Mine is an American success story, but only if you read to the end. Entering BTHS in 1960, I traveled the Staten Island ferry with a small contingent of fellow travelers throughout most of my high school career. Graduation night 1964 was the last time I saw any of them, although I have made some clandestine attempts to discover what has become of them after all these years.
From Tech I traveled north to SUNY Binghamton, called Harpur College at the time, nestled in the beautiful rolling hills of upstate New York. I was a Chem major at Tech. While Tech prepared me well for college, I was ill prepared in every other way. Socially awkward, I became depressed, unable to concentrate on my studies, and ultimately given a psychological withdrawal after two years. This was at the height of the Vietnam War. My younger brother, who had been attending Harpur, also dropped out. He was drafted and sent to Vietnam, where he was killed in the Mekong Delta on his very first day of battle. I was adrift and aimless. The draft board called my number. At that time, I was seeing a therapist. When I went to Brooklyn for my medical, I was given a psychiatric 4F, which I always found odd since so many of my friends were trying their best to avoid the draft, when I, who had lost the ability to care, received one without even trying.
My brother had named me as beneficiary for his Army life insurance. I used some of the money to purchase grave sites for him and my parents, and traveled north back to Harpur, where I hung out with some friends and eventually purchased a dairy farm near Binghamton. Given my total lack of experience, it is not surprising that my career in farming didn’t last long. I then followed some friends out west, to Berkeley, California.
In Berkeley, I attended auto mechanics’ school through Merritt College. After two years, I was ready to graduate, but emotionally still broken and depressed. It was my auto mechanics teacher, a Mr. Pacheco, who saw my dire situation. He was not much older than I, but clearly wiser. I don’t know what would have happened to me were it not for him, and for that I here thank him. At the time, it might not have seemed like much, but in hindsight he had an important impact on what followed. He found me a job. Who knows whether I would have had the energy to do so otherwise.
For much of my time since dropping out of Harpur, I had been marginally employed, often homeless, crashing in pads here and there, even living for a spell illegally in an attic. Now, at 24, I began making a steady income. I quickly moved up to working in a repair shop, tuning foreign cars, rebuilding engines. I enjoyed learning something new every day. But after two years, I had enough. I wanted something more challenging. So, I decided to go back to college. I didn’t know what would happen there. I had to try again, just for the sake of trying. In 1973, nine years after graduating from Tech, I started college all over again, across the Bay, at San Francisco State. I started out pre-med, but quickly discovered it was math and physics that attracted my more analytical interests.
I’m deeply grateful for the opportunities provided me by both Merritt College and San Francisco State. Merritt College was, at the time, free. San Francisco State, as I remember, was $99/semester. Anything else would have been very likely out of my reach and resulted in a radically different trajectory for my life.
I was more than surprised by the success I had at San Francisco State. I was able to concentrate on my studies and did very well. I graduated in 1977 and was accepted into the PhD program at UC, San Diego. I confess that my time in graduate school was one of the happiest of my life. For the first time in my entire life, now in my 30’s, I had money to spare. I didn’t have to worry where I was going to rest my head AND I was doing something interesting. Maybe I was having too much fun because it took me 8 years to graduate, resulting in a 500-page PhD (that I’m probably the only one to have read).
After graduation, I had a brief employment at NOSC (Naval Ocean Systems Center) on Point Loma, before I headed off to Los Alamos National Laboratory for a postdoc in remote sensing. This lasted three years. About this time something I never expected was about to happen: I was going to get married to a gal from South Dakota.
When I moved to Los Alamos, New Mexico, at 38, I purchased my first home. Now that I was about to start a family, it was no longer just me that had to be considered. When my postdoc ended, work in remote sensing was difficult to find, but there were job offerings at the National Lab in computational high energy physics. While I wasn’t a perfect fit, I did have a clearance. And so began my twenty-year career at the Lab, moving ultimately up to team leader for a widely used physics code.
These years at the Lab were among my happiest. I loved my job and the mile-and-a-half high community. It was here that my three children were born and raised, among the canyons and national forests of Los Alamos. In 2007, I was approaching my 60th year. My oldest child was about to enter high school. We wanted to move after retirement to South Dakota where I could return to my earlier interest: farming. Rather than wait another eight years for all my children to graduate from high school, I retired at 60 to South Dakota, where I farm about 70 acres, and do what I have always done: write, even if it’s for my eyes only.

I graduated Tech in the winter class of 1955 and was class valedictorian. There were two large issues I had wanted to discuss in my valedictory address but was dissuaded by both parents and faculty — and, regrettably, I didn’t discuss them. The first was the striking difference between my classmates and a random group of Brooklynites — say, the folks at the RKO Albee down the street watching the latest movie. Looking at my copy of the Blueprint, there were three Blacks, one Asian, and a handful of Latinos (most notably, Richard Farina, who made a name for himself as a writer and folksinger). And, needless to say, no women. That all changed for the better over the years. I remember being told there were just not that many girls interested in science in Brooklyn (although, judging from Bronx Science, that did not appear to be true in the Bronx). Has the story been told about the steps toward inclusion at Tech over the years?
These were the Eisenhower-McCarthy years, and two of my best teachers, Meyer Case (Economics) and Raymond Blau (English) were fired by the New York City Board of Education for failing to take a “loyalty oath” required of New York City teachers. Mr. Case’s testimony before the notorious House Un-American Affairs Activities Committee of Congress is available online. For all I know, there may have been more victims than just those two. I wonder what information about those years might still be available at the school. I also hear echoes in today’s news. In 1954, Eisenhower signed a bill adding “under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance, which the entire school spoke each morning in unison. There were teacher-monitors who roamed the halls checking to see that we students (and I presume, teachers, also) said it right.
I am a three-years-retired neurologist; my practice was at Mount Auburn Hospital in Cambridge, and I taught at Harvard and Northeastern. I am widowed and have two married daughters and four grandkids. I didn’t become an engineer. What did I learn at Tech? Specifically, at the least, the glories of math, with Mr. Glaubiger, and I believe that later learning the very complicated anatomy of the brain and spinal cord was helped with Solid Geometry (is that still required?). I also learned at an early age that I did not do everything well. My worst course at Tech was Freehand Drawing, where I managed a minimal 65, only because the teacher told me that since he was the only person teaching that course, and definitely did not want to see any more of me, we’d agree on 65. And I ran into so many classmates in college and medical school who had never done poorly in anything in school until they ran into unexpected trouble. I’d gotten over that feeling so many years earlier!

It’s hard to believe that I graduated from Tech over 50 years ago. I have not been back since then, but have fond memories of my time as a student. Tech prepared be very well for college and for life. After attending Tech, I graduated from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute with a degree in Electrical Engineering. Upon graduation, I started working in broadcasting and am still working in the television industry. Although I started my career in TV engineering in New York, I shifted many years ago to TV production in Los Angeles. Currently, I’m head of production at STARZ. Glad to see that there’s an active alumni organization.