of Pennsylvania and studied civil engineering. I joined the Navy ROTC and they paid for my tuition, books and gave me all my uniforms. I worked as a surveyor in the summers and went on two week cruises from the Philadelphia Navy yard.
My Girl Friend in those days was a phys-ed major in a near-by school. We had been dating since high school. My first experience with sex was in the front seat of my Mom’s 1955 Buick Century- where else?
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In those days I wasn’t totally a one gal man by any means. The Navy used to pimp for us “middies,” making arrangements at the local girl’s colleges. One such memorable institution of higher learning was aptly named “Beaver College.” This place, as you can imagine, suffered decades of torment before the board finally voted to change the name.
I was on the track and diving team, having tried football for one semester. That year the school won the Ivy League championship. This was no thanks to me as I learned immediately that this wasn’t high school. Penn won that year because they “imported” ringers from a semi-pro ball club somewhere in the Deep South. Moose Wammock and Monk Miller, two brutes who stomped all over the little kids stupid enough to play against them. This lop-sided victory immensely pleased the alumni – and that year their contributions proved it.
My very last football experience was on a particularly cold and windy November day, I was smashed into the frozen ground so hard my teeth shook. For some moments I had no idea where I was. Moose, so called because, for all his two hundred and fifty pounds and six and a half foot frame, could run faster than his namesake had just ran me over. My entire right side, from shank to shoulder, was purple, black, blue and yellow. It took until spring for the bruises to go away. I have never even watched a foot ball game from that day to this.
My idea about team sports, especially professional sports, is that whoever has the most money wins. If team A wins the supporters of team B are unhappy and visa versa- adding up to absolutely nothing. If every game ever filmed was cut up into single frames and spliced together at random the fools in the sports bars would still hoot and shout just as loudly and double up on the instant replays trying to get even- idiots all.
Today, Penn is infested with Asians, thousands of them, all five and a half feet tall and a hundred pounds- smart as hell , study like hell but no more football and no more rowbottoms” What was and what happened during a Rowbottom? In its more benign form Rowbottoms involved the heaving of basins and pitchers from the windows of the dormitories. Hundreds or even thousands of students took to the streets. Trolley and automobile traffic came to a halt when students set up barricades and lit bonfires in the streets, jumped on passing vehicles, overturned cars, and in general, just raised hell. Students broke windows and pelted police and firemen with snowballs and eggs. Of course, the call of “Rowbottom” was associated with panty raids and the burning of professors in effigy.
When did Rowbottoms occur? More than fifty Rowbottoms occurred between 1910 to 1977. Rowbottoms occurred at Penn every month except July and August. At least thirteen took place in April, a popular month for Rowbottoms. In 1956 and 1957, the University administration thought they would announce the end of student riots. Of course, who listened to those idiots…Rowbottoms continued anyway. The University and the city began working together to give the University more responsibility for controlling the students- city police were to be called only when the University could not handle things. Today, the well behaved little Asians wouldn’t dream of participating in such fun and, of course, they don’t play American football.
After school, I got a job with Charles Simkin and Sons from Perth Amboy New Jersey. We had a contract to build a new sewage treatment plant on top of the old one for the city of Trenton on Duck Island, a nasty place just south of the city. Simkin was the general contractor and his engineers had drawn the blueprints. We were working off revision forty seven. My job was to set line and grade, interpret the prints and figure out where the myriad pipes, buildings roads, and structures were supposed to go.
Some days we had as many as a hundred and fifty cement trucks parked outside waiting to start dumping. The forms were complicated to build and harder to figure out. The foreman always wanted to check the measurements and elevations. There were many heavy electric motors that would eventually be fastened to the floor of the structures with three inch thick bolts that had to be set a foot or more into the concrete. The tolerances were about 3/100’s, so, no mistakes! It was a nerve wracking and difficult job that was made more difficult because my boss was a drunk and lived at the Town Tavern swilling boilermakers and eating smoked eels. He got the job because his Dad had ,at one time, been the mayor of Trenton. Only because I had been working there in the summers, was there hope that I wouldn’t make some horrendous mistake- the kind of mistake that, at best, takes a week of jack-hammering to correct and at worse, a lot of dynamite.
Simkin got paid by the cubic yard of concrete so, figuring this out was an important part of the job. The engineers who drew up the plans had of course done this but we engineers in the field had to submit figures after each structure and building was done. I guess, as a check on the estimates. Many of these structures had short and curving stairways, oval sections of hollowed out concrete for fluids to be pumped though, doughnut shaped areas void of cement and other oddities that all had to be figured out using a variety of geometric formulas and factored into the calculations to tally, more or less, with the cubic yards of concrete actually poured.
The city engineer, a Princeton grad named Imhoffe, was a prick of the first order and thought he was God’s gift to the engineering world. None of us liked him and used every opportunity to torment him. We would spend evenings getting the figures exact on the concrete quantities and give him out of date prints, changing the dates so he would think they were current. He would spend hours sitting in his office figuring out the cu/yds for payments by the city to Smikin. We always challenged his figures and make him justify them from actual measurements. We had the formulas all figured out and could do the numbers a hell of a lot faster then he could. We used to tease and embarrass him when he made mistakes- saying “well, this just goes to show you how dumb engineers from Princeton really are. He would get infuriated that some wise ass punk kid like me could solve for yardage faster then he could with no mistakes and show him up. The teasing was getting to him and he started to get careless.
On his last day he was messing about in one of the existing (old) settling tanks, a 200’ x 40’ concrete structure with a “vee” shaped bottom. It was mostly drained except for five feet of “solid residue” that had settled in the deepest part of the vee. I leave it to you, gentle reader, to imagine what this residue might actually be. Imhoffe slipped, ending up in deep kimchee- figuratively and literally- the perfect ending for a perfect ass. They had to haul him out with a cherry picker and clean him off down wind with a fire hose. He was done- he left and I never saw him again.
One cold miserable day, I was knee deep myself in some nasty stuff trying to set up for topographic measurements when, looking up into the clear blue skies, I saw the contrails of a DC-8 heading to the sunny Caribbean with my Dad and four lovely gals to spend a relaxing weekend on the beach.. That was it! What do they call it, an invidious comparison? The next day I put my notice in and never looked back on engineering, at least not for a long while.
I was going to follow my Dad and be a commercial pilot. In 1962 I moved to Florida and worked at a variety of jobs while learning how to fly. The Navy gave my class a choice to join the reserves which we mostly all did. Vietnam was still distant thunder on summer day.
CHAPTER 3
“After years of observation, it has occurred to me that, indeed, the safest way to fly is not to return to the earth with any more force than one left it.”
-Robert Firth
LEARNING
