In September 1956, I went down to New York City on the train with my
parents. We walked to the downtown airplane office, which was nearby on 5th Avenue about a block away from Grand Central Station, and took the airport bus from there to Idlewild Airport, where I boarded an airplane for California, the first time in my life I'd ever been in an airplane. My audacity in leaving home completely by myself for the first time with a trip clear across the country still amazes me. I was too innocent and ignorant to be overwhelmed by it. [As far as I can remember, this was the first time in my life when I would be somewhere without being within a few minutes away from someone I knew.] The plane was a four-prop job, not a jet, and it flew nonstop from New York to California, a long 10-hour flight that was painful for my fidgety self, who was afraid to leave his seat. (I had one next to the window, which I wanted.) My seatmate was a returning upperclassman from UCLA or USC who pointed out the sights to me as we landed, including my new campus. I recognized nothing. The plane could not land at LA for weather reasons so we landed somewhere else (Burbank, I think) and bussed to the LA Airport, about a half hour or hour drive. I remember passing Figueroa Boulevard and marvelling at the change of names from staid New England, as well as the palm trees marching by. Then I took another airport bus to a hotel in downtown Pasadena, where I called a number at Caltech and an upperclassman was sent to pick me up and deposit me at the administration building with my suitcase. (This was all done in accordance with instructions I had received from Caltech.)
I originally stayed at Room 8 in Fleming House; my roommate was D. Clark Gibbs, one of two other Connecticut natives in the freshman class. The room was next door to that of John Harding, the graduate student who was Fleming's Resident Associate. (John was a rather good-looking young man--though he seemed at least 10 years older than me at the time--with a florid face.) At that time, there were four
residence houses at Caltech: Fleming, Dabney, Blacker, and Ricketts, plus Throop (pronounced "Troup") Club for off-campus students. (Caltech's original name was Throop College or something like that.) Throop Club also housed a cafeteria to which I went several times. I went there once to get a vanilla soda and was surprised to get a vanilla ice cream soda. (When I went to Bohn's Drugstore in Connecticut for a vanilla soda, I would get seltzer water with vanilla syrup and some milk. I loved vanilla sodas and still do. Apparently, though, it's just a New England thing.)
All on-campus students had to belong to one of the houses. At that time, it was an all-male undergraduate school. There were a few women graduate students. Incoming freshman were assigned to one house then ate and fraternized with each of the houses for about a week, after which they rated their choices, and the house officers got together and thrashed things out to choose who would wind up permanently in which house.
The four student houses were arranged in one giant quad, with a courtyard in each. The corridors where the rooms were located were called alleys. Fleming House had six alleys. Room 8 was in Alley 1 on the inside of Fleming House, on the 2nd floor, with a window looking down on the courtyard. Alley 2 was over the lounge and dining room, the only alley with only one floor. Alleys 3 and 4 were opposite Alley 1, Alley 5 opposite Alley 2, and Alley 6 in the corner between Alley 5 and Alley 1. Most of the Fleming House officers lived in Alley 6.
My roommate wasn't in when I arrived and someone asked me if I wanted to go swimming. So I unpacked my trunks and went down to Long Beach with several upperclassmen and new freshmen, including
Lee Hood, who was to become class president and quarterback of the freshman football team. Lee eventually won the Lasker Prize Lasker Prize in Medicine for his work in genetics. The Lasker Prize is frequently a precursor to a Nobel.
We played some football on the beach and I caught a couple of passes. Lee suggested I try out for the football team as an end. It was the only time I talked to him. If he had won the Nobel, I could say I caught a forward pass from a Nobel Prize winner and I figure fewer people can say that than can say they won a Nobel! It was also the only time I swam in the Pacific Ocean. It was cold.
I did try out for the freshman football team and gave up after running tires for three days. But I was able to keep the large locker athletes had.
When we got back to the campus after playing football on the beach the very first day I came to California and Caltech, D. Clark Gibbs was drinking beer (Miller's) in our room with a homely upperclassman, Dean Anschultz, and his horsefaced friend, John Price. By the time it came time to choose which house would be my permanent house, I was close friends with Dean and John and their sophomore cohort, Norm Velinty.
My other friends at Caltech included another Fleming frosh,
Tom Tebben, Mike Turner, the Fleming freshman who inherited my first room when I moved across the courtyard and who was also born on June 4, 1938, and Joe Fineman, who was Fleming House secretary. Joe and Dean didn't like each other. Tom Tebben did graduate work at the University of Chicago then returned to California, where I lost contact with him. Mike Turner went back to Caltech for his sophomore year and I lost contact with him after I broke up with his sister Shannon. Joe Fineman of course got his degree. I last saw him when he was working as a lab assistant at Caltech in 1966. I later learned he had joined a commune in New Mexico or Arizona.
Although the drinking age in those days was 21 in California and you weren't supposed to have alcohol on campus anyway, the Caltech administration figured we were mature enough and, as another upper classman put it, the rule was "It's illegal to bring liquor onto campus, so don't let us see you." Dick Dietz, another Fleming upper classman, sold beer out of his refrigerator.
Before classes began, there was a student camp for the incoming freshmen up in the California mountains. It was just like going to Camp Sequassen again. I remember very little about it. We lived in cabins, played volleyball, sang around the campfire, and professors and administration people told us about life on campus.
A day or two after I arrived at Caltech, I walked down California Street to Lake Street, where there was an ice cream store called Baskin-Robbins. I was stunned by all the different flavors and I wound up getting a licorice ice cream cone, since I liked licorice so much. It didn't taste too bad but I never wanted another one--it looked like congealed axle grease.
The freshman class was divided into several sections. My section was the appropriately-named
Section F. My classmates included Larry Niven, who later became a wellknown science fiction writer, "Hap" Gier, Jerry Johnson, Tom Tebben, and Dave "Yodar" Frager. I don't remember why we called him Yodar, but it did have something to do with the first weeks of class. Frager dropped out after the first semester. Niven was arguably the biggest klutz in the biggest bunch of klutzes in that year's freshman class at Caltech. I remember that he always had a beet-red face and one day he created an explosion by accident in chem lab, using only water and air. (Of course, I wasn't exactly a prize student either--one day, after being up all night with Dean Anschultz and John Price, I fell asleep standing up in chem lab and woke up with a streak of ink in my lab book where my pen had kept moving as I sprawled across the lab desk. One day during math class, my classmates thought I was sleeping and started to tiptoe out, leaving me to wake up in the middle of the next class. But I was just resting my weary eyes and tiptoed out behind them.)
My classes were chemistry (basic inorganic chemistry), physics (basic
mechanics), mathematics (analytic geometry & introductory calculus), history (European), and English. In chemistry, we had two weekly lectures to the entire freshman class, one by Professor Johnston and one by
Linus Pauling. There was one class for Section F, led by a graduate student, who also led us in Swift Lab, named for
Dr. Ernest Swift, who was also usually there.
Dr. Robert Leighton, who for a long time was head of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, was the Section F physics teacher and also oversaw our physics lab. Math was taught by another graduate student, Mr. Weichsel. My English teacher was
Dr. George Mayhew, who was also in charge of the student houses, and history was taught by Dr. Peter Fay. A number of students were chosen for advanced classes in math, physics, etc. Two students in Section F had advanced classes . . . in English and history.
For the next few days, the members of the new freshman class who were living on campus rotated meals in the four student houses. After all the houses had gotten a good look at us, we chose which house we wanted to belong to. I chose
Fleming. My second and third choices were Ricketts and Blacker. Then the house officers all got together and decided who went to what house. People like Lee Hood got their first choice without any trouble. I got my first choice too but I learned later that I was Fleming's 62nd choice, perhaps the very last one. D. Clark Gibbs went to another house and I wound up rooming with Al Laderman of L.A. in a room on the other side of the Fleming courtyard from my original room, a room that overlooked the Dabney House courtyard. My previous room had been in Alley 1; now I was in Alley 3. Dean was in Alley 2, over the lounge and dining room; John was in Alley 4; Joe Fineman and Norm were in Alley 6, the same "alley" where House President Larry Whitlock, fullback on the football team, lived. I remember hearing "Rum and Coca Cola" on Laderman's radio and being "shocked" by the words in one verse: "Both mother and daughter working for the Yankee dollar." I thought that was a song that would never be played in staid New England.
Then came initiation week. We wore silly hats to classes. (Fleming's was a fireman's hat). The sophomores were supposed to treat freshmen like the juniors had treated the sophomores the previous year, but one of our main tormenters was junior Bob Smoak, who lived in my alley. He was hardcore ROTC with a father in the marines. The idea was to steal other houses' hats while not losing yours. I didn't lose mine but didn't get anybody else's either. I didn't try. It was not fair to steal hats in class. We had an orange fight with Dabney during this period and I was in the thick of it. Initiation ended when we had to drink from water laced with alum then were thrown into a mud pit. Sam Trotter was one of the first and he grabbed his tormentor (Bob Smoak, I think) and they both went into the pit, starting a general mud fight between the sophomores and freshmen as well as a few of the juniors. I think even Larry Whitlock, Fleming's president, wound up in the mudpit. Joe Fineman tried to stay out of it. As soon as Sam had started the fight, I joined in. I knew we were supposed to drag the sophomores (our primary tormentors) into the pit but I knew I couldn't have been the one to start it. That was the end of freshman hazing at Fleming House. Our only other duties were to keep the doorknobs and other brass in our alleys shined.
We were required to wear a shirt and a tie for dinner. Of course, that left a lot of room for creativity. Frequently, someone would come to dinner in bathing trunks, tee shirt, and tie.
Another favorite pastime was stacking rooms. You would enter someone's room when they weren't there, take out drawers and line them up against the far wall toward the door, with perhaps some books as filler. The last drawer leaned against the door so that, when the door was shut, the drawer would fall into place and you couldn't open the door. Freshmen's rooms, of course, were
frequently stacked. However, there was a transom over the doorways and I got to be very good at crawling through the transom. I was much thinner then--I weighed 120 when I entered Caltech and 140 when I left, thanks to the carbohydrate-laden diet in the student halls.
A lot of students knew how to pick locks and had lockpicks that were
available from other students. This may have been the result of Richard Feynman's reputation. I never learned, since Dean and John knew how to pick locks.
Then there were the steam tunnels. They ran from the Atheneum at one end of the campus to about halfway through the campus. They were true tunnels, wide and high enough for people to walk through them comfortably underneath the large pipes overhead. To get to them, we went under the student houses, picked the lock of one of the storerooms, then climbed over the makeshift plywood barrier that separated the storeroom from the tunnels. They were used frequently by students when it rained.
I worked briefly at the Atheneum as a waiter. Dean also worked there. The Atheneum was the on-campus club and dining room for the faculty. For some reason, I didn't work out (I wasn't very good at it, unable to balance a tray of food-filled plates on one hand over my head) and I worked there only a few days.
Although I didn't play on the freshman team, I did go to some of Caltech's football games, which were played in the Rose Bowl when we were the home team. It was a pretty weird scene, with only a couple of hundred students watching in that large stadium. Larry Whitlow was the team's fullback. Coming home from one of the games in Dean's 1947 Plymouth coupe, several of us (including me) stopped to barf on someone's lawn.
The year before, Caltech had had its best year ever when they went 3 and 5. The year before that they had won their first game in several years and the students burned down a palm tree.
The year before I had come to Caltech, the Air Force ROTC had brought a fighter plane (wingless) on campus on a flatbed truck. During the middle of the night, several upper classmen lifted it off the flatbed with a couple of forklifts and deposited it on the lawn of the ROTC instructor. How they managed to maneuver it through the streets of Pasadena without someone calling the cops is beyond me. But the FBI investigated, at one point calling the entire student body together and saying, "We know who did this so you'll make it easier on yourselves if you'll come forward now." No one did and the FBI went home without a suspect. (I wonder what Richard Feynman and other professors thought of this. I strongly suspect most of them were on the students' side and enjoyed the show immensely.)
In October I went to an exchange social with Pomona College, where I met Elaine Wolpin from Hollywood, who called me "Grahnt." We dated several times then drifted apart--it was too hard for me to get to Pomona without a car.
Sometime during the semester, Dean, John, Norm, and I invented "trolling for cops." The idea was to troll down the main drag of Pasadena or some other town around 2 a.m. or so, driving very slowly, until we got pulled over by the cops. When they asked what we were doing, we'd say something like, "We're students at Caltech and we're just relaxing from a hard night of studying." It was a lot easier to get away with lame excuses like that in 1956 and 1957. One night we picked up 10 cops (though we cheated a little in our count) and one cop pulled us over 3 times, each time in a different car. (I don't know where the 3rd car came from; Dean and John had cars but Norm and I didn't.)
Shortly after the "game" started, we found ourselves in the Arroyo Seco when John's car ran out of gas. We started walking to a gas station. A cop pulled up. "Is that your car down in the Arroyo?" He drove us back. The car was at the intersection of three different communities and three police cars (10 cops) were there. They said there had been a number of car thefts recently but one of them drove us to the gas station and back. As we left, John said he had been worried because his parents told him if he got in trouble once again, they would take the car away. Not only that, but the car was in his maternal grandfather's and the registration (as per California law) was visible through the windshield on the dash and, of course, his maternal grandfather's name wasn't Price. But they gave us no real trouble.
Another place we visited was a small space of darkness in the lightness of Los Angeles. It was off Van Horne Street and was honeycombed with dirt roads up and down small hills and valleys. We visited it several times, calling it the Van Horne Pit.
I spent Christmas with Dean Anschultz' family in Lakewood, a section of Long Beach. Although Dean was an only child, Dean's parents (whom he called by their first names, Kenny and "Toots") required him to do chores while he was home from college. One night we toured the Lakewood area where they lived, looking at the Christmas lights. There was a contest each year for the best lights.
Before we went to Dean's house, we drove Bob Smoak to an airbase nearby, where he boarded a plane (probably a DC3) to fly east for Christmas with his folks. His father was a Marine and Smoak flew with military personnel in a plane with no side panels, all the inside struts showing, and everyone wearing a parachute.
During the Christmas break, Dean fixed me up a date with Wendy Huntington, one of the heirs to the Huntington-Holladay millions. She was a high school senior, 17 years old, and had her own house, attached to her parents'.
. . . CALTECH . . .
Theme Music:
In The Wee Small Hours, The Wild One, Rock, Pretty Baby, Bawdy Songs and Backroom Ballads (Oscar Brand)
Stories Written: "Biologist", "Sally"
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