Author Archives: Dave

Dave Flunks Out

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

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 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 .

Teddy Roosevelt’s Road

Dave grandfather (fourth from left) with officials at a job site.

Dave’s grandfather (second from right) with contractors at a job site around 1915.

Hans R. Jacobsen, my grandfather, was a civil engineer who arrived from Norway in 1902 at age 26, and helped to build New York’s first subway line. When an inaugural train went through in October, 1904 he rode in the first car. He married my grandmother, a Danish immigrant, in 1906 and after other building projects bought a civil engineering business in 1909 in Oyster Bay on the north shore of Long Island. My mother, his first child, was three, and his second daughter, my aunt Therese, was an infant when they moved to Oyster Bay.

The family joined the Christ Episcopal Church where he met Emlen Roosevelt, a New York banker, who owned property bordering Sagamore Hill, the estate of his famous cousin Theodore Roosevelt. Grandfather rebuilt a road on Emlen’s estate and supplied other engineering advice. When Theodore returned in June 1910 from a hunting trip in Africa, the people of Oyster Bay prepared an elaborate welcome which Grandfather described:

…the day he arrived was sunny and the people in a festive mood, as the train from New York came to a stop. The committee and nearly everyone present knew Teddy personally or had seen him many times. He shook hands all around and briskly, with a grin on his face, was escorted to the platform erected for the occasion and began his speech: “Fellow Oysters, large and small….” He related some of his African experiences; then, after shaking more hands, he left for Sagamore Hill, about 3 miles distant.

Sometime later…

An automobile stopped outside our home in Oyster Bay; in it was Colonel Roosevelt, as the former president preferred to be called, Mrs. [Edith] Roosevelt and the youngest sons Archibald and Quentin. My wife was inside at the time, but soon came out on the porch, where she found Mrs. Roosevelt eagerly conversing with our three-year-old daughter. I was not at home but after a few complimentary remarks about our daughter, Mrs. Roosevelt asked my wife if I could arrange to be at Sagamore Hill, at 10 AM the following morning, to discuss with the Colonel the building of a new road to Sagamore Hill.

…He greeting me most affably and mentioned the fact that I had done some engineering work very satisfactorily for his cousin Emlen; then he stated that the present dirt road was not fit for automobile traffic, and new modern road must be built.

Roosevelt in his study at Oyster Bay around the time of the road building project

Roosevelt in his library at Oyster Bay around the time of the road building project.

Roosevelt took a keen interest in the project and treated Grandfather with great cordiality. He even interrupted an intense political discussion in February, 1912 about his Bull Moose candidacy, to consult with him on the road work.

Any construction project generates friction. Here’s how Grandfather recalled the Colonel’s reaction to problem with the delivery of materials.

We were sitting in his study discussing the delay, and I told him that the stone had been ordered a long time ahead; it was unfortunate, I said, that the weather should interfere and cause delay, a matter that was beyond our control. However, I was not able to pacify the Colonel as easily as that. He thought differently: “If a man in my regiment in Cuba had accidentally shot another soldier and advance the excuse, [that] he did not know the rifle was loaded, we would have had the man court-martialed!” The Colonel’s anger did not last long. He followed me to the door; we shook hands as usual, and I departed. Mrs. Roosevelt who was admired by all and whom I often met, and spoke with, had heard of my little encounter with the Colonel; and she apologized to me later and regretted what her husband had said. I told her I did not mind at all.

The road was finished by the time my grandfather left Oyster Bay in June 1913 to return to New York for more subway construction, but not before he and Roosevelt became better acquainted through several tours of Sagamore Hill and long walks on the roads in the vicinity of their homes. In 1915 and 1918, Roosevelt wrote appreciative letters to Grandfather thanking him for the road and for inquiries about his health. In the 1918 letter he sent his love to my mother. In 1912 when he completed the road, my grandfather was thirty-six, Roosevelt was fifty-four, and my mother was five.

Dave grandfather in the 1950s when he wrote about the road he built for Teddy Roosevelt.

Grandfather followed the remainder of Roosevelt’s career in the newspapers and saved the issue when the former president died on January 6, 1919. I have them in front of me, along with the two letters, as I write.

Next week: Dave flunks out of college.

Writers in the Family

Azor, published in 1948

I’ve got to credit my mother, Maude Crowley, for setting me on the path to becoming a writer. Not only did she insist that my childhood speech be perfect in grammar and syntax, but she wrote five children’s books. The Azor series, published between 1948 and 1955, featured the exploits of a Marblehead boy much like me and his friends who were based on my pals Chris and Erik Brown. My father, Joe Crowley, a Boston newspaper editor, was also an expert in spelling and grammar. He reinforced my mother’s teaching and corrected me on anything she missed, which wasn’t much.

My mother and her sister Therese had graduate degrees in journalism from Columbia University in New York. Both worked as reporters in New York, and Therese co-wrote a study of laundry workers there. In 1931 she married a young reporter for the New York World, Joe Mitchell, who became a celebrated writer for the New Yorker. Disdaining celebrities, he wrote with compassion about obscure and eccentric New Yorkers, turning them into memorable characters. “Joseph Mitchell transformed journalism into art,” wrote Newsweek in its 1992 review of Up in the Old Hotel, a long-awaited collection of his work.

Nora Mitchell (age 6) and Dave (age 7) in Marblehead. Therese Mitchell photo.

Nora Mitchell (age 6) and Dave (age 7) in Marblehead in 1946. Therese Mitchell photo.

I saw my uncle at least twice a year during our family visits to New York and when he came to Marblehead with Therese and my cousins Nora and Elizabeth. We last met in New York in 1993, just after the publication of Up in the Old Hotel. Joe was gloomy as he often was, and as we walked the back streets around the Fulton Fish Market he said, “You know, David, there just aren’t any people left in New York like the ones I wrote about.”

Before he died in 1996 he had agreed to a film based on his work. Joe Gould’s Secret appeared in 2000 and featured Stanley Tucci as Mitchell and Ian Holm as Gould, a literate and cultured inhabitant of Greenwich Village who lived like a derelict. On February 11, 2013, The New Yorker published “Street Life” a fragment of Joe’s unfinished memoir, discovered by Thomas Kunkel who is writing his biography.

Therese who died in 1980 was a professional photographer, and in 2002 my cousin Nora published a collection of her mother’s photos from New York in the 1930s along with quotes her father’s books. In her introduction, Nora wrote,

…I read them [reissues of Joe’s books] closely for the first time in years, with my mother’s pictures freshly in my mind, I was overcome by the traces of each in the other. The words and music were such perfect companions that putting them together became an almost obsessive exercise. As I watched them watching the men on lunch break and the shoeshine boys and the unemployed men at Union Square and the waiter writing the day’s menu on the restaurant window, they were resurrected. (©The Recorder, The Journal of the American Irish Historical Society, Spring 2002)

Jospeph Mitchell tells Dave's daughter Hanna a about the South Street Seaport in New York

Joe Mitchell and Dave’s daughter Hanna at the South Street Seaport in 1976

Some people, like Nora, who don’t write often for publication, have no trouble expressing themselves when they speak of people they love. I can say the same about my daughter Hanna who reached the difficult decision in 2001 to send my special-needs granddaughter to a boarding school:

It was as if somebody pumped oxygen into her finally and all of the other children as well and she felt comfortable to be what she is…When it came time for my husband and I to leave, we looked around for her to say, “good-bye.” We finally found her surrounded by a group of boys and girls, who were all talking, laughing and having fun. We did not want to break up the party, so we stood back, watched, and cried in happiness over this vision of her contentment. Finally, one kid noticed us and poked her to let her know that her parents were standing by. She extracted herself and ran over and we let her know we were leaving and she gave us both big hugs. My husband and I cried, but she did not. She said, “Mom, don’t worry about me, I’ll do great!” And, she is. (© Woodbury Reports, Inc “Was It The Right Decision?” Hanna Ryan, April 2001)

Next week: Dave’s grandfather and Theodore Roosevelt

More About Writing

Recollections published in the Recorder, Fall 2003

I started writing these memoir pieces in 1997, when I submitted my account of a visit to Marblehead to a St. Louis hobby magazine. I picked it up again after my mother died in 2000. In 2003 The Recorder, published by the Irish-American Historical Society, printed some of my father’s recollections along with an introduction I wrote. After my retirement in 2005 I began taking writing and other classes at Washington University’s Lifelong Learning Institute (LLI). And In June 2007, I attended the Washington University Summer Writers Institute.

My grandfather had written a short memoir, Growing Up In Norway, and with his inspiration, I began writing my own. It is now in second draft form and I hope to polish it enough over the coming academic year to submit it to literary agents.

I teach night school courses at Washington University in the fall, winter and spring which limits most of my writing to the summer when I have time. Last summer The Marblehead Reporter published a short piece about an eccentric woman I knew growing up there. I’ve submitted five more articles to the Reporter which I hope they will publish over the course of the year while I’m teaching.

I get great feedback on my writing from fellow Washington University Lifelong Learning students and from members of another group I joined at a bookstore in St. Louis.

Next week: Writers in my family and my connection to The New Yorker.

The USS Missouri visits Marblehead

USS Missouri off Halfway Rock, Marblehead August 3, 1946

USS Missouri off Halfway Rock August 3, 1946

I was seven and about to enter the third grade at the Gerry School when the battleship USS Missouri made a celebratory visit to Marblehead, anchoring in Massachusetts Bay just off Halfway Rock on August 3, 1946. I knew about the ship from newsreels I had seen at the Warwick Theater showing the ceremony on its deck with General MacArthur and the top hatted Japanese officials. Looking out from our Elm Street yard I could see the Missouri way out beyond Children’s Island. It was much further away than a couple of other naval vessels that had anchored off Children’s Island during their visits. I guessed that the waters off Children’s were too shallow for such a big ship.

It was open for tours to which my mother and I were ferried, after waiting in a long line, from State Street wharf in Marblehead. The Navy used drop-front landing craft fitted with benches to take us out. The first thing I noticed when we approached the Missouri from the starboard side was the catapult near the stern with the float plane (a Vought Kingfisher) mounted on it. Then, sailors helped us off the landing craft and onto the narrow dock and stairway suspended along the side of the ship. On board, an officer led us to the plaque in the deck commemorating the Japanese surrender. I read the words:

OVER THIS SPOT ON 2 SEPTEMBER 1945 THE INSTRUMENT OF FORMAL SURRENDER OF JAPAN TO THE ALLIED POWERS WAS SIGNED THUS BRINGING TO A CLOSE THE SECOND WORLD WAR. THE SHIP AT THAT TIME WAS IN TOKYO BAY.

I felt amazed, as a seven-year-old kid, to be allowed to stand at this place. My mother had said, “David, you are so fortunate to live in America. It is the greatest country in the world.” Now, on the deck on the USS Missouri, I felt connected with the country, with the War and with the final victory. These feelings haven’t changed in sixty-seven years.

When we left the ship and descended the narrow stairway the sea had kicked up. The landing craft waiting for our group lurched, rising and falling with each wave. The sailors on the small dock had to time their transfer of each person to the instant when the gunwale of the small boat was level with the dock. After we were safely seated, I asked my mother, “What would have happened if I had fallen in”? “There are two-thousand sailors on this ship who would have jumped in to save you,” she said.

Adventures in Marblehead

Adventures in Marblehead, St. Louis, and Stops In Between with Dave Crowley