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!