Theodore
A: Sophomore year, I went out for swimming, but there were two people so much
better than I was that I knew I couldn't make the team and also I was very
busy. In sophomore engineering at Johns Hopkins in those days, you had about
a
a week schedule of labs and classes. Also I was working on the
yearbook. It was the major activity that I kept up. I was on the staff of the
yearbook all four years and was editor in my senior year. But you really start
working in sophomore engineering and remember, I was commuting with my
father, and if I stayed late, I had to hitchhike.
So I really started to hit the books more then, and I guess after the freshman
year I wasn't able to sneak over to Levering Hall and play bridge. Bridge was
an obsession with me as a child growing up. I just loved the game, having
started off on auction bridge and then when they started playing contract, that
was just like real big-time stuff and I really enjoyed it. So I've always liked to
play bridge.
Anyway, so on through my sophomore year. In those first two years my NYA
job was working in the chemistry library as a typist and the other thing that I
did to make a little bit of spending money was type term papers for people. I
took touch typing in high school and in those days, the going rate was cents
a page for double spaced and 7 cents a page for single spaced typing of term
papers. That doesn't add up to very much money, but that was the going rate.
But you could buy a hamburger, a little hamburger at the Little Tavern, for a
nickel and a bottle of milk for a nickel and a piece of pie for a nickel.
Remember this was 1935, `36, `37 and things were pretty low economically.
I gave up eating lunch. My mother said she had made lunch all through school
for three children and it lasted for her-my brother being 10 years older than
I-about
years, and she, "I've made enough lunches, but you can
make your own lunch if you want." And I was 17 years old by that time and
didn't really like sandwiches, and I didn't want to bother making lunch so I just
gave up eating lunch, even when I was swimming in the afternoon. At that
time, I remember talking to the swimming coach about it, and he said, "You're
really swimming on your breakfast, and if you're in the habit of not eating
lunch, it won't make any difference." So I was eating really two meals a day,
and once in a while maybe getting a milkshake, and that was in the days when
a milkshake was two tall glasses of nothing but milk and ice cream and good
stuff. And I'd do that once in a while, and that would cost 10 cents and could
afford that.
23
Previous Page
