1966 U-M Fall Semester

Posted on September 17, 2020 by Mike

September-December 1966 Continue reading →

Classes: I took four classes. Each was memorable in its own way.

The math department had three sequences that math majors could take. Two were for students in the honors program. I took the higher honors sequence—six classes over three years with the same classmates.

Our teacher was Professor D.J. Lewis¹. The class consisted of about twenty guys and one girl. I don’t remember any names. Dr. Lewis began by saying that there were two ways to teach math. One was to go through the proofs at a fairly brisk pace. The other was to make sure that most people were comfortable with each concept before moving on to another. He said that as a student he much preferred the latter, but when he looked back on it, he learned more from the former method. So, all through the class he filled the blackboard with formulas. I went to every class, or at least nearly every class, and I did get quite a bit out of them.

The Russian teacher was Mrs. Rado. I had the advantage over the other students of knowing the Greek alphabet, which is similar to the Cyrillic alphabet. My primary disadvantages was that all my language experience was in dead languages. In high school we learned how to translate Latin and Greek, but not how to speak or understand them. I had to spend quite a bit of time memorizing and rehearsing the conversations. Fortunately, I had the time and inclination to do it. By the end of the semester she referred to me as the “отличник“, which was a little embarrassing, especially since most of the other students were older.

I also remember one class in which I was repeatedly asked by Mrs. Rado to pronounce the Russian word for five (пять). I never did it to her satisfaction.

The class that I was worried about was chemistry. I was enrolled in Chemistry 103, which, according to the catalog, was for students who did not take chemistry in high school. When I found out that the vast majority of my classmates had indeed already taken chemistry, I was ready to panic. However, it turned out that the subject matter was very easy—basically just a lot of permutations of Boyle’s law, PV=nRT.

I was lucky to have a lab partner who knew his stuff. I don’t remember his name, but he taught me, among other things, the use of the MIT Fudge Factor, which is .9677. He explained that if you were unable or unwilling to complete an experiment, begin by calculating the correct answer. Then, multiply or divide by the MFF. That is what you report. If you multiplied last time, divide this time.

We only needed this technique once, when he decided to augment the assigned experiment with some creative glassblowing over the Bunsen burner. Unfortunately, he accidentally bumped the beaker containing our unweighed sample with his still white-hot objet d’art. We needed the weight of the sample in the beaker to be accurate to a fraction of a gram. We successfully detached the two pieces of glass, but the weight of the beaker had certainly changed. So, we worked backwards using the MFF.

The first Latin class had a strong effect on me. Mrs. Sorenson, a somewhat elderly lady, handed out a three-page single-space text of one of Cicero’s orations. She explained that this was our assignment.

Marcus Tullius Cicero — Pronounced Kikero.

In that first session I was asked to read aloud a short section. The other students giggled at my pronunciation. They had all taken four semesters of Latin at U-M. In my eight semesters at Rockhurst High School we used the Church’s pronunciation. At U-M (and, I presume, at other heathen institutions) they used a different pronunciation in which v’s sound like w’s in English, and c’s sound like k’s. There were a few other differences as well. It took me a while to get used to this.

The three pages of translation was a lot more than I expected as an assignment. However, the first class was on Thursday, and the next class was not until the next Tuesday. I knuckled down over the weekend, and I felt pretty comfortable about being able to translate the whole speech on demand.

The next Tuesday I was not called on, and the class only got through the second paragraph on the first page. It turned out that when the teacher had said that this was our assignment, she meant the assignment for the entire semester!

So, I had a lot more free time than I had calculated.

I did very well in all four classes. I was not a bit surprised that I received four A’s. Only one other guy in Allen Rumsey matched my GPA. We both won the Branstrom Freshman Prize, which was a copy of Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations.

Everyone was required to take two semesters of phys ed as a freshman. I took golf during the first semester. I learned nothing. The teacher was a coach in some other sport. Most of the time we just hit golf balls into nets in the old Waterman Gymnasium, which was torn down in 1977.

One of our classes was held at a driving range well south of campus. I walked to class; it was the only time all year that I broke a sweat. We got to see our instructor hit a golf ball. He never whiffed, but he had an enormous slice. There is no way that he could break 90 with that swing, but he taught a course in golf at the best university in the state.

Debate: If you need a primer about intercollegiate debate in this era, you can find it here.

My partner, Bob Hirshon, who lived in East Quad, and I occasionally met to prepare for the Michigan Intercollegiate Speech League tournament. Since we were only scheduled to debate on the negative we did not need to coordinate our approaches too much. I researched the good things about our treaty obligations to NATO, SEATO, OAS, and the UN and prepared some disadvantages to leaving each. I think that Bob and I also talked about what we would do on the affirmative when we had to debate both sides, but I don’t remember what kind of case we decided on.

The symbol of NATO and flags of member nations.

I have reason to think that the MISL tournament was held at Wayne State. U-M brought a handful of novice pairs. There were only three rounds. All three affirmative teams that we faced argued that the U.S. should pull out of NATO. I gave virtually the same constructive speech three times. It claimed that the pullout would be damaging economically, politically, and socially. None of their answers to these arguments seemed very good to me. The teams that we faced would have been considered mediocre to bad on the Missouri high school debate circuit.

The judge voted for us in all three debates, and I was was awarded more speaker points than anyone else. I don’t remember that I actually won a prize, but they might have given me a certificate or something like that.

I think that Bob was also one of the top speakers. After they had announced the second-place speaker, Bob nudged me and said, “It’s going to be you.” Having no comparable experience in high school, I was still quite surprised. The other U-M teams had mediocre records or worse.

It seems as if we must have gone to at least one other tournament during the first semester, but I have no recollection of it. I don’t even remember any practice debates, but we may have had a few.

They did send Bob and me to some exhibition debates, at least three. I remember one vividly. We went to one of the Ann Arbor high schools and debated against each other in front of an assembly. We wore our suits and told lots of jokes, and the kids loved us.

What I remember most vividly was how young and small the high school students looked. In the movies college kids come back to their old high school and seem to fit right in. In contrast, after I had spent only a month or so at college, these kids looked like grade-schoolers to me.

I eventually met most of the other people on the debate team. The top team was Lee Hess and his partner, a red-haired guy named Rosenberg or something like that. They had represented U-M last March at the district’s qualifying tournament for the National Debate Tournament. Their record was 0-8. At the time there were many good teams in the district, but I feel certain that there were also some that I would consider horrible.

Jeff Sampson worked with the varsity teams a lot. I don’t remember anyone working much with Bob and me. In early December I was therefore very surprised when Dr. Colburn asked me to meet with him, Jeff, and Lee Hess. I learned that Lee’s partner had quit the team, and they wanted me to debate varsity with Lee in the second semester. This would require me to go to quite a few top-quality tournaments, which would mean missing classes.

I was shocked that they had chosen me over all the other more experienced debaters. The most amazing aspect was that they wanted me to do second affirmative. Generally, the stronger debater does the 2A. The first affirmative constructive is actually written out ahead of time. How well it is delivered is not really considered very important by most judges. The debater just reads it. So the 1A’s only responsibility is the five-minute rebuttal. It consisted of presenting arguments rapidly, not selling them.

I also was asked to be 1N, which was fine with me. The 1NC usually presents a lot of arguments, and I could “spread” better than Lee could. His job would be to analyze the affirmative’s plan and come up with reasons why it was a bad idea. Experience pays off in that role.

I decided to give it a try. I had had so little difficulty with classes in the first semester that I had gained a great deal of confidence about classes. Also, of course, I absolutely loved going to tournaments—win, lose, or … uh, there are no draws in debate. You can go 4-4, however.

Jeff and Lee and I worked together through the end of finals. We decided to run a “squirrel” case on the affirmative—ending the commitment to be the first country to put a man on the moon. At the very least this approach would mean that more experienced teams would not be able to use most of their tried-and-true “canned” arguments against us. I was definitely up for that.

In those days debaters kept evidence—short quotes from books and magazine articles fully cited on 4″x6″ index cards.² By the end of the year top debaters amassed thousands of them carried them in steel cases or briefcases. Walking from one classroom to another at a tournament was sometimes a real workout.

The best schools had systems for making sure that all debaters on the team had access to all the evidence recorded by al debaters on the team. Some even traded with other teams. U-M had no such system. I was fortunate to inherit the evidence amassed by Lee’s former partner.

Everyone organized his/her own evidence. Tabbed dividers were required. It seemed obvious to me that the tabs should be numbered like an outline: IA1a, etc., but not everyone did this. I don’t know how they managed. I pulled at least fifty cards per debate, and it was crucial to place them back in the right section. Also, at least twice in my career a drawer of cards fell off a desk and spilled all over the floor. It never took me more than five minutes to put the cards back in order.

The Hatcher Graduate Library has five basements. A second building is behind this one. The campus has many specialty libraries, as well.

In those days my handwriting was still good enough that my partner and others could read it. Later I typed all the cards.

I also purchased a large artist’s pad to use for taking notes in debates, a process called “flowing”. Most people in those days used legal pads, but I could never get an entire debate on one sheet of legal paper, and I wanted to be able to see the debate at a glance.

One advantage that U-M debaters cherished was the amazing network of libraries on the campus. If it had been published, we could almost certainly lay our hands on it.

Allen Rumsey House: For all four years I enjoyed living in Allen Rumsey House immensely. It was conveniently located, and I got along fine with almost all of the guys. It was a little difficult to get used to having only two showers and three toilets available for thirty residents, but many guys were elsewhere much of the time.

There was usually a card game going on our floor—hearts, spades, or euchre. We also played another trick-taking game called “Oh, hell.” I came up with a revised scoring method that everyone adopted. One day in the first week of class Gritty introduced me to Charlie Delos from Bloomfield, who know how to play bridge. We played pretty often against Gritty and Andy. Eventually, a more or less permanent bridge game arose in the lounge. I was a frequent but not constant participant.

Charlie Delos had a date on October 22 for the Homecoming Concert that featured the Beach Boys. She canceled at the last minute. I bought her ticket from Charlie. The opening act was the Standells, a glorified garage band from Boston. All of their songs were forgettable except for the finale, which they called a “medley of our hit”, “Dirty Water.”

It was homecoming, but they did sing a song called "Graduation Day". — It was actually a homecoming concert, but they did sing a song called “Graduation Day”.

The Beach Boys recorded the concert as a live performance. They began with “Help Me, Rhonda”, which started suddenly while it appeared that they were still tuning their instruments. The highlight was “Good Vibrations”, a big hit for them that no one in the audience had ever heard before. Despite all the special effects it was just as good in person as on the record. All of the original Beach Boys (the Wilson Brothers, Al Jardine, and Mike Love) plus Bruce Johnston played and sang. It was a great day. We got to see the Wolverines beat Minnesota 49-0, and then saw a great concert. I suspect that Charlie would have preferred the date.

One of the few people who got under my skin was my roommate, Ed Agnew. He had a very strange schedule. I got up early, showered, dressed, and left by seven or so. He slept late every single morning. I never saw him in the afternoon or evening. He would roll in some time between three and four in the morning, turn on the light, and (loudly) wash his face in the sink with a lotion that he kept in a squeeze bottle. The sink was on my side of the room, and the light woke me up every time. It was very annoying.

I never saw the Ag take a shower or brush his teeth in the entire semester. Neither had anyone else on the floor. He might have taken showers at phys ed classes, but still.

The Ag spent most of his time at the undergraduate library, which everyone at Michigan calls the UGLI. There are many good places to study at Michigan. The worst is the UGLI. The selection of books is both weak and obscure. Concentration is virtually impossible because of all of the activity. In short it is primarily a pickup spot, but I never saw any evidence that the Ag had any luck in that department.

The one thing that he had going for him was his stereo. However, his taste ran to big band music. His favorite album was Victory at Sea. If he turned on the stereo in my presence, I had to leave.

Ed’s parents moved to California. He dropped out after the first semester. I knew that his grades were awful; he may have flunked out.

Charlie also did not like his roommate very much. He moved into Ed’s bed in 315 for the second semester. I liked Charlie a lot, and he even had a stereo. It was not quite as nice as Ed’s, but it would do.

The two guys across the hall, Dave Zuk and Paul Stoner became pretty good friends. Both were in the engineering school, which was easier to get into in those days than Literature, Science, and the Arts. Dave knew a lot about electricity and electronics. Paul struggled in the classes, but at least he made it to the second semester, which is more than the Ag could claim. We played a lot of hearts. Paul was a master of what we called the “Stoner Run,” in which, having already lost a heart, he would try to see how close he could come to taking all of them. He usually collected the other twelve twelve.

Stoner had a home-town honey (HTH) who was still in high school in Adrian, MI. This astounded me. I had participated in some exhibition debates in high schools. They seemed to be full of midgets! At any rate, Paul invited me to Adrian (only 20 minutes away) one weekend day. It was nothing to speak of.

In November or December Paul’s girlfriend dumped him. Paul was incredibly distressed. This was the first time I ever encountered this phenomenon.

AR had a house council that met every week on Wednesday evenings. The secretary took minutes, typed them up, mimeographed 50 copies, and slid a copy under every door. I don’t remember his name, but I really liked his style. Halfway through the semester he resigned. Gritty asked me to take his place. It seemed easy enough, and so I did it. Thus, I became embroiled in dorm politics almost as soon as I arrived.

AR had a few traditions that I was not expecting. One was the inter-floor water fights. They usually pitted the third four residents against the fourth floor. One would start with an unexpected dowsing with a water balloon or a waste basket full of water. Soon water was several inches deep in the hallways, and it became critical to dam up the bottom of the doors to the rooms with towels and whatever else was available. The most epic of these battles led to waterfalls cascading down the stairs all the way to the basement.

I am not sure when it started, but some guys on the third and fourth floors also threw water balloons. The house president, Ken Nelson, had a great arm. He could throw one from the fourth floor all the way across the street to the front door of South Quad. The hapless victims never suspected that the missile had come from such a distance.

Balloons were launched from room 415 (L in the lower right). T1 and T2 (top) are the target areas. The trees were much smaller then.

The guys in 415, right above us, invented a water balloon launcher that defied belief. It consisted of surgical tubing that was affixed to each side of a window and to a kneepad that held the ammunition. two guy would then pull back the kneepad across the room, through the door, the hall, and into room 414, where they carefully set the kneepad down on the floor and simultaneously released it. Mishaps were common, but if they were careful, the balloon came out with absolutely incredible force. It would clear both the center and the northern section of West Quad across the street and over the trees (smaller than shown in the image) into the plaza between the LS&A building and the Administrative Building. Spotters from AR were stationed there to document the bombings. No one could ever have suspected where they came from. They called the device the “Chee ho tay”. I don’t know how they spelled it.

I personally saw them operate the device, and once I saw a balloon speed over the top of the north side of West Quad.

Nobody called me “Wave” in Ann Arbor. In Allen Rumsey house most people called me KC or Case. Elsewhere, I was just Mike.

Sports: Despite the fact that a super-talented future All-American basketball player lived a few feet to the west of Allen Rumsey House, everyone was most interested in football. All the freshmen pooled all of their ID’s together, and someone purchased a block of tickets for us in the corner of the end zone.

I remember that just a few days after school started one of the assistant football coaches visited A-R and put on a short presentation about the U-M football team. A large group of the house’s residents crammed into the rec room to watch a film that he showed about the team. It featured footage of some of the underclassmen on the 1965 team who would be playing in the first game that was just around the corner. The coach that year was Bump Elliott³, and my favorite player was Dick Vidmer⁴, the quarterback. By the end of the season I judged that the former did not take full advantage of the latter’s abilities.

A fairly strict ritual was followed on the Saturdays of home games. After breakfast a group of us would watch cartoons⁵ downstairs. Depending on the starting time for the game, we would then try to grab an early lunch before following the band for the one-mile walk to Michigan Stadium⁶. This would get us there in plenty of time before kickoff.

The stadium was surprisingly unimpressive from the outside. I knew that it held 100,000 people, but it did not seem possible. To me it looked smaller than Municipal Stadium in KC. When I entered the stadium, it became clear. Fully half of the stadium is below street-level. When you entered, half or more of the stadium was below you.

If the team was on the road, we would listen to Bob Ufer’s completely unbiased accounts of the action on the radio. More than a few fans brought transistor radios to the games and listened during home games, too.

Even then, Michigan Stadium was gigantic. The team was mediocre during my first two years at U-M. Nearly all undergraduate students attended the games, but the graduate students represented approximately half the student body. They and the alumni did not attend in numbers nearly as great as in 1968 and every following year.

There were no back support or arm rests in Michigan Stadium until "premium seats" were added. — There were no back support or arm rests in Michigan Stadium until a relatively small number of “premium seats” were added decades later.

This is not to say that there were empty seats those first two years. Michigan Stadium did not have seats. It had very hard metal benches with numbers painted on them. You sat on the number corresponding to your ticket.

An obvious problem developed if people were wider than the distance between numbers. Very heavy students were a lot less prevalent then, but for the Ohio State game with everyone in parkas in late November, a few late arrivals ended up sitting on the steps.

Rudy T. probably could have been and All-American in volleyball. — Rudy T. probably could have been an All-American in volleyball.

Very few students regularly attended basketball games, even when Rudy Tomjanovich was scoring 30+ points per game. I remember watching one game in the Crisler Center in my sophomore year. All of the fans were making fun of the way that the coach, Dave Strack, clapped his hands when the team huddled during a timeout.

Intramural sports were big in Allen Rumsey, especially volleyball and ping pong. I remember John Dalby, the fourth floor RA, started recruiting volleyball players during the first week of school. When I arrived, AR had never won the overall IM dorm championsip, but we were defending champs in volleyball.

I did not play on any of AR’s intramural teams as a freshman. In the first semester I was concerned with classes and other matters. In the second semester I was much too busy debating.

Many pickup football games were played that first semester. There were several fields that were in walking distance of AR. I made many good friends in these games.

I attended a few of the house’s intramural contests, including the two epic struggles in the finals of ping pong and volleyball, both against Wenley House. We lost in ping pong when our best player, Gritty, was defeated by a guy who overcame the handicap of a cast on one leg with reflexes of a cat. However, we won the volleyball championship by keeping the ball away from Rudy T. at all costs.

1. Among many other accomplishments, Dr. Donald J. Lewis became chairman of the U-M math department. He died in 2015. His Wikipedia page is here

2. At some point in the twenty-first century index cards and everything else on paper was replaced by laptops.

3. “George of the Jungle”, which began in 1967, was definitely our favorite. I don’t remember what, if anything, we watched in 1966.

4. After he left Michigan Bump Elliott became the Athletic Director at Iowa. He died in 2019.

5. Dick Vidmer got a bachelors, a masters, and a PhD at U-M. He studied economics as an undergrad and Soviet politics and government as a grad student. He developed multiple sclerosis in 1983, which forced him to retire in 1999. He died in 2022

6. I never heard anyone in Ann Arbor call Michigan Stadium “the Big House”.

1962-1965 Rockhurst High Part 1A: Freshman Year Classes

Posted on July 30, 2020 by Mike

High school is different. Continue reading →

We were so lucky. Our class was the first freshman class at Rockhurst High in the new building at 9301 State Line Road. That meant that none of the upperclassmen were any more familiar with the layout of the new place than we were. Nobody tried to sell us an elevator pass. I made my way to my homeroom, #204, on a September morning in 1961.

Construction of the new school was still taking place during the summer of 1961.

Rockhurst has always been an all-male school. In 2020 Rockhurst High School is still in the same location, and it is thriving. The tuition is over $14,000 per year, as opposed to $300 in the sixties. There are now about a thousand students, an increase of roughly 25 percent.

St. Ignatius of Loyola.

Rockhurst is a Jesuit institution. The Society of Jesus was founded by a Spaniard, St. Ignatius Loyola. Pope Paul III approved the order in 1540. In the last few centuries the Jesuits became primarily known as educators. Rockhurst was certainly one of the best high schools of any type in the KC area.

About half of the teachers in my day were Jesuits, almost all of them from St. Louis. Many were “scholastics”, i.e., Jesuits who had not yet been ordained as priests. We students called them “mister” just as we did the laymen, but they dressed in black cassocks as did the priests. There might have been one female who taught typing. I say “might” because, by a strange twist of fate, typing was never offered to my class. In 2020 there are very few Jesuits at Rockhurst. The theology department, with a total faculty of thirteen, has only one! There are more than a dozen female teachers, including two department chairs.

One person in my freshman class was black. He played no sports, and he was never in any of my classes. I don’t remember his name. The other three classes had none, and none of the subsequent classes (while I was there) had any. Rockhurst High in 2020 had a considerable number of black students. I don’t know how many were athletes.

In the sixties a considerable number of blacks lived in KC on both sides of the state line, but I have no idea how many were Catholics. At any rate, the new school was on the far southern edge of the city, ninety blocks from downtown. I doubt that there was overt discrimination, but most of the blacks probably went to KC public schools. They might have had trouble with the entrance exam.

The freshmen class was divided into six groups, as designated by six homeroom numbers, based on test scores. We all took classes in the same subjects: religion, English, algebra, health, world history, phys ed, and, of course, Latin. So, everyone whose homeroom was 204 had no classes at all with anyone from any other homeroom. In subsequent years only minor adjustments were made to the groups. By junior year the schedules were more varied, but at the end of four years I had been in classes with less than 25 percent of the 200 or so guys in the class of ’66. So, there were many that I did not know at all.

From day one it was obvious that the classroom experience would be fundamentally different from the educations that most of us had received from the nuns. The only thing that seemed familiar was that we sat in alphabetical order so that the teacher need not waste time calling roll every day.

Discipline was strict, but there were very few incidents. Nearly everyone who attended wanted to be there and appreciated the value of the environment and the education. Each of us was issued a demerit card. Demerits were punched by faculty or staff. If you were given five demerits in a semester, you got a “jug”, which meant that you stayed after school. I got a few demerits over the years but only one jug. That occurred when Mr. Rothermich, SJ, got annoyed with me for practicing basketball moves with my rolled-up stocking cap in the speech room after school.

We had a dress code that prohibited sneakers, sandals and the like, jeans, and shorts. Shirts had to have collars and buttons. The most popular style of shoe was black leather with pointed toes (roach-killers). Facial hair was out. No hair was allowed on the collar, ears, or forehead. That was fine for the first year and a half, but in February of 1964 guess what happened.¹

We were not required to attend mass every day, but we did write AMDG (Ad Maiorem Dei Gloriam) and BVMH (Beatae Virginis Mariae Honore)

In the first religion class Father Bauman, the vice-principal, began by walking up and down the aisles asking various students a question none of us had considered: “The bible, book or books?” The right answer is definitely “books”, but I bet that a lot of devout Christians would get it wrong. The message was simple. We were not going to memorize the catechism any more; we were going to learn the basis for our common religion.

This is easier if you understand glopitude.

In the very first Latin class Mr. Kister, SJ, wrote the following sentence on the wall “The gloppy glop glopped the glop gloppily.” The purpose was to show that even in English, which is a word-order language, word endings are often used to identify the nature of individual words. Gloppy is clearly an adjective, glopped is a past-tense verb, and gloppily is an adverb. In Latin word-endings are everything. Mastering Latin is largely a matter of learning to look for and listen for word-endings. Once again, we were being taught to think and understand, rather than memorize. Latin was my favorite class for the first two years. It was edged out by Greek the last two years.

Seldom used, but easy to throw and catch.

Mr. Stark’s world history class was a little different. He made us memorize this six-phrase list: pencil, pen, eraser, assignment book, folder, paper. We were required to have them at all classes. Every so often he would require us to lay out all six items on our desk for inspection. A demerit was punched for each missing item. Fairly often an eraser would be launched by a student who had already passed inspection in the direction of someone yet to be checked.

Mr. Stark also gave a quiz every day. Everyone hated this, but I think that it was a good idea. I, for one, would probably have put off reading or just skimmed the assigned lessons until right before the test if he had not done so. When I taught at Wayne State, I borrowed this technique.

Mr. Stark, who died in 2008, was not my favorite person, but I appreciated his dedication. The one thing that I did not like was when he showed us slides of Greek and Roman ruins. Many years later I saw most of these in person, and even then I found them tiresome after a while. Looking at someone else’s photos got old really fast.

I never thought about this much, but I did not really like Mr. Stark or Mr. Ryan, the basketball coach who also taught American history, a required course for sophomores. I respected both of them, and I took all the history courses offered at Rockhurst, but I did not even consider enrolling in history classes in college. Many years later I became really interested in papal history, and by extension Italian history, and by extension European history. In fact I became obsessed with these subjects. I think that I could have been a really good historical researcher, writer, and teacher. Oh, well, that ship has sailed.

What I remember most about the algebra class taught by Mr. Sisler, SJ, was his peculiar lisp, which, I suspect, came from a slight German accent. One day he asked a question, and I volunteered an answer. He then wrote it on the board and said, “Mistuh Ravada gave us this run to twy” with all the r and w sounds reversed. Not many students sniggered, but everyone talked about it after class.

Nevertheless, he was quite good at teaching algebra. However, he disappeared after our freshman year. I don’t know where he went.

By far the weakest of our teachers was a priest, whose name was, if memory serves, Father Wallace. He taught English, and sometimes he actually dozed off in class. We read nine or ten books throughout the year. The selection was not that stellar—he had a penchant for westerns. He also made a mistake in ordering one book. He ordered The Great Impostor, the biography of Ferdinand Waldo Demara, when he meant to order a novel with a similar title. So, we wasted a few weeks talking about Tony Curtis. I don’t remember this priest being around in subsequent years, either.

I am not sure why, but we also read Mutiny on the Bounty, the non-fiction book by Nordhoff and Hall that has been made into several movies. I remember that after we had supposedly been reading it for a week or so, Father Wallace asked someone whether the sailors made it back to England. The guy whom he asked said that he had not finished the book. Eventually, when it was explained that the answer was on the first page, he had to admit that he had actually not read any of it.

Father Wallace

When we were assigned to write a short story, mine was about two twins named Judy and Jody and how they treated their dog. I wasn’t very proud of it, but my classmates voted it the best. I was quite surprised.

Phys ed was fun. Coach Tuchness, who died in 2014, had us do all kinds of interesting stuff: wrestling, marine basketball (no fouls called), tumbling, crab walks, and regular games. The best part was that he did not make us try to climb a rope. I was one of the few guys who could do a headstand out of a backward roll. I found out that my peculiar spider-shaped build with amazingly flexible wrists was ideal for both types of crab walks. In either type of crab walk race, I was unbeatable.

Coach Tuchness set up a wrestling match between Pat Dobel and me. We were both built like spiders. He was slightly taller and heavier than I was, but I really thought that I could take him. We wrestled for what seemed like a really long time, and once I almost flipped him. However, neither of us could pin the other. Coach called it a draw.

Rockhurst graded on a 100-point scale. I don’t remember any individual grades, but my average was over 90, which qualified me for “first honors.” The teachers at the Rock were tough graders, but I finished in the top ten of my class in all sixteen quarters. Where is my scholarship?

1. I found a copy of a yearbook from 1975 online. By then the hair standards had been considerably relaxed.

1977-1980 Part 1: Dealing with Detroit

Posted on July 13, 2020 by Mike

Living in Detroit was convenient but challenging. Continue reading →

U-M’s speech department knee-capped its debate program for the 1976-77 school year. I finished up my masters degree and applied to George Ziegelmueller at Wayne State as a PhD student. I was accepted. My new career as a graduate assistant started in the fall semester of 1977.

This lot is where our house was. The tree was not there when we lived there.

When I took the job at Wayne State, Sue was already working at Brothers Specifications in Detroit. It therefore made sense for us to move from our apartment in Plymouth to Detroit. We could get a lot more for less money, and both of our drives would be shorter. We rented a house at 12139 Chelsea, near City Airport (now called Coleman A. Young International Airport) and Chandler Park. We had at least twice as much space as before, and that did not count the full basement with a large wet bar.

At the time of our move I still had my little green Datsun 1200 hatchback. Sue’s Colt had been abandoned after it threw its third rod. She bought a gigantic Plymouth Duster to replace it. We called it the Tank; neither of us had ever owned a full-sized car before. I vividly remember changing one of its tires on an upward sloping exit ramp on the Ford Freeway in an ice storm. I got the card jacked up, but while I was loosening the bolts the jack gave way, and I had to start over. I was in a really rotten mood when I finally arrived home.

Sue and I had no complaints at all about the house on Chelsea. The rent was unbelievably cheap, and the house was well-built and comfortable. Furthermore, we lived there for quite a while without incident. The house to the right in the photo was occupied by a couple named Freddy and Juanita and their holy terror of a son, Fre-Fre, who used to throw rocks at me when I mowed our lawn. We were friendly with everyone in the neighborhood. When we moved in during the summer of 1977, all of the houses on both sides of the street were occupied. By the time that we left in very late 1980 several houses were empty and two or three were boarded up.

The first troubling incident occurred on New Years Eve. Sue and I were watching New Years Rocking Eve or one of the other countdown shows. We heard a fairly loud sound that could only have been a collision between two cars. I went outside and saw that our Plymouth Duster, which, as always, we had parked on the street in front of the house, was now sitting up past the sidewalk into the bushes in Freddy and Juanita’s front lawn. The left front bumper was a little dented, but otherwise it seemed OK.

The boy who lived directly across the street, whose name neither Sue nor I can now remember, told me that he had seen the car that crashed into ours and pointed up the street. I jogged up to where the car had just parked. I memorized the license plate number and the address of the house that the people in the car had entered.

Then we called the police. They came, but they were not much interested in pursuing the matter. They went to the house that I indicated, but the man who claimed to have driven the car said that our car pulled out and struck his car. He was allegedly sober, but the other man was not. Even though I told the police that there was an eyewitness, they said that there was nothing that they could do. Hey, it was New Years. No blood, no foul.

The second incident was at the office that I shared with Pam and Billy Benoit in Manoogian Hall at Wayne State. I was there in the evening because I was scheduled to teach a three-hour speech class in the College of Lifelong Learning. The next morning we all realized that some stuff was missing from the office. We called Wayne State Police. The lady who investigated noticed that the door had been scratched by some kind of tool. Evidently someone forced it open. That was a relief to me. The stuff the Benoits had lost was more valuable than what I lost (I don’t remember the items—a radio, I think). I am notoriously absent-minded, and I feared that I had forgotten to lock the door.

That week all of the doors in the building were outfitted with steel plates that were designed to prevent anyone from tampering with the locks.

Our house in Chelsea was attacked three times. The first time was in 1978 or 1979. While Sue was at work and I was at school, someone broke the glass on our back door and entered the house in broad daylight. They took the television, the Panasonic stereo unit that was also in Bob’s apartment on the Bob Newhart Show, and the AR-15 speakers.

We called the police, but they would not come because the perpetrators were no longer there. They told us to come to the precinct station to fill out a report. Since we did not have insurance, we could not see that that would accomplish anything. We did tell our landlord. He commiserated with us, and he replaced the glass on the door.

The second attack came when I was alone in the house taking a nap. I was awakened by a crash of glass that seemed to come from the back of the house. I kept my aluminum softball bat near the bed for just this eventuality. I walked swifty towards the back door brandishing my bat. The guy must have heard me; when I reached the door, he was running through our back yard toward the alley. I was disappointed. I planned to look him squarely in the eye and then swing at his knees. What if he pulled out a gun? Well I was still bullet-proof at that point.

I called the police and the landlord. The former gave me the same answer as previously. The latter replaced with plexiglass all the windows facing the back yard.

When I told some of the people at Wayne State about this incident, Gerry Cox took me aside and said that he and his 9mm handgun would like to move into our house for a little while. I declined his offer, which was serious.

By the time of the third attack late in 1980 we had replaced the television and the stereo system. This time when I came home I found the entire back door in the basement at the bottom of the steps. The plexiglass had held, but the hinges had not. This time the house was ransacked. Our brand new television and stereo were gone, but, thank goodness, they did not touch our computer and printer. They were both very heavy, and at the time it was pretty much unheard of for anyone to have a computer in the house.

This time the police came. They were especially interested in the fact that the mattress had been removed from the bed. The investigator told us that they were looking for guns.

This attack was a blessing in disguise. At that point we had already decided to go back to Connecticut after Christmas. The burglary gave us fewer things to move, and the insurance money just about covered the cost of moving what remained.

Sue learned about our last problem before I did. She received a call at home from the police. They informed her that someone had stolen the battery from our car, and they had it at the precinct station near Wayne State. She called me at work. I had driven the Duster that day and parked it on the street near Manoogian Hall.

This was, as I recall, my very last day at Wayne State. I persuaded someone to let me use his battery to help jump-start the car. That worked. I then very carefully drove a couple of miles to the precinct headquarters. If the car had stalled, I would have been stranded. There was no battery in it, and I had no means of communication.

I parked and stepped inside. I had to sit around for quite a while before a detective could talk with me. He said that the theft had been witnessed through binoculars by a Wayne State cop positioned on the roof of one of the buildings. She had called the DPD, and they apprehended the thief while he was still carrying the battery. He told me that the perpetrator was also wanted for grand theft auto.

I asked him for the battery. He said that the police needed it as evidence. I insisted that I needed the battery. My car was parked outside, and there was no battery in it. Furthermore, we were leaving town within the week, and we absolutely needed the battery. He still tried to claim that the battery was evidence, but when I pointed out that they had an eyewitness, and they were actually going to prosecute the guy for the auto theft, he relented.

The property officer led me down to the area where all the “evidence” was kept. There were two batteries in the cage. Neither was tagged. He asked me which one was mine, and I pointed at the JC Penney one. If I had pointed at the other one, I am sure that he would have given it to me. I had heard that every year the DPD had a big event in which it sold all of the unclaimed property. There was no way that anyone ever intended to use my battery as evidence.

I had no involvement whatever in the most serious incident. I was home watching Wonder Woman while Sue went to a nearby drug store for something. When she stepped inside the door, a guy with a gun told her to go to the back of the store and sit on the floor. She did so. Eventually, the guy left and the police came. Sue told them that she didn’t know anything, and they let her go.

She was still pretty upset when she arrived back at the house. She said, “I couldn’t believe it. I walked into the drug store right in the middle of a robbery. The guy had a gun!”

I replied with great compassion, “Really? You sound a bit unnerved. You missed a great Wonder Woman. They showed Lynda Carter in a bathing suit.”

There was one other major problem with living in Detroit—the snow. The city plowed the main streets, but it never maintained the streets in our neighborhood. The years that we lived there were characterized by cold and snowy winters. For weeks after a snowfall the streets had two cleared ruts a foot or so wide. Essentially every side street became one-way. Getting from our house to a main road was often a real challenge, especially for my Datsun, which was the absolute worst car in bad weather.

We did not have a problem with rats at our house, but other parts of the city did. The city purchased small steel dumpsters for every residence. The lids were rubber or plastic. Ours was back by the alley. Not long after these dumpsters were in place, somebody discovered that it was fun to put a lit M80 in one and shut the lid. The dumpster survived with no difficulty, but the lid was blown to bits. Pretty soon the rats had easier access to the garbage than ever.

1980 Why I Am Not a PhD

Posted on July 12, 2020 by Mike

Orals and dissertation Continue reading →

By May of 1980 I had enough hours in speech and related subjects to qualify for a PhD. My oral exams and my dissertation remained.

I needed to form a committee. I think that Steve Alderton¹ was assigned as the head of my committee. I doubt that I chose him. I did choose George Ziegelmueller, the Director of Forensics and also my boss, and Ray Ross, the author of the Speech 100 textbook. Other graduate students assured me that Ross was a soft touch.

I was not worried about the orals. I reviewed a few notes for maybe an hour just before the test began. A psych professor had told us that the average performance on oral exams is horrendous because most students get flustered. The best performance he had seen was by a mediocre student who also hosted a program on the university’s radio station. I figured that my 14+ years of debate experience was more valuable than that. I knew that the trick was to admit it quickly when you didn’t know something. Don’t try to invent an answer. That is, maximize the time spent on what you know by minimizing the time spent on what you don’t know.

There was one difficult question that I knew that I had to answer. Steve asked me whether validity or reliability was more important in a statistical study. I mulled over the question for a few seconds and then chose validity. I hedged my bet by saying that reliability was important, but if your study lacked validity, you did not have anything. I am pretty sure that I gave the right answer.

Anyway, the committee only kept me waiting for about five minutes before they told me that I passed.

The topic of my dissertation was communication in groups. I was most interested in the power of arguments. Before I describe what I proposed to do, I need to talk about a group-communication study on which I worked with Steve earlier in the year.

The data for Steve’s study was collected before I became involved. Forty or fifty people were presented with two different problems that were each described in two or three paragraphs. They were asked to choose between two alternatives in both cases. Their responses were recorded.

Then they discussed both problems as a group. My recollection is that there were fewer than ten groups. Each group turned in a recommendation for each problem. The discussions were recorded on tape. Someone transcribed these onto paper.

Steve and I then categorized some of the utterances in the discussions as arguments. The idea was to use statistical tools on the arguments to determine how powerful they were in producing the results.

For some reason Steve was only interested in one of the two problems. We spent a long time reading the transcripts and marking them up. He had somehow established a minimum level of agreement about what constituted an argument, and he claimed that our two evaluations had met this standard.

The final step was to find the correlation between the arguments and the conclusion. The statistical tools required that the items being counted are independent of one another. Well, most people in the social sciences would consider the groups independent of one another. If not, there would be almost no studies of groups. The individuals could also be considered independent, at least when they were filling out their original forms heard from other participants.

Steve, however, wanted to use a method called “conversational analysis” that someone at his Alma Mater, Indiana University, had advocated. In this method the arguments themselves were used to determine the sample size (always designated by the letter n). If you counted the groups, you would probably need at least one hundred of them to have any chance of getting a statistically significant result. Even if you counted individuals instead of groups, the sample size of this experiment was not very large.

However, if you set n based on the count of the arguments, and dozens of arguments could be identified in each discussion, it would be much easier. To me it seemed clear that the people in the groups were not independent of one another. It is even clearer that the arguments should not be considered independent of one another.

Steve had offered to add my name to the paper in which he summarized the findings. When I told him that I did not want him to do this, he asked me why. I told him that I thought that he was calculating his sample size wrong, and this decision made it much easier to get positive results. He responded that quite a few studies that used conversational analysis had already been published.

Believe me; I thought of a lot of sarcastic ways to explain my reluctance to be involved. I did not let any of them past my teeth, but my face may have betrayed how worthless I thought that this approach was. To say Steve was insulted would be a gross understatement.

What did interest me was the problem that he discarded. I don’t remember all of the details, but it involved a student who was challenging his final grade in a class. The grade was based on four tests. The letter grades for the tests, one of which was an F, were provided, as was the final grade assigned by the teacher. In the text it said that the teacher had not erred in his calculations. I think that the four test grades were B, B, C, and F, and the final grade assigned was a D.

In several groups, one enterprising member calculated the final grade the way that one would calculate a GPA: (4 for A, 3 for B, 2 for C, 1 for D, and 0 for F). By this method, the student had four grades with a total of eight points. The group member argued that the student should have received a C because 8 (3+3+2+0) divided by 4 is 2. In every group in which the argument was made, the group’s decision went in favor of the student. When it was not, the decision went the other way.

It was a perfect argument!

Well, like Pope Urban II’s famous speech that launched the first crusade, it was effective, but I would hardly deem it “perfect”. In the first place, the text of the problem explicitly stated that the instructor had not made this kind of a mistake. Furthermore, the 4-3-2-1 method is never used in grading individual tests because the range for an F is too great. What if the F on one test was, for whatever reason, a 0? If the B’s are 85’s and the C is a 75, the average grade is 61.25, a low D.

I thought that it might be interesting to explore why people in the groups capitulated to what seemed to me a poor argument. However, it was Steve’s data, and I did not have the gall to ask him for it to write a competing paper. As it was, he was very irritated with me already.

For the dissertation committee I also needed to recruit someone from outside the department. I planned to ask the professor who taught the psych class that I had aced and who explained about the orals. However, when I finally got around to asking him, I learned that he was on sabbatical. I really had no choice but to ask the psych department to provide a substitute. I sent the assigned professor a copy of my prospectus, but I had never actually talked to him!

For my study I wanted to use the “shift to risk” studies to which I had been introduced by Prof. Cartwright in the psych department at U-M. At that time at least forty papers had been published that used exactly the same set of twelve problems². The original study had concluded that groups made riskier decisions than individuals. Some later studies found that this shift only occurred on nine of the twelve problems. One problem showed negligible change, and in the other two the group decisions were actually more conservative.

In these studies the answers were always given in terms of a probability of success at which the riskier choice would be desirable. That is, people were asked to assign a number between one in ten and and ten in ten that represented the lowest chance for success for which they would recommend the riskier alternative. My hypothesis was (1) that each of the twelve problems had a natural set of arguments; (2) not all people are accustomed to making risk-reward decisions based on Bayesian probabilities; (3) these people can be swayed by arguments that they had not considered.

Steve asked the committee to determine whether this study was (1) important enough for a dissertation, and (2) really about speech communication. The psych professor immediately spoke up. He said that he could not address the second issue. However, he said that mine was a very clever approach to an important topic. Despite the fact that there had been a large number of studies to analyze these shifts, no one had ever proposed this mechanism. I was dumbfounded by this unrequested assistance, and all the committee members were very impressed.

Steve insisted that I add conversational analysis to my methodology in order to bring it under the rubric of speech communication. I agreed to do so, but as I was telling the committee this, I said to myself that I would never spend a minute on this study. It now seemed to me like a potential nightmare that might drag on for years.

I also realized that I really did not want to be a professor of speech communication. I loved debate, and, at least at that time, the only way to coach debate was to be on the speech faculty of a school with a debate program. I probably would need to fight for funding for the program, a task that I would not enjoy. Furthermore, because of my background in math and statistics, I felt certain that I would be asked to sit on every committee that evaluated a statistical study. I had heard about and even participated in a few of these, and I had yet to encounter one with which I would want to be associated. Here are a few examples.

My first postgraduate class at U-M had been an introduction to graduate studies. In it one of the students asserted that he wanted to go to an Arab country to study their television shows to determine how much they widespread and influential American shows were. He wanted someone to finance him to go to Arab countries, watch television for a few months, and take notes. For a PhD!No, he did not speak Arabic. When I asked if they had something like a TV Guide that he could analyze, he said that that would not be sufficient. He said that he needed to see how many camels there were and stuff like that. I am not joking.
At Wayne State I participated in a study in which the experimenter obviously lied about what was happening in other aspects of the experiment. The fact that I figured this out should invalidate his approach. It is absolutely not allowed. If I were on his committee, I would have made him start over with a new design.
I also read Juddi Trent’s dissertation. She found that the speeches in Nixon’s 1960 presidential campaign differed significantly in style and content from the speeches in 1968. It was a well-known fact (and one that she acknowledged in the first paragraph of her dissertation) that Nixon wrote the first set, and he employed a team of speech-writers for the second set. Her null hypothesis was that the techniques were the same. She then used statistics to prove that the two sets were not likely to be identical, something she knew for a fact before she started.

Faculty members have three main responsibilities: teaching, publishing, and serving on committees. I had little interest in the subjects I would need to teach and publish, and I would be considered an ogre by all of the graduate students. I decided to do something else with my life.

What I decided to do was to try to help Sue’s fledgling computer software company become more viable. Since Michigan was in the throes of one of its increasingly frequent “auto depressions”, we decided to move back to Connecticut.

1. While writing this I discovered that only a few years later Steve Alderton changed careers entirely. He got a law degree and then became (for almost three decades) an official of the federal government, a world traveler, and an artist! His obituary is here.

2. This is called the “Choice Dilemmas Questionnaire” (CDQ) published by Kogan and Wallach in 1964. Here is an example: “Mr B, who has developed a severe heart ailment, has the choice of changing many of his strongest life habits or undergoing a delicate medical operation which may succeed or prove fatal.” Participants are asked to read the statement and then imagine they are advising the main character. They are then asked to indicate the probability of success (from 1 in 10 to 10 in 10) sufficient for them to choose the risky alternative.

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Tag Archives: Wayne State

1966 U-M Fall Semester

1962-1965 Rockhurst High Part 1A: Freshman Year Classes

1977-1980 Part 1: Dealing with Detroit

1980 Why I Am Not a PhD