Another bit of autobiography: How Willamette U. influenced my life

I wrote this for a New York Times essay contest,  but they didn't use it.

Willamette University, not highly selective in 1957, had an immense impact on my life. Most importantly, through a classmate I met my wife---who attended a different college--- of more than 50 years (and counting). A faculty member's suggestion that I consider graduate school and a college teaching career diverted me from an original intent to join the Foreign Service. National panic over the launching of Sputnik during my freshman year prompted Willamette to add the opportunity to study Russian, which I used extensively during my 36 years teaching political science at Adrian College. The honors program required a major senior research project which was excellent preparation for writing my doctoral dissertation.

The curriculum prepared me well for acceptance by graduate programs at five major universities including Johns Hopkins (which I attended), MIT, and Harvard, and to win NDEA and Woodrow Wilson fellowships. But I also had time to play clarinet in the band, to take four years of pipe organ lessons, and to make some long-lasting friends.

But the biggest impact Willamette U. had on me was my very existence. My parents had met there. The college was therefore my alma mater in more ways than one!

A little bit more autobiography: a book that changed my life

I wrote this for an essay content at the New York Times, but they didn't use it.

888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888

On November 10, 1955 our Vallejo High School honor society made a field trip to San Francisco. After the formal program they turned us loose on Market Street for a few hours.

In the Bonanza Inn Book Shop I paid 10 cents for a used copy of Norman Cousins' Modern Man Is Obsolete. A charming handwritten letter taped inside indicated it had been a Stanford professor's wedding present to a former student 10 years earlier. I always wonder what happened to that marriage to put this book in that store that very day.

The book expanded an editorial Cousins wrote for the Saturday Review Of Literature immediately after the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It argued powerfully that continued world anarchy would produce atomic catastrophe and that we urgently needed a world government.

Overwhelmed, I changed my intended college major from physics to political science so I could work for peace in a diplomatic career. I didn't want to contribute to potentially dangerous technological progress when world political systems couldn't cope with the "progress" we had already made.

Thanks to another change in plans, I ended up teaching political science at Adrian College for 36 years.