Stepping Into Wonder: New Kid at Princeton

An abridged version of this essay appeared in the Reunions Guide edition of the Princeton Alumni Weekly (PAW), as part of Reunions Weekend. I wrote it as part of my 25th Reunion, which I enjoyed greatly. It does not appear online, hence I am including a longer version here. The PAW version is what I call the "broadcast" version, while here I include "cable" material that would never make it into the prim pages of PAW. The "nice" title is "Stepping Into Wonder," while the "naughty" title is "My Keyceptor is Trying to Seduce Me! And Other Tales of a Princeton Freshman." Enjoy.
------------

Stepping Into Wonder

On August 30, 1976, I flew from McAllen, Texas to Newark, N.J. to start my freshman year at Princeton. As soon as I stowed my bags and a creaky manual typewriter at the Nassau Inn, my experience began. Map in hand, I wandered the campus and found a lecture in progress. I wrote in my journal, “Finally, I discovered just what I had stumbled upon—a lecture by psychologist Carl Rogers, before a convention of Humanist Psychologists.”

That lecture, on my first day on campus, set the tone for what Princeton was, and continues to be. Coming from an isolated part of the country, where people like Carl Rogers were seen as subversive, I immediately confronted challenging people and ideas. I stepped onto campus and gained a sense of wonder at the sheer immediacy of what Princeton offered.

The experiences and impressions tumbled over one another. My journal from those days recorded the shocks of the new on social, political and sexual topics. Displays at Dillon Gym from the Association for Humanistic Psychology, for example, had “a variety of HP pamphlets and literature, each containing its own pitch toward the reader. Some had odd titles and psychic goals. The gay/lesbian arm of the meeting had a very large display of boards illustrating moderate and severe examples of anti-gay activities and also pro-gay displays.”

A few days later, I attended a “lecture-slide show by Timothy Leary on space colonization . . . I called home from Alexander Hall and told Mom of the day. I also mentioned the coed bathroom-showers here [I soon discovered this applied only to the convention]. I think it is a sane arrangement—we all have our minds potty trained.”

As a hormonally normal teenager freed from the social strictures of South Texas, I just knew Princeton would enfold me in a riotous social scene. Or so I hoped, anyway. One evening in those first weeks I met with my “keyceptor,” an upperclassman assigned to newbies to answer questions and smooth their entry into Princeton. Mine made a big impression on me, albeit not in the way Princeton hoped: “We sat in a living room and talked. She is a classics student, short, intense, buxom. ½-way through our discussion of classes I noticed she was acting rather seductive—she was lying down on the couch diddling a pen between her breasts, one of those BIC-types. I thought, ‘I guess I’m willing if she is,’ but nothing happened, that time, anyway.” We never saw each other again, but I still hear the click-click of that pen snapping through my brain synapses.

That raunchy perspective colored other aspects of my earliest Princeton days. Consider my attendance at a meeting of Undergraduates for a Stable America (USA) in Whig Hall. “We spent most of the meeting dreaming up new names for the group. Nobody likes USA. I said it first struck me as corny. I suggested the Adam Smith Society, A.S.S. I thought of a marvelous promo campaign to bolster a fun loving image: ‘Grab a piece of the A.S.S. . . .!’”

From USA my focus swung to the other end of the political spectrum. One day I was returning from a Psych lab with Jeff Sellers ‘80, “Walking back to the dorm we stopped to listen to a very intense fellow representing the Spartacus Youth League (SYL) at a table cluttered with propaganda on the walk east of East Pyne. He was probably in his early 30s, late 20s, conservatively dressed, short hair, glasses, real lefty. Finally broke away.”

“At dinner my roommates and I, stimulated by the SYL, discussed the physical traits of Communists lurking in Commons with us. Although no properly lurking males could be seen, we did see 2 girls with frizzy hair, somewhat East Europe dress. No self-respecting Red has straight hair.”

A few weeks later, I went with friends “to hear an Isaac Asimov lecture in McCosh 10. We arrived 30 minutes early but all the seats were taken except in the balcony. The lecture’s main thrust centered on the threat of overpopulation and the methods of curing it—persuading women to not have so many children.”

Ever eager to expand my cultural horizons, in late September I joined Film Society, and went to see Federico Fellini’s 1973 film Amarcord at midnight. “Jeff and I situated ourselves near the front-center. Comfortably, too much so, for after about an hour my resistance caved in under repeated assaults of sleep and I dozed a while. I saw the last 40 minutes of this Italian flick. Outside I felt so cold. It was 3 a.m., and Jeff and I walked mostly in silence to the dorm. He enjoyed the symbolism and photography and thought the subtitles detracted from his appreciation of the visual beauty. I chattered my teeth in a semblance of agreement.” The next weekend I switched gears and saw Monty Python’s And Now for Something Completely Different.

The fall of 1976 marked the presidential campaign between Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter. Always a political junkie, I joined the University Democrats on an Oct. 10 bus trip to attend Columbus Day political events in Newark. Along with USA and SYL, the University Democrats spoke to the utter political confusion (or, as I like to see it, my independence) that puzzles my friends to this day. I wrote, “I got my 1st close view of Newark, the epitome of urban Armageddon. For a funny reason I felt at ease there and sensed a town still living an ethnic dream of a long time past.”

“In due time a procession with the usual police and fire attachments and on-the-take politicos came waving past, and finally, yes, WALTER MONDALE, looking a bit heavier than I expected. Totally uninspiring. He jumped from his open-body old car and starting gladhanding the adoring masses. . . . We began trailing Mondale along the crowded street, although my Republican leanings kept me from taking a banner or yelling. Finally he got in the car. We followed him down to a speakers’ stand, and although we could not see him, we heard a very brief nonpolitical blurb on the great contributions of Italian Americans to American culture, from Christopher Columbus to Don Vito Corleone. Retracing our route back down the street we found the GOP VP nominee, Bob Dole. My group trailed him from the sidewalk while waving posters and yelling and acting like perfect representatives of the party’s symbol.”

One encounter stands out as truly mythical. During the summer of 1976, my budding interest in the USSR led me to read Russia and the West Under Lenin and Stalin, by George F. Kennan ’25. Before Freshman Week, I noted a discussion at the Woodrow Wilson School on the theme of “Solzhenitsyn as a Historian of 1917,” as I remember. Having had my fill of humanistic psychology for a while, I wandered over. Among the attendees was an elderly man, who listened attentively and asked some questions. With a jolt I realized George Kennan himself attended the discussion. “So this is Princeton,” I thought to myself. “Wow!” (Kennan died this spring just weeks short of his 80th Princeton Reunion, at the age of 101.)

The other great memory of those early days involves my try-out for The Daily Princetonian. I thought about this story in 2003, when former Georgia Governor Lester Maddox died. As background, Maddox ran for President in 1976 representing the American Independent Party, a candidacy that generated something other than enthusiasm among Princetonians, as I was to discover in October . . .

As I recorded the event: “Candidacy period, Monday afternoon I was flailing away with my Econ story and Ben Engel ’77 asked me if I wanted to do a story. Sure—so I was introduced to Andy Steinberg ’80 and we began working on the now-infamous Lester-Maddox-at-Cottage flap. Monday morning pranksters distributed flyers at all dorm rooms proclaiming the appearance of the good governor at Cottage that night. The 3rd Worlders raised a ruckus and by 5 Andy and I were in WWS for a pre-march meeting with Kathy Kiely ’77 and somebody else. Then, off to a larger meeting in the TW Center. On the way over I interviewed Provost Snowden. So, as for the rest of the happenings, read the Tuesday Oct. 19 edition. I get a mention at the very end. Did not finish until almost midnight. I stayed at the office to finish reading the sheets to make sure that the info I contributed to the story was correct.”

That store plunged me into national politics, an amazing experience for a 19 year old. In a few months, I wrote my first lead article for the Prince, on a lecture by Simon Wiesenthal, renowned hunter of Nazis. As with the Kennan encounter, I felt I had entered a special place where amazing people and events were part of the landscape. I didn’t just learn history, I touched it, and saw and heard the history makers.