated me to a dissertation about flyswatter-hole theory that could start a, like a PBS documentary mini-series. Cowen discussed the relative merits of plastic versus metal blades, the quantity of holes, the shape of the holes, the problems of air pillows that form pockets that send the fly forward when you try to swat it. He talked about the optimum positioning of the swatter so the fly wouldn't recognize what was going on, the proper distance of the blade from the fly, and the proper swatting technique. He sounded a bit like Tiger Woods's swing coach.

He went on for more than a half hour, full of passion and humor on the subject of fly eradication. When I thanked him profusely for his help,
Mr. Cowen stopped me and he said, "Dave, we haven't even talked about flypaper yet! Flypaper is highly underrated."

If curiosity can bring so much joy and conviction to the world of flyswatters, imagine what it can do when mapping the human genome, or preserving precious photographs, or observing the human condition as Anna Quindlen has done so brilliantly in her fiction and her nonfiction, or what it can bring to
all of you in the future.

I'm deeply touched by this honor from the school that I love. So here's to curiosity, here's to Grinnell College, and most of all, here's to the class of 2011.

Thank you.