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Show PART IV 17. So there I was in Chicago dreaming of horses. How I got to that city is a long story which can be shortly told. In the fall of '46 I went east to Purdue to take a new course of study called Air Transportation, get creit for my flight experience and end up managing airports, except then I got interested in engineering, aeronautical because I knew airplanes. Then I changed to mechanical engineering because there were more jobs, then to civil because I'd get to work outdoors building highways through people's lost fields and meadows, then electrical because of the mystery of electricity, and finally chemical because chemistry implies more brains. But there were too many choices, the place was too big, I felt a misfit among all those slide rules, so in winter I transferred back west to Colorado College in Colorado Springs, a small school in a beautiful place. College hopping, courtesy of the G.I. Bill. I would get a B.S. and then go to Berkeley, where my sister Tina was getting a Ph.D. in physics. Math was the big attraction for me then, it was so certain: two plus two always equals four. Problems could be solved. Then chemistry grabbed me again: those formulas had the certainty of mathematics, except something might blow up, which added a little spice. Then I took up physics because of the holy mysteries and uncertainties, and then biology because of the unknowns. Mysteries, uncertainties and unknowns were a lot more interesting than two plus two, but the trouble with Colorado College turned out to be that it was small, that everybody knew everybody else, that most of them were rich kids and fraternity types, even the ex-G.I.s were rich, |
