Report Card, Literary Effusions
Speaking of grades, here’s my first term report card. Which may make you wonder where I get off criticizing some of my professors. Well, I grump only selectively. I honor Professor Hardy’s memory with all my heart. Between his effective teaching and the head start I had from Don Lundy in high school, I did master the material in MIT’s required freshman physics and calculus courses. I did all right in chemistry, although no firm memory of the experience has endured, for good or ill.

The required humanities course (FOUND WESTERN CIVIL) was a joy, and I got closer to Professor John B Rae, who was also my faculty adviser that year, than to any of my more scientific/technological mentors. The Raes kindly hosted me in their lovely Belmont home for my first Thanksgiving in Cambridge, and it was he who encouraged me to re-work a high-school term paper; the result won the Humanities Department’s 1958 Ellen King Prize: $50 worth of books of my choice. In those days, that bought several volumes that I still treasure.
Tangent, the MIT Literary Magazine, Summer 1960, 25ยข
gave evidence of deficient judgment by including three adolescent poems of mine. The issue survives, in banged-up condition, in my library, in case your taste is similarly faulty.
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