The Invisible Student

You don’t know me. I was an invisible student, one of many who worked their way through Columbia. As the lights came on in the dorms, I left for my job as usher at Radio City Music Hall. After the last show I caught the one o’clock train back to Scarsdale, where my father was a cop. A Hayden Scholarship and scholarship room made it possible for me to live on campus after the first semester, but I still worked full-time.

The only students I remember are Gordon Cotler, who was generally ahead of me in any line we happened to be in, and Louis Simpson, who came from the West Indies. But I do remember my teachers, among them Douglas Moore (music), Irwin Edman (philosophy), Joseph Wood Krutch (drama), John Dunning (physics), A.K. Loebeck (geology), Harry Carman (CC). Jacques Barzin (19th century), James Herman Randall (philosophy of religion), William York Tyndal (Joyce), and Professor Gutman. They were not just great teachers, erudite and intellectual, but great human beings.

Dean Hawkes deserves a paragraph all to himself. On a field trip to the Sunshine Bakery, I happened to mention to another student that the sample cookies they gave us was the first food I had eaten in three days. The next day Dean Hawkes called him into his office and, handing me $10 from a cash box in his desk, said I was to help myself any time I was in need. The way he took my hand and looked at me was a profound experience; I had never felt such love and understanding before. Thinking about it over the years has made feel that greatness lies not in what you do but in who you are.

On Sunday Dec. 7, 194l, I was wakened at one in the afternoon by the sound of something being slid beneath my door. I picked up the Columbia Spectator and read: “Japs Bomb Pearl Harbor.” Shortly after that I enlisted in the Army Air Force, but I wasn’t called up until March of 1943. In the cadets I met students from all over the country, who gave me my first inkling of the exceptional education I was receiving at Columbia. No student from another college came close to the breadth of education I had received from the two-year Contemporary Civilization, Humanities, and Science courses.

Mustered out in November of 1945, I returned to Columbia in January. Though the G.I. Bill picked up the tab for my education and provided living expenses, I started a business with another writer, mostly writing for trade and science journals. To show you how thorough Columbia was in arming me for life, they not only gave me a top education but, responding to our request for “a secretary interested in writing,” they sent us the young woman who was to become my wife and life-long companion.

Meanwhile, accepted into a Creative Writing course taught by Martha Foley, I discovered the wonderful world of fiction. That class was such a great experience that we stayed together after the semester, meeting Saturdays in my office downtown or Martha’s apartment, to publish Stateside. Though the magazine folded after three issues, it began my life-long obsession with writing fiction. I stayed on at Columbia after graduating in 1947 to earn a Master’s and marry before going on to teach at Cornell.