Another bit of MIT folklore: many of the student dormitories faced out on the Charles River, and thus had a view somewhat like this one. Legend has it that one of the students in East Campus (a dormitory located on - duh! - the east side of the MIT campus) had figured out a way to tap into the university's high-pressure steam system, which was used (among other things) to heat the buildings during the fall and winter. The legend went on to say that this student had manage to coat the inside of a long pipe with Teflon, and had then connected one end of the pipe to the steam system, which he controlled with a shut-off valve, to prevent steam from gushing forth into his dorm room. Once he got everything set up, he opened his dorm-room window, pointed the pipe out toward some sailboats in the river, dropped a raw egg into the end of the pipe, and thenb turned the shut-off valve to let the pent-up steam blast the egg (which was instantly hard-boiled) out into the river. Legend says that it took him three or four shots before he was able to hit one of the sailboats. We all wondered what the sailor onboard must have thought, when hard-boiled eggs began raining down from the sky ... *********************** It was a lifetime ago that I stumbled off a Greyhound bus in downtown Boston, a clueless 17 year old kid with two suitcases that held all my worldly possessions. I dragged them out to the street (no roll-aboard suitcases in those ancient times), and asked a taxi driver to take me to an address in Cambridge that I had scribbled on a scrap of paper: 77 Massachusetts Ave. "Aye," the driver muttered, in a dialect that never did become familiar during the next several years. "SebendySebenMassAve." When he dropped me off, I noticed two things. First, enormous stone steps leading up to the entrance to an imposing granite building. And second, a long line of scraggly, sloppily-dressed young men stretching from the building's entrance down toward the street where the taxi had dropped me. Aha, I thought: I'm not the only one who forgot to fill out the official form requesting a dorm room. Welcome to MIT. I waited in line for two hours before being assigned temporarily, with two other equally absent-minded, newly-arrived MIT students, to sleep on mattresses in an East Campus dorm room that had initially been assigned as a "single" room to an understandably annoyed fellow from Cincinnati. One of the other temporary misfits, whom we immediately nicknamed "Filthy Pierre," had just arrived from Paris with nothing but one large, heavy duffel bag that he dragged into the room. Its contents consisted of miscellaneous telephone parts, which he dumped on the floor and kicked under the bed before wandering out of the room to explore Boston. (He had not showered in weeks, and he was eventually expelled for burning a cross on MIT's Great Lawn on Easter morning. But that's another story.) Thus began my four-year experience at what many still consider America's premiere scientific/engineering university. That I survived and graduated is a minor miracle; and while I'll hint at the adventures along the way, in this Flickr set, you'll have to look elsewhere for the details... I continued to live in Cambridge for a couple of years after I graduated; took a couple of graduate courses in AI and computer science, taught a couple summer MIT classes to innocent high school students (one of whom challenged me to write the value of pi on the blackboard, to 100 places, from memory - which I did), took full advantage of MIT's athletic facilities, and 25-cent Saturday-nite movies at Kresge auditorium, which always featured the enormously popular RoadRunner cartoons, and occasionally walked through the same halls and pathways that I had first explored as an overwhelmed undergraduate student. But then I got a new job, moved to New York City, got married, settled down, and began raising family. After that, I typically travelled to Boston two or three times a year on business trips, but never seemed to have time to come back to MIT for a casual visit. But one of the advantages of a near-fanatical devotion to the hobby of photography is that you begin to appreciate that all of the experiences you internalized and took for granted need to be photographed -- for posterity, if nothing else. Some of my most vivid memories of MIT, which we took for granted - like the huge,red, neon, flashing/pulsating "Heinz 57" sign out on the northern edge of the (Briggs) athletic fields -- are gone. Some of the legendary professors and deans have died and commemorative plaques have been erected in their honor. And there's a whole lot of new stuff - mostly new buildings and laboratories, whose specific purpose is a mystery to me - that I just have to shrug and accept. But the basic campus is still there. And the memories are just as vivid as they were, so many years ago. I can't say that I captured them a

Looking god-like down from my train as it sped towards York one day in February 1974, my view of Chesterfield's famous crooked spire was suddenly obstructed by huge clouds of steam. There was a loud hissing noise. We had burst a steam pipe between two of the carriages. The steam was for the train heating, which was shut off. The driver phoned ahead. At Sheffield a man in overalls was waiting with a new length of pipe. As we waited there was an unfamiliar whirring noise and a locomotive trundled through the station hauling a train of blue and red departmental coaches. At first I took it for a Class 37, but something didn't look quite right. As it passed I saw that it was the single remaining "Baby Deltic", D5901, which had survived its brethren as motive-power for Derby Research Centre's Tribology Research train (something to do with solid lubricants for valves in diesel engines). The Baby Deltics had been one of the most spectacularly unsuccessful locomotive classes introduced under the Modernisation Plan. There were only ten of them, powered, I think, by single Napier engines of the same type as those used in pairs in the full-sized Deltics. They were introduced in 1959 but were too heavy to work the north London suburban services for which they had been intended. Engine problems developed which resulted in the whole class being returned to English Electric for modification. After their return to traffic reliability improved, but a class of ten locomotives was fated to an early demise. The last was withdrawn in 1971 ...D5901 alone surviving for a few more years. This far from satisfactory photograph was taken from the window of a passing train on Tuesday 23rd July 1974. Nice to see a Class 03 shunter parked alongside. I always preferred them to the too numerous Class 08.