1984 July 11 Wednesday – Last evening AJG called asking me to be a witness this Thursday to his taking inventory and/or removing personal property from a 6^th story room on Fourth Avenue here in San Diego. He also wants Martin Atkins to serve as a witness to this. This has been triggered apparently by Lange’s absconding to Montana and mismanagement of trust funds. Actually the word mismanagement is not apt; the better word is embezzlement as there is presently nothing left but a thousand dollars in the tuspco trust and a promissory note(s) put there by Lange as consideration. AJG calls this, the note(s), a euphemism for theft. I expressed horror and AJG assented with the accompanying words, “I will either deliver the books or refund all the deposits with interest if it kills me.” He said he had known Lange for 21 years and had him as a contractor for 15, and that now, after all these years, he can no longer believe or trust him. This was one of his two major catastrophes within the past two months. The other is the loss of Miller who has left his tapes in disarray and a shambles. No one but Galambos and Miller is capable of getting them categorized, and Miller won’t and Galambos can’t live long enough to do it.
    Later, Joe arrived at 10:30 unannounced and said he had urgent talk with me. We repaired to my study where he told me of G’s depression and betrayal by Lange. Would I now go all the way? Would I after all these years step up and proffer my services? Never would my services and my loyalty be more welcome. I must do it, he said. I told him I would, that I neither fear the man nor failure, but that I have never enjoyed, or possessed the aptitude for, administrative or entrepreneurial responsibilities. Joe was very concerned. It was a beautiful thing to see.

1984 July 14 Saturday – On Thursday, July 12, at 3:55 p.m., Galambos called me at home and asked me to come to room 609, 1122 Fourth Ave where he would inspect the accounting records of the two trusts handling book subscriptions and advance course payments, and the coin medals, and other matters. I brought Martin Atkins. We arrived in the parking lot adjacent to the building (where the old California Theater used to be) at the same time as the Galamboses and Charles Hayes. The Galamboses were driving their maroon Oldsmobile with the diesel engine. We went up the elevator and walked down an abandoned hallway to the door of room 609. It was hot and the air was close and I thought of H.L. Mencken hunched over a typewriter in a hot newspaper office in the twenties, working hard and uncomfortably but loving every minute of it. Everything was redolent of the twenties and thirties. Before entering the room Galambos informed Atkins of the enormity of Lange’s criminal behavior and treachery; how he stole money from his trusts, how he embezzled funds even from FEI, how he lied repeatedly, protesting that all was well when Galambos asked him about the integrity of the funds. Mrs. Galambos stood behind him in the heat of the hallway, nodding with a serious almost stricken look on her face. When her husband failed to mention how much had been stolen she uttered in a hushed tone “one point two million dollars.” Later, he corrected this to over 2 million.
    Inside the room, which faced out to the south, were boxes stacked three high in the middle of the room. Others were stacked against the walls, 300 in all. They contained coin medals of JBG and other medals, I believe. There also were boxes of medals which had been returned due to the purchasers having left no forwarding addresses. Along the wall near the S.E. corner of the room were the financial records. Mr. Hayes went through these along with the Galamboses and discovered in ever increasing horror and shock the multitude of cancelled checks and ledger entries corroborating Lange’s unconcealed crimes. Advances and fees, some “covered” with promissory notes, and stock sales with forged signatures of Mr. Miller, were the means for embezzlement. These checks, drawn against the coin medal accounts, trust accounts, and FEI, ranged from $500 to $50,000, and increased in number in the months leading up to July of this year. The first withdrawals began in 1980, in the summer I believe. As these checks were discovered the Galamboses expressed their horror and shock. Mrs. Galambos uttered sounds of emotional torment and I got the impression that the evidence of brazen theft hit her harder, emotionally, than her husband, and that this motivated her to assert Mosaic justice over Jesusian justice. Galambos himself was outraged, shocked, angered, but found himself stopping from time to time to give short lectures to Martin and me on the principles that had been fractured, on the reasons why these crimes had been committed, on his own blindness that allowed all this to happen, and on the similarity of his fate with others who have trusted in avowals of integrity. He informed us that he intended to have Lange arrested before he could flee across the Canadian border (Lange is at this moment in Montana). He asked us if we wanted to know why, since he teaches in his theory that Jesusian justice is the true justice, the justice of spaceland. We requested that he tell us, and he went on to say that it was to protect him against charges of libel and slander, and also to assure his market that he was the plundered party and that he was not a party to this. However, he intended to tell the prosecuting judge that he had no intention of imprisoning Lange but would prefer that he be put on probation so that he could “work his ass off” to pay back some of the money he owed him. He told us that the decision to have Lange arrested was his wife’s argument and that they had fought over this the night before and that his wife had finally prevailed over him and was right….  AJG expressed his disgust over Lange’s list of persons to whom he was grateful for getting him into the gaslight project. The list was given in alphabetical order. The only persons of significance were Archimedes (for leverage) and AJG. Galambos asked me what Archimedes and he had in common on the list, and that the others could not share. I replied that “you and Archimedes are innovators.” He replied that there are many innovators. I then said, “The two of you are cosmological innovators.” Then: “And like Archimedes you are alone, a lone beacon on a benighted sea.” “That’s it,” he replied, “I am all alone, just like Archimedes.”
    He sat on a low lying, metallic file cabinet. His shoulders were hunched over and his loosened collar and blue tie stuck out at odd angles. It was hot in the room and we had taken our coats off and the sun, sinking in the west, came through the windows, making us sweat. I felt very sorry for him. I reached out and squeezed his arm. After a while he quit staring at the floor and looked up, asking, “Do you know why I won’t commit suicide?” “Why?” we asked. “Because I am a Jew.” He then explained to us that the Jews have been persecuted for centuries and yet have always survived. His eyes were alive and radiant when he said this, as if he were enjoying a rare kind of happiness and pride known only to his ancestors. “Although I have been plundered enormously I will win,” he said. “As for Lange, he is finished, he is nothing; yet I do not hate him for this.” He then proceeded to give us a lecture on the emotion of hate. Hate, he said, was the only emotion that could not be harnessed to rationality. He had thought a lot about this emotion and to this day could not see any positive merit to it. It was destructive. While he philosophized we noticed the joy he got from it and knew in our hearts as well as in our heads how very deep goes his love of cosmology, of knowledge for its own sake. Here, before our very eyes, was a man who had just been plundered for two million dollars, who had before his gaze the incriminating evidence, who was faced with possible if not probable charges of dereliction of duty by his market, who had just assured us that he would replace Lange’s depravations by his own funds – and yet was finding happiness in revisiting the joys of his innovations. Here, before our very eyes, was living proof of that unique and enviable happiness which comes to the man who has no strategic frustrations. Here, before our very eyes, was living proof that tactical frustration does not kill, providing, of course, one is anchored in the achievements of the species time scale. And here, too, was proof of why Galambos has not yet written his books.
    When we counted the silver coin medals of his father’s centennial, – the unnumbered ones that belonged exclusively to AJG, – and discovered that between 1/3 and 2/3 of the coins had been taken by Lange, I said, “This is the most unconscionable thing of all. He has plundered the helpless!” Galambos whirled and said “Yes, he has murdered the dead.” About this time Galambos discovered a service charge on a check drawn on FEI, I believe, which bore the item “insufficient funds.” Galambos became enraged. Hayes, however, found evidence that the check had not actually been returned. Still, the exposure was there: Galambos’ unimpeachable integrity had been jeopardized. Galambos gave us a long, detailed history of his checking accounts and how he had never bounced a check in his whole life. In telling the history he did not leave out some of the more endearing details of his $51 checking account balance on the day of his marriage; the cost of his honeymoon night in a hotel that left his balance $30 the next day; his father’s gifts that ran his account up to $600; his return of his father’s gifts; his balance of four dollars but never a negative balance.
He reminisced over his days with Snelson. Snelson was chintzy, he said, chintzy as you can get. He whored, he exploited his girlfriend, he wouldn’t commit to marriage, and finally Galambos had to fire him. He fired him for not living the theory. It was as simple as that. Snelson later sued Galambos for 2 million: one million for wages that putatively would have been earned at FEI, another million for loss of his right to make a living. The case went to arbitration. Marks represented Galambos, a former graduate represented Snelson. The arbitrator’s conclusion or judgement: “You don’t have a 3-million-dollar claim; you don’t have a million-dollar claim; you don’t even have a 100-thousand-dollar claim – you are entitled to your back wages, that is all.” These amounted to $31,000 which were padded up from the real wages of $16,000. “Snelson was good at padding his accounts,” G. said. G. paid the claim.
    Thinking back on Smith, G. remarked, “By contrast, Smith’s plunder of my market was benign.”
    I gave the Galamboses my copies of the Llevelin and Montrose partnership interests along with some correspondence from Lange concerning the status of the ventures and of the economy. Galambos referred to the buildings as flophouses. Lange’s stationary was a violation of the principle of not naming your company after yourself (Lange’s stationery and logos read The Lange Company), he said, and he showed his wife the proof.
    “No wonder Soulé was angry,” he said. “This lout didn’t pay him for nine months.” He then mentioned something about a restitution payment. I believe he said that Soulé got a check for $500 and returned all but $30 of it.
    When he was discussing chintziness, G. told us about Lange’s failure to pay a fifty-cent charge for Mrs. Galambos when he and his wife accompanied Mrs. Galambos to the airport where she was to catch an Air France flight to Paris. G. asked us why that was chintzy. Martin said something that I do not remember but Galambos was already giving the answer. It boiled down to this: No man should allow a woman to have to fend for herself when she is alone like that. Only one explanation accounts for Lange’s oversight: chintzyness! Chintzy people have a major identifying characteristic, he said. He asked us what it was, and again, before we could reply he gave us the answer: “chintzy people are lavish on themselves and niggardly with others.”
    He told us of his father’s generosity and how this contrasted with the chintziness of others. He refused to accept gifts, refused to have his dentures and eyeglasses replaced for better ones. “Why waste money on me? I’m going to die one of these days.” Yet he was lavish on others.
He also told us how forgiving his father was. He would forgive everyone, he said. Mrs. Galambos spoke up. “He would be very angry over Mr. Lange’s behavior.” “Yes,” replied AJG, “yes he would.” “Because it was you who have been plundered,” she said.
    Galambos then told us of his father’s getting a woman he had met in Italy into a fashionable clothing business on Madison Ave. in New York. Later, after she had become quite successful, he made her his partner in his real estate business. His father could see opportunity. For instance, when AJG, concerned for his father’s health (JBG would suffer 20 to 30 attacks of angina pectoris a day), pleaded with his father to take the word of his broker instead of climbing the stairs of proposed buildings for sale and pouring over a hundred proposals before he would get down to inspecting five, and that his broker had been good for his word on the most recent ventures or sales, his father said, “You stupid little boy (AJG was 22 or 23 at the time), don’t you know that these people live only for today? They see only the commission now. Nothing more.” “And of course he was right,” Galambos said. He then told us how his father would inspect a building by climbing from the floor level to the roof and back down again to the basement, scrutinizing it in every detail as a master builder, which of course he was. And all this with a weak heart.
    In thinking about those who have betrayed him, AJG remarked without looking at anyone, “I guess there is no reason to go on living.” Then, thinking upon this, he added: “But there was once an Archimedes, a Newton, A Bruno, a Galileo, a Semmelweis and my father. I live for these.” Moments later he told us of the melancholy of Ehrenhaft and how he had once said “Now I know why Boltzmann committed suicide.” He put his arm around me and, after commenting that my shoulders were not as big as Ehrenhaft’s, related how he had done the same thing to Ehrenhaft saying, “Remember Galileo and how he was persecuted. Yet he has won.” Then, sadly: “I have never had anyone say this to me.”
    He told us that the majority of his wealth had been created by means of his CP accounts. Lange, he said, had owned the second largest CP accounts besides his own. However, in light of his recent crimes, the story may have been false all along.
    In the meantime it had gotten dark. The lights of the city came on. Two- or three-times police cars and fire engines passed beneath us with their sirens going. It was hot in the room. Mrs. Galambos wiped her brow from time to time.
    Mr. Galambos asked me if I was ready to take over the contractorship. I said I would. It would be dangerous to commence right now, though, as it might alert Lange to skip the country before he could be arrested. He gave me the tapes and slides of Course 274, and the manual or whatever it’s called.
    When we were leaving and carrying some of the more critical boxes out of the room, Galambos, who remained behind, said, “You carry the boxes out and I’ll jump out of the window.” I looked back. He smiled and said to go and not pay any attention to his remark. When we returned he had the door open for us and it was good to see him standing there, the strongest man in the world.
    Outside in the night (it was a little after one in the morning) Martin and I helped him close the door of the old building. We walked him to his car. Inside, on the driver’s seat, he took down Martin’s home phone number, also his business number, and then shook our hands and thanked us. “I am grateful to you,” he said. “And we are grateful to you,” we said. It was a moment to be treasured because in that moment we were equal. Earlier he had told us he thought our speeches at his father’s centennial were very good and will be remembered in history.
    We offered to drive up to L.A. with him that night and deliver all his boxes, using our cars. He thanked us for that but decided it wouldn’t be necessary. We accepted his request that we guard or rather keep watch over the remaining contents of the room but refused his offer of $200 to do this, arguing that our services would be a royalty to him for the values we had gotten from him in the past, not to mention this very evening. Earlier in the evening he had asked us more than once if despite the inconvenience we had found the experience worth our time. Naturally we said that it had. We had witnessed a supreme innovator’s response to one of history’s most egregious crimes.