Harvard traditionally starts its academic year very late, in the last week of September.  Meanwhile, I was itching to get out of the house and off to college, but I had to wait.  Yale was starting the week before, and was only a bus ride away, and so I ended up slumming at Yale’s old campus, their freshman quadrangle, looking for some action, or at least some activity, to keep me occupied.

My family had many connections with Yale.  Through a connection with Undersecretary of state Walt Whitman Rostow (his brother Eugene V. Debs Rostow was the provost of Yale Law School), my dad and mom were offered a one-year position teaching a seminar on East Asia.  My dad was a double law school graduate (in Korea and at Harvard) while my mom had a PhD in sociology from Boston University, which she had earned while raising three young kids.  So we moved from Washington DC (another yet-to-be-written post) to New Haven CT so that my parents could take this job.  Even though the job was only for one year, my parents were eager to establish a connection with a top-notch American university, and in Korea “Yae-il” was only second to “Ha-bo-duh” in status.

And so we rented houses on West Rock Ave. (from the Wm. Veales), Alden Ave., and finally Yale Avenue, which was located only two blocks from the Yale Bowl.  Clearly this was meant to be.  Several years later, when my older brother Howie applied to colleges, he ended up going to Yale, which started the next generation’s association with this tradition-laden school.

So during my senior year at Hopkins, Howie was a freshman at Yale, living in “TD”, Timothy Dwight College, singing in the Yale Glee Club, and spending time with his roommates.  I envied him his newfound freedom as a college student.  I remember that during my senior year I had a meeting with my college admissions advisor, who was also my math teacher.  He asked me what I expected college to be like, and I answered “Heaven!”  He chuckled and said, “Well maybe you shouldn’t start off with your hopes too high.  Although I’m sure that you’ll find it an eye-opening and enjoyable experience.”  The meeting was brief, given that I knew where I wanted to go, we both took as a given that Harvard would accept me, and my work and activities at Hopkins were exemplary.

Back to the old campus.  The old campus was a city block-sized quadrangle with a brownstoned archway (the Phelps gate–okay I cheated and googled it) as its main form of entrance and egress.  (The superintendent’s office was located there, and arriving freshmen (freshpersons? That was the first year that women matriculated at Yale) and their families all checked in there to get directions to their dorm rooms.  I hung out there and struck up conversations with these newcomers (I, being a townie of course, was an old hand), and I quite naturally fell into the role of helping new staudents carry their luggage to their rooms.  In the process I would ask the students and their parents, and in some cases siblings as well, where they were from, what were they planning to major in, what sports they played, and all of the usual conversation-starters.  For their part, they assumed that I was an upperclassman who had been assigned this duty, and I did nothing to disabuse them of this misconception.

I found that this was the perfect way to let off my nervous energy in starting my own freshman year, and I spent the entire week performing this unappointed function.  The officials at the gate didn’t seem to mind or even notice my work as a greeter, and by the end of the week I knew twenty or thirty freshmen by name.  I would run into them in the street, and they would say “Hi Ed! How are you doing?”  Even a few months later, during the Thanksgiving break, I would go downtown and invariably run into a few of my freshman-week friends, who would greet me warmly and say “Hey, Ed! Haven’t seen you around too much!  What have you been up to?”  At this point I usually ‘fessed up and told them that I wasn’t a Yale student, and in fact was a freshman at Harvard.  They registered surprise but were good-natured about it.  After all, I had helped them move in.

The following week, when my parents brought me up to Cambridge to start two weeks of orientation, I found that I had spent my meet-new-people energy at Yale, and was starting my time at Harvard with an empty tank, so to speak.  Or perhaps it was just the fact that I had no obligations or expectations at Yale, while Harvard was going to be my new home, come hell or high water.  Funny, this is the first time that I’ve made that connection.  I had always chalked up my behavior to impatient exuberance.  Another example of how writing things down leads to new insights…

(to be continued)