Alan Zorthian

I grew up right here.

Richard Feynman would come in and sit right here and my dad would sit over there.

Feynman was an ordinary dude.

You meet him, you thought he was like some dude off the street in New York.

My name is Alan Zorthian, and I am a architect.

My dad was Jerriar Zorthian.

He was an artist.

That was his main profession.

He was very good at it.

My father met Richard P. Feynman in the mid-50s when Feynman was playing bongos at a party and my dad needed to make a big splash so he was dancing around and they became good friends.

The friendship continued until Richard's death in 1988 and they were very close.

You know, they would argue.

They liked to express their opinions.

One of the things they were talking about was, you scientists don't appreciate...

Beauty.

It's a friendly type argument.

It went till very late in the evening and then he went home and he started thinking about it and he called my dad up and said, well, look, I think the problem is I don't understand what you do and you don't understand what I do.

So why don't we educate each other?

And then they started doing this thing and they were serious.

They did it.