Again I needed a scholarship, to head for a Ph.D. This time, a number of scholarships were offered at prestigious universities, including Yale and M.I.T. My grandfather used his friendship with a professor friend at Yale to influence their decision. I still don't know whether my choosing M.I.T. was stubbornness because I thought it was a tougher school, or because I wanted to make it on my own.

In the Fall of 1937, I bought a used 1927 Chevy for thirty-five dollars, and drove from Cedar Rapids to Cambridge, Mass. On the way, I learned that the old car had no brakes when it rained, and I parayed as the car sped down those long Berkshire hills that I wouldn't cross paths with a train at the bottom. I came to the top of the last hill before Boston just as the lights of the city were coming on. Not knowing where to go, and short of money as usual, I turned off on a side road, parked under a tree, and slept in the car.

My home for the next two years was a third-floor room in an old house on Kendall Square, halfway between M.I.T. and Harvard. The third year I lived in a dormitory suite at the Grad. House. The typical poverty-stricken student, I cooked most of my meals on a gas burner, sometimes going out for a restaurant meal of beans and brown bread. Once in a long time my friends and I went over to Boston and ate at one of the many ethnic restaurants, or at Durgin Parks, in the market district, with long bare tables, benches, sawdust on the floor, and huge steaks. Once we even went to a burlesque theater!

One cold, windy day I was walking across the Harvard Bridge (Admiral Byrd is reputed to have said it's the coldest place in the world) with one dollar in my pocket. All of a sudden, I saw three on-dollar bills on the sidewalk! Surprised that they hadn't blown off the bridge, I gratefully picked them up. Then I saw ahead of me a ragged old man feeling in his pocket, then desperately looking around. With mixed feelings, I gave up the money.

At M.I.T., I was on a teaching fellowship, which meant that I monitored chemistry labs, and received free tuition plus one thousand a year.

My main memories are of hard studies made more difficult by the fact that all my courses required the daily use of calculus and differential equations. I had to learn the mathematics on my own, because in our liberal arts studies at Coe College the math was largely lecture courses. Theoretical physics was taught at M.I.T. by a brilliant Mexican nuclear physicist who spoke broken English, assumed that we already knew everything in the textbook, and filled the blackboard with complex equations.

The physical chem. professor was named Miles Standish Sherrill. He lived up to his name by living at Marshfield, Mass., originally a pilgrim settlement. He took me to visit the cemetary where my mother's ancestor Kenelm Winslow, brother of Governor Edward Winslow, who came over on the Mayflower, was buried.

My doctoral thesis, "Adsorption of Hydrogen and Deuterium by Palladium", was never published; partly because my research professor Gillespie died, partly because I immediately went to work at Corning Glass Works. The original is in the M.I.T. archives and I have a copy.

The current chemical literature is filled with controversy about "cold fusion", based on experiments on the reaction of deuterium and palladium resulting in claims that atomic and thermal energy are produced.

I've thought about having my thesis published even at this late date, in case its basic data might throw some light on the subject.

Some of the brightest students were precommunist Chinese supported by government scholarships. One day I was eating lunch with one of them, and foolishly asked the question, "Are the Chinese starting to use silverware?" After a cool silence, he replied, "The Chinese stopped using silverware two thousand years ago!"

After passing the final written, I faced the dreaded oral exam. I felt that I was behind the eight ball, because I was the last to be examined and I knew that at least one doctoral candidate had been flunked every year, and everyone had passed this year. One professor told me, "I wake up every morning feeling grateful that it's one more day past my oral exam!" And I'd heard of some students who became so petrified that they couldn't even remember their own names!

In spite of these dire warnings, I did manage to pass, and received my diploma and Doctor's hoos.

Happily, Dad and Mother came East to watch the ceremony. Then we toured the New England seacoast. Mother had said that she was going to eat lobster every day. I don't know whether she'd ever eaten lobster, because in those days, they didn't fly fresh seafood to Iowa. To my surprise, she fell in love with scallops and ate them instead!

I learned a poem: