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Cambridge (MIT
1954-1958)
Now, the hard part. My mother and grandfather were set on me going to MIT. It
was a given that I was to go there, so I did. We lived in Evanston with
Northwestern, and most of my friends went there. Some friends went 150 miles
south to the University of Illinois. We never visited any college. I took a
tour of Northwestern Engineering School but never got any impression of campus
life or entertained any thought of going there. MIT was a given, not a choice.
The 1936 birth year class was small, so it was not hard to get in. If you had a
slide rule, you're in.
I knew my way around Chicago and New York but
had not seen Boston. What a shock. What a delight. A perfect city to be a
student.
However, I was not ready to be a student at
MIT. I was way too immature, way too unworldly, way too shy, and unprepared for
MIT. There are only two kinds of students who thrive at MIT: brilliant
kids with high IQs and mature rich kids who are well-traveled and can afford
tutors. I was neither. I came in inadequately prepared for life -- academically
and socially.
Here is a fellow student's nostalgic
description of my stay. I remember these times as he describes them. https://thetech.com/2015/04/02/elander-v135-n9
Looking back, I realize that my life at MIT
was horrible. My experience was not unusual (my cousin committed
suicide in his dorm there). I had been groomed to go
to MIT since I was little. I had no choice, and I had no life.
When I first
arrived, I was assigned a room in the East Campus dorms. Mom insisted I was
going to pledge a fraternity. They were across the river, and I did not have
the slightest interest in or the social skills to enter them. I met every
friend I had at MIT in that first week in the dorm. I lived in Hayden 302 all 4 years and never set foot in any other living or
social place at MIT. There are dozens of colleges in the area. Except for some library work up the street at Harvard, I never visited any
of them.
I did not participate in any social activity
in the dorms or school and did not attend church or continue with scouts. I had
been suffering from depression and low self-esteem
since 7th grade and through High School. Going to MIT made all this
worse.
I started in Electrical Engineering like my
uncle and what seemed reasonable from my hobbies. At the end of the first year,
it was obvious that I could not handle the math, so I switched to Aeronautical
Engineering. It was a wrong choice since the department was small and the
professors were old and uninterested in undergraduates. There was no mentoring,
advising, or social contact with them or among the students.
MIT had very few female students and faculty.
We had one girl in Aero. I didn’t even know her name. Even rarer were black
students. I knew one in the dorm.
Being MIT, there were no humanities courses
to speak of. The typewriter my grandmother gave me got little use. I wrote a
paper on Thucydides Peloponnesian Wars without understanding any part of it.
The only exciting humanities course was about Skinner and involved some library
work at Harvard. MIT had a humanities requirement for graduation. There were
also graduation requirements in athletics and ROTC. These were rightfully
treated as jokes by many of us. In retirement, I took freshman courses in Literature,
Geography, History, Psychology, and Economics at Brookdale Community College in
NJ. Every one of them far superior to any humanities I
had at MIT.
I devoured Science Fiction for recreation.
The Science Fiction Club had talks by Hal Clement and Isaac Asimov. They, along
with Robert Heinlein, Ray Bradberry, and Kurt Vonnegut, were my favorite
authors.
Classical
music was
a big part of life in the Boston area. There were several classical music AM
and FM radio stations. MIT had a station in the dorm basement. My friend Roger
Buck was one of the DJs.
I had built a Heathkit FM radio, one of the
few FM receivers in the dorm. We strung over a mile of army field wire (from
the war surplus store) around the East Campus dorm buildings with several
"audio lines" (connections to individual's amplifier speaker
connection and taps to other student's room audio inputs). I was involved in a
city-wide experiment for stereo audio. We had various arrangements of
microphones in the MIT auditorium broadcasting concerts: one channel on WCRB FM, the other on WMIT AM from our basement,
and using the audio lines. The sound was so spectacularly better that stereo
later became standard for everything audio.
I liked the courses. The subject matter
interested me, and there were many choices and freedom to take classes in other
departments. I specialized in thermodynamics and internal combustion engines.
Junior year was focused on the design of a 2-place twin-jet training plane. I
had my fill of drafting table work after high school and could not get into the
project. The airplane I designed was a real dud and resembled nothing exciting
or advanced. The math associated with the project's aerodynamics, structures,
stability-and-control was beyond me, and I did not do well in those courses.
Pneumonia knocked me out in the middle of
Junior year. I nearly died. Friends walked me over to the MIT Infirmary. After
a week, MIT sent me home for a month. I missed too much of a couple of courses
and had to drop them.
An interesting thing happened in our
class. We got a "Hungarian Freedom Fighter," a victim of the
Russian takeover of Hungary. He was Superman. A bit older, a Hungarian Air
Force fighter pilot and champion glider pilot, accomplished Aeronautical
Engineering student, perfect English, tall, handsome, personable, and the
darling of our professors and the only girl in our class. I was not the only
one to feel inferior.
Fun
Fair
I worked at the Fun Fair in Skokie, IL, near
my home for all three summers. On good mornings, I would go out and fly, then
drive the miniature train, and run other rides in the afternoon and evening,
then pick balls at the driving range at night. I was too depressed and burnt
out to seek better jobs.
MIT Flying Club
The MIT Flying Club owned 2 Cessna 140s, 2-place rag wing 85 HP 100 mph simple
airplanes. These had radios, and we ran them out of Hanscom Air Force Base in
Bedford. It was an exciting place to fly as there were B-50s (later models of
B-29s) and other heavy planes. I did not get much flying time as it was an hour
away by bus, but I enjoyed dealing with the club. I produced the mimeographed
newsletter, was treasurer, and later president of the club. The members of the
club were mostly wealthy grad students and faculty with cars. It was not a
social club. Here is an
interesting article about the club in 1948-1949. How the club is today.
The Little Green
Car
Mom bought me a Renault Dauphine at the start
of my senior year. It was a tiny 4 door car that was fun to drive. It's
not so much fun to keep it running, and difficult to park in Cambridge legally.
In retrospect, it was a big mistake to have it. But I loved driving it. And
fiddling with it (which is what many kids did in high school with hot rods). I
had a couple of dates with a Simmons girl who liked to drive the car. She liked
it, not me.
My senior thesis was on turbo
supercharging the light plane engine, and I worked in the Mechanical
Engineering engine lab.
Senior year was very hard. I was rootless and did not have any idea where I was
headed. I did not want to go on to grad school and
didn't have any idea where I might find a job or build a life.
The 704 Computer
IBM donated a 704 computer to MIT and built a
new building to house it. I had seen many 701s on a field trip to Pratt &
Whitney and was intrigued by them. During my senior year, I signed up to take
the only course MIT offered in digital computing. The arrival of the new
computer created too much excitement, and the class was grossly oversubscribed.
I often had to stand outside the classroom windows on a ledge to hear and see
the instruction. There was no textbook yet. A friend gave me a bootleg copy of
the IBM 701 reference manual, but that was not much use since we had no
computer access, and the course was mostly math. I got an incomplete in the
course and stayed the summer to try and make sense of it. I flunked it. The
only course I failed (I had over a C average). I had dropped some courses in my
junior year and did not have enough credits to graduate with my class. I
had to complete another semester to graduate.
I had a job lined up at Mooney Aircraft in
Kerrville, TX. They were interested in my work on turbosupercharging (years
later, Cessna was the first to offer a turbosupercharger using the same engine
as my paper study). Now, thousands of light airplanes use turbosuperchargers. I
was not disappointed to lose out on the job. I did not want to move to Texas.
My grandfather and mother were incensed that
I did not graduate. I was left with no support or will to continue the pathetic
life I was leading. I did not want to stay another semester and could not
justify wasting more of my grandfather's money. I was pathologically
depressed
since 7th grade and had no business being at MIT.
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