I never liked the winters in Buffalo, and the weather was not much different in Ann Arbor. I spent the cold weather fighting ear infections, and when I was nine years old I was in the hospital for 12 days with mastoiditis, hopped up on the penicillin shots I received every three hours. I was in a room with a bunch of other boys. The sad thing is that some of them who were there when I arrived were still there when I left.

 Following a suggestion from my father, who sometimes traveled for business and had seen a lot of the United States, I applied at and was admitted to UCLA for my junior year of college.

             I flew to Los Angeles from Buffalo in September 1957 on a nonstop flight in a Douglas Aircraft DC-7, a prop plane that took more than nine hours to make the trip. It was my first flight except for a quick up and down in a piper cub with the father of a neighbor boy on his birthday before we moved to the farm. The mood on the plane to LA was very relaxed compared to flights today, and one of the flight attendants even played checkers with me. As I recall, we split two games. I was better at chess than checkers. Years later I learned how to play backgammon, and that is now my board game of choice.

             We landed at LAX in the early evening and I took a taxi to the Biltmore Hotel in downtown Los Angeles. The first thing I noticed was that there were palm trees everywhere. I had never seen a palm tree except in Bob Hope movies, and they reminded me that I wasn’t in Buffalo anymore.

            Going to the Biltmore wasn’t the smartest thing I could have done, since downtown LA is miles from UCLA, which is in West Los Angeles, but at least it wasn’t ultra-expensive in those days, and I could afford it. Okay, I could barely afford it for one night. The next morning, I took a taxi to UCLA. The driver drove primarily on Third Street (there were no freeways then) and I found out something about distances in LA.

             Another thing I soon discovered was that Los Angeles had smog, even on the UCLA campus. Brown, tear-provoking, ozone-scented smog. Motor vehicles were the biggest contributor since there were no catalytic converters. Now we rarely see smog from our hillside home overlooking LA. The smog sometimes made breathing difficult when playing games such as touch football.

             I lived in a private dormitory on Gayley Avenue, meals included, west of the campus. UCLA didn’t have any dormitories yet. Years later, dorms were built on the hill we had to walk over to get to the campus, which was a cross-country course in those days. At that time UCLA was still a streetcar college, with many students commuting to class.

             I ate all my meals at the dorm except for some on the weekends when I had to fend for myself, but I could walk into Westwood and get a multi-course dinner at the pharmacy for about $1.25.

             I arrived a few days before classes started. I met several of the guys who were there early for orientation. Herb was a tall boy from south of San Francisco and had a Naval ROTC scholarship, which meant that he was destined to become a naval officer. He and I toured LA by bus along with his roommate, seeing the magnificent Hollywood Bowl, Grauman’s Chinese Theater and other landmarks.

              I had two roommates. Ken was a premed student who had spent two years in the army. He had done something connected with telephone poles in the military. He told how they would practice climbing the poles with spikes on their shoes. Once when he was racing somebody who was climbing a nearby pole, he was watching the other guy and didn’t pay attention to how high he was. He got to the top, grabbed air instead of the pole, and then fell to the ground. Why he didn’t get killed is beyond me.

 Ken had been a runner in high school, and he said the best way to treat a cold was to go running, which he did, on the cross-country course. He had previously volunteered at an emergency room in Santa Monica. He took me there once and comforted a boy whose hand was bleeding. We also played tennis together. He loved to ski, and drove to Mammoth when it started snowing there. His father died in an auto accident in Michigan early in October, and he flew back for the funeral.

 Jim, my other roommate, was a freshman from Southern California, right out of high school. Both of them had cars, which weren’t needed for the walk to campus. Ken, the oldest of us three, became our unofficial leader. Many evenings we would walk to one of the libraries, study until it closed, and then stop for an English muffin on the way back to the dorm.

             I was anxious to see more of California, so when an older student proposed driving to the San Francisco area to watch the UCLA football team play against Stanford I jumped at the chance. A carful of us went to San Francisco, which was the most sinful place I’d ever been to, featuring lurid shows that Buffalo didn’t have. We saw a “dirty” movie featuring nudists, nothing like most of the movies of the era, which were censored and basically G-rated, even the Doris Day-Rock Hudson film, Pillow Talk. We slept on the floor at Herb’s parents’ house.

               I did well in my classes, better than at Michigan. I was one of the top two out of over 100 students in a statistics class, and I received such a high grade in an Anthropology test that the professor complained about me in the lecture hall, although he didn’t identify who I was in front of the other students, thankfully.

             One day I found myself sitting next to the UCLA Homecoming Queen in an English class lecture. She tried to sell me a calendar. Since I was perpetually broke I turned her down. I wasn’t clever enough to start a conversation with her.

             I met Tom at the dorm who said he was a rock climber. I had never done any rock climbing and I was intrigued. I was suffering from my undiagnosed lactose intolerance, which affected me on a daily basis. I had some dizziness, caused by permanently dilated pupils, a symptom of the dairy problem, so rock climbing probably wasn’t the best pursuit for me. Bonny and I didn’t diagnose my problem until Christmas 1973 when I got sick from drinking eggnog.

             Tom’s parents lived in Los Angeles and he had a car. As I recall, all the cars of students I rode in were old Chevrolets. Some were clunkier than others. Tom and I went out to Chatsworth in the San Fernando Valley, a place called Stoney Point Park, where there were good rock climbs for beginners. I wasn’t the most agile person in the world, but I did learn the basics, including how to use pitons and carabiners.

             I also learned how to rappel using a rope. Tom was an engineering student and made rappelling safer by fixing me up with an upper belay when I rappelled, so that if I had a problem he could stop me with the belay rope. I went on a weekend trip to Pinnacles National Monument with a friend of Tom’s and his son, and led one climb with an upper belay. Another time at Mt. Williamson I did a 115-foot rappel off an overhang. Tom’s friend said if that didn’t give me a thrill, nothing would. It gave me a thrill.

             Tom climbed the face of Eagle Rock in the city of the same name where Mason’s Occidental College is located. He had to go up part of the face on a backward-leaning overhang with direct aid, including rope, slings, carabiners and pitons. I gave him an upper belay on the most dangerous part.

             Tom was interested in other things, including hiking and running. He sometimes ran on the UCLA cross-country course, and figured that I could run a six-minute mile on a downhill section of the course. I did, just, but I was no distance runner. He attempted to run a four-minute mile on a downhill mountain trail, but had to stop after a half-mile because the skin was coming off his feet.

             Tom was also a spelunker (cave explorer), but I wouldn’t go into caves with him. He liked to map caves, but of course it’s difficult to map a three-dimensional cave on a two-dimensional piece of paper.

             He had a plan to climb 11 peaks in the San Gabriel Mountains, just north of Los Angeles, in one day. He and I did it in about 12 hours, with help from a friend of his with a car who ferried us between trails several times. The peaks included Mt. Wilson, of telescope fame, and other peaks visible from where we live now. He later told me he’d done it again in six hours, in part because of better coordination with a driver.

 His ultimate scheme was to hike from Badwater in Death Valley, the lowest point in the
Western Hemisphere, below sea level, to the top of Mt. Whitney, the highest point in the continental United States, after classes ended in June. His plan involved going from Badwater, which would be over 100 degrees in June, to the top of Telescope Peak, at 11,000 feet, in a single trek.

 One day, when we were doing some climbing at Stoney Point in the San Fernando Valley, Tom slipped while descending, and ran out of control down the steep slope and off the final cliff, landing on his knees. I got down as fast as I could, and saw that he needed medical attention, but I couldn’t tell how to help him. The jar of the landing had taken his breath away, and when he was able to breathe again he berated me for not giving him artificial respiration.

 I drove him in his car to the UCLA Medical Center where they placed a wrap-around cast surrounding his chest to protect his cracked spinal disk. I had to call his mother to tell her what had happened. This ended our plans for the Death Valley-Mt. Whitney trip, which was probably a good thing. He started rock climbing again before he had his caste off, tying a rope around the caste instead of his waist. I finally climbed Mt. Whitney in 1989.

 Several years later, Tom visited me in my Los Angeles apartment and asked me if I wanted to rappel off a bridge. I told him no thanks.

 My roommate, Ken, was a handsome Nordic blond, and he had a unique ability to charm women. One time when we were walking to our dormitory in the early evening he smiled at a passing young woman, and without him saying a word she volunteered to drive us home, which she did. Nothing else ever came of it, and in fact Ken was rather prudish, despite his gift.

 Ken had a girlfriend who lived in Palos Verdes (where Bonny and I live now), and one time he drove me to her house because she had a younger sister. It was my first time in Palos Verdes, a hilly peninsula. In my opinion, Gail, the sister, had a lot more on the ball than Lynn, who had looks but not much of a personality. Ken’s sister, who also lived in Palos Verdes, called her a nonentity.

 When I told Gail I was a junior at UCLA she replied that she was a senior (in high school). I said, “Don’t pull rank on me.” She said that was a line from a play she had acted in. I was nothing if not literary in those days.

 Ken, Herb, Jim, and I wanted to attend a dance that UCLA was having at the very young Disneyland in Anaheim. Ken had Lynn and Jim had his girlfriend from high school, and Herb had a date, so I was the only one who needed a date. I called Gail and asked her, but she was recovering from Mononucleosis and had to limit her social life. Ken and I had recently attended a mixer at a women’s residence, so I called a girl I had met there and asked her. She accepted.

 A few days later she called me and said she couldn’t go. That enraged Ken, and he stormed over to her residence and chewed her out, but we didn’t find out her reason for cancelling. Just when I was feeling like an unwanted person, Jim had his girlfriend fix me up with a friend of hers.

 This was the first time any of us had been to Disneyland, and we enjoyed the heck out of it. We went on all the rides and raced around Treasure Island. We rented a hotel room in which to change our clothes for the dance in the evening.

 Partly because Lynn was geographically undesirable and partly because I don’t think Ken was that passionate about her, their romance waned, and when she made her way to UCLA one time Ken asked me to go to dinner with them. Lynn finally told Ken she was engaged to somebody else. She said she couldn’t wait until he became a doctor to get married.

 Ken and I played a lot of tennis, and because it wasn’t always possible to get on the UCLA courts, we looked for other possibilities. One was Marymount College, a nearby school for women, so we went there and Ken used his charm on some of the female students to try to get permission to play on their courts. We ended up playing tennis with two of them and taking them to dinner, which neither of us could easily afford, but we were able to play there again.

 I didn’t go home during the school year, so I didn’t see any members of my family for nine months. We communicated by mail, because long distance telephone calls were expensive in those days.

 Herb invited me to spend Christmas vacation at his home near San Francisco. The cost to fly to San Francisco was a fraction of what it would have cost me to fly to Buffalo for Christmas. Herb had lots of friends and we partied it up. In spite of my balance problems, I remember walking on top of the wooden railing above the garage of Herb’s parents’ house. It’s a wonder any children survive until they’re adults.

 At the end of the first semester, the private dormitory building where I was living suddenly changed into an apartment building only, so we all had to find new places to live. I had been doing some painting and other work for the UCLA photographer who owned a house in Pacific Palisades, a significant drive along winding Sunset Boulevard from the UCLA campus. Sunset is known as the road on which many of the ill-fated, rear-engine-drive, Chevrolet Corvairs cracked up. He let me stay at his home during the semester break, and I helped him move into another house close to the campus.

 He said I could live in his new house rent free in return for doing chores, but I was lonely and quickly realized that wouldn’t work, so I went to the UCLA Co-op to see if there were any openings. I had applied to it before the fall semester, but it had been full at that time. The manager said he had one opening in a triple room, and my roommates would be African American and Chinese. I didn’t have a problem with that, so I moved in.

             Room and board were reasonable at the co-op, and everybody worked four hours a week. Considering all the school integration problems that were occurring in the deep South at that time, this was a racial paradise. Of course, genetically, all human beings belong to the same race. Chuck had been on the UCLA football team, and, having used up his eligibility, he stayed at UCLA to work on a master’s degree. He went on to play professional football in Canada. My other roommate had been born in China but spoke English well.

             When an Australian rugby team came to town to play UCLA, which didn’t actually have a rugby team, Chuck was recruited to play along with other football players. I watched the game and marveled at the teamwork and knowledge exhibited by the Aussies as they slaughtered the UCLA “team.”

             I played on two intramural teams for the co-op, basketball, which Chuck coached, and slow-pitch softball. My contribution during the first softball game was to let a ball go over my head in centerfield for a homerun, and then to hit a homerun in the same place as we won the game by one run.

             The co-op had an outing with a women’s residence that took place in Griffith Park. I was in my element in the huge park, climbing the steep hills with a couple of girls, including a very pretty Japanese girl from Hawaii named Joyce. When I mentioned her in a letter home, Mother wrote and told me not to date her, probably because of World War II memories. That wouldn’t have stopped me, but what did was the fact that I didn’t have a car. However, in retrospect, if she was willing to climb the park hills with me, she probably wouldn’t have minded walking into Westwood to take in a movie. I did see her at several more outings.

             In the days following the Griffith Park outing I started itching like crazy and had blisters all over my body. I self-diagnosed three-day measles or something like that and took to my bed for a while, but when the itching continued I went to UCLA health service where the lady doctor diagnosed poison oak after looking at me all over. She gave me something to relieve the itching.

             During the next few years, I caught poison oak several more times, including when I was dating Bonny, and I had to tie my hands together at night so I wouldn’t scratch myself in my sleep. However, as far as I know, the people I was with didn’t catch it, so I must be very susceptible.

             In the spring I went to a dentist in Westwood who told me I had 20 cavities. I had grown up in the days before Crest toothpaste with fluoride. When it became available, my father, who was a chemist, had us start using it immediately. The dentists in Buffalo had never adequately treated my teeth, so I allowed the Westwood dentist to fill my cavities, even though Westwood was an affluent and expensive area, and I had to borrow money from my father who was also a penny-pincher (he had lived through the depression and lost money when a bank closed). Several years later, he told me that getting my cavities filled was one of the three worst things I had ever done. He didn’t say what the other two were. Some of those fillings lasted more than 50 years.

             An ophthalmologist at UCLA discovered that my eyes had low convergences (ability to move independently), and he prescribed exercises on a machine that encouraged them to move in different directions. That improved my vision and my dizziness, but my dairy problem wasn’t discovered (by Bonny and me) until many years later.

             Roommate Jim, from the first semester, told Ken and me before the end of the school year that his girlfriend was actually his wife. They had been secretly married in December. She was also pregnant. He dropped out of school after the semester was over and they moved to northern California where he worked in a steel mill, I believe.

             I said goodbye to UCLA and flew home. I wasn’t coming back because I had been admitted to Stanford Law School, even though I didn’t have a degree. I only spent half a year there because I found out that law wasn’t my game.