memories

Larry (Young Wisch) Wischhoefer, ‘69

Burton Third

4/6/95

Ron Beatty, old buddy of these many years, has compiled a wonderfully written account of life on Burton Third in the late 60’s.  This has inspired me to expand upon a few of his observations and to add a few of my own.

Learning Humility.  Most of us who came to MIT were in the top of our high school classes.  In other words we were likely accustomed to being the ‘best’ at something or other.  Being thrust into the rigorous environment at the ‘Tute produced interesting and varied effects on the new students.  It could be a humbling experience.  I had my mind adjusted (in the proper direction, as I look back on it) very early in my MIT experience.  Shortly after getting settled in my room on Burton Third, I decided to check out my new surroundings.  My exploration led me past the game room where a lively ping pong (table tennis to us ‘serious’ students of the game) game was in progress.  There were many people watching.  I joined them hoping to get into the game.  Now I must tell you, I was a pretty good player.  I had learned the game at a young age and had seldom lost a game in the couple of years before coming to MIT.  The rules of the House table were winner keeps playing.  I got on against a guy named Darryl Sperber.  He looked pretty good, but I figured I could handle him.  He hadn’t faced my devastating backhand snap shot after all.  As we started the game, a friend of his came to the sideline.  Darryl struck up a conversation with the friend which continued throughout our game.  Psychology plays a big part of sports, especially in table tennis.  It was somewhat disconcerting that Darryl seemed not to be paying any attention to our game or to his opponent.  He was looking at and talking to his friend even as the ball was flying back and forth!  I decided I needed to get his attention and put a little fear into him, so I unleashed the backhand.  To my amazement the ball came back past me twice as fast as I’d hit it.  Needless to say, my ego and I were summarily and unceremoniously dispatched from the table in short order.

I later came to learn that the quality of table tennis played at MIT was of the highest order.  There were numerous top-notch Chinese and Japanese intramural teams.  Burton house fielded some of the top teams.  Indeed, an early 60’s graduate of Burton House won the US Open table tennis championship.  I know this because he came to the game room one day pushing a book he had authored on the game.  Burton Third residents John Toivonen and Mike Comer come to mind as participants on the Burton House teams.  One of the greatest matches I ever saw involved Mike Comer, playing for the Burton B team, against a Japanese student playing for the Math Club A team.  Mike must have eaten his Wheaties before the game because he was as psched as I’ve seen anyone.  It was a big game and there was a large enthusiastic crowd in the game room; it was the kind of exciting event you like to be a part of whether as participant or observer.  Throughout the match, Mike stayed up on the table delivering powerful shots.  There was no finesse to his game that night, it was all power.  His opponent was a masterful defensive player.  He stayed back from the table, running down shots with amazing speed and quickness.  He put devilish spins and curves on the ball.  The rallies were all long; it was hard to imagine how the players could sustain the pace of the game.  None of  the players’ psychological ploys could get to the other.  All of the games went over the limit (one had to win by two points).  In short the match pitted two excellent players playing at the top of their games with neither cracking or giving an inch.  Such events are rare whether on the pro or amateur level, in my long experience, and are to be savored when they occur.  In the end it really doesn’t matter who wins such an event.  To tell you the truth, I don’t even remember who won this match.

Freshman Shower Night.  Ron has alluded to the events of freshman shower night which traditionally occurred after the first midterm exams of the year (i.e. in November).  In this case the year was 1965.  All of the freshmen knew what was to occur.  There was, I believe, a competition between the floors of the house to see who could douse all of their freshmen in the shower first (or was it to avoid being the last floor to do so?  One of the two).  Naturally some of the freshmen, for various reasons, weren’t about to participate willingly in the dousing, as Ron has said.  As for myself, I don’t recall having any particular thought on the matter.  I did mention to my roommate, Bob Bangs, in a joking manner some days before the event that we could, because of the location of our room, theoretically escape out our window onto the roof of the dining hall if they came to get us.

I must digress a moment to mention a key player in this episode.  Bob Bangs was a real straight-laced super tool from St. Louis.  It was incumbent upon him, in his mind, to get the top score in all tests and in any other academic endeavor.  He put a lot of pressure on himself with these lofty goals, needless to say.  I remember his great distress at getting only a 93 on a test.  I think I was happy to get an average 75 score on the test.  I think you get the picture regarding Bob, he was a nice guy who was wound up a little tight when it came to academics.  His MIT pursuits were tooling and writing for the student paper (The Tech?).  Unfortunately, the pressure got to be such for Bob that he suddenly and unexpectedly left the Institute before Thanksgiving of ‘65 and went back to St. Louis.  However, in my eyes, Bob did make a small contribution to hackerdom on the floor.

The evening before shower night I returned to the room from freshman crew practice to find Bob, who had been absent for several days “working on the paper”.  Bob had a mischievous and excited demeanor about him, strange I thought.  He showed me a bucket and a length of rope he had obtained by some nefarious means.  He then gleefully explained to me a plan he had concocted whereby we would rig the rope to one the beds near the window.  We would then push the elephants (portable closets) against the door to forestall the entrance of the shower-hungry invaders.  I (why not Bob?) was then to descend the rope to the dining hall roof and make good an escape which would teach those upperclassmen a lesson.  In addition Bob would rig the bucket filled with water over the door so that when those scoundrels opened the door, they would get a dousing of their own!

Our (or Bob’s) plan went off without a hitch when the time came.  Bob kept watch for shower crew activity in the hall so that we were able to bar the door in time.  I made my escape down the rope as the door was being forced open.  A tool in the room below ours was surprised to see some fool knocking on his window demanding to be let in.  By some means which I no longer remember, I was taken in (given lodging) by a varsity crew coxswain, Ray Petit, who occupied a riverside suite on Burton 5.  Ray was a little (as coxswains usually are) mole-like guy who took great pleasure in helping perpetrate this hack.  Burton 5 was in general only too happy to assist in my endeavor if it would assist in the defeat of Burton Third upperclassmen on shower night.

The escape had occurred shortly after I had returned to the dorm from crew practice.  I’d not had time to shower or change out of my sweats.  I therefore spent the next several days going to classes and living in my sweat clothes.  One works up a serious sweat in crew practice.  As the bowman in the boat I also caught the water from everyone else’s oars in the choppy November water.  The Charles River was pretty foul in those days (in fact Mytch Rider and the Detroit Wheels had a hit song then about the “...Muddy river Charles”).  As days went by I smelled and felt ranker and ranker.  It became imperative to get back to my room to get some clean clothes and some of my books for classes.  Like Ron said, I was a tool and didn’t want to miss my studies.  I talked to Bob Bangs back in my room over the phone and had him give me a time when the coast was clear so I could slip in and out of the room undetected.  This occurred in the evening when most of the upperclassmen were meeting in a room at the other end of the hall discussing, of all things, what to do about me.  I managed to reach the door of my room when the aforementioned Mike Comer, living next door, spotted me and set out on my tail in hot pursuit.  Now Mike was pretty fast, but fortunately he was no match for the kid.  I disappeared before his very eyes up the third wing stairwell.  The rest of the story is somewhat anticlimactic.  I then found it necessary to negotiate my return to life on the floor with the agitated crew on the homefront.  Fortunately, Ed Kellet, the senior floor tutor and moral compass, mediated on my behalf.  This kept me from being thrown into the foul Charles River for my transgressions.  My punishment was negotiated down to a simple shower dousing (there may have been some peanut butter involved, but this might merely be a rumor in my clouded memory).

The Great Dome.  Everyone knows the time of panic which is cramming for the semester final exams.  One must in a short period of time, say a week, make up for the skipped classes and missed studying over the course of the semester in several subjects.  Or maybe everyone these days is so conscientious that they don’t have to do such things?  Nah.  Walter Maurer and I were roommates in our sophomore year.  Our room was on the back hall facing the athletic field.  The Heinz 57 neon sign shone into our room at night.  We played a lot of basketball, usually with Ron Beatty, Rick Heldt (the ‘Old Man’), Tom Scholz, and any one else we could scare up.  We also liked to party whenever we could.  Maybe that’s why we found ourselves in the panic mode at the end of the first semester.  Anyway we started going to the engineering library in the Great Dome to study.  It was quiet there and also far removed from our normal daily distractions, out-of-sight out-of-mind you might say.  From time to time we would take a break from our studies and explore the back rooms and hallways which ringed the library.  On one of these sojourns we found a closed door which was unlocked.  Passing through the door, we went up a staircase and found ourselves in another world.  We were on the first of four levels of steel-framed open mesh floors (the kind you can see through) which ringed the engineering library.  The wall of the library formed the inner wall of this torus and the vertical wall of the Great Dome formed the outer wall.  There were no windows; the space was only dimly lit from general area incandescent lighting.  Rows of bookcases radiated out from the central axis all around on each level.  There was an old style desk with chair and lamp on the outer wall at the end of each row.  There was no one else present in these spaces, we discovered.

Walter and I set up shop in this place.  We practically lived there for the next week until finals.  It was the perfect place to study.  We were the only beings to inhabit the space for as long as we were there.  We occasionally browsed the books in the racks.  It seemed that we were in a repository for books dating back to the founding of the Institute.  A volume of beautifully bound books on railroad engineering dated in the 1860’s stands out in my mind.   At one time we got through a metal gate on the top level.  This took us to a catwalk/ladder system by which we could ascend to the top of the dome over the engineering library.  That’s right, there is (or was, I thought I heard that the library had been remodeled) a dome inside the Great Dome.  There was a hole at the top of this dome where we were able to look down, way down, into the library itself.  We had to lay on our stomachs at this point due to the angle of the ladder and to the convergence of the inner and outer domes.  As a footnote to this story, I used my knowledge of this region of the building to help Wiley Willy Fincke of Conner 4 find a way to get to the top of the Great Dome shortly before he was to graduate.  Don’t ask me what he wanted to do when he got on the Dome.

Ron Beatty’s musings have evoked a number of other memories.  I too was in Prof. Ambrose’s advanced calculus class.  This class taught me that my dream of being a math major was misplaced.  The only other thing I remember learning in the class was that “for every epsilon there is a delta” (or was it the other way around?).  I liked to call Lenny Weinstein the ‘underground man’ because his little single room always looked like a bomb had struck it, it was kind of dim and dark, and he was from NYC where they had all those subway tunnels and such.  I used to stay with Lenny when he was at Berkeley in the early 70’s and I went to the San Francisco area on business; his apartment was the same as his dorm room.  Lenny’s brother, Norm or ‘Wino II’, was a brilliant chess player as Ron has related.  I once (and only once) beat him at a game of speed chess because he spent his time commenting on and contemplating my moves; he didn’t realize that I didn’t really know what I was doing.  Well, it worked for one game......  Norm not only became a grandmaster, he also won the US Open chess championship in the early 70’s.  This was at the time Bobby Fischer was terrorizing and conquering the chess world and big time chess matches were often reported in the papers.  So imagine my surprise when I saw Norm’s name as a participant in the US Open.  I followed the match with great interest and was equally amazed and pleased that Norm won over some bigger names in the chess world.

The Great Northeast Blackout.   I rowed on the freshman lightweight crew for most of my freshman year.  I say most because I dropped off the team in the spring due to an injury to my feathering wrist suffered playing basketball in the winter.  Bruce Parker was my roommate at the end of freshman year.  He also rowed on the crew.  The freshman crew was real good (none of my doing though).  We beat the freshman heavyweight crew in the annual fall race.  That lightweight crew went on to win the Princess Elizabeth Cup at the Royal Henley Regatta in England (a world championship caliber event) after our senior year.  To this day I have no idea how I got involved in crew.  I had played football, baseball, and basketball all my life, no rowing.  However, in the fall of 1965 I found myself out on the stinking Charles River rowing ‘power 30’s’ every evening, come rain, wind or sleet.  The MIT Boathouse at that time was a venerable old structure situated next to the BU Bridge.  One of the days in November was really nice and calm.  The water was as flat as a mirror.  Rowing was almost a spiritual experience under such conditions.  The pulling of the oars in perfect unison, the shell glided gracefully and effortlessly through the water.  At around 7 PM we were heading back up the Charles from the Science Museum toward the boathouse.  It was twilight and Boston and its lights were a perfect reflection in the water.  As bowman, I had to turn the battery powered running light on the shell’s bow so that the sailboaters could see us and avoid running into us.  From stories I’d heard I thought it maybe better that some of them not be able to see us so they wouldn’t try to run into us, but that’s another story.  Anyway the bow light didn’t work so the coach had to shadow us in his outboard.  We glided under the Mass Ave Bridge after a short sprint.  I was watching the oars skimming above the smooth water.  It seemed that something changed at that moment, but whatever it was it was so subtle that it didn’t quite penetrate my consciousness.  Suddenly, someone in the boat cried out ‘Hey, all the lights went out!’.  At first, I thought he was talking about the lights on our boats.  Then we all looked toward Boston.  To our utter amazement, the city which had been beautifully aglitter with lights was a dark silhouette against the nighttime sky.  The other side of the river was in a like state.  Burton House was totally dark.  What followed is now known as the Great Northeast Blackout of 1965.  That, needless to say, was the highlight of my rowing career.

Walt Maurer, Tom Scholz, myself, and Lee Kammerdiner of Conner 4 moved into an apartment in Allston in our junior year.  I continued to use Burton Third as a kind of local operational base and we still participated in floor and house sports activities.  Tom set up his electric piano in our Allston apartment and began practicing to the strains of Iron Butterfly’s Inagaddadavida.  He took up the electric guitar during senior year stating that he wanted to become a rock and roll star.  Imagine my surprise a few years later when his new band Boston put out a hit record.

Like Ron I could spin yarns for hours.  But really, I’d like to hear stories from some of you other Burton Third Bombers. So get off your lazy duffs and crank up your computers and let us know what’s been going on over the years.

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Larry-Stuart Deutsch and Bart Bresnik took a bicycle trip from MIT to the Rhode Island School of Design.  When they got to the intersection of Route 1 and I-95, I-95 was not yet open,  so the bicycled on that although they got stopped by the police twice.  Both time the cops agreed that they were much safer on I-95 and allowed them to continue.

On another occasion, they rode their two Vespa motor scooters with camera equipment to Mt.  Monadnock to photograph an eclipse.  Bart had a crew member, Larry's plate camera and other equipment on his Vespa and fell over a couple of times without injury or damage.  Let's hope they are inspired to elaborate on these stories.