1954
I started at the Merchant Marine Academy in 1949. I got to CCNY in February of 1951. It was tuition-free at the time, and my father was a granite cutter and we couldn't afford college so it was a great place to go. I could live at home and go to CCNY. I called up to register at the candy store around the corner because we didn't have telephones. I said I'd like to study civil engineering. I took that and got my degree in 1954. I also joined the ROTC, and that gave me a two-way deferment. I got through CCNY and then I went into the Navy OCS in Newport and I had about a five-year career in the Navy plus another 20 in the reserves. I was in submarines in and out of New London, Connecticut, and then to West Florida. I spent a lot of time underwater, got to go to the Mediterranean twice, England once, and I flew over to Northern Ireland and got to meet my grandfather and loads of cousins there. It was really great. I got to go to Lebanon. I got to see Baalbek. I got to Athens and Naples, and it was really an eye-opener. I even got to get over to Milan, visited an exchange student who had lived with us in 1948 when I was in high school, and his father was the manager of the Autodromo di Monza, the racetrack automobiles. We drove around that in a tiny fee anyway. I got to be in the Chi Epsilon Honorary Civil Engineering Society. I was president of that, and I played lacrosse, and I'd never even seen a lacrosse stick, but that was a good degree. The last summer before my senior year, I hitchhiked up to Idaho and got a job at an ADEM site as a surveyor.