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When the upperclassmen found out my date was a waitress, they were horrified. They told me that was not possible; they would get me a “proper” date. They made me feel as though I had strayed, that I was amiss. They decided to take over the situation. They went to the restaurant, found the waitress, talked her out of it, and got me another girl. They were trying to educate their “wayward son,” so to speak, but they were wrong, I think. I was only a freshman then, and I didn’t have enough confidence yet to stop them from breaking my date.
When I became a pledge they had various ways of hazing. One of the things they did was to take us, blindfolded, far out into the countryside in the dead of winter and leave us by a frozen lake about a hundred feet apart. We were in the middle of absolutely nowhere—no houses, no nothing—and we were supposed to find our way back to the fraternity. We were a little bit scared, because we were young, and we didn’t say much—except for one guy, whose name was Maurice Meyer: you couldn’t stop him from joking around, making dumb puns, and having this happy-go-lucky attitude of “Ha, ha, there’s nothing to worry about. Isn’t this fun!”
We were getting mad at Maurice. He was always walking a little bit behind and laughing at the whole situation, while the rest of us didn’t know how we were ever going to get out of this.
We came to an intersection not far from the lake—there were still no houses or anything—and the rest of us were discussing whether we should go this way or that way, when Maurice caught up to us and said, “Go this way.”
“What the hell do you know, Maurice?” we said, frustrated. “You’re always making these jokes. Why should we go this way?”
“Simple: Look at the telephone lines. Where there’s more wires, it’s going toward the central station.”
This guy, who looked like he wasn’t paying attention to anything, had come up with a terrific idea! We walked straight into town without making an error.
On the following day there was going to be a schoolwide freshman versus sophomore mudeo (various forms of wrestling and tug of wars that take place in the mud). Late in the evening, into our fraternity comes a whole bunch of sophomores—some from our fraternity and some from outside—and they kidnap us: they want us to be tired the next day so they can win.
The sophomores tied up all the freshmen relatively easily—except me. I didn’t want the guys in the fraternity to find out that I was a “sissy.” (I was never any good in sports. I was always terrified if a te
I tried all sorts of ways to escape, but there were sophomores guarding us, and none of my tricks worked. I remember distinctly one young man they were afraid to tie down because he was so terrified: his face was pale yellow-green and he was shaking. I found out later he was from Europe—this was in the early thirties—and he didn’t realize that these guys all tied down to the floor was some kind of a joke; he knew what kinds of things were going on in Europe. The guy was frightening to look at, he was so scared.
By the time the night was over, there were only three sophomores guarding twenty of us freshmen, but we didn’t know that. The sophomores had driven their cars in and out a few times to make it sound as if there was a lot of activity, and we didn’t notice it was always the same cars and the same people. So we didn’t win that one.
My father and mother happened to come up that morning to see how their son was doing in Boston, and the fraternity kept putting them off until we came back from being kidnapped. I was so bedraggled and dirty from struggling so hard to escape and from lack of sleep that they were really horrified to discover what their son looked like at MIT!
I had also gotten a stiff neck, and I remember standing in line for inspection that afternoon at ROTC, not being able to look straight forward. The commander grabbed my head and turned it, shouting, “Straighten up!”
I winced, as my shoulders went at an angle: “I can’t help it, sir!
“Oh, excuse me!” he said, apologetically.
Anyway, the fact that I fought so long and hard not to be tied up gave me a terrific reputation, and I never had to worry about that sissy business again—a tremendous relief.
I often listened to my roommates—they were both seniors—studying for their theoretical physics course. One day they were working pretty hard on something that seemed pretty clear to me, so I said, “Why don’t you use the Baronallai’s equation?”
“What’s that!” they exclaimed. “What are you talking about!”
I explained to them what I meant and how it worked in this case, and it solved the problem. It turned out it was Bernoulli’s equation that I meant, but I had read all this stuff in the encyclopedia without talking to anybody about it, so I didn’t know how to pronounce anything.
But my roommates were very excited, and from then on they discussed their physics problems with me—I wasn’t so lucky with many of them—and the next year, when I took the course, I advanced rapidly. That was a very good way to get educated, working on the senior problems and learning how to pronounce things.
I liked to go to a place called the Raymor and Playmore Ballroom—two ballrooms that were co
One time I danced with a certain girl a few times, and didn’t say much. Finally, she said to me, “Who hants vewwy nice-ee.”
I couldn’t quite make it out—she had some difficulty in speech—but I thought she said, “You dance very nicely.”
“Thank you,” I said. “It’s been an honor.”
We went over to a table where a friend of hers had found a boy she was dancing with and we sat, the four of us, together. One girl was very hard of hearing, and the other girl was nearly deaf.
When the two girls conversed they would do a large amount of signaling very rapidly back and forth, and grunt a little bit. It didn’t bother me; the girl danced well, and she was a nice person.
After a few more dances, we’re sitting at the table again, and there’s a large amount of signaling back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, until finally she says something to me which I gathered means, she’d like us to take them to some hotel.
I ask the other guy if he wants to go.
“What do they want us to go to this hotel for?” he asks.
“Hell, I don’t know. We didn’t talk well enough!” But I don’t have to know. It’s just fun, seeing what’s going to happen; it’s an adventure!
The other guy’s afraid, so he says no. So I take the two girls in a taxi to the hotel, and discover that there’s a dance organized by the deaf and dumb, believe it or not. They all belonged to a club. It turns out many of them can feel the rhythm enough to dance to the music and applaud the band at the end of each number.