John Agnew: The time was my senior year in high school
John Agnew
And I was so naïve you wouldn’t believe it. This was over a half-century ago, and things really have changed. I know this, not because I am so smart, but because my granddaughter, Maureen, will be a senior this year, and I have a front-row seat for comparison purposes. We lived in Miami until I finished junior high, when we moved to Redland and a much smaller school. We had a rural route address and a phone without a dial ( “Number please,” the lady said, just like in the movies);
I rode the school bus and I had a friend who sometimes used a horse for transportation. It was five miles to the area’s only movie theater, which was not air-conditioned.My high school class graduated 27, only a few of whom planned to go to college. I assumed I would go to college, because I thought I would like to be a doctor and I knew that college was part of the deal.
Plus, I had no skills that would allow me to survive as I was. The only jobs in the area were of the agricultural variety. I had tried farm work, but we did not hit if off. (I could tell that as soon as I picked up a shovel; some things you just know.) My grades were good, and I had won a prize for writing ($25 and my picture in the Miami Herald), so I figured I could fill out a few forms and some college would accept me. Knowing nothing about it at all, it didn’t seem too complicated. My father didn’t know anything about it, either, but he said I could go to any college I wanted, as long as it was a Jesuit institution. That restriction didn’t bother me, blissful in my ignorance, so I managed to find some names and send for catalogues.
The place that seemed best, judging by the catalogues, was Georgetown University, in Washington, D.C., so I requested an application. I am not making this up. Life really was simpler then, and my acceptance came back a short time later.
The letter said I had to take the SAT exam. I had never heard of the SAT, and I am not making that up, either. Maureen, in contrast, started taking the SAT when she was about 12, just for practice. In senior year she will be taking it every month. She plans to take a tour of every prospective college, which contrasts with my history of no tour at all.
People didn’t take a tour of colleges in my day. Washington was a 21-hour train ride away, and we didn’t have the time or money for such excursions. I never even considered it. I didn’t talk to my guidance counselor, because we didn’t have guidance counselors.
They probably wouldn’t have known anything, either. I did well enough on the SAT, but didn’t learn my score until recently. They tell you your score now, but it was a secret back then. I read that you could call and ask them to research your record, and I did. The man was very pleasant, and congratulated me for remembering where I took the exam. (He said that some people who called could not remember that far back; as I said, things were different.) My score was satisfactory, but not the 1600 I had expected. The only 1600 I ever saw was when I rode past the White House on a trolley. I had worked all summer to earn enough pocket money for the year.
My father probably borrowed some money for the tuition, which was $1,000. I packed my steamer trunk (the kind people took on a ship for a long voyage) with clothes entirely unsuitable for Washington, and the Railway Express Agency picked it up and sent it on ahead.
Then, without a single credit card, we got in the car for a two-day trip on two-lane highways, without a McDonald’s in sight. We used maps provided free by service stations. Different, as I said. I was so naïve that I thought we would just drive around Washington until we found the university (how hard could it be?) and that’s what we did. The catalogue had a picture of the most prominent building on campus, and I used that for a reference. Today, nobody would attempt this without a GPS, and not the cheap one, either. I entered college with a portable typewriter, a pen-and-pencil set and a slide rule. Maureen, no doubt, will have a laptop computer with high-speed Internet, a stereo (I didn’t know what that was), a television (I knew of only one on the entire campus), a cell phone (we had a phone booth) and a calculator, ready to take on the world of academe. However, she will need an extra semester to learn 57 more years of history. Sorry about that, Sweetie.
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