The reason was that it was the year of the Whole Man at MIT. MIT was envious that Harvard’s endowment was vastly larger and decided that lab rats, despite all their Nobel Prizes, weren’t making enough money for grand contributions. So for the class of ‘59 MIT decided to recruit some potential Captains of Industry by paying more attention to the SAT morning tests than the afternoon tests for science and math. In my class they got a whole lot more than they bargained for, and MIT never repeated that mistake again. The class of ‘59 majored in Wine, Women, and Song and the actual average cumulative rating was 20% lower than the cum that MIT predicts for entering freshmen.

The author doing his bit for recycling ca 1958

By any rational criterion I thoroughly wasted the first 2-1/2 years of my college education. On the other hand, I would have to say that my undergraduate years were the best years of my life and I would do it all again in a heartbeat.

In 1978 the movie Animal House was made, produced by National Lampoon. National Lampoon had spawned from the Harvard Lampoon, Harvard’s humor magazine. That movie was a source of outrage for my college friends and me. It is well known that Harvard types have no lives, so the National Lampoon had to steal ours to make the movie. I can put a real name on every character in that movie, and every incident in that movie, except one, happened during my tenure at MIT.

The one incident that didn’t happen during my tenure was the dead horse in the Dean’s Office. That didn’t happen at all because we actually got along pretty well with Freddie Fassett, the Dean of Student Housing. He was a classic Mr. Chips character, down to his mustache and bow tie. On at least two occasions he bailed our people out of jail for various escapades. I particularly remember an abortive panty raid. Several of us, including Greg Doyle, whom Freddie had bailed out recently due to an incident involving borrowing an Irish flag, had heard about it and were checking out the burgeoning riot when Freddie walked up to Greg, peered over the top of his glasses, and just said, “Mr. Doyle. Go Home.” We did, because Freddie was a neat guy who actually understood students.

My wife, The Twit, read this blog and insisted that I should not use real names for the people involved in the incidents described in the posts. Since she knows where the cream cheese and pepper jelly is hidden, I really can’t afford to annoy her too much. So I have provided quaint sobriquets for everyone in true Tech Tool fashion — P1, P2, …, Pn. I should also mention that everything that follows is true; you cannot make this stuff up.

 

 

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That evening there was a Freshman Orientation. The speaker said, “Look at the person on your right. Now look at the person on your left. One of you will not be here in four years for graduation.” Little did he know that for the class of the Whole Man, none of us were going to be there.

In those days, Rush Week was held immediately following the orientation. That was a chaotic week where fraternities and other living groups desperately recruited new members from among the hopelessly naïve freshmen. I started out at Chi Phi, a fraternity on Commonwealth Avenue in Boston. It was a nice place with nice guys, but it was a little formal for me with everyone dressed in suits. Also, the decor reeked of Old Money, so I was afraid of breaking something. My next stop was Phi Kappa, which was a couple of blocks down Commonwealth Avenue. Phi Kappa was very informal and owned nothing breakable. When I got there, there were three guys drinking beer on the front steps. One asked if I was a freshman. When I admitted I was, he handed me a beer from the six pack beside him and said, “Welcome to Phi Kap, kid,” and then went back to his conversation, ignoring me. I never left.

A few years later we were sitting on the front stoop playing poker and drinking beer on a nice summer day. The beat cop came by and paused. We said, “Hi, Officer.” (The ‘50s were a kinder, gentler time that allowed for better police/student relationships than the ‘60s.) He just stood there shaking his head and asked, “Don’t you guys ever go home?”

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P1, P2, and I decided to see every movie playing in Boston over the Reading Period just before final exams for second term of freshman year. We were all Physics majors because we didn’t know any better. P2 flunked Chemistry, which is forgivable as a Physics major. P1 flunked Physics, which is not so forgivable. I flunked them both, which was unforgivable for any major. (Curiously, P1 and P2 both went on to get PhDs in Physics.)

One thing we learned early on was that a good story was worth a good grade…

We wanted P3 to go out drinking, but he had a quiz the next day. We promised we would come up with a good excuse before the evening was over. P3 foolishly took our word because we were Responsible Upperclassmen. Surprisingly, we did come up with a brilliant strategy. As good engineers, we made a fake cast for his forearm with hidden catches that allowed it to be removed. We added enough dirt and cute, multi-colored signatures to make the cast convincing. It worked like a charm and P3 got to take a make-up exam.

Unfortunately, we did not think things through at 2 AM after an evening of debauchery. We forgot P3 would have to wear it to class every day for four weeks or so. That wasn’t a huge problem, but P3 woke up with a hangover one morning and put the cast on the wrong arm. (P3 used his MIT education in metallurgy wisely. If you google him, you will find about 1500 hits that all say something like, “P3, legendary rugby coach, said…” Among other things, P3 almost single-handedly got women’s rugby into the Olympics. He now tours the world with a bevy of young babes doing rugby tournaments while his wife, P3A, is home knitting.)

P4 was a fine Aeronautical Engineer but he didn’t do Humanities well. One night we wanted him to go out for a few beers, but he had a theme due the next day. I volunteered to dictate the theme to him since I generally aced Humanties because of my genetic gift for bullshit. Since his Humanities grades were abysmal, he figured he couldn’t do worse and agreed. Alas, the theme was on Hegel and I hadn’t gotten to Hegel yet in class. So I read five pages of his book and started dictating. Half an hour later P4 had his 1,500 words; after another half hour to clean the paper up and type it, P4 was out drinking. P4 got a B+, his highest grade ever on a Humanities theme. Personally, I felt the Prof really missed the point. (P4 ended up a VP at a Fortune 500. Clearly, Humanities was not a major concern at that company.)

[ed: The Twit also insisted that I expunge a marvelous story about how P4 managed to get poison ivy everywhere on a PK picnic.]

P2 had as much difficulty with Humanities as P4. Unfortunately, his story wasn’t good enough when he got back a Humanities quiz with a grade of 1, presumably for spelling his name correctly. It seems there was a question requiring a discussion of somebody’s dialectic and P2 read it as ‘dielectric’. Only P2 could make that kind of mistake because he was always a little out of phase with the universe the rest of us lived in. He once sent the IRS a letter that went something like, “I lost my W2 forms this year and I forgot to file my taxes last year. I think I owe you a little money this year but you owed me a little money last year. Let’s call it even.” P2 never heard back, and I would bet there is an IRS agent in a rubber room somewhere.

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“Sir, I haven’t been to many of your classes and…”

“Yes, I did have the distinct impression I had never seen you before in my life.” Some professors actually remember when they were students.

“Uh… Yes. I have a schedule conflict with another class that has no textbook, so I had to go to that class to take notes.”

“Hmmm.”

“Uh, I was wondering how I was doing.”

He rummaged in his briefcase and then said, “Not well. You haven’t handed in any homework and your average for the first three quizzes is 44 points below the class average.”

That was somewhat worse than I had hoped, but it wasn’t completely surprising since I had not cracked the textbook yet. However, the conversation was not going well, so I was forced to bring out the A material and after ten minutes the Prof finally agreed to pass me if I passed the last quiz and the final. The night before the final I opened the book for the first time. By 6 AM I had read all the material and I concluded I had no chance whatsoever of passing the final. My roommate, P5, happened to have half of fifth of bourbon on his desk. I wasn’t a bourbon fan, but under the circumstances it seemed like a good idea at the time. (P5, by the way, eventually became a priest, left the priesthood, and then married an ex-nun, apparently to keep religion in the family.)

I went over to the final at 9 AM with a glass containing the last of the bottle. I looked curiously at the first problem and it seemed somewhat familiar. The final was open-book, so I paged through the text and found an almost identical problem as an example; only the numbers were different. I copied the book solution using the quiz numbers and used the old standby of “Solve for X” because I didn’t trust my arithmetic at that point. So, I looked at the next problem and it was also familiar. Same drill for it and all the other problems. I was done with the 3-hour final in 90 minutes, which was fortunate because I was out of bourbon.

The prof gave me a C. Ironically, that was one of the few courses I passed that term, and I flunked out. When I re-entered after the mandatory ten month hiatus, I was tempted to try the same fluid approach to unleashing my subconscious. However, I had so many zeros weighing down my cum that I had to maintain Dean’s List grades for the last two years to barely scrape by for graduation. I just couldn’t take a chance even though a clinical case study would clearly have been of great value to students everywhere. So for two years I went to class, did homework, and read the texts. (My graduating cum was 2.495, which rounded to the mandatory 2.50 for graduation, and I had to get extra hours added to my thesis to manage that so that I wouldn’t have to come back for another term.)

Thus, it is was no great surprise that Phi Kappa was on Academic Probation for twenty-eight consecutive terms and ranked dead last among all MIT living groups for twenty-six of them. Alas, things change. Today MIT is a zero tolerance dry campus and PK (now Phi Kappa Theta due to a merger with Theta Kappa Phi) wins awards for academic excellence. Those poor kids just don’t know what they are missing.

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True geology story. A June grad geologist was surveying an area for a mining company. He then switched jobs and left his field notebook behind. The company put the area on the back burner for a few years. Then it became a hot prospect again. The company geologists poured over the guy’s notebook. However, one entry, FRDK, kept popping up and they had no idea what it meant. They finally hired the guy to come back at consulting rates. When they asked what it meant, he replied, “Funny rock; don’t know.” It is a profession that I highly recommend.

I found myself on a field trip over Spring Break living outdoors in MA, NY, and PA. New to the outdoors, I was ill-prepared. My sleeping bag had no bottom because it was meant to be used with an air mattress that I didn’t have. So that was one of the more miserable fortnights I’ve spent outside the military. It didn’t help that it was snowing or sleeting rain every day. Fortunately, I had sacrificed extra clothing for two bottles of scotch in my knapsack.

I was having a quick pop one particularly miserable evening when the Prof came up to me and said, “Look, I know you are older than the rest of these kids…” It was a sophomore course and I was a junior who had returned to school after a flunk-out hiatus. But I still wasn’t within spitting distance of 21. So, I thought he was going to tell me to quit drinking.

But he kept maundering on about setting a good example and not being too obvious about it. Finally, it hit me about what he really wanted. “Sir, would you like a drink?”

“Don’t mind if I do.” Even experienced geology professors can be miserable in some conditions.

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P9 was an interesting guy. He had a playboy image and his motto was, “Just keep drinking.” So he was eventually elected President of the fraternity. During his tenure he still played the piano, remained the life of the party, and always had a beer in his hand. What very few people knew was that he took the job very seriously. For his entire tenure as President, he was cold sober — the beer in his hand was always warm because it was the same one all night long. (While most of the inmates ended up being criminally liberal, P9’s world view today is somewhat to the right of Ghengis Khan.)

However, that sobriety came in handy. Each year we threw an April in Paris bid party in the spring. (A bid party is one where all the fraternities on campus are invited.) It started about 1 PM on Saturday and we traditionally served French 75s (one part lemon juice, one part simple syrup, two parts gin, four parts champagne), which went down very smoothly.

We actually cheated on the French 75s because we didn’t use gin. P10 was a chemistry major who earned book money isolating the denaturing agent in alcohol for the North End mob. The ATF changes the denaturing agent every six months. If it can be isolated and there is a cheap way to remove or neutralize it, that can be worth a lot of money. He wasn’t always successful, but every once in a while was good enough for the guys in the North End. So we got 200 proof ethanol in five gallon tin cans for free and that’s what gave the French 75’s a little added zip.

At around 5 PM the party was moving along nicely and everyone was having a great time; there were several people already passed out. We always hired an off-duty cop for big parties to deal with party crashers. The cop we had hired, who was probably the only person over 21 at the party, had a few French 75s and was off somewhere trying to find his gun. When the cops rolled up in front about some neighbors’ complaints, P9 was alerted and realized it would be best to head them off at the pass and meet them on the front stoop before they could see what was happening inside. As they came up the walk, P9 met them and asked, “What’s the problem, Officers?”

One of the cops looked at him and pointed up at the front of the house and demanded, “Take a look at that and tell me if you can figure it out!” P9 turned and looked up. Since it was spring all the windows were open. There was a fire escape that went up the front of the Back Bay Brownstone for four stories. Every landing on it had at least one body. People were hanging out of windows, some not too well clothed. Couples were making out. And through the windows a rock band was blaring. It was a great party.

Meanwhile, P9 responded, “Good point, Officer” and began to negotiate. The party continued until about 6 AM on Sunday.

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However, you can’t keep good men down. As we were driving to Winchester around 2 AM, we passed one of those four-legged storage mailboxes you see on corners. It occurred to us that a federal offense had to outrank a state offense, so if we took the mailbox we would win the fifth. Armed with that logic, we stopped and tried to grab the mailbox. However, the USPS had anticipated that and had hooks buried in the ground to prevent it being hauled away. I am still fuzzy about how we got the anchor out of the ground, but we did. It wouldn’t fit in the trunk but we had a convertible, so we put the top down and set it in the back seat, covering it with our shirts. We drove it back to PK to demand our prize. Fortunately there weren’t many people out at 3AM because our disguise was a little suspicious with three guys driving in their T-shirts with the top down in 40 degree weather.

We woke up P11 to claim our prize. Sadly, he was fairly sober and wanted no part of a mailbox. Nor did the President, who happened to be P10 in his maturing phase. So, the mailbox was put on the front stoop. The cops were called and told someone had played a prank on us.

Alas, the story didn’t end there. That summer, as luck would have it, I was resting my eyes on a couch in the Reception Room on the first floor, recovering from the previous evening’s revels, when the doorbell rang, rather insistently. I was the closest and answered it. The guy at the door flashed a badge. He was a postal inspector and said he wanted to talk about the mailbox.

I didn’t see a lot of options, so I invited him in, planning on relying on the prank story we had used when calling the cops. He asked for my name. When I gave it, he checked a list, looked up at me, and asked, “Did you steal the mailbox?” Oops. Because of my misspent youth, I knew that my fingerprints were in the system. I also remembered twisting, tugging, and lifting the mailbox from every possible direction so my prints would have been all over it. (At 3 AM you do not think of things like wiping the box down.) Ordinarily, I might have tried to brass it out, but my teeth were itching from my hangover and I wouldn’t have been able to match wits with a caterpillar. So, I confessed. I wouldn’t tell him who else was involved, so he told me to get the other guys and be in his office the next week — or else. I called P3 and P9 and, fortunately for me, they showed up. Nothing happened and I imagine the story brought a little levity into the dreary lives of the USPS postal inspectors.

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MIT also required four terms of participation in sports as a degree requirement. This was usually fulfilled by taking a variety of classes — swimming, archery, sailing, etc. In addition, every MIT student must pass a swimming test, probably because MIT is concerned with students falling off the Harvard Bridge and drowning. (That was not really a problem back then since the Charles River was so polluted you could walk on it.) I recall my swimming test where one kid who could not swim decided to fake it by walking along the bottom of the pool. With this caliber of student athletes, it is hardly surprising that MIT teams were not known for their winning ways. (Actually, MIT has produced a surprising number of All-Americans in sports like pistol shooting and track & field.)

P1, P2, and I took an archery course. We didn’t do really well because it was outdoors and we were trying to see if we could reach the grounds keeper riding a mower about a hundred yards behind the targets. MIT was not that dumb; the heaviest bow they provided was only 36 pounds, which wouldn’t quite reach. However, that class resulted in one of my favorite P1 stories. P1 was not a big guy, maybe 160 lbs. and 5’10”. He had selected the heaviest bow. A big guy, in the 6’2”, 220 lb. range was stuck with a 30 lb. bow and wanted to trade for P1’s 36 lb. bow. P1 didn’t want to trade, and the guy said that P1 was too small for the bow. P1 fits an arrow and holds the bow horizontally while he pulls the string back. As it happens the arrow is pointed right at the guy’s navel. P1 says, “Seems OK to me.”

P1 may not be big but he is the toughest guy I know. He played goalie for the PK hockey team. No one on the PK hockey team could skate backwards, so there was a notable lack of defense in front of him. Nonetheless, P1 played without a mask. P1 was also a stalwart of the Iron Eight, our intramural flag football team, as our center. A lot of living groups took sports a tad more seriously than we did. We played teams whose guards outweighed our whole team. One game we had to push the opposing ball carrier over the goal to avoid losing 69-0. (It was good training, though. When MIT broke intramurals up into A and B divisions, the Iron Eight ended up winning B.)

Then there was the Paradise Cafe softball team that played in the MIT Summer League. It was made up of several students on the Ten Year Plan for graduating who hung out at the Paradise Cafe, appropriately located across the street from MIT’s nuclear reactor and the Atomic Diner. (The Atomic Diner had the only short order cook in the world who took his lunch break from 12-1.) The team also had ringers who never attended MIT but worked around MIT. It was actually a very good team and dominated the Summer League for years. I was the weak link because I was overseas when US kids played baseball, and I learned field hockey and soccer instead. However, I had a lifetime batting average over .750 because I choked up on the bat so much and swung so late that I kept hitting Texas Leaguers into right field over 2nd base. Alas, my fielding lacked finesse, largely due to my being in the Paradise Cafe three hours before game time. One day I was playing 2nd base and a guy hit a shot right at me. I took a bit too much time analyzing the trajectory and it knocked my baseball cap off. That got me relegated to being 1st base coach.

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There were three groups of customers. One group included hulking warehousemen from the Metropolitan Warehouse a block away. They provided a big chunk of the 5-8 crowd as they desperately tried to avoid going home to their wives. The second group consisted of truckers from a nearby trucking company up Albany Street. They were mostly the lunchtime crowd. When they came in they would order five Houlihan’s 16-ouncers at once because they were in a hurry to get back to their trucks. Then there was the Ten Year Club MIT types, almost all from PK, who took care of the 3-Midnight shift, playing bridge before heading to the Tiki Hut in Chinatown for the 1-5 after hours shift.

Mac was a bit lax when it came to checking IDs. I had been frequenting the place so long that I was tending bar for him to pay my tab before I turned 21. When I got drafted, I was in a unit at Ft. Bragg that required a top secret clearance, and I gave Mac as a credit reference. The FBI went to see him and he thought I was in trouble, so he told them he never heard of me.

Sadly, the Paradise Cafe changed after Mac died. At 5 PM it would shut down for an hour while they brought out rubber plants and pictures of ‘30s boxers. At 6 PM it would re-open as a gay bar. So, the Ten Year Club had to set up a new headquarters at the F&T Delicatessen in Kendal Square. Physically the F&T was a major step up from the Paradise since the food was edible. When the F&T closed in the late ‘70s, due to the onslaught of a growing MIT, everyone in the Ten Year Club had managed to graduate and had left the womb. It was the much lamented end of an era.

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P12 was pretty typical of Ten Year Club members; very smart, generous, and a nice guy. On the other hand, in some respects he was a piece of work, most notably for a streak of Germanic stubbornness. One night the cops came to a party we were having in a house we rented in Nahant after our undergraduate years. P12 could hold his liquor very well, but he could also be a tad stubborn. One cop said something to the effect that if we didn’t quiet down we would get arrested. P12 went into jail house lawyer mode and said, “You can’t do that.” The cop says he could. P12 said he couldn’t. Quelle surprise! P12 spends the night in jail.

I went on a safari with P12 to Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). We were guests of some Rhodesians we had never even met. These people were very nice to us. We were not even half-way through the first beer when P12 started giving them a hard time about apartheid. He sometimes has a problem picking his spots.

P12 went cycling in Europe most summers. He often came back with some babe who spoke no English and she would stick around a few months and disappear. There was some speculation that P12 was a serial killer, but I suspect the babes would just learn enough English to realize they didn’t want to talk to him.

The Bridge Club. Playing bridge was probably the activity that sucked the most time away from scholastic activities. There were some good players and some bad players. My favorite bidding sequence involved P11. If you are a bridge player, I swear this is true. The bidding went: 1 diamond; pass; 2 diamonds; pass; 3 diamonds; pass; 4 diamonds; pass; 5 diamonds; pass; 6 diamonds; pass; 7 diamonds; double; redouble; down 7.

P13 and I were playing in a duplicate tournament. Most of the people who played duplicate bridge in those days took it very seriously. Not so much for us. Before the tournament P13 and I decided to play a particular variation of a convention (Forcing Stayman). During a hand P13 made the key bid to which I was forced to respond. However, by that time I had forgotten we were playing the convention and I passed. Our opponent immediately picked up our convention card and asked P13 what my pass meant. With a very serious face P13 clarified, “It’s the Alzheimer’s convention.”

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In those days, as a land grant college, MIT required two years of ROTC. P14 and another guy had a contest to see who could get the most demerits. They were cutting all the ROTC classes and drills so they were in a dead heat near the end of a term. P14 won by going to class and giving the instructor a hard time. That had a price, though. P14 had to come back for a full term just to make up that course to get his degree. We had his drill schedule, and we would occasionally drop by to cheer him on.

P14 was a very charming guy. You would talk to him for ten minutes and find yourself telling him your life story. P14 was also gay. The upperclassmen would take bets on how long it would take the freshmen to figure that out as P14 would bring a parade of Polish seamen and high school English teachers to parties as “old friends”, rather than girls. (You have to remember that this was the ‘50s when gay bashing was a popular outdoor sport and not even Broadway actors came out of the closet.) It is a testimony to the tolerance learned at PK that when I see old friends they will all eventually ask, “Have you heard from P14? How is he?” The answer is: He is still being P14. (He was such a strong influence on PK that in 2013 a Facebook page was created just to collect people’s recollections of him — the only PK from those years so honored.)

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I was thinking about getting a bike and asked him for advice. He said, “It will take you about three weeks to really feel like you are part of the machine. It will be about a year before you actually know how to ride it.” He was absolutely right. I was over-driving it and dropped it to the tune of a dozen skull fractures a little less than eleven months after I got it.

Never Believe What People Tell You. P7 was an EE who missed his calling. He should have been in sales because he could sell snake oil to anyone. During a snow storm he was bored, so he called an employment agency and demanded to know where the snow shovellers were. He represented himself as a Mass DPW supervisor. He then called the DPW, using the employment agency guy’s name wanting to know where the snow shovelers should go. Then he bounced back to the employment agency using the name of the guy he talked to at the DPW. It took a couple of more calls, but eventually he got jobs for twenty snow shovelers in Copley Square.

P8 was P7’s roommate. P7 talked P8 into going out on the fire escape in his underwear in winter. P7 then closed and locked the window. He did this twice in three years. (Lest you believe P8 was a total dunce, he also got a PhD in Physics. Admittedly, though, Physics PhDs do tend to be an odd lot.)

The asylum changes the inmates. One way or another, almost everyone who passed through that place in those years was changed. P10 was an extreme example of that. He came from a working class neighborhood in Newark and had some baggage from that. I remember a Kitchen Raid one night when he was a freshman. He made the statement, “If this place every pledges a nigger, I’m out of here.” Four years later he was President when the first black was pledged and they are still good friends today. And P10 is now a card-carrying Screaming Liberal.

The inmates were a very eclectic group. Their socio-economic backgrounds were very different and they had very diverse viewpoints. So much so that it amazes me that we all still hang together after half a century. People come in from all over the world for fraternity reunions and many of us see each other regularly between reunions. I think the greatest value we got from PK was the ability to get along with almost anybody. (Which was quite valuable to me later on when I was pushing geophysical field crews, but that’s another story…)

About the only thing we shared in common was a sense of humor. If I had to characterize that era in a single phrase, it would be that there was a lot of laughter. You had to be thick skinned to live there because a good ‘chop’ — a satiric, personal barb — was highly valued.

Spouses. I can’t leave that period without a word about long-suffering spouses. Those women put up with a lot of crap. How many women go to St. Patrick’s Day in New York every year in a hearse with shamrocks plastered over it? When a roommate, in the more puritan ‘50s, demands to know what a guy is doing passed out on the spare bed, how many could reply, “Oh, that’s just H.S.”? How many women would put up with a sixteen year engagement like The Twit did?

And they continue to do so; the divorce rate is under 5%. Not many people can say they have attended more golden anniversaries than funerals among their college friends.

As a group it would not be possible to find a nicer, wittier, more charming, or more full of life group of women. It defies imagination to understand what they saw in a bunch of heavy drinking, immature, and philandering college boys. (The opening statement of my instructions for my wife after I am dead is, “If you feel lonely, get a cat because you have lousy taste in men.”)

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