My uncle Campbell Bosson went along to introduce us to Father Sill. While visiting, I was put up in the infirmary along with some other applicants. We took exams in math, English, and Latin, then had physical examinations and interviews with Father Sill. I well remember climbing the stairs to his garret, arriving at the top, and seeing him at the other end of the room, smoking a pipe and looking very imposing in his white robes. He asked me a number of questions, including whether or not I had been confirmed in church. I said yes, having been confirmed just a few weeks before.

"What denomination were you confirmed in?," he asked.

As far as I was concerned, I went to the same Salem church as everybody else. I had never noticed what the denomination was. So I answered, "I'm not quite sure, but I think it begins with a P."

"Oh, you must be a Presbyterian."

I said, "No, I don't think that sounds right."

He hemmed and hawed a bit, then said, "You're not Episcopalian, are you?"

"That sounds right," I said. "I think that's what I am."

When I arrived home several days later, I found Mother in tears. She had just received a letter from Kent informing her that my application for admission had been rejected, although they had "enjoyed having Bobby there." I received a very low mark on the mathematics exam, but did better in English and Latin. The letter indicated that I seemed a bit immature, and I was encouraged to reapply the following year. When I told my parents about my encounter with Father Sill, they figured that was what had done it. This was no laughing matter to them. I'm sure they felt that the Seamans family had not measured up to the Bosson standard. What's more, my application to Kent had cost them $50, plus a donation for the new school chapel.

Lenox School

After hearing the bad news, my parents immediately whisked me off to the Lenox School in Lenox, Massachusetts, for an interview. Nobody ever asked me what school I wanted to attend. I had been sent to camp for four years, and nobody had asked for my views on that either. As a boy in that time and place, I didn't have much control over my destiny.

At Lenox, I met George Gardner Monks, the headmaster, and was given a couple of fairly perfunctory exams. In answer to one question about Greek mythology, I offered a long tale about Homer's Odyssey thanks to the Tower School curriculum. I was accepted on the spot! When I got back to Tower, I found that my friends had put up big signs saying, "Welcome, Bobby!" and "Congratulations on being admitted to Lenox School!"

Mr. Monks came from what was considered a top-drawer Boston family. He had gone to St. Mark's, one of the more prominent Boston-area boarding schools, and had become a minister. He was a great disciple of the Reverend William Greenough Thayer, headmaster at St. Mark's. Mr. Thayer felt that there was a need for a school that would admit boys who could not afford to go, for one reason or another, to St. Mark's, Groton, Middlesex, or the like, as well as boys who needed remedial training. The result, Lenox, was looked on as somewhat inferior.

It was a self-help school. The students did absolutely everything except cooking and laundry. We set the tables and washed the dishes. We swept the floors and mopped them. We had "work holidays" on some Saturdays, when we boys might have wanted to be out doing other things. All day we raked and generally cleaned up the grounds. As a result of my Lenox education, I can wash a dish better than anybody I know. After my wedding, I made the mistake of demonstrating my wife's relative inefficiency in the kitchen by showing her how to wash dishes. Served me right-I ended up washing them for a good stretch!

School began in mid-September, and we all stayed on campus until December 20, except when parents came to take us out to a meal. (In those days there wasn't a Massachusetts Turnpike, and it was a bit of a struggle for my parents, with two younger sons in tow, to get out there.) For more than three months it was no weekends, no Thanksgiving, no going home. I remember thinking in September that I was going to spend the next fourteen weeks-roughly 1/300th of my whole life span-incarcerated! Still, Lenox was a remarkable school, and it gave me a wonderful background. I had some very good masters during my five years there.

A student tends to get a reputation in a given area, which becomes very hard to change. I got a reputation for not being too facile in English. Mr. ("Snark") Clark, the head of the English department,

was always calling me in and forcing me to rewrite papers. This was a big drag, but very good for me. Nor was I the most thoughtful student in Sacred Studies. My parents were called in once during my sophomore year because I had been caught playing cards during a Sacred Studies exam. I had done no work in the course, and I could see no conceivable purpose for taking the exam. Why pretend that I had done work I hadn't done? My parents were extremely upset with me and made this quite clear by making the long drive, four hours each way, to confront me. I reformed to some extent. Before the year was over, I got Sacred Studies up to a passing grade.

I really enjoyed math and sciences, which came easily. I did well enough in mathematics my sophomore year that Mr. Monks, who taught the course, thought it would be a good thing, as an experiment, for me to take the college boards in math two years early. So that I could do so, I stayed in school one extra week and went over the junior and senior math curricula. As soon as I left the exam room, I knew that I had made one stupid mistake in proving a geometry theorem. I got an 85; if not for that mistake, I would have had 100. After that, the head of the math department gave me and one other boy special problems because we had already fulfilled the school's math requirement.

The Lenox subject that I found most interesting was senior physics, also taught by Mr. Monks, who was a great academic inspiration, especially in my area of greatest interest. As headmaster and minister, he also had an influence on my sense of values. One time, I came in from football and was the last person to leave the locker room, which was in the basement of the main building. I noticed a big electric switch, and just for the fun of it I pulled it. It turned off all the lights in the school. Subsequently, there was an inquiry to determine who had perpetrated the deed. We students were all assembled in the dining hall and were told we were going to stay there until the culprit owned up. I confessed and was given my punishment. The earthworks dam that contained the water for our natural ice-hockey rinks tended to leak. I was tasked with digging a trench all the way around the dam and filling it with clay in order to stop the leaking. I spent several weekends at the dam accomplishing this. What did Mr. Monks have to do with all this? Remarkably, he came down to the dam and worked alongside me.

Harvard College

For a long time I maintained that I wanted to go to the University of Wisconsin after graduating from Lenox. I guess I wanted to go somewhere other than Harvard College, where my two uncles (Richard Seamans and Campbell Bosson) and my father had studied. Why Wisconsin? It was reasonably far from home. In the end, I applied to only one college, Harvard, and began studying there in September 1936. I had received a high enough grade in English on the college boards that I was allowed to skip the standard freshman English program at Harvard, a noncredit writing course. I was delighted my cousin Jim Seamans, who had been an excellent student at Exeter and who had entered Harvard the same year I did, hadn't done as well on the exam and was required to take the course. Everybody in the Seamans family was convinced that somehow the two examinations had been swapped! What really happened was this. The college boards in those days weren't the multiple-choice, true-or-false affairs of today. The questions were substantive and required essay-type answers. On the English exam, we were asked to discuss books of four different kinds. With my background in Sacred Studies, I selected four books of the Bible. This staggered the examiners, or so I was told afterwards by "Snark" Clark, who knew the teacher who had read my paper.

The training I had received at boarding school was so much better than that given in most high schools that my freshman year at Harvard was straightforward. My roommate, Stratton Christensen, and I worked hard and got good grades. I was reasonably straitlaced, studying at night and going to classes in the day, while trying to compete at football, hockey, and baseball. I didn't do very well in college athletics, but I did get out there and play the game. The summer after freshman year I didn't have anything to do, so I took a full-credit course in surveying given at Squam Lake in New Hampshire. I found it fascinating. I got to know Professor Albert Haertline quite well, the camp director and a Harvard classmate of my father. He was an old-time civil engineering type, who wore knickers and big boots and liked to hike up and down through the woods, surveying. I also got to know a number of students who were already concentrating in engineering. I pursued engineering studies from there on.

The engineering faculty at Harvard was fairly small, but it had some remarkably good people. Professor Haertline became my advisor and was most helpful in his discussions with me. Den Hartog, who taught mechanical engineering, became a captain in the Navy during World War II, then came back and headed up the department of mechanical engineering at MIT. The extent to which a Harvard engineering student could concentrate in a particular area was limited. For me, there was beauty in that. I didn't have a very clear picture of what I was going to do with my life. It had been expected of me that I would go to college and get a degree, and I was doing so. But what I was going to do with the degree I didn't know. So Harvard's generalist approach to engineering allowed me to sample different fields— electrical, mechanical, civil, and aeronautical engineering. I discovered that I was especially interested in aeronautics, as taught by Bill Bollay. He wasn't a charismatic figure, but he had considerable technical ability. After serving as a naval captain in World War II, he went out west and became one of the key people in the Autonetics Division at North American Aviation.

With extra credit for the summer surveying program and for the advanced English course I had taken in place of the freshman noncredit writing course, I entered my sophomore year with six of the sixteen credits needed to graduate. So I thought, why hang around? Why not polish it off in three years? That meant taking five full courses each of my last two years. Against everyone's advice, I took six courses during the second half of sophomore year. One of the six was Astronomy 2a, which included a section on celestial navigation. In one of the key assignments, we were put in a hypothetical boat off Bermuda, given a lot of star sights, and asked to determine where we would make landfall. The night before the exam I still had not done the assignment. Nor had I studied for the exam. I had learned that the best way for me to study under that kind of last-minute pressure was to work for two or three hours, catch a couple of hours' sleep, then get up and work again-alternating work and sleep throughout the night. This time, however, I was in such deep trouble that I got hardly any sleep at all. The following morning I was so afraid that I would fall asleep during the exam that I filled an ink bottle with whiskey and drank some periodically during the exam to stay awake. Not very smart.