LAKE TERNBY, Minn. — A local man who has not discovered, invented, written, or negotiated anything of note entered his fourth consecutive day of waiting by the telephone Thursday for a call from the Nobel committees, telling reporters he remained “cautiously optimistic” after being passed over for the prizes in medicine, physics, chemistry, and, as of early Thursday morning, literature.
Gary Tunstall, 61, a retired parts manager, has kept a folding chair beside the kitchen wall phone since Sunday night, ahead of Monday’s first announcement. He has left it, according to his wife, Bev, only to use the bathroom, to answer the door for a neighbor who wanted to borrow a ladder, and once to check whether the phone was plugged in, which it was.
“I’m not saying I’m owed one. I’m saying it would be strange if they didn’t at least call,” Tunstall said. “I’ve had a very strong year of opinions.”
Tunstall said that he had considered himself a contender for the physics prize on the basis of “a theory about why the left lane is always slower,” and for chemistry on the basis of a chili recipe he described as “basically a compound.” On Thursday, after the literature prize was announced at 6 a.m. Central time without a call, he said he had “not expected that one anyway,” noting that his most substantial written work is a three-page letter to the county about a culvert, which he believes the county has not read and the Swedish Academy may not have been able to obtain. By Thursday afternoon, the phone had rung four times. Two of the calls were about his car’s extended warranty, one was his sister, and one, he said, had been “a man who said ‘sorry, wrong number’ in a very formal way,” which Tunstall has chosen to interpret as Stockholm testing the line.
Prof. Desmond Achterberg, who holds the Prewitt Chair in Comparative Annoyance at Ellery State University, said Tunstall is part of a larger tradition. “Every October, a great many men sit near a telephone,” Achterberg said. “Historically, about 1.5 million of them, and in most years, between zero and six of them are called. The scholarship refers to the remainder as the Waiting Class. I named them.”
Tunstall said his hopes now rest on the Peace Prize, to be announced Friday in Oslo, for which he believes he is “a dark horse” after having stopped speaking to his brother-in-law in August, and on Monday’s prize in economic sciences, for which he cited his views on the price of a sandwich.
“Eleven dollars,” he said. “For a sandwich. Somebody has to say it, and I say it constantly.”
Dr. Chad Brickhouse, a senior fellow at the Institute for Common Sense, said by phone from a hardware store that he had also not been called. “It’s just common sense,” Brickhouse said. “They know where to find me.” He then asked the reporter to stay off the line in case they were trying to get through.
Bev Tunstall said she supported her husband and had set a second folding chair beside the first, in case the committee called while he was in the bathroom and wanted to wait.