HRL laser physicist David Pepper was so grateful for the lessons he learned from his elementary school teacher that he sought him out after 43 years.
By Vicky Newman/Special to the Malibu Times
An experiment with an egg changed David Pepper’s life.
Stewart Gavzy, Pepper’s teacher at Hancock Park Elementary School, had the nine-year-old drop a “rubber” egg (a raw egg pickled in vinegar) from different heights in front of his classmates until the egg broke.
“The egg splattered, with a horrific smell permeating the room,” Pepper, a laser physicist at Malibu’s HRL Laboratories, recalled at a reunion with Gavzy there. “Forty-three years later, we still get a belly laugh reminiscing about this event.”
Although the demonstration was meant to show the chemical reaction that made an egg turn rubbery, it taught Pepper a lesson in life: to give free rein to his curiosity.
“I was timid,” Pepper, 53, admitted. “Gavzy was saying, go for it, don’t worry about the mess.”
Whether it was bouncing a rubber egg or demonstrating a cosmic ray cloud chamber, Gavzy urged Pepper to perform science experiments in front of the class, whatever the results.
Over the years, Pepper thought he might have missed his chance to thank Gavzy. Using the Internet and a 1959 letter Gavzy had written to his parents, Pepper tracked Gavzy down and invited him to lunch near Gavzy’s home in Encino.
In August, the two met at HRL, where they continued to reminisce.
“That was an unusually good school,” Gavzy, 75, said of the school in the Beverly Fairfax area of Los Angeles. “If you gave the pupils something interesting to work on and the freedom to do it, they would take you up on it.”
A dance instructor at the Arthur Murray Schools, a ski instructor, a surveyor/mapmaker in the Air Force, and a plumber before becoming a teacher, Gavzy tried to make learning fun for his pupils, like using a Morse code machine to tell them their grades.
“You have to make science real to children,” Gavzy said.
Gavzy made learning fun for all of his students, Pepper said. Gavzy taught them how to build crystal radio sets or brought in his microscope to show miniature biological life forms in pond water.
He took them into the schoolyard and taught them how to determine the height of trees and buildings by measuring the length of the shadows they cast and their angles.
“That was comparative geometry, but he didn’t use the word,” Pepper said of Gavzy.
“I hated math so I used games to teach it,” Gavzy remembered. “The children worked twice as hard because it was a game.”
Gavzy would point out books to Pepper about new experiments to try, all using household items. “Too many students are afraid of science, they think it’s too complicated and abstract,” Pepper continued.
“It’s the teacher’s attitude that counts” Pepper noted. “Mr. Gavzy was a most supportive mentor, he inspired me. He instilled in me the confidence to try things out and to be spontaneous.”
These are skills Pepper needs at HRL, where, for the past 29 years, he has conducted research on the practical application of lasers, like detecting unseen defects in material, for HRL Laboratories’ owners, General Motors, The Boeing Company and Raytheon.
Besides giving Pepper’s curiosity full rein, Gavzy allowed Pepper to trust his judgment and report on what he observed, even if it was a “negative,” or unexpected result.
Pepper was reminded of that when he judged a science contest at Our Lady of Malibu Elementary School a few years ago. The pupil Pepper favored as a winner had performed an experiment that would show that gas in a test tube containing a “breathing” plant would, in about a week, become richer in oxygen than ordinary air.
The boy lit a match under the tube, expecting that the match would become momentarily brighter, Pepper said. When it didn’t, the child concluded that although there was some gas released from the plant, he couldn’t say the gas was oxygen-rich compared to ordinary air.
“The fact that he made his own observations and came up with a conclusion that was counter to what was expected indicated to me that he was not biased by what was stated in the kit’s instructions, but instead, drew his own conclusions and stood by them,” Pepper said. “This indicated to me that he was objective, was careful in his experiment and documented the results of his observations.”
Standing behind one’s judgment is a critical part of the scientific process, Pepper added, because it is what leads to new discoveries in many fields.
“We can miss critical new vistas by coming to conclusions based on popular belief,” he said.
Since May, when Pepper and Gavzy first reunited, they and Pepper’s wife, Denise, have become friends and spent more time together.
“He’s like my uncle,” Pepper, the son of Holocaust survivors, said.
Besides Pepper, Gavzy has left another pedagogic legacy in the form of Denise. A teacher at the Malibu Jewish Center and Synagogue Preschool, she leads a hands-on science enrichment class. Among other tasks, the children hatch grunion eggs, make toothpaste, and, yes, perform the rubber egg experiment.
The children really like learning this way, according to Denise.
“You should see their expression on their faces when they open the grunion eggs,” Denise said. “They’re so excited.”
Gavzy, who retired in the late ’70s, continues to share his special talents. He volunteers at the Skirball Museum teaching crafts, and at Kaiser Hospital in Woodland Hills.