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 MIT in the ‘70s. P12 probably set the record for number of consecutive years. He was doing a PhD in Metallurgy. Just as he was about to hand in his thesis, somebody would publish on his topic. This happened three times. The third time they took pity on him and looked the other way to let him out.
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.”