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 roadblock set up for him at the Route 128 tolls by getting off the pike at the State Police barracks two miles before the tolls and going cross-country to Route 30.
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.”)