Michigan State University, George Saimes and where I worked in the years after leaving MSU

As our common high school friends knew, a decision had been made between Dale (Rosenberry) and I to attend the same University. I had won a prestigious New York State Scholarship that paid a considerable amount for five years. Still, if you've caught the drift of any of these chapters, doing well in high school was not my main priority.  Living was. Not only had I never seen a blackboard in high school – very bad vision, and no glasses – I was absent a tremendous amount, and had impossible problems sleeping.

My teachers did not understand the kind of home I came from. They would not have guessed it had elements in common with the home Marshal Weissman came from. One of those teachers was Dale's father. Maybe I shouldn't blame them, for I didn't understand so well, either.

When I won big scholarships at the end of my HS Junior year, many teachers did an about-face from the extraordinarily poor grades (Bs, mostly, but that was in the face of tests being awfully easy for me) they were giving me. For some reason, my teachers en masse,  tried to make up for this by giving me straight "A"s my senior year. It was a gesture, though I needed freedom from that home more than anything else.

I missed over 80 days my Senior year, took as much stress off myself as I could, and stayed away from home as much as possible. My goal was to feel better about myself after a period of feeling there was no chance I would survive. In particular, I started a lawn mowing and raking business so I could buy myself some clothes and get a badly broken tooth fixed. 

Dale was, or had been, the most popular kid in my class for years. Having his friendship was an extra plus added to several others. I felt that I had to honor the trip Basil and Billy Rosenberry took us both on during the summer before our Senior year to see many campuses. We chose MSU. It was a school Dale could get accepted to, and then there were the girls and the campus: Both gorgeous! At MSU one of my friends was the Junior Miss Michigan.

I met George Saimes my first day at Michigan State in August 1959. Dale and I were playing pool in the West Shaw Hall recreation area. George, also in his freshman year, was playing nearby. We struck up a friendship that remains to this day. During this April of 2009 we had two phone conversations about his NFL Scout web site for which I did the original web setup for him.

To put this in a context, as I often find myself saying, there were eight guys with whom I played sports in High School. All – including Dale – were dead before they were 65. Even my first wife, a disastrous marriage for which George was my best – well, actually the only other person present, outside the minister – man, died last year, also under 65.

After three months at State, George and I became roommates. We would be roommates again at the end of my second year, as I was about to graduate from Michigan State. One of my claims to fame at MSU was that George, as a sophomore, wore my jacket while appearing on the cover of Time Magazine.

George said he had to take a math course, and it was his biggest worry. I said, "No Problem," I would help him with the course. This was a characteristic mistake I've made throughout my life, often not recognizing that many people have psychological difficulties with courses like math and science.

George just couldn't do it. He got an F, a failure that threatened his eligibility for football. What we should have done was to get him tutoring early, and to have prepared for his finding a way to a passing grade a year, or two, later. Now I felt responsible for putting him in trouble.

Still, I had a plan. Spring Quarter of our Freshman year, I took the course as if I was George Saimes. 

I was walking across campus late one night next fall quarter with a friend, who had just finishing saying that she heard that I was very smart, and thought it would be neat if she were in a class with me. I suggested she might find that a very different experience than talking – in our flirty way – while walking across campus.

At that moment the teacher for the course saw me, waved, and called out, "Hi, Hero." George had a spectacular fall football season. She was referring to his having run for over 150 yards against Notre Dame. He also was an outstanding tackler, playing often, almost the entire game, in those times before specialized defenses. My friend, though quizzicle, was now doubly impressed.  I had to tell her something, suitably simple, of what that was about.

Indeed, the whole incident was a perfect storm. My friend Dale's roommate was in the class I took for George.  My luck: 33,000 students in 1960 on a huge campus you could walk across and not see anyone you knew. While he didn't tell on me directly, the RAs in the dorm were let in on the situation, and one of them confronted me near the end of the quarter.

Worst, however, was when I showed up one day to the Mathematics department Office Spring quarter of my sophomore year. I was one of the team members of the winning Putnam Team that year, my last at MSU, for I had more than enough credits to graduate. The teacher of that class and Leroy Kelly, who ran the Putnam Team, were simultaneously in the office.

Kelly and I had never gotten along. He especially hated that I seemed to be taking MSU very lightly. All was revealed by a brief interchange of hellos, and his using my name.  The story doesn't end there, with meetings all the way up to the president, John Hancock, of the University, and denouncements of me personally, by politicians in Michigan.

The upshot – Stage I: Kelly convinced the other four people I had math classes with, in the mathematics department, to give me Fs. That seemingly prevented my graduation. Ah, but even without those courses, I still had enough credits to graduate.

The upshot – Stage II: I was eventually awarded a  degree – from the Honors College to which I had been a member since the 2nd quarter of my freshman year. The letter of that award came with a letter from Dean Fusak who had followed me through the process. There is an upshot – Stage III below.

I worked for my Uncle Ted, as Peggy says, but starting in June 1961, after I left Michigan State, not while I was in school. The project there was simulating the launch of a Polaris Missile from a Nautilas Submarine in a wind-whipped Arctic Sea. Yet, that company – Allied Research Associates – within six months.

My second aerospace job was with Bell Aerosystems out in Niagara Falls. Contrary to Peggy's statement, I never had a job as an instructor at University of Buffalo. I knew my engineering, my degree major at Michigan State being Electrical Engineering, and I was at Bell Aerosystems the day President Kennedy was shot. My image of everyone I can recall from that job is of their reaction to the JFK assassination. Our projects were the Lunar Excursion Module, and the Saturn Missile.

What I found, however, was that the engineers around me at Bell hadn't seriously mastered their courses. Few  were doing more than book-keeping type calculations. The R&D people came to me, often skirting my bosses – and thereby getting me in political trouble. Soon, I found there was just too much resentment. I was getting an ulcer, possibly exacerbated by that terrible first marriage.  (The ulcer never returned after I left Bell.) 

My first wife insisted I should get out of engineering; it would impress her father if I got a PhD. That wife had a similar need-hate relation with her father, as did Peggy with her mother. Her father, Max Graff, was a problem for a long time, though years later he changed. TC never changed, her opinions grew as hard as her demeanor. Marrying poorly was de rigeour for someone from a home like mine.

The upshot – Stage III: When I tried to go back to school, I couldn't get a letter of recommendation. My applications, except for one, for graduate school were rejected with that the cited reason. The exception was University of Michigan. A professor from UM, who had been visiting MSU while I was there, knew of my situation. Luckily he was on the committee for evaluating graduate students.

My eventual thesis advisor, D. J. Lewis, suggested that they likely knew more about my story, during my time at MSU, than did I. I suspect Kelly was a pain to others, too.

UM didn't at first offer me a scholarship, and, Lord knows, I had an exceedingly poor background for seeking a degree in Mathematics. Still, I went to UM in 1964, and within a short time they procured for me a Rackam Fellowship and an NSF Graduate Fellowship. My degree – untainted by any problems this time – came in June 1967, and I did a two year post-doctoral at the Institute for Advanced Study. That was already quite an honor, though Peggy has to turn that into something strange and unlikely related to Einstein.

Although I am an unlikely academic, for the whole business is almost beyond belief political, there were a string of successes into my early career, including the offer of Tenure at University of Chicago when I was 26. No success, however, seemed to mean more, than impressing Max Graff.

When visiting the Graff home when we were first at UM, I was repeatedly told, in most certain terms, that I couldn't possibly have what it takes to get a PhD degree at UM. A friendly secretary (that's what we called Administrative Assistants then) one day told she had gotten a call from someone seeking information on me. It was my father-in-law. She assured me she steered him to someone who knew me. From that day on Max's attitude changed, to near awe. UM meant a lot to him. He had been slated to go there until his father demanded he take over a Ford Dealership in Flint.

Still, being from such a dysfunctional home, meant I lacked any connections, or training in the academic life, and even more so, didn't really like its sucking up to prestige. I continued to get in serious trouble, and had an unending series of adventures that assured I would be considered one of the most unusual of mathematicians.

I was 100% a researcher. While I knew personally a tremendous number of the most famous of mathematicians, it was an alien world to me. Still, like any mathematician, I get the usual response from a world insecure about mathematics and science, whereby almost anything I do is sneared at as being the result of my being a mathematician.

On the other hand, I was always empathetic to the problems of teaching and learning. In that context, I found educators would assume I was low on the totem pole of the places I held positions: Stony Brook, UC Irvine, University of Florida, and Hebrew University. Having been a full professor very early, having had four famous fellowships – despite the lack of politics, and having always had a very high salary, starting with that at Stony Brook, any reasonable evalution would show that was wrong.

Perception is an astonishing thing. Probably I was impervious to it, for no one I ever met was more famous than TC.