Dad: Class of 1974; Daughter: Class of 2024

Fifty years! Who could have guessed? I mean, most people have their kids at a sane age so there aren’t 50 years separating the parent’s and child’s college graduations. One obvious result is that Kate is going to have a much better experience.

When I was a senior in high school in Ft. Lauderdale, (doesn’t this sound like the next part of this sentence will be, I had to walk uphill both to and from school?), no one in my social stratum thought so much about where we’d go to college. During spring baseball practice, Costello, Seybert, and that bastard McGonagill went on a trip to the Florida colleges to scout them out, and the coach, Gary Moore, didn’t mind. When I later told the coach that I was taking such a visit, he shouted at me, “You just want to take a trip!” Why has this sort of double standard always applied to me? I think Moore just resented that I was smarter than he was. Not a high bar.

Dad took me to look at North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Duke, from which he and my mother both had master’s and where they met. I had interviews, really liked the campuses, and wanted to go to one of them. But my mother said, “You won’t work hard enough to justify the extra expense.” Instead I was strongly urged to attend Auburn University, where my dad was teaching.

Hint: don’t do this to your kids.

So I went to Auburn. Orientation was…orienting. There was a Dean of Men named James “Jimmy” Foy, in his 60’s perhaps, whose job appeared to be to run around a stage like a wild-eyed madman, and yell “Wah Eagle!” That is, for the fortunately uninitiated, the cry of Auburn students at sporting events.

We also had a Dean of Women, Katherine Cater. I don’t recall seeing her at orientation. It is entirely possible that they split up men and women for this event. Dean Cater memorably, perhaps historically, in response to the question why Auburn didn’t employ a gynecologist on campus, announced, “Our girls aren’t like that.”

Most of the men lived in off-campus boarding houses. I signed up to live in one. My roommate, Bob Someone, was six feet eight. When he breathed, all the air in the room went into his sinuses. His accent was so thick that I had no idea what he was talking about. (Everyone in Ft. Lauderdale was from New Jersey.) The best thing about these boarding houses was the food. Breakfast was whatever you wanted, served by students, other residents I suppose, who called you “sir.” Bacon, sausage, eggs, grits.

For reasons lost to time, I took my dinners at another boarding house down the road. I have an enduring memory of that: an older fellow, chubby, with reddish hair and a moustache, sitting across from me. He has a plate of fried chicken and some boiled material that passes for vegetables in the South. He also has a mound of rice. He is smirking and tucking pats of margarine under the rice.

Something went south (haha, see what I did there) at my boarding house, and I left after a few weeks. I moved in with my father in his small house not far from downtown. I cooked for us, and we had a more or less amiable existence. I did all the cooking+he only shaky moment occurred when he came home unexpectedly and found my girlfriend and me engaged in some indiscreet activity. I can still see him turning on his heel and hightailing it out the front door, poor man. Later he told me that he had encountered a couple on the front steps of his office building; she was crying, and from the conversation, he could tell that she was pregnant. (We don’t have girls like that, eh Dean Cater?) He only asked if we were being careful. I’ve always been grateful to him for eschewing lectures.

It’s been too long ago for me to comment on the quality of the education. I graduated summa cum laude, which is either a repudiation of my mother’s evaluation or a wincing comment on how thin on the ground smart kids were there. I am now and was then absolutely a loser at math. The college obligingly provided a “Math for Arts Majors” course that got a little farther than fractions. I had a 104 average going into the final.

And now the last, most telling anecdote. My senior year, I had a roommate from Chicago, of all places, named Bill, an accounting major. He was taking a political science course and agreed to participate in a Model U.N. that was taking place on campus; the Political Science Department wanted people to, and his professor said he wouldn’t have to write a term paper if he signed on. Bill always had what people used to call an eye out for the main chance. Still, a college course that exempts kids from writing a paper if they’ll goof around at Model U.N.? Eh.

He met a girl there, one of a number of kids who were assigned the task of carrying notes back and forth from one delegation to another. Who knows what credits she got from which department for that task? She was tall, with long blonde hair, an ironic smile, and a pleasing form. She and Bill started dating.

Let me state at this point that Bill, as an accounting major, may have been opportunistic, but he never lied, and he lacked the imagination to embellish.** He referred to women as “the ladies”. In any event, the next thing I knew, he was at whatever passed for the student medical services complaining of symptoms suspiciously similar to those of gonorrhea. The doctor was old, in his 60’s or possibly 70’s, and he was an extremely silly man. (I met him once when consulting him about what was probably a stomach flu.) He giggled a lot, muttered more, and, after testing Bill on the spot for, who knows, malaria, declared, “No gonorrhea!” They still shot Bill with something, and his symptoms disappeared.

A year later, Bill wrote me from his accounting job that the symptoms had reappeared. This time Bill went to a real doctor and got a real shot and was cured.

I don’t know what was going on at Auburn. In those days (1974), did colleges compile statistics on STD’s and didn’t want to acknowledge as many cases as they had? Was the doctor simply an old quack? Certainly the answer to the second question is yes; to the first, I don’t know. However you read those facts, the doctor’s behavior seems at best irresponsible and at worst worthy of suspension of his medical license. And yes, Dean Cater, you did have girls like that. Girls with actual reproductive systems and sex lives. Party like it’s 1875, august Dean of Women.

I need hardly point out that Kate’s experience at Smith will be nothing like that. I don’t even have to say why. Fifty years has made a difference, at least at places like Smith. Auburn? I don’t have any idea.

One thing I do know is that I have never ever met another Auburn alumnus/a anywhere in the world. Presumably they’re staffing labs, engineering and architecture firms, vet clinics. They don’t exist in the worlds in which I would have benefitted from the help of a network. Kate’s choice for college does have that network, whatever she chooses to do. And if not Smith, then her neighbors at Amherst and Mt. Holyoke.

Kate’s getting into Smith is my revenge on my parents. It’s a cliché that you always want better for your kids than you had for yourself, right? I feel confident that regarding choice of college, that will be the case.

**I am NOT bashing accountants in general, just Bill. When I was at AIG, we had an all-hands meeting in part to survey the financial statement. As you perhaps know, there are columns for assets and liabilities, and, in this case, they didn’t match up exactly like they were supposed to. They were $1.00 off, obviously a rounding error over billions of dollars. Nevertheless, my mischievous boss Robert, sitting near John Coleman, an accountant, poked John and whispered, “The numbers don’t match up.” John took out his wallet and gave Robert a dollar.