On the second Monday of September,1956, I found my way to Rockefeller Hall and my very first college class. It was a laboratory section of Chemistry 105.
There were more than a thousand people enrolled in the course.
We had all taken a mathematics aptitude test, and I had been placed in an advanced section of twenty so-called mathematically gifted students. (Only rarely in my lifetime have my skills been so badly misjudged.) In my section there were nineteen young men, all armed with slide rules -- a device, now blissfully extinct, that I never mastered -- and one very pretty brown-haired brown-eyed maid (still sixteen, I was later to discover) with an athletic step and a musical voice. The guys, brandishing their slide rules, clustered around the young lady-- bees, or drones rather, drawn to the solitary flower. Many were the offers to help her insert her thistle tube into her cork. Alas, I could offer no assistance, introductory chemistry class being both the alpha and omega of my scientific career.
Nevertheless, in despite of my laboratorical inadequacies, this sunny September day fifty years later, I'm still married to that brown-haired brown-eyed young woman.
So today we celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the first sighting.
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