Comedy

If I had a chance to do it all over again . . .
I’d do just what I’m going to do now.
Be a stand-up comic.

There’s no more exhilarating feeling than walking out on a stage and making people laugh. It’s orgasmic. I’ve always dreamed of doing a one-man show on Broadway. Who knows? Maybe in the future it’ll be one more thing that I can’t believe ever happened to me. For now, I’m taking a comedy show on the road. A guy asked me if I’m going to wear suspenders. What did he expect? A cape and a Phantom of the Opera mask? I’m not going to reinvent myself. I’m just going to show the world another side of me.

The Finale

The columnist Art Buchwald once introduced me at an awards ceremony like this: “The great thing about Larry King is that he doesn’t know he’s Larry King.” I always thought a good title for my autobiography would be What Am I Doing Here? because I can’t believe it all happened to me. The final night of my show was no exception.

Larry King Live was going down as the longest-running show with the same host at the same time on the same network in the history of television. But there was no time to sit around and get nostalgic about it. Family and friends had come in from all over the country for the party after the show. Plus, I was dealing with ten- and eleven-year-old boys.

The Replacement

When Bill Clinton was in office we taped a show in which we toured the White House around Christmas. Our timing was great because a holiday party was scheduled for later in the day.

I returned for the festivities with Shawn, the broadcaster Tim Russert, and the sportscaster Jim Gray and his wife, Frann. The guards out in front of the White House checked Shawn in. They checked in Tim. They checked in Jim and Frann. Then I stepped up.

Getting and Giving

Not many people realize that the final show of Larry King Live was not really the final show. We taped a show that aired two days after the finale. It was among a series of favorites that filled out the last two weeks of the year and was called “The War on Cancer.”

The principal guest was a man who’d been told he had only twelve months to live . . . eighteen years ago—Mike Milken. The former junk-bond king is now known as the man who changed medicine. As the show unfolded, we ran clips showed Lance Armstrong, Colin Powell, Sheryl Crow, Olivia Newton-John, Joe Torre, General Norman Schwarzkopf, and others discussing the disease. Nobody knew it, but there easily could have been a clip of me among that group. You would have heard me describe what it was like to be laughing over breakfast with my buddies when a call came from my urologist, asking to see me face-to- face. That’s how I found out that I had prostate cancer. It was the start of 2010—yet another layer to the wildest year of my life.

The Middle East

“ I don’t want to say Larry King has a lot of experience in the Middle East,” a guy once said, needling me at a roast, “but his first interview was with Moses.”

Not exactly the kind of compliment you look forward to in life. But the guy had a point. I’ve seen a lot. As a kid I dropped pennies into a little blue cardboard box to support Israel. As a young radio broadcaster in Miami I got into arguments when I opened the microphone to the Young Egyptian League. Jews picketed the station. When it came to Israel, they didn’t believe an Egyptian point of view had a right to exist.

Politics

A little tip to my replacement. If you’re ever going to interview Barbra Streisand—do it live. At least then you’ll know when you’re going to start.

I learned my lesson years ago when we set up a taped interview with Barbra at the Plaza in New York. She tried on many different dresses, changing over and over for hours, checking how each one looked not only in the mirror, but on camera.

Broadcasting

Very often people are disappointed when they get to meet their heroes. Their heroes just can’t live up to their expectations. I’m lucky—that’s never happened to me. Mine have always treated me in a way that made me proud. I went to visit one of them at the beginning of my final year on the show. He was ninety-one at the time and in a wheelchair. But whenever I see Mike Wallace, I picture myself as a young man in Brooklyn racing home to watch his show. The show was called Night Beat.

Crime

This is a serious topic. So let me ease into it with a funny story. The topic is crime. The story goes back to when I was just making a name for myself as a radio show host in Miami. There was a convention for police chiefs and another for district attorneys taking place over the same few days. They were both ending with Sunday afternoon sessions. Somebody came up with the idea to cancel both afternoon sessions, rent out the ballroom at the Fontainebleau Hotel on Sunday night, and conclude both conventions with a combined dinner.

Movies

I ’m often asked who’s been my favorite interview. There’s just no answer to that. I’m proud of so many of them.
But a guy recently came at me from a different angle. What’s the one interview, he wanted to know, that I’m most asked about? It ain’t even close. The one where Marlon Brando kissed me on the lips.

We were comparing that interview to the one I did with Al Pacino that aired as the show began its final two weeks. Then the guy asked, Would you be happy if the only work you’d left behind were your interviews with Brando and Pacino?
No, I wouldn’t. What’s important to me is my body of work. But I understand where his question was coming from. It was really about legacy. How would I like to be remembered?

Music

Musicians were guests on many of the shows that aired over my last two weeks. Jon Bon Jovi brought along a pair of bright red suspenders for me to wear on my final show. Celine Dion sang John Lennon’s “Imagine.” Barbra Streisand opened up her home. Garth Brooks took the time to talk with people on our staff in a way that made them feel as special as he is. Stevie Wonder composed a song for me. It had a rhyme I wasn’t quite expecting.

Larry, I’m gonna miss ya.
If you were a woman, I’d kiss ya.

Riches

T he day after the Putin interview aired was one of the best of my life: The richest man in the world came on my show and then over to my house for a dinner party. Where I came from in Brooklyn, we didn’t have dinner parties. Your aunts and uncles came over for supper.

After my father died, my family went on welfare—only in those days it wasn’t called welfare. It was called Relief. I can remember an inspector coming over to look in our refrigerator. My mother was only supposed to buy choice meat, not top Grade A. But she bought top Grade A so her children could have the best and took less for herself. Those are the things you don’t forget. And now I was hosting a dinner party for the richest guy in the world.

Leaving

I ’m not sure which comes first—acceptance or belief. When you first realize you’re about to lose something that’s a part of you, it’s hard to accept. But even when you start to accept the loss, it’s still hard to believe.

I knew my show had only a few months remaining when I sat down last September to interview the Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for the third time. Yet as our final session ended, the words that left my mouth were: “We’ll pick this up next year . . .”

Time

I ’ve never thought much about time, because I’ve always been too busy looking at my watch.

That sounds like something Yogi Berra might say. But it’s true. You can’t be a broadcaster without being extremely conscious of the clock. I’m never late. I remember a time after I had heart surgery. I was at the La Costa Resort, waiting for my surgeon to meet me so we could head to the airport. I said, “Jeez, where is he?” Somebody who knew him said, “He can be late. He’s a surgeon. Surgery doesn’t start without him.”

Cargo Cult Science

During the Middle Ages there were all kinds of crazy ideas, such as that a piece of rhinoceros horn would increase potency. Then a method was discovered for separating the ideas ­­ which was to try one to see if it worked, and if it didn't work, to eliminate it. This method became organized, of course, into science. And it developed very well, so that we are now in the scientific age. It is such a scientific age, in fact, that we have difficulty in understanding how witch doctors could ever have existed, when nothing that they proposed ever really worked ­­ or very little of it did.

But even today I meet lots of people who sooner or later get me into a conversation about UFOs, or astrology, or some form of mysticism, expanded consciousness, new types of awareness, ESP, and so forth. And I've concluded that it's not a scientific world.

Altered States

I used to give a lecture every Wednesday over at the Hughes Aircraft Company, and one day I got there a little ahead of time, and was flirting around with the receptionist, as usual, when about half a dozen people came in ­­ a man, a woman, and a few others. I had never seen them before. The man said, "Is this where Professor Feynman is giving some lectures?"

"This is the place," the receptionist replied.
The man asks if his group can come to the lectures.
"I don't think you'd like 'em much," I say. "They're kind of technical."
Pretty soon the woman, who was rather clever, figured it out: "I bet you're Professor Feynman!"

Found Out in Paris

I gave a series of lectures in physics that the Addison­Wesley Company made into a book, and one time at lunch we were discussing what the cover of the book should look like. I thought that since the lectures were a combination of the real world and mathematics, it would be a good idea to have a picture of a drum, and on top of it some mathematical diagrams ­­ circles and lines for the nodes of the oscillating drumheads, which were discussed in the book.

The book came out with a plain, red cover, but for some reason, in the preface, there's a picture of me playing a drum. I think they put it in there to satisfy this idea they got that "the author wants a drum somewhere." Anyway, everybody wonders why that picture of me playing drums is in the preface of the Feynman Lectures, because it doesn't have any diagrams on it, or any other things which would make it clear. (It's true that I like drumming, but that's another story.)

Bringing Culture to the Physicists

Nina Byers, a professor at UCLA, became in charge of the physics colloquium sometime in the early seventies. The colloquia are normally a place where physicists from other universities come and talk pure technical stuff. But partly as a result of the atmosphere of that particular period of time, she got the idea that the physicists needed more culture, so she thought she would arrange something along those lines: Since Los Angeles is near Mexico, she would have a colloquium on the mathematics and astronomy of the Mayans ­­ the old civilization of Mexico.

(Remember my attitude to culture: This kind of thing would have driven me crazy if it were in my university!)

Alfred Nobel's Other Mistake

In Canada they have a big association of physics students. They have meetings; they give papers, and so on. One time the Vancouver chapter wanted to have me come and talk to them. The girl in charge of it arranged with my secretary to fly all the way to Los Angeles without telling me. She just walked into my office. She was really cute, a beautiful blonde. (That helped; it's not supposed to, but it did.) And I was impressed that the students in Vancouver had financed the whole thing. They treated me so nicely in Vancouver that now I know the secret of how to really be entertained and give talks: Wait for the students to ask you.

Judging Books by Their Covers

After the war, physicists were often asked to go to Washington and give advice to various sections of the government, especially the military. What happened, I suppose, is that since the scientists had made these bombs that were so important, the military felt we were useful for something.

Once I was asked to serve on a committee which was to evaluate various weapons for the army, and I wrote a letter back which explained that I was only a theoretical physicist, and I didn't know anything about weapons for the army.

Is Electricity Fire?

In the early fifties I suffered temporarily from a disease of middle age: I used to give philosophical talks about science ­­ how science satisfies curiosity, how it gives you a new world view, how it gives man the ability to do things, how it gives him power ­­ and the question is, in view of the recent development of the atomic bomb, is it a good idea to give man that much power? I also thought about the relation of science and religion, and it was about this time when I was invited to a conference in New York that was going to discuss "the ethics of equality."

 There had already been a conference among the older people, somewhere on Long Island, and this year they decided to have some younger people come in and discuss the position papers they had worked out in the other conference.

But Is It Art?

Once I was at a party playing bongos, and I got going pretty well. One of the guys was particularly inspired by the drumming. He went into the bathroom, took off his shirt, smeared shaving cream in funny designs all over his chest, and came out dancing wildly, with cherries hanging from his ears. Naturally, this crazy nut and I became good friends right away. His name is Jerry Zorthian; he's an artist.

We often had long discussions about art and science. I'd say things like, "Artists are lost: they don't have any subject! They used to have the religious subjects, but they lost their religion and now they haven't got anything. They don't understand the technical world they live in; they don't know anything about the beauty of the real world ­­ the scientific world ­­ so they don't have anything in their hearts to paint."

It Sounds Greek to Me!

I don't know why, but I'm always very careless, when I go on a trip, about the address or telephone number or anything of the people who invited me. I figure I'll be met, or somebody else will know where we're going; it'll get straightened out somehow. One time, in 1957, I went to a gravity conference at the University of North Carolina. I was supposed to be an expert in a different field who looks at gravity. I landed at the airport a day late for the conference (I couldn't make it the first day), and I went out to where the taxis were. I said to the dispatcher, "I'd like to go to the University of North Carolina."

Thirteen Times

One time a science teacher from the local city college came around and asked me if I'd give a talk there. He offered me fifty dollars, but I told him I wasn't worried about the money. "That's the city college, right?"

"Yes."

I thought about how much paperwork I usually had to get involved with when I deal with the government, so I laughed and said, "I'll be glad to give the talk. There's only one condition on the whole thing" ­­ I pulled a number out of a hat and continued ­­ "that I don't have to sign my name more than thirteen times, and that includes the check!" 

The 7 Percent Solution

The problem was to find the right laws of beta decay. There appeared to be two particles, which were called a tau and a theta. They seemed to have almost exactly the same mass, but one disintegrated into two pions, and the other into three pions. Not only did they seem to have the same mass, but they also had the same lifetime, which is a funny coincidence. So everybody was concerned about this.

At a meeting I went to, it was reported that when these two particles were produced in a cyclotron at different angles and different energies, they were always produced in the same proportions ­­ so many taus compared to so many thetas.

Would You Solve the Dirac Equation?

Near the end of the year I was in Brazil I received a letter from Professor Wheeler which said that there was going to be an international meeting of theoretical physicists in Japan, and might I like to go? Japan had some famous physicists before the war ­­ Professor Yukawa, with a Nobel prize, Tomonaga, and Nishina ­­ but this was the first sign of Japan coming back to life after the war, and we all thought we ought to go and help them along.

Wheeler enclosed an army phrasebook and wrote that it would be nice if we would all learn a little Japanese. I found a Japanese woman in Brazil to help me with the pronunciation, I practiced lifting little pieces of paper with chopsticks, and I read a lot about Japan. At that time, Japan was very mysterious to me, and I thought it would be interesting to go to such a strange and wonderful country, so I worked very hard.

An Offer You Must Refuse

Cornell had all kinds of departments that I didn't have much interest in.  (That doesn't mean there was anything wrong with them; it's just that I didn't happen to have much interest in them.) There was domestic science, philosophy (the guys from this department were particularly inane), and there were the cultural things ­­ music and so on. There were quite a few people I did enjoy talking to, of course. In the math department there was Professor Kac and Professor Feller; in chemistry, Professor Calvin; and a great guy in the zoology department, Dr. Griffin, who found out that bats navigate by making echoes. But it was hard to find enough of these guys to talk to, and there was all this other stuff which I thought was low­level baloney. And Ithaca was a small town.

Certainly, Mr. Big!

I used to cross the United States in my automobile every summer, trying to make it to the Pacific Ocean. But, for various reasons, I would always get stuck somewhere ­­ usually in Las Vegas.

I remember the first time, particularly, I liked it very much. Then, as now, Las Vegas made its money on the people who gamble, so the whole problem for the hotels was to get people to come there to gamble. So they had shows and dinners which were very inexpensive ­­ almost free. You didn't have to make any reservations for anything: you could walk in, sit down at one of the many empty tables, and enjoy the show. It was just wonderful for a man who didn't gamble, because I was enjoying all the advantages ­­ the rooms were inexpensive, the meals were next to nothing, the shows were good, and I liked the girls.

Man of a Thousand Tongues

When I was in Brazil I had struggled to learn the local language, and decided to give my physics lectures in Portuguese. Soon after I came to Caltech, I was invited to a party hosted by Professor Bacher. Before I arrived at the party, Bacher told the guests, "This guy Feynman thinks he's smart because he learned a little Portuguese, so let's fix him good: Mrs. Smith, here (she's completely Caucasian), grew up in China. Let's have her greet Feynman in Chinese."

I walk into the party innocently, and Bacher introduces me to all these people:
"Mr. Feynman, this is Mr. So­and­so."
"Pleased to meet you, Mr. Feynman."
"And this is Mr. Such­and­such."
"My pleasure, Mr. Feynman."
"And this is Mrs. Smith."
"Ai, choong, ngong jia!" she says, bowing.

This is such a surprise to me that I figure the only thing to do is to reply in the same spirit. I bow politely to her, and with complete confidence I say, "Ah ching, jong jien!"

"Oh, my God!" she exclaims, losing her own composure. "I knew this would happen ­­ I speak Mandarin and he speaks Cantonese!"

O Americana, Outra Vez!

One time I picked up a hitchhiker who told me how interesting South America was, and that I ought to go there. I complained that the language is different, but he said just go ahead and learn it ­­ it's no big problem. So I thought, that's a good idea: I'll go to South America.

Cornell had some foreign language classes which followed a method used during the war, in which small groups of about ten students and one native speaker speak only the foreign language ­­ nothing else. Since I was a rather young-­looking professor there at Cornell, I decided to take the class as if I were a regular student. And since I didn't know yet where I was going to end up in South America, I decided to take Spanish, because the great majority of the countries there speak Spanish.

You Just AskThem?

When I was first at Cornell I corresponded with a girl I had met in New Mexico while I was working on the bomb. I got to thinking, when she mentioned some other fella she knew, that I had better go out there quickly at the end of the school year and try to save the situation. But when I got out there, I found it was too late, so I ended up in a motel in Albuquerque with a free summer and nothing to do.

The Casa Grande Motel was on Route 66,  the main highway through town. About three places further down the road there was a little nightclub that had entertainment. Since I had nothing to do, and since I enjoyed watching and meeting people in bars, I very often went to this nightclub.

I Want My Dollar!

When I was at Cornell I would often come back home to Far Rockaway to visit. One time when I happened to be home, the telephone rings: it's LONG DISTANCE, from California. In those days, a long distance call meant it was something very important, especially a long distance call from this marvelous place, California, a million miles away.

The guy on the other end says, "Is this Professor Feynman, of Cornell University?"
"That's right."
"This is Mr. So­and­so from the Such­and­such Aircraft Company." It was one of the big airplane companies in California, but unfortunately I can't remember which one. The guy continues: "We're planning to start a laboratory on nuclear­propelled rocket airplanes. It will have an annual budget of so­and­so­many million dollars. . ." Big num­ bers.

Any Questions?

When I was at Cornell I was asked to give a series of lectures once a week at an aeronautics laboratory in Buffalo. Cornell had made an arrangement with the laboratory which included evening lectures in physics to be given by somebody from the university. There was some guy already doing it, but there were complaints, so the physics department came to me. I was a young professor at the time and I couldn't say no very easily, so I agreed to do it.

To get to Buffalo they had me go on a little airline which consisted of one airplane. It was called Robinson Airlines (it later became Mohawk Airlines) and I remember the first time I flew to Buffalo, Mr. Robinson was the pilot. He knocked the ice off the wings and we flew away.

The Dignified Professor

I don't believe I can really do without teaching. The reason is, I have to have something so that when I don't have any ideas and I'm not getting anywhere I can say to myself, "At least I'm living; at least I'm doing something; I'm making some contribution" it's just psychological.

When I was at Princeton in the 1940s I could see what happened to those great minds at the Institute for Advanced Study, who had been specially selected for their tremendous brains and were now given this opportunity to sit in this lovely house by the woods there, with no classes to teach, with no obligations whatsoever. These poor bas­ tards could now sit and think clearly all by themselves, OK? So they don't get any ideas for a while: They have every opportunity to do something, and they're not getting any ideas. I believe that in a situation like this a kind of guilt or depression worms inside of you, and you begin to worry about not getting any ideas. And nothing happens. Still no ideas come.

Uncle Sam Doesn't Need You!

After the war the army was scraping the bottom of the barrel to get the guys for the occupation forces in Germany. Up until then the army deferred people for some reason other than physical first (I was deferred because I was working on the bomb), but now they reversed that and gave everybody a physical first.

That summer I was working for Hans Bethe at General Electric in Schenectady, New York, and I remember that I had to go some distance ­­ I think it was to Albany ­­ to take the physical.

Safecracker Meets Safecracker

I learned to pick locks from a guy named Leo Lavatelli. It turns out that picking ordinary tumbler locks ­­ like Yale locks ­­ is easy. You try to turn the lock by putting a screwdriver in the hole (you have to push from the side in order to leave the hole open). It doesn't turn because there are some pins inside which have to be lifted to just the right height (by the key). Because it is not made perfectly, the lock is held more by one pin than the others. Now, if you push a little wire gadget ­­ maybe a paper clip with a slight bump at the end ­­ and jiggle it back and forth inside the lock, you'll eventually push that one pin that's doing the most holding, up to the right height. The lock gives, just a little bit, so the first pin stays up ­­ it's caught on the edge. Now most of the load is held by another pin, and you repeat the same random process for a few more minutes, until all the pins are pushed up.

Los Alamos

When I say "Los Alamos from below," I mean that. Although in my field at the present time I'm a slightly famous man, at that time I was not anybody famous at all. I didn't even have a degree when I started to work with the Manhattan Project. Many of the other people who tell you about Los Alamos ­­ people in higher echelons ­­ worried about some big decisions. I worried about no big decisions. I was always flittering about underneath.

Testing Bloodhounds

When I was at Los Alamos and would get a little time off, I would often go visit my wife, who was in a hospital in Albuquerque, a few hours away. One time I went to visit her and couldn't go in right away, so I went to the hospital library to read.

I read an article in Science about bloodhounds, and how they could smell so very well. The authors described the various experiments that they did ­­ the bloodhounds could identify which items had been touched by people, and so on ­­ and I began to think: It is very remarkable how good bloodhounds are at smelling, being able to follow trails of people, and so forth, but how good are we, actually?

Fizzled Fuses

When the war began in Europe but had not yet been declared in the United States, there was a lot of talk about getting ready and being patriotic. The newspapers had big articles on businessmen volunteering to go to Plattsburg, New York, to do military training, and so on.

I began to think I ought to make some kind of contribution, too. After I finished up at MIT, a friend of mine from the fraternity, Maurice Meyer, who was in the Army Signal Corps, took me to see a colonel at the Signal Corps offices in New York.

The Amateur Scientist

When I was a kid I had a "lab." It wasn't a laboratory in the sense that I would measure, or do important experiments.

Instead, I would play: I'd make a motor, I'd make a gadget that would go off when something passed a photocell. I'd play around with selenium; I was piddling around all the time. I did calculate a little bit for the lamp bank, a series of switches and bulbs I used as resistors to control voltages. But all that was for application. I never did any laboratory kind of experiments.

Mindreaders

My father was always interested in magic and carnival tricks, and wanting to see how they worked. One of the things he knew about was mindreaders. When he was a little boy, growing up in a small town called Patchogue, in the middle of Long Island, it was announced on advertisements posted all over that a mindreader was coming next Wednesday. The posters said that some respected citizens ­­ the mayor, a judge, a banker should take a five­dollar bill and hide it somewhere, and when the mindreader came to town, he would find it.

A Different Box of Tools

At the Princeton graduate school, the physics department and the math department shared a common lounge, and every day at four o'clock we would have tea. It was a way of relaxing in the afternoon, in addition to imitating an English college. People would sit around playing Go, or discussing theorems. In those days topology was the big thing.

Mixing Paints

The reason why I say I'm "uncultured" or "anti­intellectual" probably goes all the way back to the time when I was in high school. I was always worried about being a sissy; I didn't want to be too delicate. To me, no real man ever paid any attention to poetry and such things. How poetry ever got written ­­ that never struck me! So I developed a negative attitude toward the guy who studies French literature, or studies too much music or poetry ­­ all those "fancy" things. I admired better the steel­worker, the welder, or the machine shop man. I always thought the guy who worked in the machine shop and could make things, now he was a real guy! That was my attitude. To be a practical man was, to me, always somehow a positive virtue, and to be "cultured" or "intellectual" was not. The first was right, of course, but the second was crazy.

Monster Minds

While I was still a graduate student at Princeton, I worked as a research assistant under John Wheeler. He gave me a problem to work on, and it got hard, and I wasn't getting anywhere. So I went back to an idea that I had had earlier, at MIT. The idea was that electrons don't act on themselves, they only act on other electrons.

There was this problem: When you shake an electron, it radiates energy, and so there's a loss. That means there must be a force on it. And there must be a different force when it's charged than when it's not charged. (If the force were exactly the same when it was charged and not charged, in one case it would lose energy, and in the other it wouldn't. You can't have two different answers to the same problem.)

A Map of the Cat?

In the Graduate College dining room at Princeton everybody used to sit with his own group. I sat with the physicists, but after a bit I thought: It would be nice to see what the rest of the world is doing, so I'll sit for a week or two in each of the other groups.

When I sat with the philosophers I listened to them discuss very seriously a book called Process and Reality by Whitehead. They were using words in a funny way, and I couldn't quite understand what they were saying. Now I didn't want to interrupt them in their own conversation and keep asking them to explain something, and on the few occasions that I did, they'd try to explain it to me, but I still didn't get it. Finally they invited me to come to their seminar.

Meeeeeeeeeee!

On Wednesdays at the Princeton Graduate College, various people would come in to give talks. The speakers were often interesting, and in the discussions after the talks we used to have a lot of fun. For instance, one guy in our school was very strongly anti­ Catholic, so he passed out questions in advance for people to ask a religious speaker, and we gave the speaker a hard time.

Another time somebody gave a talk about poetry. He talked about the structure of the poem and the emotions that come with it; he divided everything up into certain kinds of classes. In the discussion that came afterwards, he said, "Isn't that the same as in mathematics, Dr. Eisenhart?"

"Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!"

When I was an undergraduate at MIT I loved it. I thought it was a great place, and I wanted to go to graduate school there too, of course. But when I went to Professor Slater and told him of my intentions, he said, "We won't let you in here."

I said, "What?"
Slater said, "Why do you think you should go to graduate school at MIT?"
"Because MIT is the best school for science in the country."
"You think that?"
"Yeah."
"That's why you should go to some other school. You should find out how the rest of the world is."

The Chief Research Chemist of the Metaplast Corporation

After I finished at MIT I wanted to get a summer job. I had applied two or three times to the Bell Labs, and had gone out a few times to visit. Bill Shockley, who knew me from the lab at MIT, would show me around each time, and I enjoyed those visits terrifically, but I never got a job there.

I had letters from some of my professors to two specific companies. One was to the Bausch and Lomb Company for tracing rays through lenses; the other was to Electrical Testing Labs in New York. At that time nobody knew what a physicist even was, and there weren't any positions in industry for physicists. Engineers, OK; but physicists ­­ nobody knew how to use them. It's interesting that very soon, after the war, it was the exact opposite: people wanted physicists everywhere. So I wasn't getting anywhere as a physicist looking for a job late in the Depression.

Always Trying to Escape

When I was a student at MIT I was interested only in science; I was no good at anything else. But at MIT there was a rule: You have to take some humanities courses to get more "culture." Besides the English classes required were two electives, so I looked through the list, and right away I found astronomy ­­ as a humanities course! So that year I escaped with astronomy. Then next year I looked further down the list, past French literature and courses like that, and found philosophy. It was the closest thing to science I could find.

Latin or Italian?

There was an Italian radio station in Brooklyn, and as a boy I used to listen to it all the time. I LOVed the ROLLing SOUNds going over me, as if I was in the ocean, and the waves weren't very high. I used to sit there and have the water come over me, in this BEAUtiful iTALian. In the Italian programs there was always some kind of family situa­tion where there were discussions and arguments between the mother and father:High voice: "Nio teco TIEto capeto TUtto. . ."
Loud, low voice: "DRO tone pala TUtto!!" (with hand slapping).

Who Stole the Door?

At MIT the different fraternities all had "smokers" where they tried to get the new freshmen to be their pledges, and the summer before I went to MIT I was invited to a meeting in New York of Phi Beta Delta, a Jewish fraternity. In those days, if you were Jewish or brought up in a Jewish family, you didn't have a chance in any other fraternity. Nobody else would look at you. I wasn't particularly looking to be with other Jews, and the guys from the Phi Beta Delta fraternity didn't care how Jewish I was ­­ in fact, I didn't believe anything about that stuff, and was certainly not in any way religious. Anyway, some guys from the fraternity asked me some questions and gave me a little bit of advice that I ought to take the first­year calculus exam so I wouldn't have to take the course ­­ which turned out to be good advice. I liked the fellas who came down to New York from the fraternity, and the two guys who talked me into it, I later became their roommate.

String Beans

I must have been seventeen or eighteen when I worked one summer in a hotel run by my aunt. I don't know how much I got ­­ twenty­ two dollars a month, I think ­­ and I alternated eleven hours one day and thirteen the next as a desk clerk or as a busboy in the restaurant. And during the afternoon, when you were desk clerk, you had to bring milk up to Mrs. D­­, an invalid woman who never gave us a tip. That's the way the world was: You worked long hours and got nothing for it, every day.

This was a resort hotel, by the beach, on the outskirts of New York City. The husbands would go to work in the city and leave the wives behind to play cards, so you would always have to get the bridge tables out. Then at night the guys would play poker, so you'd get the tables ready for them ­­ clean out the ashtrays and so on. I was always up until late at night, like two o'clock, so it really was thirteen and eleven hours a day.

He Fixes Radios by Thinking!

 When I was about eleven or twelve I set up a lab in my house. It consisted of an old wooden packing box that I put shelves in. I had a heater, and I'd put in fat and cook french­fried potatoes all the time. I also had a storage battery, and a lamp bank. 

 To build the lamp bank I went down to the five­and­ten and got some sockets you can screw down to a wooden base, and connected them with pieces of bell wire. By making different combinations of switches ­­ in series or parallel ­­ I knew I could get different voltages. But what I hadn't realized was that a bulb's resistance depends on its temperature, so the results of my calculations weren't the same as the stuff that came out of the circuit. But it was all right, and when the bulbs were in series, all half­lit, they would gloooooooooow, very pretty ­­ it was great!