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toWarD a unifieD fielD tHeory
engagement with Emily’s house occurred when I was responsible for an errant snowball taking out one of her windows. (So much for my damned good outfield arm.)
There was a huge living room in Phi Gam, where house parties and the weekly fraternity meetings were held. (Fraternity meetings were known as “Goats” because, as I wrote in the minutes when I became “Recording Secretary,” a goat is a “filthy animal that eats garbage and fornicates indiscriminately.”) Adjacent to the living room, known as the “Goat Room” to most, was a library, the Calvin Coolidge Memorial Library, which held couches and, most important, a community TV that would be tuned to Giants football games on Sundays. Silent Cal, our late brother, would have been proud. On the lower level was the bar, furnished with an electric tap, booths, a jukebox, and, later, a popcorn machine. Adjacent to the bar was a room the floor of which was covered by mattresses. I never visited that room, and I forget its name, although I’m sure that it seemed catchy at the time.
The fraternity brothers, in groups of three or four, shared bedrooms and related “social rooms” that were furnished with couches, bars, and the like. Dates were entertained in the social rooms. I roomed with Sam Preston and Roger Scott, the first freshman I had met when I arrived at Morrow.
Sam was very smart, a serious student, an excellent ballplayer, a very good drinker, a frustrated Cubs fan, and a good friend. He was about my height but was in what seemed to me to be much better shape. His hair was short, and his five-o’clock shadow seemed to appear much earlier than that. He smoked cigars, not as an affect but because he liked to. Sam was a man. His social life (on the female side) consisted of visits to and from his high school sweetheart, Winnie deWitt, whom he later married. Sam, an economics major, went on to get his Ph.D. in econom- ics at Princeton, before becoming Dean of Arts and Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania. He taught sociology there, with an empha- sis on demographics; the Preston Curve, which shows a correlation between life expectancy and income, is named for him.
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