During the summer of 1978, before my last semester as an undergraduate student, I interned with Conoco’s operations research division in Ponca City, Oklahoma. I turned 21 that summer, watching the grass wilt in the Oklahoma summer heat.
Gasoline had skyrocketed to an-unheard-of sixty cents per gallon after the 1973 oil embargo, the Jonestown massacre was a few months away, and the Iranian hostage crisis was yet to come. Although Grease and Animal House may have been the popular movies, the cool confines of the small-town Ponca City library provided my afterhours entertainment.
My summer objective was simple – save enough money to pay my fall tuition. With frugality as my watchword, I was living in a “fully furnished” cheap apartment, complete with an aging dinette set, an occasional chair, a couch, and a double mattress. Compared to dormitory life, it was spacious and regal. My aging car, with balding tires and a ripped Landau roof, was parked on the street outside.
The Tuition Bill Loomed
On a hot Sunday afternoon in August, I sat in one of the chairs at my Oklahoma kitchen dinette, checkbook and stamps strewn atop the worn surface of the table. It was the same table where, earlier in the summer, I had taught myself the Pascal programming language and the rudiments of cellular automata theory, using Conway’s Game of Life as a guide. (See A Feeling for the Code.)
It was time to pay my fall tuition bill for Missouri’s engineering school, then the University of Missouri at Rolla (UMR), now the Missouri University of Science and Technology (MST). After verifying my bank balance, I carefully wrote a check for $346.50, the total due for the fall semester’s tuition and fees. After placing the check and required paperwork in a stamped, addressed envelope, I paused to survey my situation.
After subtracting the tuition, my remaining bank balance was the now munificent sum of $2.15. More to the point, my wallet was empty, save for my Arkansas driver’s license and my social security card. Though I possessed a battered Texaco gas station credit card, embossed with my father’s name, it was my emergency backup, used only in automotive mechanical extremis. (Mind you, this was a time when gas stations were not convenience stores. They sold gas and oil and offered wrecker and repair services.)
Savoring Two Cans of Corn
As the coolness of the refrigerator wafted over me, the refrigerator’s interior light balefully illuminated its empty shelves. A careful inspection of my kitchen cabinets then confirmed the true paucity of my food reserves – just two cans of Del Monte whole kernel sweet corn. Meanwhile, payday was at least a week away.
I knew I had some important culinary decisions to make. I thought about the psychology and physiology of hunger, and the biomass conversion efficiency of the human digestive tract. (I may have been poor, but science and engineering were old friends.) Should I devour the two cans of corn, then fast for several days? Or, should I eat one third or one half of a can each day, stretching my rations?
How did I resolve this conundrum? Knowing hunger might well overwhelm rationality, I doubted my ability to stop after eating just part of a can. Instead, I ate one can and drank the liquid. Then I fasted for three days and ate the other can. In the process, I learned a few things about myself. First, you need a cover story for skipping lunch, because people do ask questions. For me, it was about wanting to stay focused and finish a task.
Second, when you are seriously hungry, every kernel is a banquet, savored for texture and flavor, rolled around in your mouth like fine wine. Also, water helps sate hunger by filling the stomach, at least temporarily. Finally, after several days, hunger declines, as the body accepts reality and begins drawing on internal fat reserves.
I counted the days with anticipation; I have never been so glad to see a payday in my life. I walked directly to the bank, deposited the check, withdrew ten dollars, and headed to the grocery store, hoping to buy something filling and inexpensive I could eat in the parking lot. I think I settled on a can of chili with a pop-top lid. In general, I cannot recommend buying food while hungry. Short-term gratification can overwhelm thoughtful selection, but when hungry, you do what you must.
Play the Hand You’re Dealt
Lest this semi-starvation diet seem unnecessarily draconian, it is worth understanding my life and context. I was a poor scholarship kid, scraping by on a combination of my National Merit Scholarship and a Basic Educational Opportunity Grant (now Pell Grant), plus whatever I could save. As a matter of frugal practicality, I was hoarding every penny I could from my summer job, knowing the fall tuition bill would come due later that summer.
There was little my parents could do to help me financially; they were poor – the Arkansas Ozarks red clay kind of poor. My father had a fifth-grade formal education, though he later earned a GED. He worked hard at the sawmill, but money was scarce and indulgences were few. I knew this from personal experience, having worked at the sawmill myself. (See Low Hanging Fruit: Memories of Childhood.) Truthfully, with one fewer mouth to feed, my parents were better off with me in college than living at home. That’s just the way life was.
Did I envy people who had more? Yes, but I learned early not to wish for things that could not be. Did I blame my parents? Of course not; they were doing the best they could. Was I occasionally frustrated by those I felt were squandering opportunities I lacked? Certainly.
Though I was poorer than most, I was richer than some, and for that I was grateful, and I knew I was neither special nor unique. From early childhood, I knew the game of life was not fair. To have any chance of winning, you play the hand you’re dealt – wisely and astutely, even if you privately feel you might be an unfortunate victim of bottom dealing.
I was both determined and desperate. The nightmare of failure – days filled with menial, dead jobs and nights spent sifting through the ashes of stillborn dreams – drove me relentlessly. I unhesitatingly embraced the Apollo 13 mission control mantra, “Failure is not an option.” If it took me twenty years to claw my way out of my childhood circumstances, I was prepared to pay the price. I understood the twin concepts of deferred reward and compound interest; time and relentless diligence were my friends. (See A Taste of Sherbet and Livin’ Large on Three Cents a Bale.)
Meanwhile, I felt blessed to be in school. Beyond the intellectual delights, I was living in a dormitory with central heat and hot water, mostly enjoying the variety and new experiences of cafeteria food. With nothing in my pockets except lint, there were no late night pizza deliveries or restaurant indulgences in my college life, just the menu of the day, whatever it might be.
My first year in college, I quickly abandoned cafeteria breakfast in favor of extra sleep before my morning classes. Dropping lunch while working during the summer was just the next logical step. I stayed on the one meal a day plan for the next decade.
Wardrobe Upgrades Required: Install Now
When my summer internship in Oklahoma ended, I packed my few belongings in my old Ford Galaxie 500 and headed home to Arkansas, stopping in the big city of Springfield, Missouri to buy a few new clothes before the fall semester began in Rolla, Missouri. I completed my undergraduate degree early, in December 1978 and headed to Purdue University on a graduate fellowship, a path to a Ph.D. I happily chose despite knowing it promised years of continued penury.
Fast forward a few years. I was now a young assistant professor, teaching data structures to undergraduates. At the end of the semester, I received student feedback on my teaching performance. (These teaching evaluations are still common, though fraught with potential bias, particularly for women and faculty of color.)
I anxiously scanned the report for feedback. Did Reed know the topic? Yes. Did he explain it effectively and clearly? Yes. Was he accessible and friendly? Yes. All seemed good, until I read the freeform comments from my students.
To my surprise and dismay, there were several comments not about my knowledge or teaching effectiveness, but about my appearance, all variations on a common theme: “Reed really needs to upgrade his wardrobe.” I even vaguely recall a comment suggesting I looked homeless.
Instinctively, I looked down at what I was wearing. It hit me: they were the same clothes I had purchased five years earlier, before I started graduate school – old jeans, ratty athletic shoes, a faded t-shirt (complete with logo), and a battered flannel shirt that served as a light jacket.
Maybe the students were right. It was a lifelong habit, one initially born of necessity and hand-me-down clothes, but that seemed natural and inevitable. Although my roles and responsibilities had changed, I was still living like a poverty-stricken student. Offered as further evidence to the court – my little one-bedroom apartment was burglarized and nothing was stolen, because I owned nothing worth stealing.
Years later, I related the story of my apartment burglary to a friend. He observed that the only thing worse would have been the burglar leaving a U.S. $20 bill and a note saying, “You need this more than I do.”
Field Engineering Repairs and Duct Tape
This clothes reverie took me back to my days as an undergraduate. The teaching assistant (TA) for one of my mathematics classes arrived the first day looking sartorially challenged, dressed in faded jeans and a battered t-shirt. As he paced in front of the blackboard, explaining some nuance of vector calculus, I noticed that his athletic shoes were approaching end of life, and the sole of one shoe was beginning to separate from the shoe above. This separation continued day-by-day until one day the shoe sole was flapping when he arrived in class.
Thinking the end was at hand, I was surprised and amused when the TA returned the next class wearing the same shoes, albeit with a field engineering repair. He had used two turns of duct tape to re-secure the sole. Although engineers and the U.S. Marines are vastly different cultures, they both live by a common creed – improvise, adapt, overcome. I appreciated this engineering ingenuity; it was something I would have done – if I could afford duct tape.
Later, as a financially struggling graduate student, I loaned textbooks to an international graduate student too broke to buy the required texts, and a friend related a story of another graduate student slowly starving as they sent part of their already meager graduate stipend home to an impoverished mother. Quiet desperation takes many forms, often masquerading as normalcy to hide unfortunate reality. You simply play the hand you’re dealt.
The Moral: Gratitude
At the time, I was unaware of the Dutch humanist and philosopher, Erasmus, otherwise I would have appreciated the lived truth of his statement, “When I get a little money I buy books; and if any is left I buy food and clothes.”
What’s the moral of this little story? First and foremost, I have been extraordinarily blessed. As rocker Joe Walsh famously sang, “Life’s been good to me so far.” Alas, not everyone is so fortunate. In a world where the cost of higher education has skyrocketed, it is now extraordinarily difficult for poor students, no matter how diligent and determined, to do what I did. That worries me greatly.
As I preached passionately to world leaders, when I led technology policy for Microsoft, as a university leader, and in testimony to the U.S. Congress, talent is not a respecter of socioeconomic status; it emerges everywhere. Successful societies find it and nurture talent wherever it appears.
I am forever grateful that the combination of a National Merit Scholarship and a Pell grant gave me a one-way dream ticket. It is not for me to judge, but I hope I have proven worthy of the investment.
Coda
For the record, I still love corn in all its prepared varieties- on the cob, whole kernels, street corn, creamed, corn casserole, or even in cornbread. Every kernel is still a banquet. Every time I eat it, I remember that fateful summer.
Recent Comments