McCullough’s Legacy

David McCullough

He squeezed through the line and said with a gentle smile, “Excuse me,” sterling blues looking up an inch or so at me. Well-coiffed white hair, thick arched eyebrows, wearing a blue sportscoat, his wife followed him, also well-coiffed and in a simple classic gray dress. The crowd, bending around the corner and down the block had come to see him talk. It was October 2015.

He and his wife disappeared into the foyer of the small college town theater. In minutes he’d take the stage to a capacity crowd of over 1000. His talk, The History You Don’t Know. 

Born in Pittsburgh in 1933 as David Gaug McCullough and a Yale graduate, he was a Pulitzer prize winner and the trusted storyteller of the documentaries, The Civil War and Seabiscut. 

I’d taken my 91 year old mother who’d read some of his books, Harry S. Truman, John Adams and Theodore Roosevelt. I’d read the Truman one. We had tickets several seats back from the stage. The audience chatterings quieted as he walked to the podium, then the applause thundered.  

He looked up at the balcony, then at the packed crowd below and began. “Harry Truman said the only new thing in the world is the history you don’t know.”  

The crowd listened as he talked about the importance of understanding the principles of the founding fathers, patriotism, loyalty, modesty. 

My mother, who graduated from college during the WWII years, awaiting the return of my dad from the European campaign, enthusiastically smiled, nodding at his words. 

For me, an obscure writer of essays and several mystery novels, McCollough’s reflection about what drove him to write books was the message of the day. 

“It was always curiosity,” he said, “that motivated me to begin a project, from the time I set out to work on my first book, The Johnstown Flood.”

McCullough, while an ivy league graduate in English Literature, only held a BA degree, which didn’t give him the Ph.D union card into the academia world of history writing. In many publishing circles, that higher order sheepskin, and only that sheepskin, permits one to speak about matters of today and yesterday. But an idea and a wanting to learn drove him onward. 

McCullough said he was lucky to have his first book picked up by a publisher. But, I only wanted to learn about that flood which took over 2000 lives in 1889 and occurred near my Pennsylvania home when I began the project. 

That intent, he said, was his starting point with that book in 1968 and all those that followed, some 14 non fiction. 

So, the yearn to learn and a curious mind sustained him in all his years as a writer, well into his 80’s. It was this simple comment that stuck with me that Fall evening. For it is curiosity that prompts me to pick up the pen most mornings, whether where reflection and research is needed, or following my imagination into a mystery.   

According to Jennifer Uhrlass, a family therapist, writing in the 2023 February edition of Psychology Today, “Curiosity is the driving force behind human progress and understanding.”

Being curious activates the neurochemical dopamine, the pleasure chemical which creates motivation for more learning. That curiosity, she says, can be an antidote to fear and coping with uncertainty, the by-product being creativity leading to innovation.

Boundless examples exist through the millenniums in cognitive science and of the wayfarer adventurer who seeks just to learn.

There is some evidence that travel and charting a course for unknown lands wards off depression. Adventurers do so, to ease the stagnation that routine brings. Stanley might not have found Livingstone without the curiosity to search for that missionary.

Without Newton’s insatiable appetite for wanting to know, we’d not have universal laws of gravity, thus the Wright Brothers would not have made that famous first Kitty Hawk flight in 1903.   

Other than finding truth, a real testament to curiosity is the impact it has on one’s survival. 

A Wikipedia google search says curiosity is an evolutionary adaptation based on an organism’s ability to learn. Elephants, apes, octopuses, dolphins and rats will pursue information in order to adapt to their surroundings. This adaptation is called neophilia, the love of new things. For one interested in the study of curiosity, creatures in the wild have perpetual curiosity, whereas humans have something called epistemic curiosity, or a drive to know, to learn, to create.

Ultimately, does a curious mind help one live longer? According to a writer, George Lee it could. In the blog, The Curious Life, he says being curious could very well help the older person to live longer. 

In one study published in the Journal of Aging, he says, older adults who scored higher on measures of curiosity had a lower risk of dying over a five year period.

Of course that finding doesn’t mention how a person gets to old age and whether curiosity can help them get there. 

But, those closest to us sometimes are our best models. My mother, age 96 when she died, was an avid reader. Her younger brother, also near 96 when he died, always had his nose to the encyclopedia page. Another uncle, who never met a stranger and was a pilot died at 89 and spent his life planning one engineering project after another.

My aunt, 98, took up the banjo after 70 and was an avid Bridge player. Her cousin, 98, took up the guitar and also had a passion for golf her entire life. 

My father-in-law was 98 when he died. After his retirement he spent his days fixing and puttering about and even though he only had a grade school education he found a life of learning in the world of audio books.

Curiosity isn’t the magic pill that will help one survive to old age, but unlike its impact on the cat, it will do us no harm either.

David McCullough left us in 2022 at the age of 89. He never wrote a book about curiosity, but he left a legacy in his many pieces of work which speak to it.