Ping to the Pong

I was a half-decent table tennis player. At least I thought I was. We had a fancy table at home that my dad built (the base was all lumber, with sturdy four-by-four legs; none of that folding metal crap for him), and that's where I learned to play. I also honed my skills on the table at the Y Camp of the Rockies, which was in rarified air 8,000 feet above sea level in Estes Park, Colorado. If anyone was going to get a nice bounce out of the ball, that was the place to do it.

But then I found myself at MIT, and I couldn't compete with the Chinese students who dominated the tables in the Student Center. For that matter, I wasn't even at the top of the depth chart on Second East. That honor belonged to John Richardson, who graduated in 1977, after having beaten most of us into submission over three years. Not only did he play barefoot, but he could put an English on the ball that was unbelievable. And he had hair like Andre Agassi.

Ping-pong was a pastime we all indulged in - frequently when we were stoned, or drunk, or trying to forget an upcoming thermo exam. We also played variations, such as Fling-Flong, which reversed all the normal rules of ping-pong by requiring players to bounce the ball once on their side of the net and once on the other side, and a game that was half ping-pong and half Chinese fire drill (no, the Chinese students who dominated the tables at Stratton did not play it), in which players would hit the ball while running around the table. But mostly, we played conventional ping-pong. Most of us used the "shake hands" grip that every kid learns starting out. Some were practiced enough to use the "pen-holder" grip that made the Chinese such ferocious competitors. And then there was Paul Alfille, who found a broken paddle with no handle on it and played every game gripping it around the outside edge with his fingertips. He got so good at it that he never played ping-pong again with a paddle that had a handle.

When I was a senior, I actually got to manage a ping-pong tournament for the Student Center Committee. I almost regretted it. At the last minute, I let in a Chinese player who hadn't signed up by the deadline; when I did, his colleagues shook their heads, "You know he's going to win the tournament..." He would have - except after demolishing three successive foes, he took a lengthy lunch and missed his quarter-final match, for which he was disqualified.

I drew my share of Stickles cartoons that featured ping-pong ("Jump the Net", for example). I also drew my share of cartoons whose humor was slightly blue. However, because I still entertained dreams of cartooning in family newspapers when I got out of school, I had to make them family-friendly...which meant I had to Bowdlerize a few of the off-color words.

This was not even the final version; I changed the word to "lucky", just in case someone knew the homonym to that word. If I ever draw the strip again, though, I'm not going to f%$#&^g sanitize it.

So who was really the best player in our dorm?

Commons

Some of you may remember this as a riff on a famous Cheech and Chong routine. Some of you who ate Commons at MIT for any length of time probably regard this as the truth. Commons was not something to be savored, like fine French cooking or vintage wine, but something to be endured. And the same was probably true of any college campus in those days, and true even today. Commons was probably the one thing that could make Domino's Pizza seem like a blessing.

Commons was an activity that MIT largely contracted out. ARAServ must have been the low bidder because they were responsible for everything - including Flank Steak (we always called it Flake Stank), Raunch (er, Ranch) Style Stew and the one Indian dish that I'm sure must shame every Indian who has ever eaten it - Mulligatawney Stew (I am convinced "Mulligatawney" means "leftovers" in whatever language it was coined). Commons was famous for chopped sirloin burgers that looked like hockey pucks, oatmeal that would glue the roof of your mouth to your tongue, and vegetables that always included a surprise seasoning in them (the spiced rice appeared to have been seasoned with floor sweepings, while the flaky green stuff that flavored the peas appeared to be grass clippings). Breakfasts were okay if you stuck to the packaged cereals and the skim milk (which some wag changed the spelling of by changing the "i" to a "u"), but the eggs...

Not only was Commons just plain awful, it had a great effect on those students who ate it. Undergrads fed a steady diet of Commons starting at the beginning of September had usually gained 10 pounds or so by Christmas.

That was about as long as it took most students to develop defensive eating habits. When I arrived on the campus, I had fretted because the most comprehensive meal plan covered only 19 meals a week, leaving breakfast on Saturday and Sunday mornings off the menu. In the end, I opted for 15 meals a week, on the theory that I had enough money to get a cheap pizza in Cambridge on the weekends. At the end of the year, I opted to buy a book of meal tickets instead, and when I found I wasn't using very many of my tickets, I went off Commons for good. To facilitate the transition, I bought a hot plate, a can opener and a mini-fridge. I ate like a king...and so did the roaches. On the weekends I would leaven my home-made fare with burgers from Pritchett Lounge (their milkshakes were heaven, but their Frispos must have been the only fries that were not actually fried, but rather extruded from a Frispo machine) and pizzas from the truck that visited our dorm late at night. And there was ice cream from Steve's, which at the time was the best in the area. By the time I left MIT, my weight had ballooned - all the way up to 130 pounds. And I had developed a skill that would take me through my single years. Microwave ovens would be invented a scant two years later, forever changing the game of cooking in the dorm room.

My mini-fridge, by the way, was bought for $25, American. When I graduated, I sold the same fridge for the same $25, so I considered that a decent return on investment.

More Strips About Roaches and Food

Did I mention we had a lot of roaches in our dorm? Did I mention that all the dorms had a lot of roaches? In 1975, East Campus became the national test-bed for the rollout of the Roach Motel, a little cardboard box with two openings, one at each end, and a super-powerful bed of sticky glue inside. A roach crawled in, got stuck and stayed stuck until death. Which could be a while; have you ever seen a roach poop? This method has proven so successful that they've now made mouse-traps on the same principle. I still prefer traditional killing methods - like a cat.

Of course there were roaches in the dorms. How could there not be? We had lots of food - on shelves in our rooms, in the lounge areas and in the wastebaskets half-eaten. We also had garbage of various types, dirty piles of clothing and even such delicacies as loose leaf paper, newspapers and, of course, textbooks. Did I mention that a roach can subsist on almost anything?

Roaches are different from one part of this country to the other. I know that because the Texas cockroach - which we euphemistically called a palmetto bug - was easily twice the size of the traditional MIT roach. What the MIT roaches lacked in size, however, they made up for in just plain old toughness. They always knew when danger was coming, and they never moved in a straight line. Try to stomp them and they were already under the refrigerator before you could get a shoe on them. They didn't fly, which was fortunate because the Texas roaches did, but they could get into any small space. And they ate whatever they found. I know that because I could occasionally hear them chewing.

But there were some things that even a roach could not eat.

Spring Break

Spring break. At MIT, it usually occurred in the second or third week of March, at about the midpoint of the semester. For us, it was a week off when we could escape the campus. Some of us would head south to the beaches, others would go skiing. My freshman year, I went to visit relatives in New York and took a train trip to DC to try to get a summer position with the FAA. In the Spring of 1975, global warming had yet to set in, and it had snowed in DC the day I went down there. In subsequent years, I would return to my home in Texas, and in fact I did some rehab on my fractured ankle by doing some bicycle touring around Houston.

These days, Spring Break is the busiest time of the year in places like Daytona Beach, rivaled only by the annual visit of the Harley Davidson enthusiasts. Those of us who were students in the '70s are probably the biggest market for Harley Davidson motorcycles of any age cohort, which is odd, because we would have had trouble balancing a Harley in our younger days. Besides, Bob Seger was a relatively new phenomenon on Top 40 radio in the '70s and "Don't Fear the Reaper" would not be released on record until Spring 1976, so the cachet of a lone dude on a hog cruising down A1A had not been established.

Those who stayed behind had lots of free time to engage in hacks. In fact, when the hall tutor was away, some of the floor residents put their carpentry skills to work and proceeded to plasterboard over his doorway, so that he could not find his room when he came back. A more famous story involved the owner of a nice sports car who came home to find his car had been dissassembled and transported up to his fifth floor dorm room, where it was reassembled. Sometimes the hacks were well received, but in one case, a student had come home to find his dorm room completely filled with computer paper. He proceeded to remove it in a most inelegant way - he set fire to it. Not only was the paper completely gone,as a result, but so was his room, which was later converted into a second lounge. If you went up to Fifth East, the Goodale Lounge was not in its customary spot, having been shifted by the fire.

My Spring Break is going to be spent at a conference in Chicago, which isn't quite Daytona Beach, but it promises to be interesting nonetheless. I'll have more cartoons to post after that.

Campus Radicals and Social Action

In addition to the usual collection of Marxists, Maoists, Spartacists and Objectivists, MIT had just plain old garden-variety social activists. The origins of the Social Action Coordinating Committee (SACC, for short) predated my arrival at MIT and probably predated the origins of thursday. They probably were motivated to action by the Vietnam War in the '60s, and since every other college campus was ablaze with unrest, they didn't think MIT should be left out of the party. However, the most they could muster was the invasion and occupancy of the President's Office, which was accomplished when a small group of students, no doubt inspired by outside agitators (like Richard Nixon), proceeded to break open the door with a battering ram one evening. If anyone got killed, maimed, arrested, investigated or even had their chocolate rations suspended as a result of this action, it certainly was not Kent State or Berkeley by any stretch of the imagination.

When I got to MIT, Nixon had just resigned and the Vietnam War was over for the US (and would soon be over for the Vietnamese in a few months). That left SACC with nothing really to complain about. Campus controversies, such as MIT's decision to train nuclear engineers for the Shah of Iran in 1975 and missile technicians for Chiang Kai Shek in 1976, failed to ignite the student body the way Transparent Horizons did when it showed up at East Campus.

Lacking a motivating cause, SACC decided that their purpose in life was to prevent backsliding at thursday. To that end, they waged epic battles for control of the editorial content of the paper between 1975 and 1978. They also led an effort to elect one of their own President of the Undergraduate Association, which succeeded in 1976 (as good and well-motivated a UAP as Phil Moore was, nothing really changed). SACC would not find a raison d'etre until Ronald Reagan was elected President in 1980.

Three Cheers for the 'Tute!

It has come to my attention that not only is it possible for Caltech to win a basketball game, but that MIT has made the Division III playoffs of the NCAA. And beaten their first round opponent, Ithaca College (a subset of Cornell, I presume). I am almost certain this phenomenon occurred because the intrepid roundballers were expert in calculating the precise trajectory that a basketball departing the hand at a certain speed and at a certain vector angle would travel when acted upon by the forces of gravity, and how to plot that angle of decay so that the spheroid would pass precisely between the metal rim of a hoop without touching either side, given the circumference of a basketball is known and allowing for a certain amount of wind resistance. Either that or they just knew how to throw down on those wusses from New York.

Since 1983, MIT has been busily expanding its athletic facilities, and students from our day and age (1978) would not recognize the place. For us, athletic facilities consisted of at least one gymnasium, the Rockwell Cage, which had a dirt floor that Steve Tyler of Aerosmith once puked on, so I am told. It was a great place to play flag football and intramural lacrosse. There was a basketball court on top of Walker Memorial, too, and while it didn't have the panache of the Boston Garden, it certainly had the parquet floor - loose floorboards and all. Walker also had some tennis courts, on whose surfaced played some of the greats of macroeconomics. And there was a tennis bubble on the West Side of Campus that collapsed in the Great Blizzard of '78.

There is also the Steinbrenner track, which annually hosts the alumni reunions.

As I explained earlier, Steinbrenner's name is not on that building. And so far, MIT has been fortunate not to be gifted by Donald Trump.

More Characters: Evan the Red

I've been having a bit of a debate. Not with myself, mind you, but with the various members of the Ayn Rand Worship Society. When they were much younger, they had their own publication dedicated to flanneling free market principles, Romantic literature and Star Trek (I think I told this story already). Today, they are all alumni, they publish blogs and run endless debates on MIT's Linked-In site devoted to the postulation that  they are so much smarter than everyone else when it comes to economic thought, and therefore policymakers should take them seriously.

What separated the denizens of Ergo from the denizens of thursday was that whereas we were a bunch of smelly, hairy, pimply-faced leftists in flannel shirts and bluejeans, they were a bunch of smelly, clean-shaven, pimply-faced libertarians in short-sleeved button-down shirts and khaki pants from JC Penney. And they had discovered Brylcreem. Not that either of our respective groups was ever going to find romance with a partner of the opposite sex. We were just two sides of the same bad penny.

Speaking of flannel shirts and blue-jeans, there was one particular Marxist who happened to live on Second East - next door to me. And he was as dyed-in-the-wool as it gets. If you've ever seen the Young Ones on BBC America, the most obnoxiously leftist member of the foursome, Rick, can be recognized by the Soviet-style heroic paintings that he applied with a brush and a roller to his wall. This is not exaggeration. My Marxist neighbor actually did that to his dorm room interior.

So who was this person? We called him Evan the Red.

He really was everyone's favorite socialist. He was always telling us oppressed masses how we could better ourselves. In addition, he had liberated himself from Food Service by acquiring a hot plate and buying in bulk.

Evan had been doing this long before Costco made it popular with the bourgeoisie. The only problem was that Evan had developed a cooking style that was essentially to put a pot of vegetables on low flame and then rush off to the Marxist Lecture Series. This form of cooking was known as The Slow Burn. Evan had been blackening food long before Paul Prudhomme had perfected the technique and made New Orleans a gastronomic landmark.

However, when Evan made a blackened dish, it remained blackened for a long time. And the Fire Department usually had to be called in.

But when Evan was around, nothing went to waste.

A final note: the old joke among Jews is four rabbis, five opinions. Among the small community of radical activists, it was 12 leftists, 13 different (and fiercely distinct) leftist groups...

The only thing that united them was Doctor Marten's boots. Never, ever get them confused...

One day, I will have to explain the Social Action Coordinating Committee. They were a bit more, ahem, mainstream.