What’s Wrong with This Picture? (age 17) We were living in New York City at the time and I needed to apply to college. I had won a Regents scholarship that was good only in NY state, so I applied to Manhattan College and Cornell. Cornell did not reply to my application and Manhattan, which usually accepts anyone with a rosary, rejected me. So I ended up at MIT in Massachusetts, sans Regents scholarship.
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.