I saw, this to me was an incredible danger that we are in. That was why I was interested in "What can the little man do?" And what I could do then, I saw, had to do then with these tools, and nothing could really stop me doing these tools, and I've never been considered subversive by anybody because I'm apolitical, I'm not talking about that. And nobody could possibly know me without knowing that I'm not calling anybody bad, and I would like everybody to win. I'm not at all biased. Right, the little fellow can do something, and, now,

Another question. "No matter what age one is, the following question is of immense importance. You are near 80 years old. What do you think about death? What do you think death is? What do you want to do, or what do you see is the most important thing to do the rest of your life?" I went in with you, quite carefully into my the data, the reasons why I am convinced that I am not the physical or that I am not the telephone, I am not the medium. And, for the same reason I am convinced that all the life, then, is absolutely immortal. That the thing that is life was not the physical, so that I see it ALWAYS as metaphysical. And I see the metaphysical as part of the eternity and I don't have any death. I have absolutely no feeling of death. I know that you may not be able to see me pretty soon, or something like that, but that is a time and again I have written a letter to an old friend of mine, and his widow writes back and says, "I'm sorry you didn't know it, but Jack died three years ago" or something like that, and it's really awful that I didn't know it, but I didn't. The point is, I write back and say "It can't be, because I wrote to Jack. You've informed me but I didn't know that, and I don't know it now. I'm still writing to the same Jack. That's my friend. They can't die. It is really so.

At any rate, then. "What do you see is the most important thing for you to do for the rest of your life. Well, just our friend INTEGRITY. That's all. And whatever confronts you, try to attend to it. There are a lot of thoughts you have that need attention, and there are a lot of unexpecteds that are going to need attention. I would like to leave that, with this one, I think that I've been telling you what I've been trying to do, and I hope I'm going to keep on doing it for as long as I can. This piece that I've given you, THE TWILIGHT no the one I call COMPLEXION has, the second half is what I am trying to do, and I have rewritten that, WHAT I AM TRYING TO DO with my life, and I have rewritten it time and time again that would tell you what I would like to do for the next years I may have.

The, I wanted to switch off here, I overtalked about that point. I've been talking about friends that didn't die, and immortality there are certain areas of thoughts that I keep realizing I haven't touched on and I would like to say a little more about. Can any of you remember a clue in anything I was saying there? About immortality. (From the audience. "You said that life was not-physical. and that it is eternal.") I'm going to hope I know what I was going to tell you. I had said a little earlier that as far as I could see everything is "Only the impossible happens," and I'd like to give you two-three experiences in my life that make me say this. There are thousands and thousands of things that happened in my life that make me say it, but these are these seem to be very outstanding kinds of items.

My wife and I lived in an apartment in Forest Hills New York, they were called the Tennis Apartments, they were right next door to the Forest Hills Tennis Club for quite a few years and we were on the top floor 4 floor building it had an elevator but also a pretty easy walk up and down, and the we took the apartment during the war was still on W.W.II so it had rent control and the landlord didn't like most of us in the apartment house because he couldn't raise the rent. As long as you kept you were the original people in there at that time, the law at that time protected us, so we were paying $70 a month for really a very nice bedroom, a very nice living room, kitchen bath, and in a nice building, nice neighborhood. So, here, there are things like our ice box, and ice box would be, anything we had in the way of facilities, the building had been beautifully built originally and had good copper plumbing and things like that so that actually it went on very well a man named Grover Attenbury (sp?) was the architect, I was trying to think of his name the other day that's it Grover Attenbury and, at any rate, the electric icebox was a General Electric with the old cooling device up on the top a big open thing, and it had an engine down below, a belt going around pumping and continually getting out of order, and the owner of the building then had a repair man, and he put in very poor parts anything that needed service in there they would make it do it very poorly, hoping it would annoy you, hoping we would finally move away. And so this icebox was one of those things, that it would just, day after day it would go wrong, and you didn't want to put your own one in because he said he'd own it. Well, Anne and I were going off on a trip. At that period I was covering many universities around this country and we used to drive all over the United States, and I gone off on a trip, and I invited my partner Shoji Sadao to stay in our apartment while we were away, and he decided to do so, but he said he was not going to eat there. He had someplace else that it was more convenient for him to eat, so he was just sleeping there, and, at any rate, Anne and I were coming back from California via Texas and Louisiana, and we had left New Orleans and we were driving north, and on the state highway, a State Highway Policeman overtook us with this big siren and stopped us, and he had our car number, and he had my name, and he said "I stopped you because your apartment in New York has just burned up, and my lawyer had wanted me to know about this thing, and so he knew where I was, that I would be going from New Orleans at that time, and so he told the State Police and they caught me.

At any rate, we worried very much because Shoji had been staying in the apartment. And I called up Shoji was alright, but he said it was a complete burned out mess. So we got back, and before we went away Anne had wanted to have the apartment painted, and so we had hired the painters to come in and paint it, and she had taken all our furniture and things and put it in the middle of the living room, and put sheets and things over it so it had a mountain there, but these big sofas you could do that, they were by the wall, there were book cases full of books, and she had put coverings over that, so the paints would not get on the books. So, at any rate, the fire went on, I'll tell you about the fire, when we got there and found out what happened, the icebox had caught on fire. Shoji knew we were coming back within a couple of days, and he was going away so he thought he ought to start the icebox so that it would be cold when we got there. So he started it up, and it, as usual, got in trouble and caught on fire, and the whole kitchen burned up, and then went into the hall way and into the bedroom where, if he had been in there he would have been caught in there then started into the living room the living room actually didn't get the sofa that Anne didn't like also didn't get burned, but our books were all blackened up over at the office you'll find a lot of my books you'll see smoke on them, in the archives there that came out of the fire. But, they actually didn't get burned up but they were very messed up, and the some beautiful old furniture got smudged and the fire engines were pumping water and chemicals in there made an awful mess, but we were able to have the old furniture fixed up and things like that. At any rate, the icebox, the kitchen was burned and the icebox fell down in the apartment in the kitchen below of the people down below.

The people below, I never knew, but I used to walk up and down for years and they would always have on their front door, very ostensibly, in political campaigns they would have all the people that I would think would be very obnoxious politically they always wanted. They were always for what I wasn't for. I wasn't very interested in politics, but these were the most obnoxious people. So quite clearly we were different kind of viewpoint, and I used to work that is where I developed the first geodesic domes did that took the two years of time off to do my mathematics longhand and all, and I'd be often making models at night out in the kitchen and they'd hear me around working, because I would work till 3 and 4, I really had to put in time, and they'd keep knocking on the ceiling that I was bothering them, that noise up there. They clearly didn't like me, and I apparently would not have been very enthusiastic about them from their political viewpoint. But we never met them. Never saw them face to face.

At any rate, after this was over, it was agreed that the apartment could be fixed up and we could move in, but Anne had decided she had had enough of it, she didn't want that anymore. And I would have been perfectly glad to go back and have the low rent. She decided we were going to move, so we did really move, and we went out to California. This all happened in around April, and we were at Christmas time out in California where our daughter is, and I decided to get my daughter a good watch. This was before they were the kind of watches we have quartz watches and things like that today, and watches really needed quite a lot of repair, and in the old days it was a pretty good idea if you got a good watch to get it at a good place where you could count on repairs, at some establishment that would be there when you come back the next time. And so I wanted to get my daughter then a good watch that she could get repaired.

I went to a place on Wilshire Boulevard not far from where they lived, and it was one of the big department stores, a very fancy department store, in Los Angeles if any of you are Los Angeles people you would know it, but at any rate it was a fancy one, and I found the jewelry department. They had watches alright, and I found just the watch I wanted, and so I said to the lady, "Would you call the head of the department because I am going to have to give you a check." And she said "I can take care of that. What is your check on?" And I said "It's way across the country in the east." And she said "Where abouts?" And I said "Forest Hills, New York." And she said "Oh, I came from Forest Hills." And I said "Where did you live?" And she said "Number 6, Burns Street, that's our address." And so she said, and I said, "Yes, well we still have I'm from Forest Hills" it didn't say Burns Street on my check. But it turned out that she and her husband lived in this apartment house for a long time and the people upstairs were horrible. And suddenly there was a great fire and the icebox crashed through, and they had enough so they decided to move to California. (The audience breaks into uproarious laughter.) This was in a couple of months, and clear across the United States! So I didn't tell her I was because she wouldn't have approved my check. But this is typical.

Now, I was, one of the boys I spoke to you about a picture of the Butler Grain Bin Dome in the Hains Park in Washington, I spoke about Wally Saunders, the architect and his wife sitting out in front. Wally was quite a long time head of the Architectural Department at the University of Michigan. But he was a very dear friend through many of the years, and he comes into this story. Another time in California I had to leave my daughter's house on Christmas Eve on Christmas night, the night of Christmas to get to the airport and I was off for Europe, or for wherever it was And, I needed to get a yellow taxi, and I did, and they lived in Pacific Palisades a long way over to the airport, and I had noticed that the expressway which is now called the San Diego the Santa Monica Freeway was not finished, but it was partially built, and I had noticed where the last section had been open. I knew that. At any rate I started telling I saw the taxi cab going one way, and I said if you go this way in Santa Monica I'll get you on the freeway a little quicker, because I happen to know that it just opened yesterday, and he said it's not very often people tell a Los Angeles taxi driver how to get around. And he said, how did you happen to know that? And I said well, I'm sort of interested in things like that, I'm more or less of an engineer. And then he got talking, he said "You know, the men that can design these sections going like this and going like that, and then they are going to come together just like that," he said "they really have my greatest admiration, I don't see how you could possibly do such beautiful things and get things to work out like that," and he said "Did you ever hear of a man called Buckminster Fuller?" And I said "Why?" and then he told me all about he was a great engineer, and he really knew a fantastic amount about me. We were going along the expressway at 65 and I didn't want to say I was Buckminster Fuller, I was afraid he'd turn around and we'd crash, so I didn't say anything until we got to the airport, and then I told him I was Buckminster Fuller, and I gave him some reprints of things that I had written, and he was very grateful. And that was that.

Then, a few years later I got a I gave him my address and I got a letter, he had gone to Mexico, he had left Los Angeles. He might come back, but at any rate. Then, now we covered more years, and Wally Saunders, the Head of the Architecture Department was put in the AIA Visiting Board to visit different architectural schools, the accrediting board and he had never been to the west coast himself, and he suddenly had to go to the west coast schools and Berkeley and down, and he was in San Francisco and I was there, and so we met, and I, for some reason or other, I told Wally about this man he was a very dear friend, and I knew it might interest him that I had gotten to the point in my life where a taxi driver might know who I was. And so he was very interested.

Anyway, Wally had to go down to, then, UCLA, and he was going to do and USC accrediting. He had never been at the west coast. So I left him, I took him out to the airport, and about a week later I got a postcard from my taxi man again, saying "Thank you for sending Professor Saunders to see me." He had picked up Saunders at the other end of the airport. I had just told him about this thing. I've never heard from him again, but these are typical to me of the absolutely impossible things that go on.