esrosedotblog

In writing about Angell, below, I realized something.

I have been reading The New Yorker for 60 years.

When I went to MIT, the dorm sold magazines in the "office" and as I got to be friends with Freddy, a character out of the annals of queendom, he shoved this magazine in my hands and said the equivalent of "read, dear, read".

So I did. And I was tested. Freddy made sure I bought one every week and what is more, he would ask questions about the articles. How did I like this or that.

I didn't go to MIT for the courses actually. As it turns out, I barely managed to pass those. What I got was a whole way of life which was totally new for a boy from the Pocono Mountains of Pennsylvania. A hillbilly. A smart one and an alien among his people but a hillbilly nonetheless. Incidentally the word "hillbilly" passes the spell check with flying colors.

The desk which turned out to be a little fiefdom of its own (I worked there later in the game but was a dining hall worker for most of my time there), impressed itself on every kid who ever lived on East Campus. A complex of dorm buildings all in a tight little community never to be outdone by the newer dorms on West Campus across Massachusetts Drive. We were proles. They were more upper class, non-scholarship. We were clearly sent to East Campus because we were part of a group identified as student aid kids. Loans, scholarships but not likely, and workers on campus jobs. My kind of people. They knew what they were doing, if they were doing it and I believe that they were. In those days stuff like that was done routinely. It worked! No rich kid ever appeared on East Campus except to get help on his homework from some smarter kid who was on the way up. Who might even, someday, hire the rich kid for a job. It was that way. A kind of unraveling of the social fabric that led to MIT leaders all over the world. A lot of people think it is the education. Sure. But it is the experience. The way of life. Engineering has no classes. It works to undo the system not reinforce it. Revolutionary.

MIT was the first school to have work co-op programs in three departments, deals with the likes of IBM and other big companies to take on kids as interns. Nurtured into the system. In a good way.

I digress.

The key point I am making is that it was MIT life, not MIT academics, that made me the man I was and still am today. And, thank god for that. And for Freddy and The New Yorker. One more aspect of the making of a life. What you put in is what you get out.

That's Boston in the background incidentally, after the Charles River.

Labels: culture, MIT