Part 4 Violating the Law of Probability
This is so weird. Not earth shaking, but weird. Here I was a few days ago, involved in writing a blog about a series of very improbable events which have occurred during my life, and Caramba!!, another one happens. Picture this:

Place: St. Simons Island, Georgia, Harris-Teeters supermarket. Time: Five days ago.

My son, Josh, and I are checking a pile of avocados to find one which is ready to eat. A man, possibly about fifty years of age, who is also shopping, hands me an avocado, saying," Here’s a good one." He steps away, and I hear him say, "Are you from Colorado?" Now I must explain that my hearing is not very good, and my son later informed me that what he was really saying was that this was a ripe avocado.. I answer, "Yes. I’m from Colorado." His eyebrows rise and his eyes widen as he asks me where I’m from in Colorado. I tell him that I was born and raised in Denver. Now he yells,"Steve", and waves to another man shopping amongst the vegetables nearby. So Steve comes over , and the first man, whose name is Mark, tells him that I am from Denver.

Steve is from Denver and is visiting here in St. Simons Island. He asks me about the part of town in which I was raised, the high school I attended, and other similar questions. I tell him that I was raised on the West side of town and that I attended North Denver High School. He asks me if I remember any names of people I knew as a kid. He comes out with a number of Italian names, some of which I remember from high school. Then he mentions the name Hoffman. I tell him that I do remember a Morris Hoffman, a kid who grew up with me in the children’s institution where I was raised. As we kids all had nicknames, he was known to us as Tuffy Hoffman.

Steve just about went through the roof at hearing this. It turned out that Tuffy is one of his family’s closest friends. Steve’s father and Tuffy worked together for many years. And so we reminisced, exchanging memories of "The Queen City of the Plains" before it mushroomed and morphed into the big metropolis that it is today.

This is another improbable meeting. Mark is a neurologist with a practice in Denver and in Georgia. He has a home on St. Simons Island. Steve is an attorney, and he and his wife are visiting their friend Mark. The guys were doing the shopping for a dinner which their wives would prepare. And this chance encounter developes a link with a kid who grew up with me seventy years ago and a thousand miles away.

Violating the Law…Part 3

Here is another very unlikely event which happened to me.

After basic training at Camp Haan, Calif., I was sent with a cadre of soldiers to open a new camp nearby at Arlington, in the middle of the orange groves. I have mentioned that I was raised as an orphan in a children’s home in Denver and, other than my younger brother and two half sisters, I knew of no other relatives. My father, was out of touch with us while I was growing up, and we first heard from him about the time I graduated high school and left the home.

One evening I went to a USO recreation center for military personnel. While there, I heard someone mention my name, Grodsky. I assumed that it was some other guy from my outfit. But when I looked around, I could see no one that I recognized. There were two soldiers conversing nearby, and when they were finished, I asked if either of them was named Grodsky. One of them indicated that his name was Dave Grodsky. As this is not a common name, we began to exchange information. He was stationed at a nearby camp, and he told me that his home and family were in Roxbury, Mass. I told him my father’s name, Max, and described my upbringing, indicating that I knew of no other relatives. He wrote to his father, and the upshot of this was that his father was my father’s brother, and Dave was my cousin. My father was from Lithuania or some other part of Russia, and after he came to America, lost touch completely with his family. It turned out that he had another brother in Chicago. So after all the years that had passed, my father was once again in touch with other members of his family, and I had acquired at least one cousin and a couple of uncles. I kept in touch with Dave during the war, and even after. When I was working in Washington D.C., I had an opportunity to meet him and his wife.

To tell the truth, I am not strongly inclined to maintain family connections, other than my own family. I did have an opportunity, when I was stationed for a while in Illinois, to meet my uncle who lived there. However, I never did maintain these links. But, it has always struck me that this freakish contact was another instance of an event that, somehow, would be extremely low on the scale of normal probability.

Part 2 …VIOLATING THE LAW…continued…………

NOTE I suggest that the reader go first to the previous blogs prior to reading PART 2.


I was now in the army. After Pearl Harbor, I had tried unsuccessfully to enlist in Denver, San Francisco, and Oakland, California. I was quite nearsighted and the physical requirements seemed to exclude guys with thick eyeglass lenses. While working at a shipyard in Vallejo, I took a short trip to Los Angeles. While there, I signed in at a recruitment center. A few weeks later, I was surprised to receive a notice accepting me in the army. Because of my age, I still had to get an approval from my father in Texas, and then I was to report to the induction center at Fort MacArthur in San Pedro near L.A.
In my previous blog, I had mentioned that I spent my time from three years of age to seventeen in a children’s home in Denver. Now, two years later, I reported to the Los Angeles induction center. There I found myself in a crowd of young men, draftees and volunteers, waiting to be sworn in to the service. We were told to line up in front of the
desk where we would fill out the forms and be sworn into the armed forces.

I was astounded to find that the guy next to me was Nate Entner, a kid who had grown up with me for many years in the home. He had left the place a few years earlier than I had, and it seemed that he had gone to L.A. to live with relatives. Now he had been drafted. What a remarkable coincidence that, a thousand miles from where we had spent our childhood, we would end up in the same line at that induction center. In the following days, the new recruits were assigned to many different camps to undergo basic training. Now, to add to this freakish coincidence, Nate and I found ourselves assigned to the same basic training center at Camp Haan, near Riverside, California. He was in the barracks adjoining mine. In a few weeks we discovered that there was another ex-homekid, Lester Pinter, at the same camp, but in a different unit. He was a slightly older boy, an excellent musician, who at this time had been assigned to the camp band.

With all of the millions of men in the armed services at that time, what are the probabilities that Nate, I, and Lester as well would be thrown together far from where we had grown up as children in the home?

Tool-mark match

A toolmark match as seen through the comparison microscope.
The evidence mark found on an aluminum, door frame at the scene of a rape, may be observed above the horizontal black line. The comparison mark, seen below the black line, was made by a screwdriver found in the possession of a suspect six months after the crime was committed. Note the excellent coincidence of the microscopic striations in the two marks. The probability of finding two instruments with exactly the same configuration of tiny irregularities is so small,that we can conclude that both marks were made with the same tool.

Violating the Law of Probability

VIOLATING THE LAW
OF
PROBABILITY



As a forensic scientist, I have been exceptionally interested in the concept of probability, which, to me, has been a major cornerstone underlying the practice of criminalistics. The criminalist is confronted with the classic questions, including who, what, why, when, where, and how. One of the major activities in this occupation is the comparison of objects, usually to determine whether they have a common origin which might serve to indicate possible involvement or innocence regarding an unsolved crime. Examples of the kind of questions which arise are:
Was this bullet fired from this gun?
Was this mark made by this tool?
Did this bloodstain come from the victim?
Was this bite mark made by the suspect’s teeth?
And, as you might imagine, there are hundreds of similar questions which the forensic scientist is called upon to attempt to resolve. And the decision as to whether or not there is a positive correspondence will really boil down to the establishment of a probability. This is based upon the presence or absence of numerous similar characteristics in the exemplars which are being compared.
It is not my intention to devote this paper to the practice of criminalistics, although that would be a fascinating subject. I simply wanted to indicate how the concept of probability came to be of considerable interest to me. Actually, I have been amazed at certain events which I have experienced in my own lifetime; events which, at least to me, would seem to be highly improbable. I would like to emphasize at this point, that I do not place mystical or supernatural forces behind these events, although others may wish to do so. Nor do I believe that I am in any way special with regard to such happenings. I suspect that many persons have had similar unlikely experiences, and I would welcome hearing from such people.

Episode One: An improbable discovery.
I was not quite three years old. My mother had died following the birth of my brother. We had two half-sisters a few years older. My father, who sold fruit from a horse and wagon, was unable to care for us, and we were placed in a children’s home in Denver, Colorado. My father dropped out of sight, and in the following years we heard nothing more from him. We grew up without knowing whether he was dead or alive, and we were treated effectively as though we were orphans. At the age of fifteen or sixteen, my sisters were farmed out as domestic servants. This was now the heart of the great depression. My sister Edith found the domestic servant role unbearable and ran away. She was now sent to the girls reformatory at Morrison, Colorado. When she was finally released, she hit the road, riding freight trains and bumming around the country, trying to survive.
Now she was wandering down a street in Albuquerque, New Mexico. She spotted a crumpled envelope lying in the gutter. Out of mere curiosity, she picked it up. Who knows what might be inside? It turned out that it was empty. But when she looked at the writing on the face of the envelope, she was able to discern my father’s name.
I have no idea whether it was sent to him, or whether he was the sender. Nor do I know anything about the age of the envelope, although for the writing to still be legible, it must have been of fairly recent origin. Now we knew that at least he was alive up to this point in time. We would no longer consider ourselves to be orphans.
At the age of 17, I graduated from high school and left the Home . I was out in the world, and to this day I am grateful that I was able to join the CCC,
( Civilian Conservation Corps), a great government program that was the salvation of many a poor kid. It was at this time that I finally heard from my father. Yes , he was alive in El Paso, Texas. He had a truck and traveled around the southwest, trading with the farmers in that region. For your information, I finally met him when I was in the army during the war.
But I have always thought of the freakish circumstance of my sister wandering down a hot, dusty street in Albuquerque and picking up a dirty envelope which allowed us to know that our father was still alive.
What is the probability of such an occurrence?
In my next blog, I will describe another event, which, to me seemed to stretch the laws of probability. In the meantime, I would be delighted to hear from any reader who might have gone through a similar experience.