“Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman”: Adventures of a Curious Character

There was always some kind of difficulty with the letters going back and forth. For example, my wife kept mentioning the fact that she felt uncomfortable writing with the feeling that the censor is looking over her shoulder. Now, as a rule, we aren’t supposed to mention censorship. We aren’t, but how can they tell her? So they keep sending me a note: “Your wife mentioned censorship.” Certainly my wife mentioned censorship. So finally they sent me a note that said, “Please inform your wife not to mention censorship in her letters.” So I start my letter: “I have been instructed to inform you not to mention censorship in your letters.” Phoom, phoooom, it comes right back! So I write, “I have been instructed to inform my wife not to mention censorship. How in the heck am I going to do it? Furthermore, why do I have to instruct her not to mention censorship? You keeping something from me?”

It is very interesting that the censor himself has to tell me to tell my wife not to tell me that she’s … But they had an answer. They said, yes, that they are worried about mail being intercepted on the way from Albuquerque, and that someone might find out that there was censorship if they looked in the mail, and would she please act much more normal.

So I went down the next time to Albuquerque, and I talked to her and I said, “Now, look, let’s not mention censorship.” But we had had so much trouble that we at last worked out a code, something illegal. If I would put a dot at the end of my signature, it meant I had had trouble again, and she would move on to the next of the moves that she had concocted. She would sit there all day long, because she was ill, and she would think of things to do. The last thing she did was to send me an advertisement which she found perfectly legitimately. It said, “Send your boyfriend a letter on a jigsaw puzzle. We sell you the blank, you write the letter on it, take it all apart, put it in a little sack, and mail it.” I received that one with a note saying, “We do not have time to play games. Please instruct your wife to confine herself to ordinary letters.”

Well, we were ready with the one more dot, but they straightened out just in time and we didn’t have to use it. The thing we had ready for the next one was that the letter would start, “I hope you remembered to open this letter carefully because I have included the Pepto-Bismol powder for your stomach as we arranged.” It would be a letter full of powder. In the office we expected they would open it quickly the powder would go all over the floor, and they would get all upset because you are not supposed to upset anything. They’d have to gather up all this Pepto-Bismol … But we didn’t have to use that one.

As a result of all these experiences with the censor, I knew exactly what could get through and what could not get through. Nobody else knew as well as I. And so I made a little money out of all of this by making bets.

One day I discovered that the workmen who lived further out and wanted to come in were too lazy to go around through the gate, and so they had cut themselves a hole in the fence. So I went out the gate, went over to the hole and came in, went out again, and so on, until the sergeant at the gate began to wonder what was happening. How come this guy is always going out and never coming in? And, of course, his natural reaction was to call the lieutenant and try to put me in jail for doing this. I explained that there was a hole.

You see, I was always trying to straighten people out. And so I made a bet with somebody that I could tell about the hole in the fence in a letter, and mail it out. And sure enough, I did. And the way I did it was I said, You should see the way they administer this place (that’s what we were allowed to say). There’s a hole in the fence seventy-one feet away from such-and-such a place, that’s this size and that size, that you can walk through.

Now, what can they do? They can’t say to me that there is no such hole. I mean, what are they going to do? It’s their own hard luck that there’s such a hole. They should fix the hole. So I got that one through.

I also got through a letter that told about how one of the boys who worked in one of my groups, John Kemeny had been wakened up in the middle of the night and grilled with lights in front of him by some idiots in the army there because they found out something about his father, who was supposed to be a communist or something. Kemeny is a famous man now.