In memory yet green : the autobiography of Isaac Asimov, 1920-1954

by Asimov, Isaac, 1920-1992

  But I didn't realize it. I did what I was told, in true cowardly fashion, and I deserve to feel sick over it every time I think of it.

  Since I gave up zoology as a major, however, I like to think that I wasn't totally insensible.

  Of course, there were other reasons for giving up zoology than my dislike of animal experimentations—reasons that were less important but more persuasive. My sharpest memory of the course is, as you might expect, a trifle—but it turned the scale.

  Our zoology lectures were given us by Dr. Elftman (I think) in an old-fashioned room with a tile floor. At one point during one of those lectures, I needed a handkerchief and pulled one out of my pocket. In the same pocket was a glass marble. I had it there because it was a pretty marble and I liked to look at the light through it.

  It came out with the handkerchief and went bouncety-bouncety-bouncety all over the tile floor.

  Elftman waited patiently while the class held its breath and I, red-faced, struggled to retrieve the marble. When I had done so, and silence had fallen, Elftman said, contemptuously, "Well, this is a junior college." The dam broke and the other students laughed—and laughed— and laughed.

  A small thing, and not worth remembering, except that it helped sour me on zoology. I ended the course with good marks, but the incident of the dropped marble, even more than the killing of the cat, made it easy for me to consider switching majors when the appropriate time came, and that, in turn, helped deflect the current of my life for (I believe) the better. So though I wasn't thankful to Elftman for his contempt then, I am now.

  4

  My first year at Seth Low, at least at its Brooklyn campus, was also my last. That first year was Seth Low's tenth year and its last. Columbia University simply put an end to it. Why, I don't know, but I'm not paranoid enough to think it was on account of me. 4

  I was not particularly depressed by that. I had done well in that Seth Low year of 1935-36, and was back to smartest-boy-in-the-class form, which cheered me up. (In fact, my class average in the four years of college was just about A—, with equal numbers of A's and B's and

  4 Once again, I had a narrow escape. If I had not been skipped in first and third grades, I would have reached the stage of applying for college one year later, in 1936. Columbia, without Seth Low to fall back upon, would undoubtedly have rejected me outright, and there would have been no escape from City College.

  one or two C's. This was by no means record-breaking or even particularly startling, but it was reasonably good. I didn't have to slink around.) Then, too, the ending of Seth Low didn't leave its students homeless. Columbia University may not be notable for its loving kindness, but it wasn't quite as heartless as all that. In the second year, we were told, we would be moved up to the main campus at Morningside Heights in Manhattan. I had the dim feeling that this meant we would become full-fledged Columbia students, and that satisfied me, too.

  5

  If there was something that worried me as my freshman year in college came to its close, it was the matter of finances. The hundred-dollar scholarship I had received the year before had been a one-shot, for the freshman year only. What was to be done for the sophomore year?

  Fortunately, my father managed to persuade one of his customers to arrange a summer job for me and so, in June 1936, I went to work at the Columbia Combining Company. It was the first time in my life that I worked as an unskilled laborer in a paying job, and also the last time. I got it at the cost of lying a little about my age.

  It was a thoroughly unskilled job. What I had to do was to help pull out lengths of rubberized fabric from a huge roll suspended on hooks at one end of a long measured-off table, cut fixed lengths of it, pile one length on top of another (with each end of the length held down by an iron bar), put down a length of slick paper every ten lengths, then fold them up ten lengths at a time. We would then pile them onto a handcart, appropriately marked, and they would be taken out into the universe somewhere.

  All that varied was the type of roll we worked with, the number of lengths we pulled out, and the length of the lengths we pulled out.

  Mind you, I only helped. I had a superior, a couple of years older than I, who counted the sheets, saw to it that they were laid exactly one on the other, and ordered me to move each sheet this way or that until the adjustment was correct.

  It was very dull work, but it brought in the breathtaking sum of fifteen dollars per week (a full fifteen dollars, for there were no payroll deductions in those days—no withholding tax—no Social Security). I might have earned more, but I had to beg off overtime, since, job or no job, I had to put in as much time as possible in the candy store.

  Except for walking endlessly back and forth along a twelve-foot-

  long table, I remember only one incident out of the ten weeks or so I was on the job.

  Some of the men had to wash pretty thoroughly at the end of the day, and change from their work clothes to their street clothes. One of those men, rather slim, rather macho, seemed to take pleasure in speaking roughly to me and in watching me respond with a nervous look. I was the youngest person there, still only sixteen, and they were blue-collar workers, only lightly educated, and hard-bitten. To me, they were an utterly unknown quantity and therefore frightening.

  One time, after he had taken his shower, and before he had put on his street clothes, this man approached me with no clothes on in what, looking back on it now, was clearly intended to be a seductive manner, and said, "What about it? I'll go easy on you."

  I thought he was offering to fight me, and I scrambled back in haste and fell over some rolls of fabric, at which humorous feat everyone laughed. I got to my feet and made for the door, but they called me back and said, "He's just joking, kid," and I came back, but cautiously.

  Nothing more happened in that way for the remainder of my job's duration, though I took care to remain far away from this particular man. I assume now that everyone there thought I knew what the man was suggesting and that in running away I had tried to avoid that suggestion. It was not so.

  I had heard of homosexuality in a dim and vague manner, I think, but it certainly didn't come to mind at the time. I was merely trying to avoid (so I thought, then) getting beaten up by a hard-muscled and sadistic brawler. It was only long afterward that, remembering the incident, I was suddenly afflicted retrospectively, with an entirely new terror.

  He may, of course, have been joking, but, remembering his walk, I don't think so.

  The summer came to an end at last, and it had been a hot summer. It was during that summer that New York experienced its hottest day on record—106° F. on July 9—but I don't remember it. I certainly don't remember it the way I remember the coldest day zVi years earlier.

  I was skinny, then, and relatively unaffected by heat. My father, however, had grown fat and now weighed well over two hundred pounds. I remember him sitting outside the store on hot, muggy days

  when the customers had momentarily thinned out, trying to catch his breath and muttering that he was completely unmanned.

  Still, the hot summer brought me $150 or so that I had made at the summer job. Add to that the $15 a month I expected to make at my NYA job and we could struggle through for another year.

  In September 1936, then, I began my second year at Columbia, and now I was taking courses at Morningside Heights. It meant a new extension of my physical world. For the first time in my eleven-yearlong school career, I attended an institution that was not in Brooklyn. Every day I walked a few blocks to the subway station and took it to the end of the line at Fourteenth Street and Eighth Avenue, where I changed to another subway line, went up to 116th Street, and then walked to class through (and up) Morningside Park, which had several flights of stairs in it. (That's why the western side was called Morningside Heights.) I then retraced my steps in the evening. The whole trip took a little over an hour each way, about eleven hours per week just traveling.

  It wasn't completely wasted time, however. I read the new
spaper, for instance, and by now I was fiendishly interested in politics as well as baseball, and the time was rapidly approaching when F. D. Roosevelt would be running for re-election. Or I read books or, in a pinch, did some studying.

  Columbia was the most elaborate institution I had ever attended, with its numerous buildings spread out over blocks and blocks of Manhattan. I was strangely detached from it all, however.

  Since I was not at a dormitory, I was never on campus except to go to classes, and I did so in the most economical way possible, walking straight to the building in which the classes were held and then straight out of it. There was many a building I never entered at all in all my years at Columbia.

  Nor was there ever a feeling of being part of an organic whole, I was at all times a visitor and the students who passed me as I moved from one building to another were strangers to me. My own mood in all this was so like what it had been at high school that there was scarcely any inner awareness that I was in college.

  Besides, I wasn't in Columbia College. The fact that I was at the Morningside campus and went from course to course with the sophomores of Columbia College did not make me one of them after all. I was not allowed to register at the college. Along with the other Seth Low rabble, I was eventually put into the category of "university undergraduate." I was not an undergraduate of this college or that college,

  but of the entire university taken as a whole. But this had always been the fate of the Seth Low student after the second year. It was just that I experienced the fact a year early (if not quite the title—I was still theoretically Seth Low, even though Seth Low was defunct in my second year). It was disappointing and freshly humiliating, but I suppose I should not have been so simple as to expect anything else.

  I took my first course in chemistry in my sophomore year and fell in love with it. The teacher (whose name I have forgotten) was interesting and the chemical demonstrations were delightful. I enjoyed the laboratory infinitely more than I did the zoology dissections and was both fascinated and' relieved to be working with chemicals rather than living things. I might have begun to have a glimmer of myself as a professional chemist even then, were it not that the assumption that I was going to be a doctor of medicine overrode everything.

  It was the immediate fascination of working with chemicals and the ease of the subject that drew me to chemistry, rather than any abstract consideration of the importance or value of science in general or of that science in particular. I wasn't complicated enough to grow philosophical over such matters, but I was simple enough to know what I liked.

  What made chemistry easy was that not only had I had it, on a simpler level, in high school, but also, as it happened, I had read chemistry texts on the college level under the delusion that they were ''library books" so that I had given myself a formidable head start.

  What was not wonderful was the new course I was taking as part of my zoology major. It was embryology, and it consisted, in very large part, of looking through microscopes at slides of embryo sections of chicks at each day of their twenty-one-day period of development, and then drawing what one saw.

  I was under a double handicap here. No matter how I adjusted my microscope focus and my light and my slide, I never saw what the embryology text told me I would see. I saw clearly, of course; there is nothing wrong with my vision; I just don't have that kind of visual imagery that sorts out tiny details. Then, if I had seen it, I would have been unable to draw it anyway. My artistic inability is of the towering sort that could have produced a Sistine Chapel if every fault could have been turned into a corresponding and equal virtue.

  Toward the end of the semester, the teacher announced in a warm and jovial manner that everyone in the class was passing the laboratory part of the course. He added, even more warmly and jovially, "except one."

  With a sinking heart and a desperate effort to try to recall if there

  happened to be someone in the class who drew embryos even worse than I did, I called out, "Who's the one?"

  And with a kindly manner, he said, "Strange you should ask that," and got the dutiful laugh of everyone else in the class.

  Fortunately, I was spared an overall failure. My reasonable work in the lecture portion of the class raised my final mark to a snappy C—.

  That was enough, however. The killed cat and the dropped marble had brought me to the edge, and the embryology professor's pleasant sense of tact pushed me over.

  I switched majors. I never took another course in the biological sciences. Chemistry was my new major, and that remained permanent. And for the first time I began to doubt whether I really wanted to go to medical school, with its dissections and microscopes.

  Windsor Place

  While I was in my sophomore year, we had another change of candy store. In December of 1936, my father sold his third candy store and bought his fourth. The new candy store was at 174 Windsor Place, in the Park Slope section of Brooklyn, about 4.8 miles southwest of Decatur Street.

  It was farther west than any other residence we had ever had in Brooklyn, and it was only two short blocks west of Prospect Park. I always described the location as being "on the other side of Prospect Park," for whenever I said I lived near the park, the person I spoke to would always say, "On Flatbush Avenue?" and I always said, "No, on the other side."

  All our candy stores were alike in essentials, but I remember this one best. Unlike the Essex Street store and the Decatur Street store, it was not on the corner of the block, but was in the middle, as the Sutter Avenue store had been.

  When one entered the door, one found the store broader (left and right) than it was deep. Near the left wall was the cigar counter, with the cash register at the end away from the door. That cash register marked the nerve center of the store, and my father was usually behind it and a little to the left, where a bare patch of counter was the place where money was handed in and change handed out.

  The cash register was an old-fashioned one, with the amounts that were rung up showing on white tabs that moved up into the glass-enclosed top. There were separate keys for penny units from 01 to 09, for dime units from 10 to 90, and for dollar units from $1.00 to $3.00. I don't think it was conceived that any spendthrift would be so lost to reality as to find ways of spending more than $3.99 at one time.

  From an early age I was allowed free access to the cash register and I quickly learned how to play chords on it. You could strike, at the same time, one of the dollar units, one of the dime units, and one of the penny units, so that if someone paid you $1.64, the tabs marked $1, 60, and 04 would show up. You could not push down two or more of the keys in a particular unit.

  Then, of course, there was the "No Sale" key, marked in brown to distinguish it from all the whites and with which no other tab could be punched. "No Sale" would open the cash register if it were necessary to give someone two nickels for a dime, or to poke around for something you had placed there for safekeeping.

  Making change, with or without a sale, was an art my father much valued. It had to be done speedily and correctly, and it must have been a great relief to my father when he found that I caught the essence of making change at once and could be relied on to make no errors. He never showed that relief, however, for he strictly maintained the notion that proficiency was merely to be expected and that praise would rot my moral fiber.

  Looking back on it now, I am amazed that my father let me have full use of the cash register. There were foolproof ways of withholding some of the money for my private profit. I never did it, because it never even occurred to me to do it (so that I didn't suffer the agonies of temptation), but how did he know that it would never occur to me to do so?

  On the wall behind the cash register were the vertical slots in which packs of cigarettes were kept in a definite order so that my father could speed service by reaching for the desired brand without looking. In those days, all the cigarettes were "regulars," of course. There were no king-size, no filter tips. The individual packs were all $.13
except for a few mavericks, which were $.10.

  We kept an open pack out of which we would sell individual cigarettes for a penny apiece. And, of course, an occasional millionaire would buy a whole carton of them and we would stand around reverently to watch my father ring up a purchase price of some $2.50.

  There was a hinged top to the cash register, and when that was lifted, certain meters were revealed that indicated sums of various kinds. My father usually set one of them to zero at the beginning of the week, and it amused me to keep an eye on it to see how the week's intake was running.

  At right angles to the cigar counter was the candy counter, laden with a wide variety of penny candies in three rows, each in its open box. Some were a penny apiece, some two for a penny, some even five for a penny. A few were lavish enough to be two cents apiece. There was a fourth row up on top where we kept the nickel candy bars for wealthy kids.

  Waiting on the candy counter, which was my exclusive job in even the very first candy store, and which I never entirely outgrew, was a tedious task. The typical youngster with three pennies to spend could buy

  candy in any of a thousand combinations or more (I mean that quite literally), and it took him a long time to decide how best to make his investment. I had to wait, more or less seethingly, for him to make up his mind.

  Behind the candy counter was a small enclosed area where we kept reserve supplies of candy and cigarettes, and where there was a toilet. It was the one niche of privacy in the store, but only my father could use it freely. For the rest of us, it was there for paternally begrudged emergencies.