All 100 entering freshmen, swollen heads and all, go for a long weekend of camping up in the mountains north of LA, and many faculty are there. You get to play volleyball and have fireside chats with the likes of Linus Pauling, Richard Feynman, and other Nobel winning scientists. Remarkable! But after the pumping up, an even more remarkable return to reality.
When you return to campus, you have a series of unannounced exams and you are rated with your place in the entering class. That is, someone is #1 in a certain test area, and also #100. You might get the lowest grade of the entire class in something! I didn't do too badly, mostly in the middle as I remember, but my buddy Matt, coming to Tech from the local high school with me, was disturbed when his LA County-breaking test scores were not even in the top 10 among Cal Tech freshmen. Man, this got you squared away real quickly. After being told I was a genius for a decade, I found out I wasn't after all. So I became a writer instead of a mathematician ha ha, though it took me a decade to make the transition.
From my memoir, Dress Rehearsals:
CHAPTER THREE
The Mathematician & the Jock
Am I a genius? I discover not at Cal Tech – so become a football quarterback instead. How I learned to appreciate the humanities in an institute of science. The amazing wit and practical jokes on the Cal Tech campus.
1/ California Institute of Technology
Before starting our freshman year at Cal. Tech., Matt, I and the other 98 entering freshmen spent a required long weekend camping in the San Gabriel Mountains with selected upperclassmen and faculty, an orientation to the special world of the Cal. Tech. community. We felt special indeed. Here we were, still in our teens, hobnobbing with world-renowned scientists, some of them Nobel Prize winners, like Linus Pauling and Richard Feynman. In the campground setting, all sense of intellectual class disappeared, and somehow it seemed as if the only thing separating us, the freshman class, from the top minds in the country (our faculty) were a few years, that soon enough it would be us getting the grant money, making the profound new discoveries, winning the Nobels.
The orientation weekend was casual and largely unorganized. Many activities were available at the campground, and one afternoon I found myself playing quarterback in a spontaneous touch football game. Afterwards a balding man approached me and complimented me on my passing ability. He identified himself as the coach of the freshman football team. Had I thought of trying out for the team? Of course not. I wasn’t even aware that Cal. Tech. had a football team. The coach pointed out certain advantages to playing team sports at Tech., such as being excused from afternoon lab schedules and not being required to take any other gym classes. I told him I’d give it some thought.
We left the mountain to start classes. Or so we thought. The casual sense of the weekend, in which entering freshmen felt equal to faculty, changed dramatically as soon as we returned to campus. Before starting classes – and at Cal. Tech. the entire first term for freshmen was required, without electives – we found ourselves taking a battery of tests. But we’d already done brilliantly on our college boards, which had helped us get admitted in the first place. Why more tests?
These tests weren’t graded, they were ranked – from 1 to 100. In other words, on each test, in each specialized area of mathematics or science, you would know how many entering freshmen scored better than you. On each test, someone – no doubt still full of self-congratulation and confidence, if not downright arrogance, from being accepted into one of the toughest schools in the country – was going to finish dead last and was going to know about it.
Fortunately I didn’t finish dead last, or even in the bottom third, on any of the tests. In a couple areas of mathematics I finished in the top quarter. But mostly I finished where my total score placed me, just a tad above the middle. I’d had a straight-A average in high school and was the Salutatorian of my class, but at Cal. Tech. I was decidedly average. This was the first moment in the greatest lesson the college was going to teach me.
Suitably humbled, we began our freshmen year in earnest. I soon learned what my strengths and weaknesses were in the sciences, reinforcing what I’d begun to learn in high school. I shined in the areas of mathematics that derived from algebra but had difficulty in areas deriving from geometry. I was strong in theory classes in chemistry and physics but weak in laboratory work. In mechanical drawing, which was required, I was so atrocious I got the only D I ever received in a college course.
Classes at Cal. Tech. were small. Since you found yourself moving from required class to required class with many of the same group of guys (no girls admitted), friendships came quickly. These friendships also were influenced by whether you lived on campus in a dormitory or not. A surprisingly large number of the freshman class of 100, perhaps 20, lived in Southern California and commuted. I was still living at home in Pasadena, though I now had my own bedroom, and joined the subclass of commuters. We missed out on a lot of campus life, of course, by going home every day, but we tried to make up for it by hanging around together and creating our own sense of camaraderie and fraternity. All of us really wanted to be living on campus with the majority of the students.
Early on I found myself making friends with a commuting student from Glendale named Quentin, who was another “just average” Cal. Tech. freshman. Quentin and I also shared a passion for sports, which defined another way in which Cal. Tech. students defined their class structure: there were those who liked to participate in sports and those who didn’t. So I quickly found my place on campus as a commuter and a jock.
Indeed, in such a focused environment of mathematics, science and technology, with stiff intellectual competition all around you, sports became more important to me than ever as a kind of escape valve by which to forget studies and recharge the mind. It became clear to me right away that I needed some kind of structured diversion to keep sane, and to find it I decided to take the coach up on his offer and try out for the freshman football team.
2/ Sports (sort of)
You didn’t really try out for sports at Cal. Tech. You showed up. Apparently there was little doubt in the coach’s mind that I was going to be his freshman quarterback. Only about 15 guys showed up for the team, and of these only one other wanted to try out for quarterback. Coach gave us each a football and told us to throw it long. I threw a zinger, about a forty-yard spiral. The other guy threw a soft, wobbly pass that went end-over-end for about fifteen yards before crashing like a ripe coconut. I was the quarterback. He was my backup.
This was an era in which players went both ways, playing offense and defense, which was fortunate since we had so few players. Eventually we browbeat others to join us so we at least could put 22 guys on the practice field and scrimmage. But we never had anything close to depth.
We had a four-game season, playing against the likes of Occidental College and Whittier College, small schools like ours but schools less concentrated in their curricula than Tech. They may even have had a physical education major.
Our first game was against Occidental, and the first half presented the most auspicious beginning in the history of Cal. Tech. freshman football. We scored two touchdowns! I scored the first, by running untouched around the right end after calling for a halfback sweep around left end. I noticed that our linemen were giving away the direction of the play by the way they lined up. In the huddle, therefore, I lied. I told them I was going to toss the ball out to the halfback running left but instead took the snap under center and, after faking left, suddenly sprinted around right end. The Occidental defense had gotten lazy by this time, also realizing that our linemen were telegraphing the play, so I took everyone by surprise and dashed into the end zone almost before anyone, including my own team, realized what was going on. Unfortunately, this was the kind of trick that only worked once.
Our second touchdown was more traditional, a halfback run off-tackle late in the second quarter, which somehow went for eighty-five yards and a score. The back who ran the ball was so exhausted afterwards he missed most of the third quarter , still trying to recuperate. My dad, who was at the game, told me later that the halfback looked like a cartoon, running scared with his feet in front of him, leading the way.
We were behind 28-12 at the half, and this was the closest half we would play all season. Occidental ended up winning the game 52-12. Moreover, these two first half touchdowns ended up being the only points we scored all season! Our auspicious start fell flat on its face. Our worst game was losing 85-0 against Whittier in a driving rainstorm on a field that soon became a mud bath.
If ever sports was about playing the game for its own sake and not whether you won or lost, it was football at Cal. Tech. I loved playing and so did most of my teammates. Even losing 85-0 in a mud bath was fun – it fact, it was delirious fun! We were very good at amusing ourselves, cracking jokes in the huddle and pulling stunts that drove our coach crazy, such as trying a 90-yard field goal on first down. When your game plan is three plays and punt, creative play-calling becomes attractive.
As quarterback, I must have lost hundreds of yards by the end of the season. Despite the 85-yard run in our first game, we really didn’t have much of a running game. I could pass accurately if I was given time to get it off, so mostly I called passing plays, or plays with a pass option, and most of the time I got sacked before getting the throw off. I may have lost over five hundred yards by season’s end.
On defense, I played safety. The coach’s strategy behind this was to keep me from getting injured by keeping me far from the ball. As it turned out, I led the team in tackles!
I played every offensive and defensive down of the season except two. Once I had the wind knocked out of me on offense and had to come out. For two plays the backup quarterback ran the team, and he was a sight to behold. Not only did his passes go end over end, when he ran he waddled like a duck. It was hard not to laugh from the bench, and even the coach had a hard time keeping a straight face. I ran back in for fourth down, just in time to punt, and the backup came out with a great grin on his face, knowing that he had just won his letter.
Football was such a blast that Quentin talked me into going out for basketball, which was his sport. Quentin, at about six-two, made first string forward, and amazingly enough I played first string as the other forward even though I was only six even. Our center was about six-three.
The freshman basketball team actually won a few games, solely because we had a guard who could make almost half his shots taken from anywhere between the top of the key and mid-court. His job was to get free somewhere over the mid-court line, and our job was to get the ball to him. When he got hot, he was amazing to watch – I’ve not seen such a display of long-range accuracy since then. His shooting let us occasionally experience something that Cal. Tech. teams almost never experienced, the joy of winning.
After lettering in football and basketball, I decided to go out for track. My motivation was to build up my speed for football, but the track coach had other ideas. First he tried to make me a shot putter. I could never get the hang of it. Next he tried the javelin. I almost nailed him with an errant throw. Finally I ran the third leg on the mile relay team. Our freshman track team won one meet, a close victory over the House of David and its team of long-bearded preachers.
The best part of playing sports at Cal. Tech. was the camaraderie that developed among the athletes. Since much of the time we not only were losing our competitions but getting slaughtered in them, we depended on one another to keep our spirits up. We told jokes, we discussed homework problems, we horsed around. The coaches were forever trying to get us to behave like respectable athletes who took the competition at hand seriously, losing with grace, but we were built of different stuff and were participating for different reasons. We were having so much fun an observer would think we were winning. Of course, we didn’t expect to win. We just made sure we had a hell of a lot of fun losing.
In the summer after my freshman year, before school started, I reported to early football practice. I was going to play for the varsity, which ran the single wing because its coach was a former UCLA coach whose teams had done the same. The coach wanted me to try out for two positions: quarterback, which in the single wing is primarily a blocking back, and tailback, who is the passer and runner.
I loved playing quarterback in the single wing because I got to call the plays and yell out the signals. Most of my blocks were traps, a pretty easy line of work. Since I could catch the ball as well as pass it, the coach even activated a couple of trick plays in which I became a primary receiver. At tailback I was not as good as the starter, a returning senior, but I thought I had a good shot at becoming the starting quarterback, even if I was only a sophomore.
The same summer the season preview issue of Street & Smith’s Football Digest came out – and miracle upon miracle, in the Southern California regional supplement my name was listed in the back as one of the promising new prospects for the Cal. Tech. varsity football team! In high school, I had bought this preview religiously to read about UCLA and the Fortyniners and find out what their seasons would be like. Now my name was listed between the same covers as the names of my past heroes. With my name in print, I felt like a football star!
Unfortunately, my prospects crashed as hard as those of the freshman football team the year before. I hurt my knee in a late summer scrimmage and quit the team. The coach wanted me to undergo rehabilitation, telling me I would be ready to play before the season ended, but I already was thinking of leaving school. Playing football, even for the varsity, no longer appealed to me. I was trying to figure out what to do with my life.
3/ The Humanities
Ironically enough, the Cal. Tech. professors who taught courses in the humanities were the ones who first got me thinking of majoring in something other than mathematics. The humanities courses at Tech. were extraordinary, as good as anything I later took at UCLA or the University of Oregon. In American history we compared early drafts of the Declaration of Independence with the final draft, studying the reasons for the changes. In a literature class we studied Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. I was getting seriously interested in history and literature for the first time.
In high school, I had been able to earn A’s in these subjects by just going through the motions. The only “literature” that interested me was science fiction. I subscribed to several sci-fi magazines, including Galaxy and Astounding. My favorite authors were Isaac Asimov, Theodore Sturgeon and Robert Sheckley.
Sheckley now lives in Portland, and it was a great thrill to meet him in person decades after I had become a big fan of his wonderful sense of humor. But I was distressed to learn that such a giant of the Golden Age of science fiction struggles to get published today, even though his oldest fans say he is doing his best work. In American culture, the question always is: What have you done lately?
At any rate, at Cal. Tech. I began to pay closer attention in my history, philosophy and literature classes. As a result, my central interests were beginning to change once again. There seemed to be so much I didn’t know, so many books I hadn’t read. How would I ever catch up?
In my short story, “Death Is A Paper Tiger” (published in The Mississippi Review), an elderly character remembers his youthful passion for books:
"But so ambitious as a young man! I want to learn everything. I want to read everything. I read Confucius, Lao Tzu, Plato, Aristotle, saints, Descartes, Locke, Kant, Hume, Nietzsche. I read Shakespeare, literature. Marx and Freud. The Old and New Testaments! My eyes go bad, I can't keep a job for reading. And all I find out from so many books is this--that nothing changes. Then I stop reading. Better to drink. What is new?"
Linus Pauling, my chemistry teacher, published a book called No More War, and I became a Pauling groupy. I followed him to area lectures against nuclear arms, and I marched behind him for peace.
One afternoon I saw him approaching as I was eating my sack lunch on a bench on campus. He asked if he could join me.
Pauling was easy to talk to. After some casual chat, I confessed that I was less happy as a sophomore than I had been as a freshman. I was even thinking of changing my major into something in the humanities. Pauling was gently supportive, telling me that good minds were needed in the humanities as much as anywhere else, that there was no shame in leaving Cal. Tech. to pursue other interests elsewhere. In retrospect, I think his support was a real turning point in my self-reflection about my future.
As it turned out, Quentin was going through the same self-searching. We decided to transfer to the University of California at Berkeley together, leaving at the end of our first sophomore term, which would have us starting over in Berkeley in January, 1959. Since we were in good standing, both with B averages, we were able to get scholarships.
I had discussed none of this with my parents. Now it was time to let them know my decision. I fooled myself into thinking I was doing them a favor because Berkeley was considerably less expensive than Cal. Tech., and with a scholarship I wouldn’t need much in the way of financial support at all. I thought of my move as saving them money. If Dad was disappointed by my plans, he didn’t say anything – but mother was devastated.
She loved being a Cal. Tech. mom. I had no idea. She was on several committees at the college and had become good friends with Mrs. DuBridge, the wife of the college president. Mom had built a new social life around the college, and this would be damaged now that I was leaving Cal. Tech. How could I leave such a fine college – especially since I was maintaining a B average? She must have thought I had lost my mind.
Quentin and I bought an old car for the trip to Berkeley. It was a World War II model, a two-door sedan; loaded with boxes of our belongings – and it didn’t even make it over the San Gabriels. We blew the engine on the long, steep upgrade and ended up trashing the car for pennies on the dollar, shipping our boxes and taking a Greyhound to Berkeley.
We had convinced ourselves that we were transferring to change our majors to something or other in the humanities. But I stayed a math. major, and Quentin stayed a physics major, as if we still needed our past majors as security blankets. We found an apartment to share and got ready to begin a new life. Neither of us had ever lived away from home before.
4/ Genius & Wit
Before bidding goodbye to Cal. Tech., I have to say a few words about the extraordinary world of humor that gets created when genius and wit come together. I never witnessed more outrageous practical jokes or witty behavior than during my short stay as a student there.
One afternoon at football practice David, who played guard, came to me with an idea. David was short, barely five foot, but feisty and fearless. What he lacked in size he made up for in creativity, and his specialty was biting the ankles of opposing linemen in pileups, a practice that earned him more respect than his small stature warranted.
David had been studying the football rulebook and discovered what he considered to be an ambiguity that we should take advantage of. The game of football, he noted, is played with a ball of such-and-such dimensions. Nowhere however, does it clarify that the game is played with only one ball. At most the interpretation would be that there was only one ball of the specified dimensions – but the possibility of using a second ball of different dimensions was totally within the grammatical meaning of the rules, according to David. Since he was a genius with a photographic memory, I took his word for it.
In our next game, therefore, we had a trick play prepared. It worked beautifully, we scored a touchdown, and then we argued with the referees that it should count, only abandoning the cause when they threatened to make us forfeit the game. Why would we want to lose 1-0, the score by forfeiture, when we already were losing 21-0?
Our trick play worked this way. David came into the huddle with a miniature football, which I hid in my jersey. I then tossed a quick incomplete pass to the right with the standard ball. After it fell to the ground I took out the peewee ball and threw a perfect strike to my left end sprinting down the sideline. The greatest surprise of all was that he actually caught it. Touchdown! The argument began, and even our coach was against us. Cal. Tech. never learned to hire coaches with senses of humor.
Another example of the Cal. Tech brand of humor happened on the morning of my first final exam at the end of fall quarter. The exam was scheduled at eight o’clock. I entered the classroom a bit early and sat down. The lights were off. More students trickled in, sitting down without turning on the lights. Finally the teacher came in, and he turned on the lights. As soon as he did, loudspeakers hidden on roofs and in bushes all around campus began blasting at great volume the stirring sounds of Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries. Welcome to exam week at Cal. Tech.
On another occasion a student living in the dorms flew home during a long weekend. He was wealthier than most of us and had his own sports car. His room was on the third floor. When he returned, he couldn’t find his car in the dormitory parking lot. With panic he rushed up to his dorm room to phone the police and report the car stolen – and there it was, in the middle of his room, idling as sweetly as a kitten. His buddies had disassembled the car and reassembled it in his room!
A few years later, I was able to witness the Cal. Tech. brand of humor on international television. I was watching the Rose Bowl game. I believe UCLA was playing. During halftime the UCLA card stunt section prepared to start its famous UCLA spell out. As the letters spiraled out across the section, however, they did not spell out UCLA at all. They spelled Cal. Tech.! I and other former Techies all around the world went crazy with delight.
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