Another part of my childhood got chipped away this week. Mr. Wizard, also known as Don Herbert, passed away on Tuesday. He was 89 years old. I always felt smart after watching Mr. Wizard's World on Nickelodeon. That my parents had grown up watching his show off and on didn't really mean anything to me at that point in my life. I was still selfish enough to think that I had discovered things like this (I was a teenager before I finally acknowledged that the Monkees had been on television before I was even born).

Mr. Wizard would take these seemingly complicated experiments and break them down so that anyone could understand the science behind them. I tried many of them myself. My parents liked this show much better than the green slime drenched You Can't do that on Television so they encouraged it. Even when I was in middle school and (in my mind at least) too old to watch Mr. Wizard, I still did. There were so few things to make an adolescent girl feel smart in the late 80's so I clung to what I could find.

I don't claim to have any overt love for science. Literature is and always was my thing. But, Mr. Wizard helped me understand the physical world around me and for that I will always be grateful.