Memoirs
After High School Days
Polytech and Bourbon Popsicles
(preliminary)
After I graduated from high school, there was no doubt that I would go to college. I don't know how but I chose a school in downtown Brooklyn called The Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute (Polytech). It was a very good engineering and science school and I could get there by subway.
Originally the school was located in an old medieval style building complete with circular towers at the corners. One tower held a radio club that I paid a visit to, but was not that interested in. I probably went there for a while but the school was outgrowing that building so they bought what was the old Gillette Razor factory which was a few blocks away. This was a real factory and originally consisted of large open areas with concrete floors and round concrete pillars. We moved in before it was completed, so we watched it grow around us. The construction consisted of making rooms with cinder block walls. Concrete floors and cinder block walls. On our way from class to class we actually saw some of the rooms being built. Really charming.
No matter, however, our purpose was to learn and that we did. I remember very little about those days - and only about two or three teachers. The one I liked was our mechanical engineering professor. He was a neat guy and I remember becoming essentially the "teacher's pet" by solving a homework problem that he stated "no one would solve." So I did - and I was the only one to solve it. Obviously I didn't have any friends in that school. In the first semester my grade average was perhaps 4.0 out of 4.0.
The other two teachers I remember was one totally neurotic English teacher whose name may have been Mr. Kaplan. He was so neurotic he could barely hold himself together in front of the class. His clothes were always disheveled and I now suspect he was on a lot of tranquilizers. His speech was sometimes not too coherent. (An English teacher?)
Finally I remember a teacher (and a course) that lasted one semester. It was an elective and after the requisite "drop" period had expired (you couldn't drop it without getting penalized), we were all sorry we took it. I am not sure if he could teach or not and the subject was absolutely obscure for engineering types like myself. It was organic chemistry.
I have no idea why they gave it or why I took it, but I was not alone in my absolute confusion about the material. I do remember that the average grade on his exams was 30 % - that was the average. Of course he couldn't flunk the whole class and that is when I learned about "curving" the grades (raising the average up to a normal level like 80%). I guess he could have set it wherever he wanted - just so a reasonable number of people passed and a few got "A" grades even though they flunked every test. The net result was that he was gone the next semester, and probably, the course also. I never liked inorganic chemistry too much so I have no idea what motivated me to take organic chemistry. It's all memorization at that level and I really didn't care about all those molecules.
Going Co-Ed (then dropping out)
I forgot to mention, for the first year I went there Polytech was an all male school. However that was just the time that schools had to admit women who qualified. During my second year (which became my last year), we became a coed school with a single woman student. She was bright and attractive and got a lot of whistles and I think we were lectured not to do that.
Unfortunately that was my last year as a student at the school. After the second year I began to have serious personal problems and couldn't concentrate. In the last semester my grade average dropped to around 2.0 (50%). I remember going to the school's psychologist who suggested I take a year off (that was allowed). At the end of the year I remember that I said I did not feel like I wanted to continue with school. I was already working, and I was going out with my first real girlfriend (Norma). I preferred the money to the education.
The Iced Lab - Indoor Snowball Fights and Bourbon Popsicles
While I was still matriculated I already had an after-school hours job in the physics lab at a research branch of the school called the Microwave Research Institute." At first I worked for a professor who was studying the crystalline structure of ice. I am pretty sure his name was Dr. Post (professor Post). We did what was known as X-ray crystallography. We were studying the structure and properties of ice for - I think - the Navy. The experiments required that we make thin pieces of pure ice and for purpose that we had a walk-in freezer. We would then fill plastic tubes with pure water and place them in the freezer in a special machine that lowered the temperature of the water very slowly to the freezing point. This is how you make a perfect cylinder of perfect ice crystals. My job was to slice the ice tube into thin sections (in the freezer) and somehow get them outside into the X-ray machine for analysis.
When we went into the freezer which was well below freezing, we donned fur lined jackets with fur lined hoods. A usual aspect of the of the freezer was that the walls eventually got covered with heavy frost deposits from the outside air. The frost on the walls was kind of like what collects on the ground in an ice storm. It was loose and we would periodically have to scrape the walls (no defrosting for this freezer). The result was that we came out with a box of snow like ice. This was then immediately proceeded by an indoor snowball fight - often in mid-summer.
The lab had another experiment in magnetic resonance imaging better known today as MRI. At the time we had the closest thing to an MRI machine that existed, but it could only image crystal structures - not organic material like people. Our lab may have been the precursor to the whole field of MRI as it exists today as a medical diagnostic tool. I do remember the huge magnet and the pumps to keep it cool. This was all when I was still a student and was my part-time job.
Bourbon Popsicles
When I stopped going to school, however, I applied for, and got, a position as a full-time technician in the technical maintenance department. Up there we had some interesting equipment too.
For one experiment it was necessary to drop the temperature in a small chamber to as close to absolute zero as possible. That's minus 273 degrees Fahrenheit. In order to do this you had to start with something pretty cold, and that was liquid nitrogen. We had a tank of it. Liquid nitrogen is interesting stuff. I believe it is about minus 80 degrees Fahrenheit and is the common gas nitrogen, in liquid form. The interesting thing about it was that it was possible to pour it into a thermos like container or even a properly insulated beaker and not have it all boil away immediately. There was just enough time to make what soon became a trademark of the lab, bourbon popsicles.
Our intrepid head technician came up with the idea one day and brought in a bottle of bourbon and some popsicle sticks. Here is how you make a bourbon popsicle; fill a test tube with bourbon, then fill a beaker with liquid nitrogen, place a stick in the bourbon filled test tube and dunk it in the liquid nitrogen. Voila - the bourbon froze and out came a bourbon popsicle. The only problem with bourbon popsicles was that you had to lick them pretty gingerly. If not, your tongue could freeze to it.
Continue to The Women in My Life
Temporary End