Category Archives: College

WRMC

A student at the control board

Mark Skolnik student at the control board

When I arrived at Middlebury College in Vermont in the fall of 1957 at age 18, I was planning to become an engineer, transferring — with good physics, chemistry and math grades — to MIT after my junior year. I had done well in these topics in high school, and I had always enjoyed fiddling with radios and simple electronics.  After a few weeks at Middlebury I went into the basement of the Student Union building to check out the college radio station, WRMC. I could learn more about electronics, I thought, if they would take me on as a volunteer to do technical work.  An upperclassman showed me around. In the control room were two large turntables built into a bench on either side of a sloping panel with a lighted meter and six black knobs with a bunch of lever switches. Large windows on either side of the control room allowed the engineer to see into the studios on the left and right.  “Marty” (a pseudonym) is our chief engineer,” the upperclassman said, “He’ll be back later this afternoon and can answer your questions about the electronics.”

Marty was from Maine and worked with large mainframe computers for the local gas company during the summer, he told me when we met.  He led me out of the studio, past storage cages with provisions for the Student Union coffee shop upstairs to a small back room which contained a teletype machine fed by United Press International.  “American Tobacco pays for the UP teletype at many college stations like WRMC” he said. “All we have to do is air so many Lucky Strike commercials a day. They’re on those transcription disks.” He pointed to a stack of sixteen-inch records in sturdy manila sleeves leaning against the wall near the teletype.  These records, I could see, would fit on the Gates turntables I had seen in the control room, but were too big for home phonographs.

In an alcove behind the teletype was a large home-built electronic chassis with glowing tubes and wires sitting on a shelf.  It hadn’t been dusted in a long time. “That’s the transmitter,” Marty said. “It feeds into the old class-bell wiring underground that goes to all the buildings and dorms. They don’t use the bells anymore so we use the wires as an antenna.”

The next day I came back to learn how use the equipment in the control room. Jim Tracy, a sophomore, showed me how to cue records and operate the switches and knobs while always watching the VU meter to keep the needle out of the red “distortion” zone. Later that day I met another sophomore who had a country and western show and who was willing to let me do the engineering for him.  After a few weeks I was comfortable in the control room and asked if I might do some announcing too; I thought that it might help with my stuttering.

They let me start with the news, reading selected items from the UP wire. I did fine without stammering. You had to edit your copy beforehand, they said, because sometimes there were typos and other errors in the teletype feed.   When Pope Pius XII died on October 9, 1958, the first UP bulletin read “POOP DEAD.” I went on to read other material and served as News Director for awhile. My main responsibility was to keep the teletype supplied with fresh ribbons and a full paper roll. God forbid the paper should run out in the middle of an important story overnight. It happened once and I got into big trouble.

Eventually I hosted my own classical music show.  It was very easy to run the entire station from the control room, announcing, cueing up records and manipulating the knobs and switches on the control board. You didn’t need a separate engineer and announcer if the show wasn’t too complicated to produce.

Rothchild & Frame

Ed Rothchild and Pete Frame cover a ball game with the successor to the BBB

WRMC covered Middlebury College sports by sending one or two reporters to the home and away games. We leased a special line from the telephone company for each game we covered, and carried a homemade portable console to connect the microphone to the phone line in the press box.  This black box was called “Baker’s Battery Bastard,” or the BBB after the former student who constructed it.

Peter Talbot was one of the juniors who were most active at the station when I was a freshmen. We envied him, because he had a summer job working on a real radio station in Connecticut. He also had a great bass voice that projected well on the air. One day he showed us a trick with which an announcer could recreate the play-by-play for a baseball game from a properly kept score card and a recording of crowd noises. One person could create the illusion alone in the studio and the listener would believe that the man on the radio was actually at the ball game:

It’s a bouncing grounder. And, OOOOOh, it’s by the shortstop on one hop. Johnson charges for third…[crowd noise up]… The throw from center. Not in time!  Heeee’s safe!!!…[more crowd noise]…

The deception depended on the listeners not knowing exactly when the game was played, and, of course, on a ready willingness to suspend skepticism every time they turned the radio on.

Next week: The transmitter

Inside Sea Shell City

Another Man Eating Clam

Another Man Eating Clam. From Sea Shell City in Michigan.

We headed around to the back of the building to see if anyone was home. There it was, a modest-sized trailer—the summer residence of the owners of the establishment. I knocked, but there was no response.

A few days later it was really open. Inside were shallow dusty wooden trays displayed on tables.  Each seashell had a label with its species and a price. The shells needed dusting, too.   The man-eating clam was represented by its shell, which might have contained a cocker spaniel with little room to spare. I felt no fear  of being eaten.

In January, 2008, Vermont Public Radio broadcast an account of the Republican State legislator Ted Riehle who had championed the nation’s first anti-billboard law, which had passed the Vermont Legislature and was signed by Governor Phil Hoff forty years earlier in 1968. When it took effect, the billboards in Vermont came down, and were replaced with standard green signs announcing in uniform letters the names of businesses on the road ahead or off on side roads.  Seashell City and its signs were gone.

I was surprised to learn that one of my roommates at Middlebury College, Lyman Orton, had helped in own way to bring the billboards down. Here’s what he told the writer Robert F. Wilson,

I rounded up a few fraternity brothers and we went out late at night and began cutting the billboards down. We started with axes but the support timbers seemed as big [as] telephone poles, so we knew that wouldn’t work. We bought crosscut saws, and over a couple of years we got rid of quite few of them. It made the papers, of course, but we never got caught. (I guess the statute of limitations is up, so it’s safe to tell the story!)

Some of Lyman’s inspiration came from his father, Vrest Orton, a man of strong opinions who was one of Vermont’s early billboard opponents and a friend of Ted Riehle. Had the elder Orton known of Lyman’s midnight vandalism?  Wilson’s book on Vermont curiosities doesn’t say.

The Vermont Public Radio broadcast which occurred a couple of weeks after Riehle’s death, included an interview with Paul Bruhn, executive director of the Preservation Trust of Vermont. Bruhn and the VPR reporter recalled the stiff opposition the bill had faced from those whose livelihoods depended on outdoor advertizing, and the skill with which Riehle had mustered the environmental forces among the majority Republican legislators. In the end it was Hoff, the governor, who supplied the final push, by bringing along enough Democrats to get the bill passed.

A tasteful Vermont road sign

A tasteful Vermont road sign as illustrated by Ryan Fowler of Native Vermont Studio

Someone in Middlebury had told me that the Seashell City billboards, more than anything else, could claim the true credit for the pioneering billboard law.  I couldn’t confirm this account either on the internet or by e-mailing friends in Middlebury. I called Paul Bruhn of the Preservation Trust.

“Sure it did,” he said when I asked if Seashell City propelled the unique law towards passage.

“The proponents couldn’t single out anyone’s signs. There was enough controversy already, but Seashell City was on everyone’s mind.”

“Were there any worse signs in the state,” I asked. “No. They were the most egregious.”

I told him about the paper plate “closed” sign and dusty shells. He laughed and said, “I drove by many times on my way to my cousins, but I never went in.”

Today, Vermont tourism and its businesses thrive without the billboards and have done so for forty years. Drive through and look at the State. They never needed the signs in the first place.

Next Week: Neuroma

Sea Shell City

A Vermont road in the fall

A Vermont road in the fall

I was drawn to Vermont in my teens by Kenneth Robert’s novels about the French and Indian and Revolutionary Wars. The heroic people and evocative names in his stories kindled my love of history and my romantic dream of living close to the sites where these historic events took place. When the acceptance letter from Middlebury College arrived in the spring of 1957 I was overjoyed. Visions of adventure and love among the mountains and along the lake described with such appeal in Robert’s books consumed my imagination as I set out for college.

The reality of Vermont’s beauty exceeded anything Roberts had described.  The late afternoon light against the lush green hills was luminous, sparkling and dense, like a golden sea of air.  College life was tough—devoid of adventure or love, in my case — but the appeal of the wonderful mountains, hills, lakes, villages and farms more than made up for my troubles.

During my years at Middlebury and at UVM in Burlington I took little notice of the tourist attractions that lined US Route 7, the main highway that linked Connecticut to the Canadian border. Some were tacky but most fit in gracefully with the surrounding scenery. There were reasonably-priced antiques, maple syrup cookeries, rustic cabins, and restaurants offering home cooked meals. Every item and ingredient was guaranteed to be absolutely fresh, entirely local, and manufactured reverentially by hand.  Their billboards didn’t seem any worse than those of other tourist states.  Like the Burma Shave signs they conformed to their commercial purpose and to the surrounding landscape which they refrained, for the most part, from obscuring.  That’s how it seemed in 1963, when I left the state for graduate study at Princeton.

When I returned to Middlebury with my wife to teach in 1966, one business, just south of the town on the east side US Route 7, had altered this peaceful landscape. Its proprietors must have studied the relative uniformity and approximations to acceptable taste displayed by existing billboards and concluded that ordinary signs couldn’t do justice to their extraordinary attraction. They plastered every US highway leading into and through Vermont with what must have been at over a hundred signs. A modest billboard in Connecticut, white with red letters, along US Route 7 proclaimed that rare and exotic treasures from the seven seas, shells not found in any zoological collection because of extreme dangers involved in collecting them, were to be seen a mere two-hundred  miles to the north on Route 7 at the amazing and electrifying “Sea Shell City.”

A sign for a similar attraction in Michigan. Photo by Mike Monroe

A similar attraction in Michigan. Photo by Mike Monroe.

Once you crossed into Vermont, any sign of restraint in the size and placement of the notices vanished. And, as you got closer to Middlebury, they got bigger, and more frequent.  A billboard south of Rutland clarified what the sign in Connecticut meant by danger: “See the Giant Man-Eating Clam” “Only one mile ahead, on the right,” announced the penultimate billboard several miles north of Brandon, Middlebury’s neighbor to the south. This sign was so large that it obscured the Green Mountain range for a moment as you drove by.  And finally it appeared: your ultimate reward for having endured two-hundred miles of two-lane road, often stuck behind trucks, travel trailers, and farm implements. White with huge red letters, the sign was so tall that you had to crane your neck back in your car seat to comprehend its upper reaches and it bore the unmistakable simple declarative sentence:  “THIS IS IT!”

Your eyes were drawn involuntary to the right to behold the establishment itself: a modest dirt parking lot with at most three cars parked in front and a Quonset hut maybe sixty feet long and twenty feet wide. We drove by it dozens of times during our three years in Middlebury, always in too much of a rush to stop in and check it out.  Friends told us that it was a retired couple who spent the winter in Florida collecting the shells, and then came up for the tourist season to sell them.

I had to have a look.  There were no cars in the lot the day we interrupted our errands to pull in and to sample the wonders of Seashell City ourselves.  We got out and approached the front door.  The top half of the front door was a dirty window, and someone had Scotch-taped a paper plate to the glass from the inside. In pencil was one word: “Closed.”   I guess they’d blown their sign budget on the billboards.

Next week: Inside Seashell City

Dave Flunks Out

Old Stone Row, Middlebury College

Middlebury College

When I was a kid, I dreamed of becoming an aeronautical engineer and an officer in the Navy serving on aircraft carriers. My high school grades in math and science, a mixture of B’s and C’s, should have been a tip-off that engineering wasn’t a good plan, but I ignored them. I also minimized my rejection for a Naval ROTC program that would have paid for my college, and given me a commission at graduation. Mere obstacles to be overcome.

When MIT and other top colleges rejected me I began to worry. “You might consider a three-two program,” the MIT admissions officer said, “Do well for three years at certain schools and MIT might take you as a transfer student.” That’s how I turned up in the fall of 1957, at age eighteen, at Middlebury College in Vermont

Rules for freshmen men at Middlebury in 1957

Rules for freshmen men at Middlebury in 1957

College was a shock. Compared to most other freshmen, my social skills were right in line with my athletic abilities: close to zero. Fraternity rush was a nightmare — no one wanted to talk with me, and I ended up by default in a non-affiliated men’s group, called the Atwater Club. The B’s and C’s of my high school years sank to C’s and D’s in college.

“Lots of people have a rough time in their first year of college and turn out fine,” one of my parent’s friends assured me. My parents themselves were all encouragement, too, without a word of criticism, bless them.

I hung on to my engineering dream and returned in the fall of 1959 for another go. I moved into the Atwater Club off campus. The other guys were misfits like me, some very intelligent, a couple of proto-beatniks with beards and berets, and several with hobbies too fascinating to resist. My roommate was an expert on streetcars, and we spent Thanksgiving break riding every subway line in New York City and every trolley line in Newark and Hoboken. Ditto in Philadelphia. And the streetcar hobby was on top of the 23-plus hours a day I was spending as a volunteer at the college radio station, WRMC.

I had buried studies and class work somewhere in the deepest recesses of my mind and had passed from blind, unrealistic optimism into deep denial. Sure, I was afraid, but I believed that the grades would take care of themselves—somehow. The approach of first-semester finals in January 1959 unleashed the panic that I had long suppressed with extra-curricular pursuits. There was no way I could pass physics and calculus.No amount of cramming could save me, and I knew that Middlebury tossed you out when you failed two courses. We had joked about students flunking out and having to go to junior college, or worse, to inferior urban diploma mills like BU in Boston. Now the humor was gone.

Out of desperation, I sought refuge in a collection of science fiction paperbacks that had accumulated in the Atwater residence. Maybe my predecessors in academic crisis had used these books as the sand in which they buried their heads, just as I was doing.

Dave's flunkout grades

Dave’s flunk out grades

The notice of failing grades appeared in my mailbox, followed a day or two later by a short letter from the dean. The college was dropping me. I had flunked both physics and math. When I called my mother to deliver the news, she took a deep breath and said, “Well, I guess Joe and I will have to come up and get you. We’ll call you back tonight after Joe gets home.” She didn’t react with the hysteria that I feared, but I felt terrible anyway. They put a huge effort into my education, and I had failed them.

The next day I went to see the dean who offered his sympathy, but said that it was unlikely that I would ever return to Middlebury. The more I thought about what he told me about never returning, the angrier I became.

When my father arrived a few days later to collect me and my things, he seemed panic stricken. I hadn’t seen him so upset before. “What’s going to happen now?” he demanded. I don’t know if anything I said reassured him during our five-hour ride, but when we got to Marblehead I learned that my mother had been on the phone researching alternatives for me. It felt good to be home, with the impossible situation at Middlebury behind me. What the dean had said stuck in my mind and I began, at last, to think.

The first step was to get a job, which was easy. My father’s brother Paul, a vice-president of Sylvania, had arranged summer jobs for me before at one of their factories in Salem, and was willing to do so again. With an income I felt independent enough to plan without worrying about burdening my parents. My anger at the Middlebury dean drove me forward.

With the failure in physics and calculus, I had no problem realizing that I wasn’t suited for engineering. Psychology seemed interesting, and I thought it would be nice to help people. I went into Boston University and signed up for two night school courses in psychology and one in public speaking. Now I had to suppress BU’s reputation as a haven for flunkouts from better schools, and forget the jokes about diploma mills.

A course in social psychology opened my eyes to the possibilities of research, and taught me an important lesson about the relative quality of students. Many of the men at Middlebury seemed to focus on fraternities, drinking, cars, sports and sex. For these guys, Middlebury was a convenient place to learn to ski, pick up girls, and to pursue some serious drinking. My BU classmates could not have been different; they were motivated to learn. All worked full time in the day and none had much use for nonsense like getting drunk.

The professor took us through his lab where he studied group communication and I was fascinated by his clever experimental designs. Another student on the tour invited me to a party in an apartment near the campus where we discussed psychology and other academic subjects. It’s possible that I had one beer. In class, a woman in her mid-thirties sat beside me, and we talked. She was a nurse earning her college degree at night and had served in World War II. I was twenty and said nothing to her about the warm surge of affection that I felt.

One night, a student asked a question about the previous week’s lecture. The professor paused to think, and another student whipped out her steno pad and read back the instructor’s exact words. Wow! I hadn’t seen anything like that at Middlebury.

Determined to succeed, I typed all of my class notes on my evenings off and kept them in binders. I wasn’t going to depend on the slovenly note-taking that had contributed to my failure at Middlebury. I know that my parents were relieved to see me taking charge of my education. My father helped by commuting to Boston by train, so that I could have the car to get to my job in Salem and to class in Boston at night. My mother did light shopping on foot in downtown Marblehead and waited for the weekends for bigger errands. Many years later, she said that the time in 1959, when I lived at home and went to school in Boston, was one of the happiest for her.

At the end of the spring semester at BU I had two A’s and one B. I knew then that I was on the right track with psychology and that I might exact my revenge on the dean at Middlebury by gaining readmission and proving him wrong. I knew the procedure: write a letter to the Administration Committee at the college demonstrating that you had mended your wayward habits, and that you could succeed now. I began to compose it in my mind.

My mother suggested that I really didn’t have to work, and could go to summer school at BU full time. I took additional psych courses and elementary German which I knew that I’d need for graduate school. One of the professors announced a term paper, sending me into a panic. I didn’t know where to start. When I told my mother, she offered to help me with the research and even to type the paper. I was embarrassed by her generosity. After all, she and my father had sacrificed so much for me, and as an adult, I should be proceeding on my own. I typed out eleven pages on the development of vision in infants and got a B.

By the middle of August 1959 I had my summer school grades: four B’s. With the letter to Middlebury College mostly written in my head, I headed upstairs to my attic room in our Marblehead house to type it out. I had a good supply of erasable bond paper and my favorite blue carbon sheets. I worked slowly, trying to avoid mistakes. I requesting readmission to Middlebury, chronicled my academic downfall,  my change from physics to psychology and my redemption at BU. I dropped my transcript into the envelope with the letter, mailed it on August 21, 1959 and waited.

Less than two weeks later I had a response from the college re-admitting me. The following weekend my parents drove me back to Middlebury for the beginning of my junior year. I couldn’t wait to confront the dean.

He was all smiles this time, and I was polite as I expressed my gratitude for his good wishes. I said nothing about my anger at him which, for some reason didn’t subside with my readmission, but instead grew stronger, fueling revenge fantasies that lasted for seven years.

A Middlebury prof in his lab. 1968 photo by Walter Beagley

Dave as a Middlebury professor, in his lab. 1968 photo by Walter Beagley

Still determined to show him how badly he had misjudged me, I looked for an opening. An opportunity came when I returned to Middlebury again in the spring of 1966 with a Princeton doctorate under my belt, this time to interview for a faculty post.

The dean and I found ourselves standing, side-by-side in the men’s room near the end of my interview. I savored the irony of our relative positions then and now. “We’re equal now,” I thought, and I realized with a smile to myself that I had forgiven him.

Nest week: Dave’s first car: the 4CV .