“Dr. Asimov, may I please have your affidavit?”
That was me, speaking. Or, I suppose, I should rather say, that was I. Sorry, Pappy. It was 1960, I think. Maybe a year earlier. That would make me a sophomore or a junior. Likely then hall chairman of the infamous fifth floor of the East Parallel, in East Campus, MIT. And as such, curator of the Jack Florey War Chest. And an insatiable appreciator of the works of Isaac Asimov, even back before his first hundred-book milestone.
In those days, Asimov was still married and lived in Newton. And, as it turns out, he loved to hang out with the undergraduates of SFSMIT (The Science Fiction Society of MIT), which met on Fridays at 5:00 p.m. in the Crafts Library Lounge at MIT, just across Ames Street from my digs at 505 Walcott.
The brown flyer in my mailbox got my attention by claiming that “The Science Fiction Society of MIT...has many guest speakers during the year including Isaac Asimov, Hal Clement, Isaac Asimov, Johen [sic] W. Campbell Jr., Hal Clement, Isaac Asimov, and Isaac A.” I wasn’t a big joiner. Didn’t really collect affiliations. Had my trencher already well stuffed with studies, activities, and East Campus shenanigans, and had never taken the trouble to walk across the street to a meeting of the SFSMIT. But the prospect of meeting Asimov titillated my undergraduate soul.
So, when the bulletin board in Building 10 announced that Asimov would be this week’s
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speaker at SFSMIT, I decided (without much regret) to postpone dinner at Walker Memorial Commons and to hear what he had to say.
Already told you that I didn’t collect affiliations. I didn’t collect autographs, either. Still don’t. Always seemed tacky (though I’m not sure we yet had the word) to walk up to a famous person and ask for a signature. Even worse, to ask the victim to pretend that we were somehow acquainted. As if one would ever ask a real friend for an autograph. But as Asimov bantered with my classmates (he never did get around to giving a conventional speech), I was moved and excited and found I did want some tangible souvenir of the occasion.
Forty years later, I can’t recall his announced topic. Not sure he, or we, ever flitted within sight of it. The conversation was more like those bumpy-cars at a carnival than like, say, orderly traffic on a highway. More like Brownian motion than glacial drift. Not much like the lectures we were accustomed to.
But I do remember one thing Isaac Asimov said, because I wrote it down on the back of the brown flyer. He said, “I’m in favor of all sorts of crazy things.” At the end of the meeting, I approached the author and asked, with a grin which he reciprocated as he signed:
“Dr. Asimov, may I please have your affidavit?”
Cambridge, 11 December 2002
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