My Three Years at Tufts University.

After High School, in 1970 I went to Tufts University. I had a very memorable social life at Turfs -- in those days the parties never ended. Randy Roos from my class at Wellesley High School was my roommate for one year. He was and still is an incredible jazz musician.

I had a scholarship at Tufts that provided free tuition. Maybe as a result of all the late night parties, I did not actually attend any class lectures at all while at Tufts. Instead, I was then in an independent study program funded by the Sloan Foundation which allowed me credit for courses simply by doing the class homework and taking finals. There were some Tufts Professors that acted as my mentors, so I got to understand the academic world from their perspective and started then a habit of doing research projects in many diverse areas. I was still enthused about using a computer for anything and everything, but my projects became more technical and mathematical. As a Tufts undergraduate I wrote software for computer movies, to design holographs, to simulate the structural stability of geodesic domes under wind stresses, and to simulate the alpha wave of the human brain using partial differential equations. The Sloan Foundation had a program that allowed students to purchase equipment for their projects (the purchases where then the property of Tufts). At my request, that Foundation purchased equipment for two laboratories (an optics lab for computer made holography and a computer graphics lab for making computer movies) that I set up and used while doing projects on those topics. But, quite correctly, they refused to pay for the materials for a geodesic dome that I designed on a computer, saying that they had done enough and they would not pay for my house. So I constructed a geodesic dome at my cost and set it up one winter on the Florida Keys. One of my friends that aided me on that project, Glenn Bell, later became an architectural engineer and designed the geodesic dome centerpiece at the Disney Epcot center.

Just after my first year at Tufts, I hitched out west to California and British Columbia for a couple of months, and learned a lot more about the real world and really connected for the first time with people. I met and traveled with some really amazing people on those travels. I also had wonderful adventures on that trip. For example, on my westward hitch through Oregon, I saw the high peak of Mount Hood in the distance, so I got out and hitched to its base, climbed the peak on that afternoon and evening. I ascended to the volcanic peak’s caldaria just below the summit and camped there late that night. Unable to sleep due to the cold, I watched in the late hours of that night a storm of shooting stars that always occurs on August 11 and is quite striking at high altitude. In the morning, at dawn, I saw the Pacific Ocean for the first time in my life, and then glissaded (a mountaineering technique that involves a controlled slide using an ice axe or stout stick) down the mountain’s glacier to the lower slopes of that mountain. That date is still memorable to me, since it also is my wife Jane’s birth date.

In the spring of 1973, on my final term at Tufts, I took a course in winter survival where I met Jane Anderson, now my wife. We had a class camping trip to the Kancamagus wilderness in New Hampshire where it got down to –24 degrees F. I did not see Jane again until a month later, when I was playing my flute in the late evening in one of the student dorm stairwells at Tufts and Jane came up that stairwell. Things went from there. Outside of a short break, we have lived together since then, and Jane has been the center of my emotional life.