Memoir 9: More college

Stanford

Memoir 9:  Stanford

In this section I’m going to write about my experiences in college -1951 to 1955.  I went to college a lot more years than that, but as a graduate student – this will come later.  I attended Caltech in Pasadena for one year, 1951-51, and Stanford 1952-1955.  I already have written a summary of some of the weird goings on at Tech and have posted it separately.

I had blamed “Science” for my unhappiness at Caltech, and had somehow persuaded myself that I wanted to go to law school, and then become a politician.  (I was a rabid Taft Republican in those days; I thought people like Eisenhower were practically Commies!)  Therefore, I became a political science major, later transferring to economics.  One of my classmates was the current senior (VERY senior) senator from California, The Honorable Diane Feinstein.  She was Diane Goldman then and was constantly involved in campus politics.  She was a fairly good student, but easy to fluster during the debates that always developed out of our Thursday discussion sections.  Together with Jerry Goldberg – center on the football team – I did my best to piss her off.  She could be a bit self-righteous. 

Anyway, after Caltech, Stanford was very easy.  After calculus, physics and chemistry in the same quarter, three quarters in a row, a few courses in “social science” and a unit of band were a vacation.  I tried to get into as many intramural sports as I could.  I played a lot of tennis.  And, of course, I spent a lot of time trying to meet girls.

 

At Stanford, meeting girls was hard.  I think the male/female ratio at that time was about three to one, and those scarce females held out for dates with fraternity boys who had nice, clean, shiny cars, and dressed well.  I had a 1951 Dodge something-or-other at the time, which I rarely washed and never polished.  That, plus my Beaumont High School yokel personality, doomed my efforts in the social line.   I had a Jewish friend who used to date girls from a Jewish sorority at San Jose State.  I persuaded him to take me there, although he warned it wouldn’t be fun – I was not MOT (Member of the Tribe).  He was right.  I did manage to get a date one year for the Big Game prom (Big Game is the football contest with Cal Berkeley).  It went badly.  My social problems ended when Virginia, my high school girl friend, entered San Jose State.

Now maybe I can dredge up some interesting events at Stanford. 

Well, one involved Ralph Buckwalter.  My first year at Stanford was spent rooming with three other guys at Stanford Village, which was a converted WW2 naval hospital in Menlo Park, a few miles from campus.  Ralph was a freshman, and Ralph was in love.  He had a huge, gold tinted picture-frame with the smiling image of his high school girlfriend inside.  Nothing wrong there, except that he talked about her all the time.  “She’ll make such a wonderful mother” was one of the least nauseating things he would say.  We took it for a couple of weeks and then, one day, we hid the damned thing.  Ralph, of course, went berserk – threatened to kill us all.  He even cried.  But he couldn’t find the picture (we had hidden it in another guy’s room down the hall.)  When he finally calmed down, after at least a week, we put the picture frame back – but with the visage of a particularly ugly gorilla inside.  This set him off again, of course.  Maybe two weeks later the gorilla disappeared and the girl reappeared.  Made no difference – Ralph hated us all.  Poor guy: she dumped him toward the end of the year.

Okay, then, my John Brodie story.  When I started taking economics classes I did well (elementary economics is a bit like bone-head calculus, but with a lot more words), so I was asked to be a student “reader”.  Econ 1 was always a very large lecture section, and the exams always consisted of a few short essays.  The professor dreamed up the questions, then handed the whole thing off to a teaching assistant.  The T.A. administered the exam, and then farmed out grading of the questions to us readers.  We each had one question to grade, which meant reading upwards of 50 essays on the same topic.  The professor told us the points he was fishing for, and then turned us lose.  Jesus!  Was that ever boring!  The worst part was that any student who disagreed with our grading had the right to meet with us and complain.  We met these irate students in a big room at the top of Economics Corner; the T.A. was there to protect us if things got out of hand.  My technique was to re-read the whole answer, then maybe give a few points on the basis of the student’s complaint, but subtract a few for other “errors” I had suddenly encountered.  It was a hard job, for which we were paid $1.25/hour.  (We submitted our hours”honor system”.)    By my senior year I was making nearer $3.00/hour by virtue of reporting more hours than I had worked.  I figured that, with all my experience, I was worth it. 

Anyway, about John Brodie:  Brodie was Stanford’s star quarterback.  He may not have been dumb, but he certainly never learned much about economics.  (Or much else, I suspect.)  We (the T.A. and I) did our best to keep him eligible, by inflating his scores.  Yes, I know – you always wondered if that sort of thing went on.  It does; or at least it did, in the 1950s. 

Oh, yeah – this is funny.  I became a good friend of the head T.A., a Ph.D. candidate who later because a very successful academic.  Paul was a horny bachelor at the time.  All econ courses had Thursday discussion section, led by T.A.s.  When the class list arrived at the beginning of the quarter, Paul and I would sit down with the list and the latest Yearbook – and; put all the pretty girls into Paul’s sessions!  We would add a few hopeless males, of course, to make it look legit.

But in the end: Brodie never led Stanford to the Rose Bowl, and Paul never scored with his students.  I may be wrong, but I think he later married another econ grad student and lived happily forever after.

 

I took Band two quarters per year; I skipped fall quarter because the band was expected to perform at half time in football games, which took too much practice.  I played bass clarinet, which is a big, cumbersome wooden thing shaped like a double gooseneck.  Stanford’s band had two bass clarinets: me, and an earnest woman who was a music major.  I showed up for practice my first time just ahead of her, so the band director made me first chair.  Bass clarinets don’t make much noise, so the director was unaware of how much better she was than me.  I never practiced.  When we were rehearsing and the music got too tough I would play “Mary Had a Little Lamb”.  In between breaths she would glare at me and whisper “Shut Up!”  During actual concerts I just faked anything I couldn’t actually play.  And, by golly, I (and every other band member) got an A, every quarter! 

So, all in all, Stanford was relatively dull.  I played a lot of tennis (mainly with Paul, the T.A.), had a date with Virginia nearly every week end, studied a few hours most nights, and drank quite a bit of beer at Rossotti’s, a real dive of a tavern in the hills west of campus.  I was admitted to Stanford law school after my junior year but, thankfully, decided not to go.  If I had become a lawyer I suspect that I would have made a lot of money, but that – by now – I would have been long since dead!  I graduated in June of 1955, and got married to Virginia the same day.  My old Caltech wrestling buddy Sam was the Best Man.

And then – it was off to the army!

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