Part 6. San Francisco and the road, 1978 to 1990: how his telescope spread and how he lived

They were on that road because of Bill Clarke, the ranger who had made the group unpaid employees of Death Valley National Monument. When Clarke was transferred he sent word: “They’ve moved me to the Grand Canyon. Come!” From about 1978 through 1981 the group came for star parties that usually ran 16 days and 16 nights, with Sun telescopes out in the daytime and the big telescopes after dark.33.Crater Lake interview, edited; Crater Lake interview, transcript; Anecdotes.his own accountCrater Lake interview, edited: F. Owen Hoffman, interview with John Dobson, 31 July 2004, Crater Lake Institute oral history, edited by Stephen R. Mark (December 2005).his own accountCrater Lake interview, transcript: F. Owen Hoffman’s own transcript of the same 31 July 2004 interview, posted before the edit.his own accountAnecdotes: John Dobson, “Memories” (anecdotes), sidewalkastronomers.us (archived copy).

One summer the rangers asked them to keep track of the crowd. The figure Dobson gave was 20,000 visitors in 16 days and nights, at the Sun telescopes, the slide shows and 6 to 8 telescopes in the dark. A party of Australian astronomers once stayed on past midnight and spent the rest of the night at the 24-inch, sketching northern galaxies. And there was the man in the business suit, to whom Dobson offered a look at the Sun. When the man had looked, Dobson told him to come back that evening and the group would entertain the Hell out of him. The man straightened to his full height and answered, “There is no Hell in us; we are Christians,” and went on, “but we would like to see the works of the Creator.”44.Riverside talk, web text; Telescope Making 1983, p. 44; AP, 24 Feb 1980; Crater Lake interview, edited; Crater Lake interview, transcript.his own accountRiverside talk, web text: “Dobson on Dobsonians”, transcript of his 1983 Riverside talk, sidewalkastronomers.us.his own accountTelescope Making 1983: “Dobson on Dobsonians”, his Riverside talk of May 1983, Telescope Making no. 20, pp. 43ff.record from the timeAP, 24 Feb 1980: Associated Press, “In Quest Of The Heavens”, Santa Cruz Sentinel, 24 February 1980, p. 79 (California Digital Newspaper Collection).his own accountCrater Lake interview, edited: F. Owen Hoffman, interview with John Dobson, 31 July 2004, Crater Lake Institute oral history, edited by Stephen R. Mark (December 2005).his own accountCrater Lake interview, transcript: F. Owen Hoffman’s own transcript of the same 31 July 2004 interview, posted before the edit.

The slide shows were there because Dobson held that the talk had to come before the telescopes, so that people would understand what they were about to see. He taught cosmology as well as astronomy in San Francisco’s adult education program, and the cosmology was his own. He would not have the big bang, which set him against what most astronomers thought.55.Riverside talk, web text; Crater Lake interview, edited; AP, 24 Feb 1980; Oregonian 2003.his own accountRiverside talk, web text: “Dobson on Dobsonians”, transcript of his 1983 Riverside talk, sidewalkastronomers.us.his own accountCrater Lake interview, edited: F. Owen Hoffman, interview with John Dobson, 31 July 2004, Crater Lake Institute oral history, edited by Stephen R. Mark (December 2005).record from the timeAP, 24 Feb 1980: Associated Press, “In Quest Of The Heavens”, Santa Cruz Sentinel, 24 February 1980, p. 79 (California Digital Newspaper Collection).his own accountOregonian 2003: Richard Hill, “Telescopic Visionary”, The Oregonian, April 2003.

Dennis di Cicco had seen the Sidewalk Astronomers’ big telescopes at Riverside in 1978 and built a 16-inch on the same lines. It was at the Stellafane convention in Vermont that summer, and it won over Richard Berry, who edited Astronomy magazine and was about to start a quarterly called Telescope Making. For more than 10 years, Berry wrote later, amateur astronomers had almost wholly ignored what Dobson was building.66.Orwell newsletter 2002; Berry 1998; Bartels 2014.a later writerOrwell newsletter 2002: Neil Morley, on his visit to Orwell Park Observatory, 29 September 2002, Orwell Astronomical Society newsletter, November 2002.someone who was thereBerry 1998: Richard Berry, on “the Dobsonian revolution”, Astronomy, August 1998 (25th-anniversary issue).someone who was thereBartels 2014: Mel Bartels, “Remembering John Dobson”, bbastrodesigns.com, January 2014.

Berry went to Riverside in May 1979 hoping to meet Dobson, who was not there. Three of the Sidewalk Astronomers were: Bob Kestner, Doug Berger and Earle Watts. By Berry’s account builders like them had spent the late 1970s being told that their telescopes could not work, to their faces and often by people who had never looked through one. Berry spent an evening at Berger’s telescope and said what he thought of it, a mount that moved smoothly and good images from a mirror 1 inch thick, and the three of them hardly knew how to take it.77.Berry 1998.someone who was thereBerry 1998: Richard Berry, on “the Dobsonian revolution”, Astronomy, August 1998 (25th-anniversary issue).

It was Kestner who wrote the telescope up. His article ran in Telescope Making that summer under the heading The Dobsonian Telescope: Part I, and Berry added a note for readers who were wondering where “Dobsonian” came from. It was, he wrote, “the adjectival form of John Dobson’s name,” and he had to say who that was: a key man in the San Francisco Sidewalk Astronomers, who had put on hundreds of star parties across the western states. Berry wanted the word kept for instruments closely related to the ones Kestner described.88.Telescope Making 1979.record from the timeTelescope Making 1979: Telescope Making no. 4, Summer 1979.

The second part, in the fall, told how to build one. Kestner wrote that he owed what he knew of the telescope to Dobson’s efforts and in part to his own stubbornness. A telescope that only tilts and swivels can get by with a thin mirror, which costs less, so long as the glass is held without being bent. The first time Kestner had an 18-inch mirror only 1 inch thick to mount, he asked Dobson how. “Hang the mirror freely in a sling with its back resting on a 9 point flotation,” Dobson told him.99.Telescope Making 1979; Kestner 1979; Telescope Making 1982, p. 14.record from the timeTelescope Making 1979: Telescope Making no. 4, Summer 1979.someone who was thereKestner 1979: Bob Kestner, “Building a Dobsonian Telescope”, Telescope Making no. 5, Fall 1979, p. 14.record from the timeTelescope Making 1982: “Dobsonian Developments” (with the section “What Is a Dobsonian Telescope?”), Telescope Making no. 15, 1982, pp. 13-14.

None of the telescopes the Sidewalk Astronomers set up in the city had a drive to follow the sky, and Dobson’s joke was that they did have one, which ran on the yoghurt he ate. On Christmas night of 1979, and again the night after, the group was at Ghirardelli Square in San Francisco with the Psychedelic Giraffe, a 10.5-inch, and some others, but without the 24-inch, which was too big to use in town. A city sidewalk offered little but the Moon and the planets, and whatever was in the eyepiece slid out of it about every third viewer, so that somebody pushed the tube along, or, on a fine night, showed a viewer who would not leave the eyepiece how to push it.1010.Mayer 1980, p. 28.his own accountMayer 1980: Ben Mayer, “Astronomy on the Sidewalk” (interview with John Dobson), Astronomy, April 1980, pp. 24-28.

On pleasant evenings he and other members set up in Golden Gate Park and wherever else the tourists were, and asked the people walking by to look. “The public has to see,” he said that winter. “It’s dumb to live blind-like in this world.” By his reckoning more than a million people had looked through the group’s telescopes by then, about 100,000 a year for more than 10 years, and no sidewalk astronomer he knew of would have charged them for it.1111.AP, 24 Feb 1980; Mayer 1980, p. 27.record from the timeAP, 24 Feb 1980: Associated Press, “In Quest Of The Heavens”, Santa Cruz Sentinel, 24 February 1980, p. 79 (California Digital Newspaper Collection).his own accountMayer 1980: Ben Mayer, “Astronomy on the Sidewalk” (interview with John Dobson), Astronomy, April 1980, pp. 24-28.

Soon after Christmas he was in Los Angeles. He had been going there since 1978, when, his club’s biography says, Swami Swahananda, lately moved to Hollywood from the San Francisco and Berkeley centers, asked him to lecture to the Vedanta Society of Southern California. By Gopal Stavig’s account he stayed with the Society for months at a time, in 1978 and 1979 and again in 1985. San Francisco was still home.1212.Mayer 1980, p. 24; Club biography; Stavig 2019, p. 7.his own accountMayer 1980: Ben Mayer, “Astronomy on the Sidewalk” (interview with John Dobson), Astronomy, April 1980, pp. 24-28.a later writerClub biography: “John Dobson: A Brief Biography”, sidewalkastronomers.us (archived copy).a later writerStavig 2019: Gopal Stavig, “Ramakrishna-Vedanta in Southern California”, part VIII, “John Dobson” (2019).

Ben Mayer interviewed him there for Astronomy magazine and asked when the mount had got its name. The term, Dobson said, had “crept into the vocabulary only a few years ago and I don’t even know where it started.” Later, David Levy wrote, he came to believe that Berry had coined it. The Sidewalk Astronomers, he told Mayer, had about 100 members around the world, paying dues of $10, and the bylaws had only two rules about who could join: “We have to like you and you have to like us.”1313.Mayer 1980, p. 24, p. 27; Levy 1995.his own accountMayer 1980: Ben Mayer, “Astronomy on the Sidewalk” (interview with John Dobson), Astronomy, April 1980, pp. 24-28.a later writerLevy 1995: David H. Levy, “Walden of the Sky”, Sky & Telescope, September 1995, p. 84.

The money had come mostly out of the members’ own pockets. About $10,000 a year would have let the group do the job properly, he said, half of it to run the telescopes around the parks and the rest to keep them out of the rain while they were in the city. “We’re in bad shape,” he told a reporter that February. By the figure he gave then, the group actually spent about $2,000 a year, and the dues covered about half.1414.Mayer 1980, p. 27; AP, 24 Feb 1980.his own accountMayer 1980: Ben Mayer, “Astronomy on the Sidewalk” (interview with John Dobson), Astronomy, April 1980, pp. 24-28.record from the timeAP, 24 Feb 1980: Associated Press, “In Quest Of The Heavens”, Santa Cruz Sentinel, 24 February 1980, p. 79 (California Digital Newspaper Collection).

The rain was getting in already. The school bus that had been the group’s bedroom and storeroom through most of the 1970s had died, Levy wrote, on the way home from the canyon in 1978. It was only a storeroom now. At the end of 1979 it stood in Marin County with the 24-inch’s trailer hitched behind and the 24-inch and the tube of the 22-inch inside. Somebody had put a brake drum through one of its windows, and a good deal would have to be rebuilt. The Skaggs foundation had given $14,000 for a vehicle fitted with a tailgate lift, so that handicapped viewers could reach the eyepiece, and for repairs to the mounts of the two big telescopes. There was nothing yet for travel.1515.Mayer 1980, p. 27, p. 28; Levy 1995.his own accountMayer 1980: Ben Mayer, “Astronomy on the Sidewalk” (interview with John Dobson), Astronomy, April 1980, pp. 24-28.a later writerLevy 1995: David H. Levy, “Walden of the Sky”, Sky & Telescope, September 1995, p. 84.

At Riverside in May 1980 Berry stopped at a big white telescope whose owner, Bob Ferguson of the group in Sonoma County, had spent 3 years on its mirror. “It was John Dobson that told me I could make a telescope; I thought it would be too complicated,” Ferguson said.1616.Telescope Making 1980.someone who was thereTelescope Making 1980: Richard Berry, “Riverside 1980”, and letters, Telescope Making no. 8, Summer 1980.

Later on the same trip, the day before the Sidewalk Astronomers were to leave for the canyon, Berry went to Brian Rhodes’s house in Pacifica to meet Dobson, and before the day was out he was helping to cut the seats out of a motor home. It was the vehicle the Skaggs grant had bought. Dobson drove up in it “pretty frantic,” Berry wrote, with both big telescopes still to be fitted inside by morning, a deadline that Berry could see would be missed. He could see, too, that the new machine was a poor trade for the worn-out bus: it was weak on hills and it handled badly.1717.Telescope Making 1980; Levy 1995; Mayer 1980, p. 28.someone who was thereTelescope Making 1980: Richard Berry, “Riverside 1980”, and letters, Telescope Making no. 8, Summer 1980.a later writerLevy 1995: David H. Levy, “Walden of the Sky”, Sky & Telescope, September 1995, p. 84.his own accountMayer 1980: Ben Mayer, “Astronomy on the Sidewalk” (interview with John Dobson), Astronomy, April 1980, pp. 24-28.

The bus stood in front of the house with an 18-inch telescope and the tube of the 24-inch inside it. The tube was cardboard Sonotube, painted blue with stars and clouds, 11 feet 9 inches long and 30 inches across, and the mirror that belonged in it was 1 inch thick. On a trailer beside the bus sat the telescope’s huge rocker, painted purple and two shades of blue, which Rhodes had helped rebuild about a year before. Its sides had been doors once, heavy ones, and you could still see where the doorknob and the mail slot had been. Rhodes, Dobson had told Mayer, was the backbone of the group.1818.Telescope Making 1980; Rhodes memoir; Mayer 1980, p. 27.someone who was thereTelescope Making 1980: Richard Berry, “Riverside 1980”, and letters, Telescope Making no. 8, Summer 1980.someone who was thereRhodes memoir: Brian Rhodes, “John Dobson and Delphinium”, memoir of 1968 to 1979, sidewalkastronomers.us.his own accountMayer 1980: Ben Mayer, “Astronomy on the Sidewalk” (interview with John Dobson), Astronomy, April 1980, pp. 24-28.

That summer Dobson wrote to thank Berry for printing Mayer’s interview and Kestner’s two articles: a good many people had called or written to say how much they liked them. Berry had already gone back to press with the first article. By July 1980, as he remembered it in 1998, the two were coming off the press again as “a skinny little booklet with red covers” under the title How to Build a Dobsonian Telescope.1919.Telescope Making 1980; Berry 1998.someone who was thereTelescope Making 1980: Richard Berry, “Riverside 1980”, and letters, Telescope Making no. 8, Summer 1980.someone who was thereBerry 1998: Richard Berry, on “the Dobsonian revolution”, Astronomy, August 1998 (25th-anniversary issue).

Jim Jacobson of Coulter Optical, by Berry’s account, asked for 2,500 copies of a booklet of reprints. Coulter was a mirror company that had just announced a 17.5-inch mirror for $595 and been flooded with orders. Many of the buyers would have been lost without instructions, so Jacobson packed a booklet with every mirror he sold and mailed one to everybody who wrote to ask about his mirrors.2020.Berry 1998; Riverside talk, web text.someone who was thereBerry 1998: Richard Berry, on “the Dobsonian revolution”, Astronomy, August 1998 (25th-anniversary issue).his own accountRiverside talk, web text: “Dobson on Dobsonians”, transcript of his 1983 Riverside talk, sidewalkastronomers.us.

Coulter went on to sell whole telescopes. As Dobson told it late in life, the man who ran the company had looked through a 24-inch on a mountaintop in California, decided that if Dobson could do it he could, and begun selling telescopes modeled on it. Dobson got no royalties from Coulter or anything of the kind, he said in the same interview, and he added that the man had always treated him very well.2121.King 2014; Sky at Night 2006.a later writerKing 2014: Bob King, “John Dobson, Inventor of the Popular Dobsonian Telescope, Dead at 98”, Universe Today, 16 January 2014.his own accountSky at Night 2006: Interview with John Dobson, BBC Sky at Night Magazine, December 2006.

Dick Houskeeper put an 8-inch together with his son for $175, out of bought parts and junk from the desert, and wrote that he had been drawn in by “the gospel according to John Dobson”.2222.Dodson 1981-82.a later writerDodson 1981-82: Steve Dodson, “A Poncet/Dobson Hybrid Mounting”, Telescope Making no. 14, Winter 1981-82.

At Stellafane in 1981 the biggest telescope that had ever been shown there was a 22-inch built by Steve Dodson, a telescope maker in Ontario, and its mirror was Long Eye’s. Pardeilhan and Dobson had sold it to him. Dodson called the telescope Phoenix II and gave its trailer a heavily reinforced tongue. He had also added what Dobson’s telescopes did without: his sat on a platform that followed the stars, turned by hand with a small pulley, so that a dozen people in a line could look without anybody aiming it again. The mirror had come through the wreck, he wrote, only because telescopes of this kind travel with the mirror taken out and put in the car.2323.Telescope Making 1981; Dodson 1981-82.record from the timeTelescope Making 1981: Photo feature on the 1981 Stellafane convention, Telescope Making no. 13, Fall 1981.a later writerDodson 1981-82: Steve Dodson, “A Poncet/Dobson Hybrid Mounting”, Telescope Making no. 14, Winter 1981-82.

The group was getting ready for the canyon when Berry saw it in June 1980, and that is the last record from the time that we have. The end is Dobson’s own account, given in 2004 and again in a late memoir. In 1981, he said, the park’s naturalist sent him a copy of a letter from a visitor, and with it a letter of his own that asked the group not to come back. The visitor’s letter, as Dobson quoted it, said, “We don’t need to be exposed to such controversial views in the National Parks.”2424.Telescope Making 1980; Crater Lake interview, edited; Anecdotes; Crater Lake interview, transcript.someone who was thereTelescope Making 1980: Richard Berry, “Riverside 1980”, and letters, Telescope Making no. 8, Summer 1980.his own accountCrater Lake interview, edited: F. Owen Hoffman, interview with John Dobson, 31 July 2004, Crater Lake Institute oral history, edited by Stephen R. Mark (December 2005).his own accountAnecdotes: John Dobson, “Memories” (anecdotes), sidewalkastronomers.us (archived copy).his own accountCrater Lake interview, transcript: F. Owen Hoffman’s own transcript of the same 31 July 2004 interview, posted before the edit.

The complaint, as he gave it, was about what the public was being told: the group was “raising controversial scientific questions with an uninformed public.” The letter quoted Dobson himself, and by his account its writer had loaded onto him every grievance he had against scientists and had him saying things he never said. Asked about it in 2004, he made a guess about the kind of person who writes such letters: “The complaints often come from the fundamentalists and creationists.” Which views this letter meant, none of his tellings says.2525.Crater Lake interview, edited; Crater Lake interview, transcript; Anecdotes.his own accountCrater Lake interview, edited: F. Owen Hoffman, interview with John Dobson, 31 July 2004, Crater Lake Institute oral history, edited by Stephen R. Mark (December 2005).his own accountCrater Lake interview, transcript: F. Owen Hoffman’s own transcript of the same 31 July 2004 interview, posted before the edit.his own accountAnecdotes: John Dobson, “Memories” (anecdotes), sidewalkastronomers.us (archived copy).

He answered the naturalist before he stayed away. The Sidewalk Astronomers did not say those things, he wrote, “and you don’t say that the rocks at the bottom of this canyon started at 4,004 BC.” Then he kept away from the Grand Canyon for 14 years. All of this is his telling. We have neither letter, and nothing from the Park Service.2626.Anecdotes; Crater Lake interview, transcript.his own accountAnecdotes: John Dobson, “Memories” (anecdotes), sidewalkastronomers.us (archived copy).his own accountCrater Lake interview, transcript: F. Owen Hoffman’s own transcript of the same 31 July 2004 interview, posted before the edit.

The group was at Crater Lake that same year. The Eugene Register-Guard reported 18-inch and 24-inch telescopes on the rim that the public could look through, and Mel Bartels, a telescope maker who took it that the reporter had mistaken length for aperture, drove up with a friend to see. “I couldn’t believe it: giant telescopes in cardboard and wooden frames,” he wrote. “A thin wiry guy was in charge,” showing people the Sun and all but shouting at a visitor who would not believe that the spots on it were real. He struck Bartels as a force of nature, and his way of talking put Bartels in mind of cult leaders and gurus.2727.Bartels 2014.someone who was thereBartels 2014: Mel Bartels, “Remembering John Dobson”, bbastrodesigns.com, January 2014.

While the telescopes stood idle Bartels went over them. The focusers were sliding tubes, the mirrors were thin and looked like plate glass, and he could not find a machined bolt or an adjusting screw anywhere. In the tube of one of them Dobson’s son was asleep. The telescopes had names, Delphinium and Stellatrope and The Little One, “which wasn’t so little”. Dobson would sooner talk about what was in the eyepiece than about how they were made.2828.Bartels 2014.someone who was thereBartels 2014: Mel Bartels, “Remembering John Dobson”, bbastrodesigns.com, January 2014.

About midnight Dobson said that he was tired and was going to bed, and he left the two visitors the 24-inch for the rest of the night, provided they locked it afterward and left it pointed away from the morning Sun. They kept at it until the sky brightened at 4:30, one up the ladder at the eyepiece and the other pushing the tube along from below. Within weeks Bartels had ordered glass for a 24-inch of his own. Long afterward he wrote down what he thought had been new in the design: precise work where it mattered, in large thin mirrors of plate glass hung in slings on floating supports and in bearings of Teflon, cork and Formica, and none where it did not, in cardboard tubes, sliding focusers and wooden mounts.2929.Bartels 2014.someone who was thereBartels 2014: Mel Bartels, “Remembering John Dobson”, bbastrodesigns.com, January 2014.

They came back for several summers in the 1980s, a week or two at a time. Hank Tanski, the chief naturalist, gave them a key to his own house and arranged a food allowance, $7 a day for each of them if they fed themselves. In early July the snowbanks could stand 30 feet high, and that was where the milk was kept.3030.Crater Lake interview, transcript; Crater Lake and Kobau report 1986; Anecdotes; Crater Lake interview, edited.his own accountCrater Lake interview, transcript: F. Owen Hoffman’s own transcript of the same 31 July 2004 interview, posted before the edit.his own accountCrater Lake and Kobau report 1986: John Dobson, “Crater Lake, British Columbia and Mount Kobau 1986”, trip report, sidewalkastronomers.us (archived copy).his own accountAnecdotes: John Dobson, “Memories” (anecdotes), sidewalkastronomers.us (archived copy).his own accountCrater Lake interview, edited: F. Owen Hoffman, interview with John Dobson, 31 July 2004, Crater Lake Institute oral history, edited by Stephen R. Mark (December 2005).

At home in San Francisco he taught. In the fall of 1982 the city’s Randall Junior Museum listed Telescope Building with John Dobson for Monday evenings from 6:30 to 9:30, September 27 to November 29, at $22 a family, with the materials for an 8-inch put at about $150. Somebody worked out about then that his astronomy class, once his travel was counted, paid him $1 an hour. One man who had taken a class from him came to Riverside in 1987 with an 18-inch that he had named Never Again.3131.Randall Museum listings, 1982-86; Astronomy 1983; Telescope Making, Summer 1987.record from the timeRandall Museum listings, 1982-86: San Francisco Recreation and Park Department, “Schedule of Classes”, Josephine D. Randall Junior Museum listings, Fall/Winter 1982-83 and Winter/Spring 1986 (Internet Archive).someone who was thereAstronomy 1983: “See the Universe!”, on the San Francisco Sidewalk Astronomers at Fremont Peak, Astronomy, August 1983 (author’s name not legible in our copy).record from the timeTelescope Making, Summer 1987: Report on the 1987 Riverside Telescope Makers Conference, Telescope Making no. 30, Summer 1987.

By 1982 a telescope of his kind could be bought ready-made. Coulter’s was the Odyssey 1, a 13-inch. A builder who took stock of the type in Telescope Making that year had started from Berry’s booklet 2 years before and made 3 telescopes since, the latest around Coulter’s 17.5-inch optics. He liked the Odyssey for a plain reason: its eyepiece could always be reached by somebody standing or sitting. Complete telescopes of the kind, he wrote, were on the market from 8 inches to 18.3232.Telescope Making 1982, p. 14; King 2014; Crater Lake and Kobau report 1986.record from the timeTelescope Making 1982: “Dobsonian Developments” (with the section “What Is a Dobsonian Telescope?”), Telescope Making no. 15, 1982, pp. 13-14.a later writerKing 2014: Bob King, “John Dobson, Inventor of the Popular Dobsonian Telescope, Dead at 98”, Universe Today, 16 January 2014.his own accountCrater Lake and Kobau report 1986: John Dobson, “Crater Lake, British Columbia and Mount Kobau 1986”, trip report, sidewalkastronomers.us (archived copy).

The same article listed what builders were already changing. The bigger telescopes were getting wheels, tubes that came apart in sections and lighter frames, so that they could travel, and the two things the design could not do, find an object by its coordinates and follow it across the sky, were being worked on. James Van Nuland saw a lesson in the Odyssey. It had taken a commercial builder, he wrote to the magazine in 1985, to make most amateurs notice a design that Dobson had spent 20 years pushing: the builder read Kestner’s two articles and announced the Odyssey 1 soon after.3333.Telescope Making 1982, p. 14; Van Nuland 1985.record from the timeTelescope Making 1982: “Dobsonian Developments” (with the section “What Is a Dobsonian Telescope?”), Telescope Making no. 15, 1982, pp. 13-14.a later writerVan Nuland 1985: James H. Van Nuland, letter to the editor, Telescope Making no. 26, Summer 1985.

In 1983 a writer for Astronomy went up Fremont Peak for one of the group’s star parties. Most of the telescopes that people had brought were of Dobson’s kind. The group’s own came up the mountain in 25-foot motor homes, with the bases in trailers, and some took 6 adults to put together. Dobson, looking out of a motor home’s window, said, “I never would have imagined this!” He had taken out no patent. “If I had patented the design,” he told the writer, “I’d be a rich man now.”3434.Astronomy 1983.someone who was thereAstronomy 1983: “See the Universe!”, on the San Francisco Sidewalk Astronomers at Fremont Peak, Astronomy, August 1983 (author’s name not legible in our copy).

At Riverside that May the lecture hall was “full to overflowing” for his paper, Dobson on Dobsonians, and the Clifford W. Holmes award went to him at the same conference, a plaque and $100. He had never liked the name on the telescopes and said so to the hall: “Long before they were called Dobsonians, I used to complain that telescopes should not be called by people’s names.” The group’s news was about money. An invitation to tour Alberta had come the summer before, the money for it had not been found in time, and the summer’s tour was off unless donations turned up that nobody was expecting. If the Sidewalk Astronomers had 500 members around the world, he told the audience, they could keep going all summer.3535.Telescope Making 1983, p. 19, p. 43; Riverside talk, web text.his own accountTelescope Making 1983: “Dobson on Dobsonians”, his Riverside talk of May 1983, Telescope Making no. 20, pp. 43ff.his own accountRiverside talk, web text: “Dobson on Dobsonians”, transcript of his 1983 Riverside talk, sidewalkastronomers.us.

The pictures he showed had been made for a book of the group’s own, to be called Sidewalk Telescopes, which he had been working on for 15 years. Molly Lusignan, one of the hard-core members, had photographed him putting a telescope together, and Earl Junghans had spent 5 years turning her photographs into line drawings, so that the book could be printed cheaply. Now Berry’s booklet had “scooped” it. Somebody else had done the job, Dobson told the hall, and the group would probably never bring out a telescope book.3636.Riverside talk, web text; Telescope Making 1983, p. 43.his own accountRiverside talk, web text: “Dobson on Dobsonians”, transcript of his 1983 Riverside talk, sidewalkastronomers.us.his own accountTelescope Making 1983: “Dobson on Dobsonians”, his Riverside talk of May 1983, Telescope Making no. 20, pp. 43ff.

Some of the group were going to India in September, for about 4 months, and Jacobson had given two Odysseys for them to take. They suited the job, Dobson explained: in India there would be no shortage of eyes, and he wanted telescopes that people could walk up to and walk away from, with no 12-foot ladder in the night. He was in India that year, “doing lectures all over the place,” as he told a class in the 1990s.3737.Riverside talk, web text; Energy 4; Cosmology class 7, at 01:04:37. Recorded: “doing lectures all over the place” (Cosmology class 7, 01:04:37).his own accountRiverside talk, web text: “Dobson on Dobsonians”, transcript of his 1983 Riverside talk, sidewalkastronomers.us.his own accountEnergy 4: John Dobson, “Energy 4”, notes with two song verses he dated about 1945 and about 2000, sidewalkastronomers.us (archived copy).his own accountCosmology class 7: John Dobson, cosmology class 7, audio recording, about 1994 (recording).

The Alberta tour came off in the end, though not with the 24-inch. Word that the trip was on came too late to raise a crew for the big telescope and the motor home, and the 18-inch, Stellatrope and a Sun telescope went instead in Dobson’s own van, which had been repainted California orange. In July 1986 he and one companion took the van north again, to Crater Lake and on to British Columbia. One morning at the lake the crew of the tour boat filled the van with food while nobody was there, dozens of sandwiches included, at a time when the two of them had badly run short.3838.Sidewalk Astronomer, Summer 2004, p. 12; Crater Lake and Kobau report 1986.his own accountSidewalk Astronomer, Summer 2004: The Sidewalk Astronomer (newsletter of the Sidewalk Astronomers), Summer 2004.his own accountCrater Lake and Kobau report 1986: John Dobson, “Crater Lake, British Columbia and Mount Kobau 1986”, trip report, sidewalkastronomers.us (archived copy).

At the Canadian border the customs officer came out to look at the telescopes and put their value 50 cents under the line where anything was owed. Dobson and his companion had been afraid of a charge of $500 on instruments that size. The star party was on Mount Kobau, and the two of them were asked to sit with the judges of its telescope makers’ competition. The optics prize went to nobody, for want of a contest: nearly all the big telescopes there had bought mirrors, most of them Coulter’s, and the only entry with a homemade one was the 18-inch the two judges had brought themselves. It was through another man’s 17.5-inch, fitted with a nebula filter, that Dobson had what he called the finest sight of the Veil Nebula in his life.3939.Crater Lake and Kobau report 1986.his own accountCrater Lake and Kobau report 1986: John Dobson, “Crater Lake, British Columbia and Mount Kobau 1986”, trip report, sidewalkastronomers.us (archived copy).

On Saturday, July 25, 1987, he gave the keynote address at Stellafane. He began with cosmology and came around to telescopes, and to the mount that had his name on it, which he did not think was much of an invention. It was like inventing the cup a second time, he said: armies had been killing each other with mounts like that ever since there was gunpowder, and he could not figure out why nobody had run telescopes that way. Whenever he was asked about the Dobsonian revolution, his usual answer was that “all previous revolutions were fought with cannons on Dobsonian mounts.”4040.Deep Sky 1987; Telescope Making 1987; Club biography.someone who was thereDeep Sky 1987: Report of the 1987 Stellafane convention, Deep Sky no. 20, Fall 1987.his own accountTelescope Making 1987: “Highlights of the 1987 Stellafane Convention”, Telescope Making no. 31, Winter 1987-88.a later writerClub biography: “John Dobson: A Brief Biography”, sidewalkastronomers.us (archived copy).

“I’m not particularly interested in telescopes; I’m interested in information,” he told the convention, and what counted about a telescope was this: “It’s how many people, in this vast world, less fortunate than you, have had a chance, through your telescope, to see and understand this world.”4141.Telescope Making 1987.his own accountTelescope Making 1987: “Highlights of the 1987 Stellafane Convention”, Telescope Making no. 31, Winter 1987-88.

The design went on changing in other people’s hands. At the Texas Star Party in 1988 Tom Clark, a builder who argued that a big telescope ought to be made light, watched Dobson look over his 18-inch very closely and take a few photographs of it. “I’m going to show my friends how the Dobsonian should have been designed in the first place,” Dobson told him. By that winter, a writer in Telescope Making reported, builders were replacing the cardboard tube with an open frame of aircraft aluminum. Dobson weighed the two in an undated essay: a solid tube gave the better view, but a telescope in struts was easier to get out where the public could use it, and that, he wrote, was what mattered.4242.Clark 1989-90; Telescope Making 1988-89; Struts and Wrappers.someone who was thereClark 1989-90: Tom Clark, article in Telescope Making no. 39, Winter 1989-90 (with his account of the 1988 Texas Star Party).record from the timeTelescope Making 1988-89: Telescope Making no. 35, Winter 1988-89: Richard Berry, “Telescope Making at Alcon ‘88”; an article on refining the Dobsonian; and the letter headed “Dobson in Need”.his own accountStruts and Wrappers: John Dobson, “Struts and Wrappers”, undated essay, sidewalkastronomers.us (archived copy of 2009).

In the summer of 1988 Don Moser of Smithsonian magazine traveled with him on Vancouver Island, where the parks ministry of British Columbia had invited him to give talks and put his telescopes out. Dobson’s son was with him for the summer, as in other summers, and the boy’s place on the road was the box mount of the biggest telescope, because the van had no room for a passenger seat. It was a battered 1973 Chevy and Dobson’s home for the trip, and it held the boy’s skateboard, Frisbee and soccer ball, his father’s guitar and lariat, the bedding, a stepladder and 4 telescopes.4343.Moser 1989, pp. 102-110; Space.com 2000.someone who was thereMoser 1989: Don Moser, “John Dobson, the celestial Pied Piper”, Smithsonian, April 1989, pp. 102-110.a later writerSpace.com 2000: Space.com profile of John Dobson, May 2000 (reprinted on sidewalkastronomers.us).

One evening at a park called Strathcona he lectured in the campground and then took about 50 campers down to the shore of the lake, where he set up 3 telescopes, Stellatrope, Zigadene and Ceanothus. It got late. Dobson, who was 72, was still going up and down the ladder when somebody on the park staff suggested packing up, and he seemed reluctant to stop.4444.Moser 1989, pp. 102-110.someone who was thereMoser 1989: Don Moser, “John Dobson, the celestial Pied Piper”, Smithsonian, April 1989, pp. 102-110.

At Rathtrevor Provincial Park he sat on the beach with the Sun telescope and called the bathers over to look at sunspots. A woman asked how much the donation was, and he told her to keep her money. Between bathers he talked to Moser about the big bang, which he did not accept, and about the mistake he thought physics had made in supposing that nothing lies under the universe. Asked whether this was not religion, he answered sharply that anyone who liked could call it religion, but that he was talking physics. One astronomer complained to Moser that Dobson thought he had the secret of the universe.4545.Moser 1989, pp. 102-110.someone who was thereMoser 1989: Don Moser, “John Dobson, the celestial Pied Piper”, Smithsonian, April 1989, pp. 102-110.

Asked about money, Dobson said that he was living on the last of what he had banked before Proposition 13, in the years when he taught at adult schools around the Bay Area and at the Jewish Community Center, and that once it ran out he expected to go on relief. His friends had kept him before, when he went to San Francisco with nothing to live on. “My rent is being paid by a friend in Atlanta,” he said, and a friend in Texas was paying his medical bills and for this tour. “I’m 72 years old, and I don’t have any money. I get no Social Security. I’m unemployed.”4646.Moser 1989, pp. 102-110.someone who was thereMoser 1989: Don Moser, “John Dobson, the celestial Pied Piper”, Smithsonian, April 1989, pp. 102-110.

He was proud, even so, of all the big telescopes that were out there by then. He had seen them at star parties, he said, loose on the hills like cattle. Making them to sell was another matter: “My mind will let me help people to make telescopes for themselves, but it won’t let me make telescopes for sale.” His own had been copied thousands of times, Moser wrote, by amateur builders and by manufacturers who advertised theirs as Dobsonians, and none of those sales earned him anything.4747.Moser 1989, pp. 102-110.someone who was thereMoser 1989: Don Moser, “John Dobson, the celestial Pied Piper”, Smithsonian, April 1989, pp. 102-110.

The Sidewalk Astronomers themselves were less active than they had been. Dobson, Moser wrote, was “never able to get significant funding from the National Park Service,” and one member said, “The group atrophied for lack of funding.” At another park, Miracle Beach, some people who came along found him jumping in and out of a twirling lariat. He had set up the Sun telescope, found nobody about, and fetched the rope from the van to pass the time. Then he called them over to see the Sun.4848.Moser 1989, pp. 102-110.someone who was thereMoser 1989: Don Moser, “John Dobson, the celestial Pied Piper”, Smithsonian, April 1989, pp. 102-110.

Telescope Making for the winter of 1988 to 1989 printed a reader’s letter under the heading Dobson in Need. The reader had clipped a story from the San Francisco Chronicle and sent it in, and other readers had sent the same story, Berry replied. Every reader who had built a Dobsonian telescope, he wrote, “surely owes John Dobson a debt of gratitude, and perhaps more.”4949.Telescope Making 1988-89.record from the timeTelescope Making 1988-89: Telescope Making no. 35, Winter 1988-89: Richard Berry, “Telescope Making at Alcon ‘88”; an article on refining the Dobsonian; and the letter headed “Dobson in Need”.

In 1989 Bartels spent a week with him in Seattle, at the house of John Casino, who was finishing a 36-inch mirror and needed help with the last of it. The glass was thin, and Casino was trying out ways of mounting it that would bend it into a better shape. When Dobson talked that week, it was about things far back: the war, his work as a chemist for the war effort and how the atomic bomb had shaken him, China, and the monastery, where he used to slip out for buckets of beach sand and sift it into sizes for grinding mirrors. Bartels tried sand afterward and found that it went to mud almost at once.5050.Bartels 2014.someone who was thereBartels 2014: Mel Bartels, “Remembering John Dobson”, bbastrodesigns.com, January 2014.

The man Bartels had found all but shouting at a doubter on the rim of Crater Lake was, in private, “quiet, thoughtful and prone to thinking in long periods of silence.”5151.Bartels 2014.someone who was thereBartels 2014: Mel Bartels, “Remembering John Dobson”, bbastrodesigns.com, January 2014.

1. The word. It is in print by the summer of 1979, in Berry’s note. Berry’s 1998 article dates the design to the early 1970s; Dobson put his first telescopes of the kind in the Sacramento monastery, which he left in 1967. His dislike of the name is on record in 1983, 1987, 1988 and 2003.5252.Telescope Making 1979; Berry 1998; Telescope Making 1983, p. 43; Stavig 2019, p. 7; Riverside talk, web text; Telescope Making 1987; Telescope Making 1988-89; Oregonian 2003.record from the timeTelescope Making 1979: Telescope Making no. 4, Summer 1979.someone who was thereBerry 1998: Richard Berry, on “the Dobsonian revolution”, Astronomy, August 1998 (25th-anniversary issue).his own accountTelescope Making 1983: “Dobson on Dobsonians”, his Riverside talk of May 1983, Telescope Making no. 20, pp. 43ff.a later writerStavig 2019: Gopal Stavig, “Ramakrishna-Vedanta in Southern California”, part VIII, “John Dobson” (2019).his own accountRiverside talk, web text: “Dobson on Dobsonians”, transcript of his 1983 Riverside talk, sidewalkastronomers.us.his own accountTelescope Making 1987: “Highlights of the 1987 Stellafane Convention”, Telescope Making no. 31, Winter 1987-88.record from the timeTelescope Making 1988-89: Telescope Making no. 35, Winter 1988-89: Richard Berry, “Telescope Making at Alcon ‘88”; an article on refining the Dobsonian; and the letter headed “Dobson in Need”.his own accountOregonian 2003: Richard Hill, “Telescopic Visionary”, The Oregonian, April 2003.

2. The Grand Canyon. The 1974 and 1976 visits are in the group’s report of 1976; the years 1978 to 1981 are Dobson’s, given in 2004. The 20,000 is his own figure, for days and nights together; Moser has the park shows drawing 400 visitors a night at times. The count has no year in his 1983 talk; “last year” in the 1980 interview and a news story of February 1980 make it 1978 or 1979, though in 2004 and in his memoir he said 1980. Only the interview’s edited text has the sentence about fundamentalists and creationists; it also has a ranger, not the Park Naturalist, sending the letter, and his guess about what the ranger thought, left out here.5353.Summer Tour 1976; Crater Lake interview, edited; Moser 1989, pp. 102-110; Telescope Making 1983, p. 44; Mayer 1980, p. 28; AP, 24 Feb 1980; Anecdotes; Crater Lake interview, transcript.record from the timeSummer Tour 1976: “Summer Tour 1976”, Sidewalk Astronomers trip report in two parts (New Oraibi, the Grand Canyon, Yosemite), sidewalkastronomers.us (archived copy).his own accountCrater Lake interview, edited: F. Owen Hoffman, interview with John Dobson, 31 July 2004, Crater Lake Institute oral history, edited by Stephen R. Mark (December 2005).someone who was thereMoser 1989: Don Moser, “John Dobson, the celestial Pied Piper”, Smithsonian, April 1989, pp. 102-110.his own accountTelescope Making 1983: “Dobson on Dobsonians”, his Riverside talk of May 1983, Telescope Making no. 20, pp. 43ff.his own accountMayer 1980: Ben Mayer, “Astronomy on the Sidewalk” (interview with John Dobson), Astronomy, April 1980, pp. 24-28.record from the timeAP, 24 Feb 1980: Associated Press, “In Quest Of The Heavens”, Santa Cruz Sentinel, 24 February 1980, p. 79 (California Digital Newspaper Collection).his own accountAnecdotes: John Dobson, “Memories” (anecdotes), sidewalkastronomers.us (archived copy).his own accountCrater Lake interview, transcript: F. Owen Hoffman’s own transcript of the same 31 July 2004 interview, posted before the edit.

3. The bus, the motor home and the 24-inch. Levy’s 1978 is the only date we have for the bus’s last trip; a notice of April 1978 still offered seats on it through September. How it died, and how the group traveled in 1979, the sources we have don’t say. That the Skaggs grant bought the motor home is Levy’s statement. Berry’s visit is dated to early June 1980 by a satellite launch he watched earlier on the trip.5454.Levy 1995; Noe Valley Voice 1978; Telescope Making 1980.a later writerLevy 1995: David H. Levy, “Walden of the Sky”, Sky & Telescope, September 1995, p. 84.record from the timeNoe Valley Voice 1978: “Star Parties”, Noe Valley Voice, April 1978.someone who was thereTelescope Making 1980: Richard Berry, “Riverside 1980”, and letters, Telescope Making no. 8, Summer 1980.

4. Crater Lake. The interviewer’s transcript has “several summers in a row”, a week or two each; the edited text has many summers of about 16 days and contradicts itself on when the visits ended and whether the group were official volunteers, so neither is stated. The visits we can date in the 1980s are 1981, a July in 1984 or 1985, and July 1986.5555.Crater Lake interview, transcript; Crater Lake interview, edited; Bartels 2014; Sidewalk Astronomer, Summer 2004, p. 12; Crater Lake and Kobau report 1986.his own accountCrater Lake interview, transcript: F. Owen Hoffman’s own transcript of the same 31 July 2004 interview, posted before the edit.his own accountCrater Lake interview, edited: F. Owen Hoffman, interview with John Dobson, 31 July 2004, Crater Lake Institute oral history, edited by Stephen R. Mark (December 2005).someone who was thereBartels 2014: Mel Bartels, “Remembering John Dobson”, bbastrodesigns.com, January 2014.his own accountSidewalk Astronomer, Summer 2004: The Sidewalk Astronomer (newsletter of the Sidewalk Astronomers), Summer 2004.his own accountCrater Lake and Kobau report 1986: John Dobson, “Crater Lake, British Columbia and Mount Kobau 1986”, trip report, sidewalkastronomers.us (archived copy).

5. Coulter. Dobson in 1983, a conference report of 1984 and Berry in 1998 name Jim Jacobson of Coulter Optical; only the 2006 interview says Braginton. Of three tellings of how Coulter’s big mirrors and telescopes began, Dobson’s of 2006 and a reader’s of 1985 are told here; in Berry’s of 1998 a cancelled contract left the company’s enlarged shop with capacity to spare. None rules out the others. Berry tied the booklet to readers’ demand in 1980, to Jacobson’s request in 1998.5656.Riverside talk, web text; Telescope Making 1984; Berry 1998; Sky at Night 2006; Van Nuland 1985; Telescope Making 1980.his own accountRiverside talk, web text: “Dobson on Dobsonians”, transcript of his 1983 Riverside talk, sidewalkastronomers.us.his own accountTelescope Making 1984: Report of the 1984 Riverside Telescope Makers Conference, Telescope Making no. 23, Summer 1984.someone who was thereBerry 1998: Richard Berry, on “the Dobsonian revolution”, Astronomy, August 1998 (25th-anniversary issue).his own accountSky at Night 2006: Interview with John Dobson, BBC Sky at Night Magazine, December 2006.a later writerVan Nuland 1985: James H. Van Nuland, letter to the editor, Telescope Making no. 26, Summer 1985.someone who was thereTelescope Making 1980: Richard Berry, “Riverside 1980”, and letters, Telescope Making no. 8, Summer 1980.

6. India and Alberta. For India we have his plan of May 1983, a later essay that puts him there that year and two recorded remarks, but no account of the trip. The words quoted are from a class of 1994 or 1995. His recorded words are quoted only where several independent speech-recognition systems (different engines, run separately) heard the same words; where they did not agree, he is paraphrased and the note gives the time in the recording. The Alberta tour is from his report in the group’s newsletter for winter 1985, which gives days but no year: summer 1984 or 1985.5757.Riverside talk, web text; Energy 4; Cosmology class 7, at 01:04:37; A Million Telescopes; Sidewalk Astronomer, Summer 2004, p. 12.his own accountRiverside talk, web text: “Dobson on Dobsonians”, transcript of his 1983 Riverside talk, sidewalkastronomers.us.his own accountEnergy 4: John Dobson, “Energy 4”, notes with two song verses he dated about 1945 and about 2000, sidewalkastronomers.us (archived copy).his own accountCosmology class 7: John Dobson, cosmology class 7, audio recording, about 1994 (recording).his own accountA Million Telescopes: “A Million Telescopes”, John Dobson’s spoken words transcribed from video by Jim McCullough, sidewalkastronomers.us (paraphrased).his own accountSidewalk Astronomer, Summer 2004: The Sidewalk Astronomer (newsletter of the Sidewalk Astronomers), Summer 2004.

7. Stellafane and Vancouver Island. The talk is dated by Deep Sky and worded as Telescope Making printed it. Timothy Ferris, in 1998, has less privileged for less fortunate and this universe for this world. Moser’s trip is dated to summer 1988 by Dobson’s age and the April 1989 issue. Moser prints the name and age of the son, then a child; this series leaves both out and says of him only what these printed accounts say of those summers.5858.Deep Sky 1987; Telescope Making 1987; Ferris 1998; Moser 1989, pp. 102-110.someone who was thereDeep Sky 1987: Report of the 1987 Stellafane convention, Deep Sky no. 20, Fall 1987.his own accountTelescope Making 1987: “Highlights of the 1987 Stellafane Convention”, Telescope Making no. 31, Winter 1987-88.a later writerFerris 1998: Timothy Ferris, “Annals of Astronomy: Seeing in the Dark”, The New Yorker, 10 August 1998, pp. 54ff.someone who was thereMoser 1989: Don Moser, “John Dobson, the celestial Pied Piper”, Smithsonian, April 1989, pp. 102-110.

8. Money and home. His club’s biography, like the Los Angeles Times, has him in Los Angeles for part of every year from 1978; the dated stays are from Gopal Stavig, a historian of Vedanta in Southern California. We have not read the Chronicle story that readers sent to the magazine, and do not know what it said, when it ran or what readers did about it; the heading is the magazine’s. On fees the record has both: he took no money at the telescope and his classes were paid work, yet the Chronicle’s obituary says he charged no fees for teaching.5959.Club biography; LA Times obituary 2014; Stavig 2019, p. 7; Telescope Making 1988-89; Moser 1989, pp. 102-110; Randall Museum listings, 1982-86; Astronomy 1983; SF Chronicle obituary 2014.a later writerClub biography: “John Dobson: A Brief Biography”, sidewalkastronomers.us (archived copy).a later writerLA Times obituary 2014: Elaine Woo, obituary of John Dobson, Los Angeles Times, January 2014.a later writerStavig 2019: Gopal Stavig, “Ramakrishna-Vedanta in Southern California”, part VIII, “John Dobson” (2019).record from the timeTelescope Making 1988-89: Telescope Making no. 35, Winter 1988-89: Richard Berry, “Telescope Making at Alcon ‘88”; an article on refining the Dobsonian; and the letter headed “Dobson in Need”.someone who was thereMoser 1989: Don Moser, “John Dobson, the celestial Pied Piper”, Smithsonian, April 1989, pp. 102-110.record from the timeRandall Museum listings, 1982-86: San Francisco Recreation and Park Department, “Schedule of Classes”, Josephine D. Randall Junior Museum listings, Fall/Winter 1982-83 and Winter/Spring 1986 (Internet Archive).someone who was thereAstronomy 1983: “See the Universe!”, on the San Francisco Sidewalk Astronomers at Fremont Peak, Astronomy, August 1983 (author’s name not legible in our copy).a later writerSF Chronicle obituary 2014: David Perlman, obituary of John Dobson, San Francisco Chronicle (SFGate), January 2014.

9. His cosmology. Part 7 tells it. The judgment given here was printed in 2003; Moser, in 1989, has him rejecting the big bang and bothering some professional astronomers.6060.Oregonian 2003; Moser 1989, pp. 102-110.his own accountOregonian 2003: Richard Hill, “Telescopic Visionary”, The Oregonian, April 2003.someone who was thereMoser 1989: Don Moser, “John Dobson, the celestial Pied Piper”, Smithsonian, April 1989, pp. 102-110.

10. What we have not read. We have not yet read his own Sky & Telescope article of April 1980, Have Telescopes, Will Travel, or that magazine’s 1989 profile of him by Stephen James O’Meara; we know both from its indexes only. A telescope book of his came out in 1991; Part 8 tells it. Quotations from the magazines, the 1980 news story and the club’s copy of his 1983 talk come from machine-read scans, not yet compared with the printed page.6161.Sky & Telescope indexes; Astronomy review 1991; Telescope Making 1987; AP, 24 Feb 1980; Riverside talk, web text.record from the timeSky & Telescope indexes: Sky & Telescope, indexes to vol. 59-60 (1980), vol. 78 (July-December 1989) and vol. 91 (1996), entries under his name; the articles themselves not read.record from the timeAstronomy review 1991: Review of John Dobson, How and Why to Make a User-Friendly Sidewalk Telescope, “Astronomy Books”, Astronomy, November 1991.his own accountTelescope Making 1987: “Highlights of the 1987 Stellafane Convention”, Telescope Making no. 31, Winter 1987-88.record from the timeAP, 24 Feb 1980: Associated Press, “In Quest Of The Heavens”, Santa Cruz Sentinel, 24 February 1980, p. 79 (California Digital Newspaper Collection).his own accountRiverside talk, web text: “Dobson on Dobsonians”, transcript of his 1983 Riverside talk, sidewalkastronomers.us.