Ph.D. from the Edge of Hell

Maybe Harlem had gotten better since [and maybe because of] Langston. Maybe not. Then again, CCNY was not like all of Harlem. Most of Harlem was still plenty raw. All the nearby subway stops were pretty raw, but the gentrification as I approached the college was highly path dependent. Sometimes I got off at 145th st. I heard on the radio one day, that a little 8 year old boy was shot there. A man was running down the street cranking off rounds at random. A crowd crushed in on him and beat him to death before the police arrived. Or so the radio said. They said that neither the boy or the man looked like me.

The recommended route was to walk up the hill towards Convent Ave. I think there was a Baptist Church. I was there on Sunday mornings sometimes. I was a graduate student. Convent Avenue was one truly fine street. I knew it would be a long time, if ever, before I would be able to buy anything there. And I didn't know if they would let me. Just outside the gate of the College was the Hamilton Grange. In the fall and spring, Mr. Baker would be out tending the yard in his Park Service uniform.
You could not get by him without a warm, "good morning!" - even the first time. I wondered if the Grange had seceded from New York. Eventually I realized there was something special about him. [A mere 30 years later and I realize that I had met a person incurably in touch with the truly important.] But I never stopped to talk to him. I told myself I was too busy. I had to get down with the Laws of Nature. But I was just afraid. I screwed up. Mr. Baker could hardly have been clearer that he meant the best for everybody. He was a guy by the door who takes care of things ... like I am now.

Around lunch time, food vendors would pull their carts up just inside the gate - among them Raymond the Bagelman. In New York City, Raymond was four or five orders of magnitude more famous than the President of the College, Robert E. Marshak. Robert had a ceremony and press conference to award Raymond an honorary 'Ph.B'. The next day at lunchtime, Raymond was arrested just inside the gate on Convent Avenue.

The station at 125th st was standardly raw, but things got very quickly worse towards the South Campus. It was dodgy by day and just plain scary by night or at least that's the way I felt about. but I couldn't go all the way back to the North Campus to get a better path to the subway. That would have been giving in to racism. One time I was with Dick when this dilemma arose. Dick worked with me not only in the lab, but in Science for the People as well. It was night. He thought we ought to think about it. He had better left credentials than me. Maybe I wasn't so bad after all. It wasn't too tense. There were two of us and Dick is 6'3".

Robert had invented the V-A theory of the weak interaction. Somewhat later, the electroweak unification gained currency. I heard that Steven Weinberg had done it. Only when the Swedish Academy awarded the Nobel for it, did I learn the Abdus Salam, a Pakistani physicist had done significant heavy lifting. I don't know if Pakistan was Pakistan at the time.