Back to Work After the War
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Well, I got back home to Lima out on Stewart Road on May 20, 1946. And the next
couple of weeks were spent swapping stories with my older brothers Marvin and
Kenneth, Seeing the friends and relatives I
hadn't seen in over three years was also enjoyable time spent. After a lot of
yarn-swapping and visiting, I began thinking about doing something productive
to earn my keep. My brother Ken was a pipefitter
at the Westinghouse Plant in Lima and he was able to get me a job as a
"pipefitter's helper.” I wasn't assigned to Ken but to a
pipefitter's helpers pool. Sometimes I would work with a
garrulous old coot named Cherry and sometimes I would be with Ladd Bollinger,
a jolly coon-huntin' character with whom it was fun to work He was
full of stories, many about our fellow employees. I had to join the
pipefitters union (Ladd Bollinger was the union president), pay my dues, and
go to their meetings. I also went to several American
Legion meetings with Ken, but that didn't seem like good nighttime
entertainment to me after a hard day’s work. Working at The Plant soon taught me
that I didn't want to spend the rest of my life as a worker bee in that kind
of hive. After I had burned my hand,
arm or leg on every non-insulated steam pipe in the plant, I realized that an
industrial installation can be a dangerous place to work. To insure my
longevity, I thought, I'd better find something else to do in a less
hazardous environment. A return to college was what I
really wanted and, with the G. I. Bill to help with my expenses, I embarked
on that course of action. After a letter or two and some phone
calls, I decided to go down to OSU to talk to the counselors in the Arts
College, even though the last time I did that I ended up in the Army. I told them that I wanted to switch from a
pre-veterinary major to pre-med and
that I was interested in the Arts-Medicine program. Under this plan I would take three
years of a pre-med curriculum, and IF
I was lucky enough to get accepted into a school of medicine, and IF
I passed the first year of medical school, then
THAT first med school year would be considered the fourth year of my bachelor
of arts program, and I would get a BA degree.
Luckily, all the courses I had
taken before I went into the Army were the same courses required in
pre-med, so there would be no make-up courses needed. This, then, became my working plan.
All I had to do was submit the list of courses I wanted to take in the fall
quarter of 1946, sign up for the G.I. Bill, and then find a place to
live. Course-wise, to satisfy the foreign
language requirement,. I would have to take four more quarters of German.
There were also some mandatory English and social studies course
requirements. I would have to take
more physics and math courses, too, plus qualitative and quantitative
analysis, a year of organic chemistry, and some zoology and botany courses. It seemed that I would be really
busy for the next two-and-a-half years
with all the didactic courses. Then I would have to do well in the MCATs
(Medical College Aptitude Tests), and pray for acceptance into the 1948
freshman medical school class. It all looked like a tall order. But,
what the heck -- it beat the burns,
cuts and scrapes of being a "pipefitter's helper." Where to live became the next
problem to solve. Having had a single room to myself during my first two
quarters before the Army, I didn't want to have to put up with a roommate,
and I didn't want to go the fraternity route either. But since there were practically no single
rooms in the university housing system, I would have to find some solution in
private housing. Since it has now been 60 years since
those times, I don't recall how I got in touch with Rich and Kate Romaker,
but they became the solution to my problem. Kate and Rich had been high school
classmates of mine. Kate had been Kate Bonfiglio and Rich was Richard
Romaker. And they now had become involved in the health sciences, too. Kate
had gone through nursing school during the war and Rich had completed pre-med
and was either in med school at OSU or was preparing to enter it when the two
married. Kate's father had bought a narrow,
brick two-story house at 999 Delaware, just where it dead-ended
into Second Avenue. It had a nice big bedroom on the second floor where
they stayed. They agreed to rent me a small adjoining single room and we would
share the bath. The house was 10 or 11 blocks from
the south edge of the OSU campus and, since I didn't have a car, it was a
vigorous walk. If the weather was bad, I could catch the Neil Avenue street
car but, all in all. it was an ideal set up. Since I had to study and Rich had to
study, it was quiet around the little
house. In the winter they would frequently invite me down for a cup of hot
chocolate and some cookies at around ten or ten-thirty before bedtime. In school, I had Professor Oskar Seidlin
for German. I don't know what had happened to Professor Hans Sperber, the
professor I had previously had before the Army, but I did like Professor
Seidlin. He introduced us to the German philosophers Hegel, Kant, Nietzsche,
Schopenhauer and others. I also had the grand old man of
physics at Ohio State, Professor Alpheus Smith. It was he who stimulated
young William Fowler from my same Hazel Avenue in Lima, to continue in
physics and to progress to win a Nobel Prize in astrophysics while a professor
at Cal Tech. My old pal Juke Pike from my previous
college days would get together with me frequently on Friday after classes.
He was in a business curriculum and so we didn't have a lot in common
scholastically. But we had great
after-hours attitude-adjustment sessions. At the Sunset Cafe and Grill on 5th
Avenue, we could get a pitcher of beer for fifty cents and hot dogs for ten
cents each. We regaled each other
with war stories, as he had been in the Navy and I in the Army. I'm sure we
both lied a lot but we had a great time. And so, September 1946 found me out
of the Westinghouse plant and back into academic pursuits. The pieces had all
fallen back together and I was on my way. |