HIGH HOPES

This story describes my return to civilian life and the resumption of my quest for a college degree.

HIGH HOPES

I left Ft. Jay's hospital on Governor's Island in May 1947, healed from my hemorrhoid operation, and pondered my future. The government had provided numerous benefits to the veterans of WW II, including a program that paid tuition expenses to any school of higher education that would accept you, up to the limit you had earned, a function of how long you had served. While enrolled, the student also received a living allowance; the amount dependent on marital status.

If you chose not to go to school, and were not quite ready to get a job, you could apply for an unemployment benefit that paid veterans $20 per week for a full year. The recipients called themselves members of the 52-20 club. Quite a few vets joined that group, but far more chose to attend colleges whose enrollment numbers surged.

In late May 1947 I enrolled once again at Stevens Tech, at my brother’s urging, where the number of undergraduate students shot up from a pre-war level of 600 to 1,600. In June, I began a mandatory and unique summer session consisting of six weeks of study to learn how to be a surveyor followed by six weeks of hands-on shop training.

The school conducted its surveying course at a scenic and rustic campground in Johnsonburg, New Jersey, located about fifty miles from Hoboken. Students were grouped into four-man survey parties for the entire session. The other three members of my survey party included two recently discharged veterans and one teenager just out of high school whom we teased constantly because he was so naive.

One morning my survey party came upon some pheasants. Three of us tried to nail them by throwing our surveyor’s chaining pins at them, without success. We missed the birds, and had a devil of a time finding these long, thin, pointed steel rods. The prospect of returning to camp without the school’s equipment made our teen member distraught. 

Another memory that sticks with me is the time a classmate offered to drive me home in his convertible. He took a shortcut over a virtually impassable mountain trail. I had no say in the mater. On a rutted road in the middle of a heavily forested area a rock punctured the oil pan. He managed to plug the hole with rags before all the oil drained. This episode convinced me to return to camp by train.

Our camp team played fast-pitch softball against other teams in the surrounding resort area, usually for a keg of beer. Our star pitcher could throw a softball faster than Bobby Feller could hurl a baseball. He usually struck out all the opposing batters. To make the game more interesting, he would sometimes zip two fastballs in for strikes, and then lob one pitch over the plate, the only chance the batter had to make contact. One day my home run cleared the center fielder's head by a mile, the best hit of my life. That’s the fondest memory of camp that remains with me.

When camp ended, the students returned to Hoboken to undertake six weeks of intensive shop training. That summer was brutally hot, and the days spent in the foundry were sweltering and intolerable. My body endured the extremes of weather that year, from a frigid Alaskan arctic winter to the hell-fire of an East Coast summer.

   Our shop training included some lessons on how to weld. One student already knew the trade. He cut off the flow of gas to another student’s acetylene torch by dousing it with water, causing it to make an explosive noise that frightened the pants off the novice, who leaped backwards and ran outside in absolute terror, followed by peals of laughter.

My passing grade of “C” in both surveying and shop training class that summer gave me just enough confidence to remain enrolled. A failing grade in one or both would have made me quit.

My sophomore classes began in September 1947. My campus activities included playing junior varsity basketball, helping the staff of the newspaper, and rejoined the Mu Chapter of the Chi Phi fraternity. Much to my surprise, I managed to pass all the courses, and concluded that studying to be a mechanical engineer might not be a bad choice.

However, most of my better grades came in classes such as Humanities and Gym. That should have told me otherwise.

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