Page 174 - WhyAsInY

Why (as in yaverbaum)
were probably more than one thousand students who believed that they wished to go to college, you’d get about five minutes with the College Placement Dean, Miss Bradshaw, who had her favorites. I believe that I was not among them. She recommended that I look into Kenyon Col- lege in Ohio, Coe College in Iowa (!), and Rice University in Texas, and she mentioned no other school to me.
Because our class was huge (almost twelve hundred seniors), the school would process only three applications, plus a mandatory applica- tion to a City school, such as Brooklyn College. Feeling that I could do a lot better than Miss Bradshaw thought, I wrote to Amherst, Princeton, Dartmouth, Brown, Columbia, and Brandeis for catalogs; applied to Amherst under their early decision program (where I agreed that if I were accepted, I would go); and I sought an interview as soon as I could get one. I just didn’t want to fill out four applications, and I had a little bit of confidence when it came to Amherst; the prior Mayor, Peter Mel- nick, had gotten in. I felt that Columbia would be a “safe” school for me because more than twenty Midwood graduates got in in 1960. I liked Amherst because of its size, its location, and its “intellectual” reputation. Aunt Rose, who was truly an intellectual snob, always took credit for my applying there. To her credit, she did put me in touch with Ralph Moss, the son of a friend of hers, who was a freshman. Getting in touch with Melnick and Moss was the wise and mature thing to do. Each was very helpful to me and positive about Amherst. Unfortunately, when I arrived at Amherst and was a freshman who could have benefited from connec- tions to the upperclassmen, I learned that both of them had dropped out. They never returned.
What ultimately sold me on Amherst, however, was my visit and interview. Lesley and I traveled to western Massachusetts together, tak- ing a train to Northampton. She was applying to Smith, and we had our interviews on the same day. When I arrived at Johnson Chapel to go to the Admissions Office, I was ushered into a room where a very large bald man, wearing half glasses that were tilted on his nose, was seated behind the desk. He introduced himself as Professor Ziegler, and before I could settle in and adjust to the surroundings, he asked me if I had read
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