The Caltech experience (1951-52)
I should never have attempted Caltech. I had excelled academically at Beaumont Union
High School, and I thought I liked science.
No way, however, was I ready for the scholastic meat-grinder that was
Tech at that time (& certainly remains).
I was used to getting top grades with minimal effort; at Tech I busted
my butt, for B’s. Most of my
contemporaries were from large high schools, with top-of-the-line lab equipment
and excellent, well-paid teachers. I was
from Beaumont. As I wasn’t used to being
mediocre, I responded by being a first-class cut-up. More about that later.
I was only there my freshman year. Each quarter we took math (calculus),
physics, and chemistry. We also had
small courses in English, history, and something called Air Science – Tech was
experimenting with Air ROTC. (It was a bust, I’m pretty sure.) We went round to our classes in “sections” –
about 20 guys (no girls at Tech then).
Most of the real teaching was done by senior graduate students who had
been admitted because of their research abilities, certainly not their teaching
proficiency. Once or twice each week we
(the entire freshman class) would have a lecture from one of the professors –
Linus Pauling, for instance. They were
generally a waste of time; most of the real learning was accomplished in problem sessions, with the grad students.
I estimate that we went to class five or six hours each day. We also studied at least four hours every
day, and sometimes a lot more. Study was
intense, believe me. We were all
competing for the best grades. Caltech
computed its grades to the third decimal place; a 2.965 (about my overall
average) was WAY better than a 2.890!
There were no girls, and most of us were classic nerds, so
dating was nearly nonexistent. Every so
often we had an “exchange” with some nearby girls’ school, such as Scripps in
Pomona. We tended to think the girls at
these events were strange and unattractive, and I’m certain that they felt the
same about us. Exchanges don’t work; any
guy sufficiently self-confident to have fun at such an event would have a
girlfriend already.
So what did we do for fun?
Well, in my case, we dabbled in sports, and goofed off. Caltech has four “houses” (or did, 50 years
ago). We played one-another in 7-man
flag football. I was a big star – I
had played high school football, I could run, and I could throw. We had fantastically complicated plays, which
were ingeniously designed but rarely worked because we were such a bunch of
klutzes. My house was Dabney, and we won
the title that year. I also played
basketball; I tried out for the varsity but got cut; thereafter I played on the
JV team – possibly the worst basketball team ever assembled, except for one – we
beat somebody that year. I had my
glasses broken several times, and it was near the end of that season that I
decided I would give up the game – it was costing my family too damned much to
replace my glasses. (Contact lenses were
decades in the future.) In the spring I
played tennis with anybody I could find; I don’t think Tech had a tennis team,
but it did have some good courts.
Goofing off required great amounts of time and energy. Goofing off at Tech was a major activity;
nerds have to be able to let off steam somehow.
We engaged in numerous inter-house water fights, using water balloons,
fire hoses, stirrup pumps, and anything else that would work. My main task was to provoke a fight; I was a
freshman, dumb, fairly fast, and fearless.
When we decided to provoke a fight with another house, I would strip to
my shorts, fill two water balloons, then run through the lounge area of the
enemy house, screaming inflammatory challenges – and I would break the balloons
over the heads of whoever was sitting there.
Then I would run like hell for Dabney.
Once I got caught. I got the
“whirlpool treatment”. I won’t describe
it, but it involved a toilet.
One water fight, between all four houses, got so out of hand
that the Pasadena police were called in.
We would throw water balloons at them, then lock our (massive) doors, go
out on the sleeping porch, and prepare to drop to the next floor if they came
in. That night we did quite a bit of
water damage to the Tech accounting machines, which were in the basement below
one of the houses. All hell broke loose,
and we didn’t have quite so much fun for the rest of the year.
I had three roommates.
The room was plenty big enough for our desks, books, clothes, etc.,
because we slept on the porch. This
“sleeping porch” was long enough to accommodate about a dozen beds. I don’t remember having any trouble with this
arrangement, although sometimes people would have to be shut up. (We were freshman; we were rarely
drunk.) I guess the Pasadena weather is
as good as they advertise. I think the
bathroom was “down the hall” somewhere; I can’t remember.
Oh, yes – Dabney House.
It was quite comfortable, almost elegant. It wasn’t a fraternity, but it had some of
the trappings. (The other houses were
the same.) Once you had “selected” your
house, and they had agreed to take you (everyone got in somewhere), they
“initiated” you – made you perform some task, at the peril of am uncomfortable punishment. I was told
to locate three bricks carved with line integral signs among the thousands of bricks that at that time
made up most of the campus walkways, as well as some of the buildings. I found two, but not the third. I decided to brazen it out; I went before the
assembled House and announced that there were four such signs (I had just scratched one the day before, in an
out-of-the-way place.) Unfortunately for
me, the next day the seniors went out and inspected my effort – and judged it a
fake! I was sentenced to the dreaded
“egg treatment”.
Here’s how the egg treatment worked. Someone went to a second-story window,
measured outward exactly 18 inches from a designated spot – and lowered a plum bob. The spot the plum bob indicated was
marked with an X. The victim was then
stripped to his shorts and required to lay with his mouth directly over the
X. One of the victim’s roommates was
sent to the proper window and ordered to measure out exactly 18 inches – and
break a raw egg. Ideally the egg falls
directly into the victim’s open mouth.
If you closed either eyes or mouth, they did it again. If your roommate missed, they did it to
him. Fortunately, I got by with only a
single egg. You were not required to
swallow.
Some of the initiation tasks were more pleasant than
others. One of my fellow Dabney freshmen
was Frank Capra, Jr., son of the famous movie director. He had gone to studio school (with Elizabeth
Taylor, no less). His “task”, if you
could call it that, was to bring a starlet to dinner, which he did. Naturally, we were mostly too shy to talk to
her, but plenty of us dumped food on our shirts while watching her. I think her name was Pier Angelie.
My best friend at Tech was a guy named Sam Sims. He was from Indio and had played high school
football against me, although I didn’t know him at the time. He was in another house – I believe it was
called “Ricketts”. Sam was on the
Caltech varsity football team, which at that period was not so bad. Unfortunately, he had a trick shoulder, which
limited his playing time. Pretty much
every evening after dinner I would go over to Ricketts, burst into his room,
and attack him. We would wrestle,
slamming each other around the room and making a God-awful racket for about ten
minutes. People from all over would come
to watch. Then we would start our
nightly academic labors. It was an
effective way to blow off steam, I guess.
The funny thing is that Sam’s roommate studied right through it – he had
earplugs and only appeared to notice when one or the other of us crashed into
him.
I should write about several other things – the exams, and
the phenomenon of “snakes”.
For the “big three” – math, physics, chemistry – our exams
were taken together – the entire freshman class (180 souls, I believe) in a big
auditorium. They were designed to take
four hours. However, for some of us
could forever would have been too short – and for a few, only an hour or two
were needed. There were about a
half-dozen guys in the class that were extremely smart; they seemed to solve
problems by intuition, and had a hard time helping the rest of us. These despicable creatures would compete to
see who could finish first. When one of
them did finish he would stand up, yawn, grab his stuff and, going down front,
toss his exam paper (blue book) on the table.
All the while a chorus of hissing and booing would grow. As the object of all this hatred and wrath
exited the room, he would invariably turn, smile, and flip the rest of us the
finger. It was all in good fun; I doubt
if any of these guys were ever actually killed, although there were numerous
death threats.
In addition to these ultra-smart guys there were a similar
number of kids who also got near-perfect grades, by dint of studying virtually
all the time. They were called “snakes”,
because they would go into their holes (their rooms) and never come out, no matter
what was going on outside. A favorite
activity during water fights was to smoke out the snakes and toss them in the
shower – or worse.
I will record one instructive example of Caltech humor, with
regard to a snake. As I said earlier, we
all took our exams together, in one big room.
Tech had a rigid honor system; there were no faculty anywhere around
during exams. (Grades were so important
that – if you cheated and anybody found out – the students themselves would expel you from school That sort of thing happened
every so often.) So, during an exam, if
you had to go to the bathroom, you simply left your bluebook at your seat, and
went. One time a guy sitting next to a
snake happened to have an extra bluebook.
When the poor reptile in question got up to go to the john, his neighbor
hid his bluebook, put the blank one on his desk and, when the snake came back,
lit it afire! The poor guy screamed,
began to cry, beat out the flames with his bare hands, and then attacked his
persecutor – who was twice his size.
When he got his real exam paper back he was too upset to continue. There was hell to pay, naturally, but at Tech
this was considered the height of fun.
(I didn’t see this; it was a Caltech legend. I don’t doubt that it happened.)
So why did I leave?
Well, I wasn’t happy there, and I blamed it on science, not myself. I decided I wanted to be a politician (!),
not a physicist. Thus I decamped to
Stanford to go to law school. (The
change of schools nearly put me in the army, in the middle of the Korean
War.) As you know, I did return to science. but not for a long time.
However, I think I was better off leaving Tech and getting my unorthodox
science training the way I did. But who
knows?
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