Krum Elbow

The part of the Columbia campus that I most enjoy remembering was the Columbia boathouse at Krum Elbow. It was, it seems, inaccessible by land, sited in an isolated rural area across the Hudson river from Poughkeepsie....

Columbia College 1950

My Favorite Game That I Saw at Columbia

In the late 1940s, Columbia played Army in football at Baker Field. Army had a formidable team and was expected to make quick work of Columbia. Army also had two teams,...

Columbia College 1950

The Closing of the Ring

Although I am now a New Yorker again, I have lived and worked on six of the seven continents.

I was a commuter, a subway student, for the first three years of my Columbia...

Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science 1950

What Happened to Physical Diagnosis

I have been retired for ten years. As do most of my contemporaries, I have had a variety of ailments. I am struck by the almost universal cursoriness of physical examinations by today’s physicians....

College of Physicians and Surgeons 1950

A Student’s Story

My first year in a CC class upset my applecart. Catechism instruction did not prepare me for the daily debates. Occasionally I made a point. The one I remember is “omission can be as much an...

Columbia College 1951

Auditing

Taking more points a semester than was necessary, there was no time or room for Prof. Joseph Wood Krutch’s course. The literature course covered modern novels and writers. Somehow, I managed to get to his class without registering...

Columbia College 1951

Dormitory Life

After a period of commuting, my parents changed our apartment and my brother opened a dental office in my bedroom. It was a good reason to move into the dormitory. I shared my room with a classmate...

Columbia College 1951

Encountering Lionel Trilling

When I entered the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, then known as the Faculty of Philosophy, I registered in Lionel Trilling’s course in American Literature. And I came to read The Liberal Imagination, which was...

Graduate School of Arts and Sciences 1951

My Spiritual Pilgrimage at Columbia

I was a fairly nominal Christian when I entered Columbia. During my second year, another engineering student, having heard via the grapevine that I was supposedly a Christian, invited me to his room each...

Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science 1951

The Teacher Who Changed My Life

It was unlikely that I, a solidly pre-medical student from a solidly medical family (father was P&S ‘00) would be impressed by a distinguished professor of philosophy. Yet it was James Gutmann who...

College of Physicians and Surgeons 1951, Columbia College 1941

“Great Minds of My Generation”

The greatest mind of my generation, it was my privilege to know, belonged to my classmate, the late and much regretted Allan Farnsworth.

All members of our class were proud of the first Columbia...

School of Law 1952

Psychological Religion

During my time as a graduate psycholgy student 1948-52 I took completely elective courses on the Old Testament the New Testament. With another grad student I sat in on a course on Genesis given at Union Theological...

Graduate School of Arts and Sciences 1952

The Ike and I

As a student at The College of Pharmacy (68th St. and Broadway), I was in my sophomore year.

We had to go to Pupin Hall on the campus for physics. During a lab period, we...

College of Pharmaceutical Sciences 1952

Combat Veterans

I entered Columbia College in 1946 along with many combat veterans of World War II. I was 22 years old and one of the youngest veterans in my class. I had flown missions over Germany in B-17’s...

College of Physicians and Surgeons 1953, Columbia College 1949

Entering College

I was a graduate of Lafayette H. S. in Brooklyn, N. Y. in 1942. World War ll had started, and I enlisted in the Army Air Corps as an Aviation Cadet. After flying as a Bombardier with...

Columbia College 1949, College of Physicians and Surgeons 1953

Envious Regrets

I went through the college as a young 16 year old, still living at home in Washington Heights, focused on a pre-med education and adolescent socialization. I helped out on the Columbia Review, wrote humerous poems for...

College of Physicians and Surgeons 1953, Columbia College 1949

Freshman Orientation

Most members of the college class of ‘52 will remember our first introduction to the then newly appointed president of Columbia University, Dwight Eisenhower. He gave us some quite unexpected advice at our freshman orientation, telling us...

Graduate School of Business 1953, Columbia College 1952

Post World War ll Years

Dear Editor,

I entered Columbia College in February 1946 as one of many World War ll combat veterans. The G. I. Bill of Rights paid for most of my tuition, thank goodness. I also...

Columbia College 1949, College of Physicians and Surgeons 1953

Advice to Myself

To an entering freshman who did not grow up in New York City, I would strongly advise him/her to set aside one evening a week and one Saturday or Sunday a month to explore Manhattan. A...

Columbia College 1954

Love Letters

The best teacher I had at Columbia was Professor Gilbert Highet from whom I took Humanities in the fall of 1947. He had just returned to Columbia after having served in British Intelligence during World War II....

School of Law 1954, Columbia College 1951

Mark Van Doren

Mark Van Doren was my humanities teacher. One day in class, he asked a question and called on me. I wasn’t paying attention and asked him to repeat the question. He then apologized to me for...

Columbia College 1954

my favorite text book

While at Columbia we used Richard Courant’s “Differential and Integral Calculus.”

It’s been my constant companion for forty years.

I taught mathematics for twenty years and never found a textbook comparable.

Unfortunately it went out...

School of General Studies 1954

My Most Memorable Summer Job

I worked every Summer during my college and engineering school years but the best was the last. I was hired by American Cyanamid (now gone) to do some devolopment work in thermoplastics and specifically...

Columbia College 1953, Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science 1954

Armageddon

In early September, 1952, I arrived on campus as a sophomore, a transfer from the University of Oklahoma. It was my first visit to New York.

It was the Saturday before the Monday that Orientation of New Students...

Columbia College 1955

Dr. Charles Frankel – Five Years Later

Dr. Frankel exposed this freshman to Contemporary Civilizations; each lecture, “lights” would go on!

He wrote the basic history of contemporary thought. I recall inquiring on the first day of class what...

Columbia College 1953, Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation 1955

My Best Teacher

Even though it has been over 50 years since I was graduated from Columbia College, it took me less than a split second to come up with my “best teacher” nomination: Professor Boris Stanfield.

Why? More...

Columbia College 1955

Financial Aid

Quite simply, I could not have even considered coming to Columbia but for having qualified for a Ford Foundation grant in 1952. The program sought high school juniors a year or more younger than their classmates (I...

Columbia College 1956

Sex and the Switchboard

I lived in John Jay and Hartley when I was attending Columbia.

In those days, there were telephones in the hall on each floor of the dorms, and they were connected to the outside world...

Columbia College 1956

So THAT’S What Life Is About!

I came to Columbia largely sheltered from the real world, with little experience other than sitting on a stoop with my friends or immersing myself in books. As a freshman, I was assigned...

Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science 1956, Columbia College 1954

The Armada Defeated

Garrett Mattingly was a spell-binder who could keep history graduate students on the edge of their chairs while describing a story for which we all knew the ending. When he finished the lecture, there was breathless...

Graduate School of Arts and Sciences 1956

The Beauty Part

For me, now celebrating the 50th reunion of the College’s class of 1956, the most beautiful site on campus was and remains the Casa Italiana in general, and its Teatro in particular. I was honored to...

Columbia College 1956

Where the Heck Is It?

I was the first boy in my family to go to college since my great-grandparents emigrated to this country – something that may have been true for more than a few of my classmates,...

Columbia College 1956

Joseph Bernard Stern

I took some classes the summer of 1952 to make up deficiencies so that I could enter the School of Nursing that fall. One of the courses was Sociology, taught by Joseph Bernard Stern. He used...

School of Nursing 1957

Summer Activities

Each of my three college summers were primarily spent on “cruise” as a Regular NROTC midshipman. When the “cruise” was over I joined my brothers (Herbert, ‘54C and Alan, ‘57C) at a hotel in the Berkshire Mountains...

Columbia College 1957

Sunday mornings at Columbia Chapel

An Episcopalian friend of mine, whom I had already known as an undergraduate at Ohio State and who was getting her masters in English Lit at Columbia, sang in the choir of the Columbia...

School of Library Service 1957

A Just Education

When I was a freshman I led a panty raid on Barnard. We had at least 100 guys storming the Barnard dorm in search of underwear. (What trophy could be more valuable?) In the pandemonium I...

Columbia College 1958

Arriving Early

In the fall of 1956, a fellow student and I arrived at Colubmai as the first two students to attend engineering school on the Combined Plan from Hendrix College in Conway, Arkansas. Neither of us had been...

Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science 1958

Arts While at Columbia

A long time ago, the physical therapy degree program was all-consuming, with classes at 168th Street and internships all over NYC, but I found a few hours, once in a while, to enjoy the arts...

Program in Physical Therapy 1958

Boucher and Brecht

As a student in Arts Humanities, I was sent out to compare a couple of paintings, one by Boucher, at the Frick Collection. As I stood studying the work, in front of the ornately upholstered chair...

Columbia College 1958

Dorm Life

It was a warm, beautiful, late-spring day, and we were studying for finals. As I looked out of my Livingston Hall 2nd floor window, a pretty co-ed walking by caught my eye. I yelled a hello to...

Columbia College 1958

Religious Life as an Undergraduate

As an undergraduate (1954-58) I went to services, including a few at St. Paul’s (at one, Billy Graham waved his gilt-edged Bible and impressed my friends who were interested in theater), some at Union...

Columbia College 1958

Succinct as Could Be

During freshman week we attended several lectures. The one that stayed with me and which I passed on to my children (Michele ‘86C, Benjamin ‘91C) is that of the late Harry Coleman.

He said to...

Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science 1958

Back to “Seven Storey Mountain”

This will be brief. Some time at Columbia (two years at Barnard), around 1944-46, I became acquainted with the writings of Thomas Merton. I read “The Seven Storey Mountain” and particularly enjoyed his recollections...

Teachers College 1959, School of Nursing 1949

Bunk Bed in John Jay

We had three people in two rooms on the 6th floor of John Jay for the first semester of our freshman year. Our furniture consisted of a double decker bunk bed and a cot....

Columbia College 1959

Columbia on My Mind

My first contact with Columbia was in the small cotton town of Cleveland, Mississippi, home to Delta State Teachers College. In 1924, the state legislature created this school to train teachers for the public school...

College of Physicians and Surgeons 1959

Meeting My Wife

I met my wife-to-be at a Newman Club mixer in 1957, two weeks after I got out of the Army. In those days, the Newman Club was nominally Catholic; but their beer blasts were legendary and...

Graduate School of Business 1959

Sophomore Sweetheart Dance

One of the dippiest things and one of the funniest things I ever heard at Columbia did not take place in a classroom. It took place at the Sophomore Sweetheart Dance. Our class had not one,...

Columbia College 1959

Sound from the Depths of Philosophy

I had come to Columbia in 1950 on a research fellowship in the Electrical Engineering Dept. My sponsor was Prof. Harvey Fletcher, who had recently retired as director of research at Bell Labs....

Graduate School of Arts and Sciences 1959, Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science 1959