I went to college at the University of Cincinnati. When I enrolled, I expected to study engineering because that’s what my brother Bob had studied. I started out in metallurgy and made Dean’s List the first semester of my freshman year. But I think that’s because everything was a repeat of what I’d done in Walnut Hills. In the second year it started getting hard.
The toughest course was physical chemistry. We had a professor whose exams were always in the fraternity files. We studied some prior exams. If you studied three or four years back, you’d find most of the questions you were going to get. This wasn’t cheating, it was just preparing.
In my second year of college, we had a course in Introduction to Chemical Engineering. One time we had a test: you had so many pipes feeding water into a tank, and other pipes letting water out. The question was to find out how long it would take for this tank to fill up. I probably got a 25 or a 30 on that test. One guy got a 70 or 80, and everyone else failed. I thought: if this is what I’m getting into I can’t do it; who am I kidding?
So engineering wasn’t the field for me. I had had some vocational evaluations done in high school, and I think the evaluations suggested that I be an actuary, an accountant, or a meteorologist. These were all things that had to do with math. So I took advantage of a degree in industrial management that required two years of engineering and three years of business administration. There I found my love in accounting.
The cost of clothing while I was in college:
- Jeans: $1.97
- Suits: $15 – $25
- Underwear: 25 cents
- Chambray shirts: 97 cents
I joined a fraternity – Sigma Alpha Mu – but didn’t live there; I lived at home. I joined there because my brother had been there, but I enjoyed it very much and had good friends there and was quite active. I couldn’t do as much there as I wanted because I was in a co-op program, which meant I went to school for 8 weeks, and then spent 8 weeks working on a job.
Jobs when I was in college
I had several co-op jobs when I was in college. First I worked in the metallurgical lab, but it was boring, and I got canned. Next I worked at Sharon Steel in Sharon, Pennsylvania. I worked there for two 8-week sessions. I lived in a boarding house and walked to the mill. It was a rolling mill: they rolled the steel out and cut it off at the end. My job was to carry it to the lab to be checked for quality control. I picked the red-hot steel with a pair of tongs. I also worked for Oregonia Steel, in Lebanon OH. That was a steel fabricating plant, where they made patterns for cutting stairs.
I spent 3 semesters working for Paul Herget, who was the head of astronomy at the University of Cincinnati. We were computing the course of Venus, working at the observatory, which was in Hyde Park or maybe beyond Hyde Park. I took my bike there.
We’d get observations from people around the world, and we’d feed the data into an IBM 602 multiplier. We had two IBM machines, and we’d put the data in one and then the other, and they would give different results. We’d start the day by calculating the next point on a Friden calculator (a machine that was like an adding machine) and then keep running the IBM machines until they matched and came up with the right answer. It sometimes took a dozen or so runs before they’d agree. Then we’d go to the tabulating machine and the reproducing punch, and then the sorter to sort the cards. That’s how we would come up with the points on the planet’s course.
We used to have IBM repairmen out at the start of business because that’s when we got the lousy answers. But Dr. Herget knew more about the machines than the repairmen.
During college, I also had a job in business administration, working for Herschmans dry-goods store. At Christmastime, I worked in the toy department there, assembling and selling toys.
The Felson Family 