Party Time

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Most of our parties were B&Bs (Beer & Broads) that started on Friday night and extended through early Sunday morning. A jazz group would sometimes come in to jam in the wee hours when they got off from work. We had a piano in our basement bar and would sing...

The Great Mail Box Robbery

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We decorated our bar with both street and other interesting signs that we gathered clandestinely. Unfortunately guests sometimes considered them cute and stole them. So the Social Chairman, P11, got the bright idea of offering a fifth of whiskey as the prize for the...

MIT Athletics

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MIT is a very tough school for athletics because the students who take athletics seriously have no time to practice. So MIT does not field a lot of Division 1A teams. However, MIT regards athletics as part of the education. If you can gather enough people to form a...

Paradise cafe

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One cannot talk about attending MIT in the ‘50s and ‘60s without talking about the Paradise Cafe. It was run by Roland “Mac” MacSorley as a classic neighborhood dive. It had only a beer and wine license. It served inedible sandwiches, and there was a bottle of pickled...

College Clubs

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The Ten Year Club. This exclusive club was for students from the late ‘50s who could not bring themselves to leave the MIT womb. Most of us managed to get our BS degrees within 5-6 years. But then we went on to graduate school, so that some of us were still going to...

One of a Kind

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P14 was, hands down, the most unusual person I’ve ever met. He was a great classical piano player; he turned down a scholarship to Julliard to go to MIT. He was absolutely brilliant. He ran quiz reviews in physics and math for the fraternity and he was an excellent...

College Perspectives

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Best Advice. P6 had a big Indian motorcycle. When the Mass Pike opened, P6 decided to try it out from NY to the Route 128 tolls outside Boston on opening day. He left a fleet of brand new State Police Chryslers in his dust. Just to add insult to injury, he avoided the...

Ages 10-13

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A guilt Trip (Age 10). Did I mention that I was a rather odious child? In ’48 the Ginza in Tokyo was mainly canvas street stalls amidst rubble fields. One day I stopped at a stall with lots of neat rubber spiders and insects for sale. I decided I wanted one, but...

Geology in Venzuela

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I was on a job evaluating an old gold mining district in Venezuela, El Callao. The district was up a tributary of the Orinoco River in head hunter country. (The head hunters were not much of a problem, though, after a century of state-sponsored genocide.) The mines...

Geophysics in the Outback

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We had a field crew running in the Australian Outback. The party chief was the legendary “Black Jack” Benlow, named for his preferred tool for calming down recalcitrant crew members. Jack had a strong sense for the proper way to do things. At 3 PM the crew would break...