Page Stephens
Page StephensSSS Member since: The Middle Ages (or at least it seems like that)
Occupation: Retired Professor of Anthropology
Education & Background: AB Wabash College (History); PhD Univerity
of Illinois (Anthropology)
Email: hpst@earthlink.net
I am one of the founders of The South Shore Skeptics. I have
served on and off as Coordinator since its founding. My involvement with
the SSS is tied up with our founding.
Back in the dark ages when witches roamed the Earth—as opposed to today which might be described as the even darker ages when even more witches roam the Earth—my wife Penny O’Connor subscribed to The Skeptical Inquirer. We used to lend copies to our friend Tom Siegel who noticed the existence of The Bay Area Skeptics and decided to subscribe to their newsletter, BASIS. Some time later, Tom suggested that we found our own group with aims similar to those of CSICOP. I therefore wrote to CSICOP and asked how one went about doing such a thing. Shortly thereafter CSICOP sent us a reply with the names and addresses of two local astronomers who were active in CSICOP's affairs, Steve Shore and Nick Sanduleak.
I contacted Nick, and soon he and I got together and formed a committee to found the organization. We held a meeting to decide on a name and to plan future activities and were off and running.
For those of you who are interested in the origin of the name South Shore Skeptics it is a combination of a pun on Steve Shore’s name and a skeptical comment on the Cleveland public relations idea that Cleveland is located on the north coast of the US. The idea was that lakes do not have coasts and that Cleveland is located on the south shore of Lake Erie.
CSICOP gave us a copy of their mailing list, the treasurer of the defunct Cleveland Humanists (West Side) offered us $75.00 for mailing expenses, and we held our first lecture at CWRU. We asked those who attended if they would join us in our efforts and that group many of whom are still active formed the basis of the SSS.
I have forgotten who gave the first lecture, but it was either Nick Sanduleak or Rick Rickards, probably Nick. In any case they gave our first two lectures which dealt with Nick's paper entitled “Moon Acquitted of Murder in Cleveland,” a comment on the lack of the existence of the full moon effect, and Rick’s paper on astrology which he revised and gave to us again some years later.
Our first big break came when Nick asked James Randi to lecture for us, and we drew some 250 people to two lectures; the first at Baldwin Wallace College and the second at The University of Akron.
It has been downhill and shady ever since—or at least level—and we are still in existence.
I became involved with the skeptical movement for the same reason that some years before I had studied anthropology: I found human ideas strange and wanted to discover why people believed the things they did. When I taught the anthropology of religion at The University of Illinois I would invite self proclaimed witches and practicioners of other religious ideas to come to my classes and talk about their ideas.
My approach was then, as it still is, that while I didn't necessarily agree with their ideas, I thought that they should be open to discussion and debate. I will admit that I am somewhat more skeptical about changing peoples’ ideas about the nature of the world after some forty years of being a skeptic and fifteen or so years in the skeptical movement, but that is the triumph of experience over hope. For example, in spite of the advances in scientific knowledge more people probably believe in astrology today than did in 1957 when most people laughed at it. In any case I still try my best to change ideas whatever the outcome.
But back to my intellectual peregrinations.
I first ran across skepticism in the early 1950s, as did many others of my generation, when I read Martin Gardner's classic book “Fads and Fallacies.” Then, as now, skepticism is not exactly the most popular of ideas, .
This is an interesting book which I think you should all read along with the rest of Gardner’s works. Another interesting book from that era that influenced me was Bergen Evans “The Natural History of Nonsense”.
I fooled around for a while while in grade and high school with notions of UFOs, and various other ideas of the weird but by the time I got into college I had discovered that there was no evidence that any of them had any vaidity when subjected to scientific scrutiny with “an intense scrute” a phrase I recall some character in the British radio comedy "The Goon Show" once used.
After getting my AB—I leave it up to you to decide what those initials stand for—in history at Wabash College I decided that history did not give me enough insight into the nature of human thought so I entered graduate school in anthropology where I spent my most productive time working with my late friend Julian Steward who had retired by that time.
Today I spend most of my time reading, learning, writing, raising intellectual hell online, finally learning how to play chords such as the ones my wife describes as demented 13ths on the guitar and other fretted instruments and working with a variety of organizations like The South Shore Skeptics. I also take care of my seven cats, and my wife Penny O'Connor takes care of me.