Everything in my world feels exciting and new! This must be the golden payoff pot at the end of an academic rainbow of adventures. My tomorrows and their tomorrows seem open, rich and challenging. Also, they might prove to be remunerative.
Long days and nights of non-stop worrying filled with studying, writing theses plus jumping through a myriad of academic hoops that the Pennsylvania State University, PSU, maintains for professional credibility are fading ghosts from the past. There is a historical protocol to university traditions that was developed long, long ago, way back to the thirteenth century at the University of Paris. People from all over the world place a great deal of merit and importance on the way our beloved forefathers and fore-mothers behaved and believed.
The ethereal tones of Gaudeamus igitur so reminiscent of medieval Germanic graduation ceremonies at Goettingen University circa 1850, still ring in my ears. However, few people living in the USA today, can relate to such old-world customs but, somehow, I still find them charming and emotionally moving. Again, there seems to be no accounting for tastes as the Romans during Cicero’s time still remind us.
But that was long ago, and this Albuquerque scene is taking place, today. Here, I am, sitting alone in a motel room in Albuquerque, New Mexico, preparing to deliver a one-hour presentation on the propagation and absorption of a plane electromagnetic wave propagating into vast regions of a relativistically hot plasma medium, such as the corona of a star, maybe our own Sun!
This is bizarre and rather unbelievable. Where is Merlin, the Magician, making all this hoopla possible? Is Steven King at work here? Maybe, I have slipped into the Twilight Zone and Rod Serling will appear to shake my hand? Is there life after magneto-hydrodynamics? I am not sure, at the moment!
Life does not get any better than this for a thirty-year-old guy, who only ten years ago, was wandering the gray, soiled, cobblestone streets of a moribund, industrial, Massachusetts city that had already lost its way and its former importance after the local, textile sweatshops had moved their lung-clogging operations to the Carolinas, North and South.
For me, the empty lunch pail of opportunity in Lowell, Massachusetts had driven me to greener pastures elsewhere. How happy I find myself slowly reminiscing on all those fine and encouraging teachers at l’Ecole St-Louis, the Marist brothers at Le College St-Joseph and the many professors at the Lowell Technological Institute, LTI, now called U-Mass Lowell. it is only a glint of a memory from days long ago and far away.
Life’s demands and economic crises move us reluctantly on-wards even when we resist and refuse to budge. This truth seems to hold for cities, towns and people, too. Nobody wants to be pushed around like a hockey puck on the ice with no say in the matter.
But, I digress. This second portion of my PSU life experience had lasted 30
months from March, 1967 to September, 1969. These were transition times when all five family members – my Frau, Beryl, and her three teenage children plus myself – were adjusting to life in a quiet, central Pennsylvania college town, State College, after surviving the cultural stress and excitement of learning a new language and culture while managing our daily lives in a Bavarian fashion in Munich, Germany.
Being now married, my domestic life in State College contrasted sharply with the previous, bachelor ease, freedom and discovery of living in a somewhat Spartan but intellectually very stimulating environment at the University Club on College Ave. This social club offered serious students of proven ability an opportunity to live off campus but adjacent to the main university facilities.
The Club provided meals and lodgings for some 40 graduate students and visiting, foreign professors with many opportunities to share opinions and
exchange professional concepts in common areas. At the time, it was, in effect, a men’s club where membership was not determined by excessive amounts of dollars oozing from one’s wallet, but rather by civility, an interest in international affairs and academic accomplishments.
In contrast, my first stint at seeking an advanced education and professional credentials in Happy Valley – the local residents call their township this affectionate name – had taken place in a time period from September, 1961 to October, 1963. Those efforts had resulted in my obtaining an Master of Science degree in physics from a nationally acclaimed university. In 1963, that piece of paper would give the holder a potential entry pass at several research universities and national laboratories. For starters, I was pleased.
Pleasing and impressing individual members of my doctoral committee from the Physics Faculty had been a 30-month-long challenge that was highlighted by ephemeral hopes and constant concerns regarding the status of my NASA-funded research appointment. NASA can give, but NASA can, also, take away, and quite suddenly. I never felt safe and secure for financial reasons. Fortunately, the powers that be at the time proved themselves to be trustworthy.
Knowing how to be well-liked by the students and respected by professors as a doctoral candidate in my multi-disciplinary position required my wearing several hats, simultaneously. I was expected to conduct a theoretical thesis through the Nuclear Engineering Department on the interaction of a plane electromagnetic wave with a relativistically hot plasma medium plus also supervise and run a hands-on, teaching laboratory for seniors in the Electrical Engineering
Department. When I was not occupied with these duties, I also interfaced with one of my thesis advisors, a kindly older gentleman, Dr. Gibbons, in the Physics Department.
Sometimes, I wondered which scientific flavor was more likely to stick to me. Was I a product of a nuclear, electrical or a physics environment? This dilemma could be frightening. I must not become a multi-personality, a scientific freak! There are no jobs for such people!
Professors, there were four of them, who often wanted differing proofs of competence. After about ten years of preparation delving into the multi-faceted contents of experimental and theoretical physics, which took me to laboratories and institutes in Pennsylvania, California and West Germany, I felt some sense of having achieved, at least, a modest degree of respectability in the corridors of the hard sciences.