April 12, 2019--Go For It, Charlie!

I did not know what to expect about college life when my parents dropped me off for orientation week at Columbia. 

My father's final words were not about being careful to choose an appropriate major or how to think about the future. Rather, his advice was, "But be sure to go out for crew." The rowing team, which was best known for going season after season without winning a race.

Most of my classmates and I were more brainy than athletic and I knew less about port and starboard than differential equations. 

As a Jewish kid from Brooklyn who grew up in an immigrant family where Yiddish was the first language, when it came to participatory sports I knew only about street games such as ringolevio and stick ball. Crew? That was for the goyim. They were headed for board rooms and European vacations, my friends and I, if the quotas weren't filled, for medical or dental school.

Orientation was designed to inculcate in us Columbia and Ivy League lore. Like our fight song (assuming our forlorn football team knew anything about fighting), Roar, Lion, Roar. And, more alluringly, in a sex education workshop, how to prevent girlfriends we might get to know from becoming pregnant, and how, as much as possible, to avoid excessive masturbation. I made notes about the former but not the latter. In regard to that I came pre-oriented. 

During the first year all my courses were required--Humanities, Contemporary Civilization, Art and Music History, Quantitative Reasoning, foreign language (for me French), science (for me chemistry), and Freshman Comp.

The one I knew least about was Comp, but when classes commenced I came to quickly learn that it would be my most challenging subject. I had gone to a technical high school where reading literature and writing about it was not emphasized and so I was not surprised (though deeply anxious about my tottering status) 
when my first paper was returned to me emblazoned with red ink corrections, criticisms, and a boldly circled F.

But two months into the semester everyone in the class became obsessed with something other than declarative writing--without a preamble of notification one night our Comp instructor appeared on TV as the star contestant on 21, America's most popular quiz show.

It was on once a week and contestants were asked to decide each time if they wanted to continue to compete for more money or stop and pocket what they had won during previous weeks.

So every Wednesday, the day before the show aired, we would arrive at the classroom early and fill the blackboard with our advice, and, projected into the situation, our longings for distinction--

GO FOR IT CHARLIE!!! GO FOR IT!!!

Our instructor was the son of America's leading literary family, Charles Van Doren who died at 93 earlier this week.

He would smile when he erased the board, but during the months he was on the show he never mentioned it and in that hierarchical era there was no likelihood that any of us would feel it appropriate to mention it or his soaring good fortune. Even when he appeared on the cover of Time magazine, nothing was said or shared. Just fantasies about rising in the world by using one's wits.

For us it was enough to bask in his success and growing fame. Things that on a different scale I craved but was incapable of allowing myself even to openly imagine.

But then when 21 and other quiz shows were exposed as frauds, including Charlie, who was briefed in advance about the evening's questions, what remained of my innocence was shattered.

His rise and then his precipitous fall became fully part of how I begin to understand and experience the world.

But I was taking my own advice and going for it.