Passing the Butter and Picking up the Penny

1951-1955 - Avenue H/Bedford Ave. , Brooklyn, NY

I set out for college with only a vague sense of what that might mean. One thing I did know was that I would be saving money by living at home. Moving out and living in an apartment never occurred to me. If anyone had mentioned that idea, I would have thought it was stupid. Why would anyone in a family want to pay two rents? Besides, there were no dormitories at Brooklyn College. It was a commuter school serving working class students whose families could not or did not want to send their children away to college. The tuition was, as I recall, five dollars a semester.

I took the BMT subway and got off at Avenue H, then walked the twenty minutes to campus. Every school day I carried two peanut butter sandwiches on wheat bread and two apples in a brown paper bag. As I write this I laugh, thinking what four years of peanut butter would look like if it were scooped from my sandwiches and put into a pile in the middle of a street. I can see the light brown color. The chunkiness in the hill is sticking out and I imagine it to be six feet tall. Could cars get around it? Would drivers survive a crash? I imagined the headline in the New York Daily News: DRIVER KILLED BY PEANUT BUTTER.Because I had decided to be a pre-med student, I was instructed to take preselected classes. My very first class at Brooklyn College was a chemistry class that started at 8:00 a.m. I was shocked at the hugeness of the classroom. There were 300 students. It was like a theatre with a wild, constantly moving madman, Professor Cheronis, smiling, shouting and laughing at his own jokes while he pulled his long mustache. I admired his interweaving of chemistry into our everyday lives. In his lab I was introduced to the microscope. When I looked through the lens, I could not see what others were seeing. At first I thought it was because I wore glasses and my lenses and the lenses of the microscope made the images cloudy. But others with glasses were nodding and excited. I was too embarrassed to ask anyone about what they saw. No matter how hard I looked, I saw nothing that they were describing. I didn't know what ions would join others to make a compound. I have no idea why I didn’t fail that class. I ended up with a C. I guess there were others who were having the same or different problems. The C meant that I would probably have to change my major. Becoming a doctor was a fading goal.