🔬 Auto Tech Scoop: CASSI | The Future Is Already Here!
The details of how Mom discovered the program are lost and there's no information about it online. It was the summer of 1965. I was seventeen and between my junior and senior years of high school. Back then, summer meant earning money for school clothes, daily swimming in Sennebec Lake, and hoping to meet an interesting summer girl.
When Mom brought up the possibility of traveling alone to a summer program at Depauw University in Greencastle, Indiana, I suspect my initial reaction was to shrug it off and let summer be summer. Well, that didn't last long. The title of the program-Communication Arts and Sciences Summer Institute quickly hooked me.
The trip was by bus, first from Rockland to Portland, then to Boston. Once on the bus from there to Chicago, I remember a woman with a Hispanic accent coming through the bus offering rental pillows for five cents. I should have taken advantage as the trip was roughly eighteen hours.
In Chicago, I departed the bus, tired and sore, with a delay of most of the day before getting on another to Greencastle. At that point, I was feeling a new sense of freedom, one that trounced any unease about being that far from Sennebec Hill Farm. I rode the transit, visited the Museum of Science and Industry, admired Lake Michigan up close, and took in a baseball game (can't remember whether it was the Cubs or White Sox).
When I finally arrived at the university, I was given a room and introduced to some of the other kids. I remember three of us playing poker during one heck of a thunderstorm, interrupted when lightning struck a giant oak not far from the dorm, turning it into a lifetime supply of toothpicks.
Coming from a town of 1500 in rural Maine should have made meeting other teens from different states and backgrounds an intimidating experience, but it was exactly the opposite. We bonded as adventurers often do, Sharing growing up stories and stuff we liked to do. One kid told us he went to Hell almost every weekend. He was telling the truth. Hell, Michigan was near where he lived and kids flocked there to drink beer and party.
Another guy I made friends with invited me to meet him at the World's Fair in New York after the week was over, and I crushed big time on a girl from Nashville named Alice.
One of our evening rituals was walking to a nearby pizza place not far from campus. When service was too slow one night, a very flamboyant male member of our group fell to the floor, clutching his stomach and yelling, "The baby's coming, the baby's coming!" Suffice it to say that we were served quickly.
While I don't remember much about the classes, I do remember going on a tour of the Eli Lilly plant in Indianapolis that manufactured insulin.
I did make it to the World's Fair, my strongest memory of it being a machine that blew giant smoke rings and was sponsored by a cigar manufacturer. In keeping with the new freedom that came with this away from home experience, I made a last minute decision while staying with family friends in Tuckahoe, outside of New York City, and flew standby to Nashville the following June to attend Alice's high school graduation. It was bittersweet because by then she had a steady boyfriend and I was a third wheel.
In hindsight, the experience was extremely freeing and likely made my decision to go to college at Arizona State University an easy one. I guess the adventure bug had bitten me all too well somewhere between Union, Maine and Greencastle, Indiana.
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