La Jolla, at least when I was there, was both a resort city and a city for moderately rich people. (The tourists who came there during the summer were also reasonably well off.) Needless to say, my wife, daughter and I fit in neither of these categories, but nonetheless the only place we could find to live was a tiny exorbinantly priced apartment in someone's house in the city of La Jolla. Many of my fellow students had been luckier and found cheaper places a little farther north, in Del Mar or Solano Beach, or farther south, in the Pacific Beach area of San Diego. (I was told disapprovingly that Pacific Beach was mostly inhabited by hippies. When I said, ``That sounds good to me,'' I got a very disapproving look in return.)
La Jolla is along the seashore, but most of the coastline is fairly stoney rather than sandy. The is only one small portion of beach, a sheltered cove called The Cove, where people go to swim and snorkel. I spent quite a bit of time at the Cove, especially after a friend taught me how to snorkel.
The city has lots of nice and somewhat pricey restaurants, and a small but good art museum. The University of California at San Diego is actually a few miles north of the main part of La Jolla. There is actually better and larger beach (although not so good for snorkeling) near the University, where the Scripps Institute is located.
I decided to transfer to UC San Diego (in La Jolla) purely because one of my fellow students had been there and said that it was an incredibly friendly place: all the graduate students were friends, and many of the faculty were very friendly with the students. A woman named Connie who had been a fellow computer programmer at Sylvania was now a student there, so I arrived with an instant friend. Connie, as a personable and attractive woman in a mathematics department (I think there were two other women students at the time), was a big center of attention not only from the graduate students but from a lot of the faculty. So pretty soon I knew everybody. (It's quite essential that I have friends in my life who are outgoing and know how to have fun, since I am not and do not.) (Unfortunately, by the time I left La Jolla, Connie and I were no longer good friends. This was almost totally my fault, because of the classic problem I have in being friends with women. Rent the video of When Harry Met Sally for further details.)
Furthermore, the students at UCSD were bright, and mostly pretty likeable. (One of them, incidentally, was Vernor Vinge, who had already published his first science fiction novel.)
Whereas the few good students at Maryland had been mostly pretty nerdy, the math grad students at UCSD gave a big party every month, where there'd be a keg of beer and a powerful sound system playing the Beatles and Rolling Stones and Jefferson Airplane and the Doors (this was 1967), and everybody danced. I danced. I had never danced at parties before. I said I didn't know how, but women would drag me onto the dance floor anyway. After a while I became a very popular dance partner at these parties.
Faculty came to these parties and danced to rock and roll. One time a professor brought a dancer he'd picked up at a strip club.
The married students had pretty wives, and the unmarried ones had even prettier girl friends.
My wife also became quite popular with the grad students, and this was a big help in enhancing my own social life. If it hadn't been for her, I don't know that people would have invited me to half the events they did. (People did like me, without question. It's just that, unlike my wife, I wasn't the sort of person one thought to go out and have fun with.)
I was in the middle of the Youth Revolution, the Psychodelic Revolution, the Love Generation, all of which were things that in Maryland I had known about only from reading Newsweek. Many of the male graduate students had hair flowing down below their shoulders, some students walked around campus and around town all day barefoot.
My new friend David Minda, who lived in a garage a block away from me, had an incredible collection of rock and roll records, and was very much a devotee of the Beach Boys and the Kinks. I, who had always considered rock and roll as low class music that only illiterates would listen to, was now listening to the new "underground" FM rock station in Los Angeles. Up till now, my record collection had consisted of jazz, classic unamplified blues (Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee, Dave von Ronk, Ramblin' Jack Elliot) and music from France (Yves Montand, Juliette Greco, Georges Brassens) and other European countries. Now I was buying records by obscure rock and roll bands such as the Bonzo Dog, the New York Rock and Roll Ensemble, and Elephant's Memory.
Although I never took LSD (something I now sometimes regret), I did find out what it was like to smoke pot -- something which was especially exotic then, because possession of a single joint at that time was still a major felony.
We marched against the war. We campaigned for Eugene McCarthy. (Well, I never did, but several of my friends did. And I did cast my write-in ballot for McCarthy in the general election.)
The People's Park riots happened in Berkeley, and we had big sympathy demonstrations on campus. Hubert Humphrey (then running against Nixon) came to speak on campus and we went and booed and hissed him for refusing to take a stand against the war.
The University lecture series brought people like Harry Partch, Alan Kaprow, and David Riesman (who had been one of my heros in high school) to campus. I actually got to be part of a dinner party of about twenty people with David Riesman, who I found appallingly conservative. I took part in staging a Happening at Scripps Beach with Alan Kaprow. (Nothing controversial, really. I seem to remember a lot of candles floating in the ocean.)
For me, it was truly like being born again. (But if that's so, then becoming Professor Lady must later have been like dying a premature death.)
For me, if I were to go back and do things over again, the moral is quite obvious: Don't choose a school on the basis of their course offerings or their program or their prestigious faculty (although the math faculty at UCSD was extremely prestigious). Go someplace where there are really good students, and everything else is almost sure to also be good.
The only thing was, the money situation was getting a little scary. La Jolla is an expensive place to live and my fellowship didn't give me as much as we needed. I had a few thousand dollars (1967 dollars) in the bank from when I'd been a computer programmer, but that was dwindling. And then my wife and I noticed that one of my daughter's teeth was growing in really crooked, and the orthodontist assured as that it was absolutely essential that she have braces.
And although the courses at UCSD were good, there weren't really any good faculty to direct a dissertation in the area where I wanted to work -- abstract algebra.
So I got my Masters degree and got myself a temporary position at Humboldt State College (now Humboldt State University) in Arcata, 300 miles up the California coast from San Francisco. There I became part of a group of young, bright faculty who I found very likable.
Mostly, though, what people in Humboldt County were interested in was cutting the trees down. The main industry in Arcata was the pulp mills. That and daffodil picking during the summertime.
The other big industry in Humboldt County wasn't nearly as well developed when I was there as it later became. That was marijuana farming. But there were already a noticeable crowd of long-haired pot growers there.
In Arcata, I was genuinely out in the sticks. San Francisco was three hundred miles away, but at that time a lot of the highway going down was very bad. I remember that it was a six hour trip on the Greyhound bus.
The Arcata Theatre was the only movie house in town, and it was only open on the weekends. (However the second year I was there, a group of people started renting it during the week and showing art films.) There was really nothing anywhere around me to nourish my intellect or nourish my conception of the sort of person I wanted to be.
Humboldt State College, as it was then known, had more than doubled its enrollment in the past two years, as I recall. The Math Dept, in any case, had gone from a faculty of 5 to one of 15 in two years.
The new assistant professors in the Math Department were like myself in that they were young and many were almost alarmed at suddenly finding themselves in a small town hundreds of miles from civilization. So we had a pretty good sense of comraderie.
Several of the newly hired math faculty had only Masters degrees, like myself, but unlike myself they had been given regular positions. This meant that they could later go on leave to finish their PhDs in order to get tenure. But I'd been hired on a temporary basis, which meant that I would never be able to take a leave of absence. Probably if it hadn't been for this piece of apparent bad luck, which seemed very unfair to me at the time, I'd still be in Arcata now.
I will say that, from what I've heard, Arcata has become a much nicer little town since I left, although it may not suit the original residents as well.
The Math Department had been temporarily put in a run-down cheap apartment building that had been condemned by the State in anticipation of widening the freeway. Although this was certainly less than first class office space, it did have the advantage that each suite of three offices (an office in each bedroom and one in the living room) came with a bathroom and a working kitchen.
Almost directly across the freeway from the Math Department, at about 19th and G Streets, was a large tavern called the Keg that catered to both students and faculty. It was nice because it was very friendly and students and faculty actually did talk to each other. At night they had a live band, and in those days it was not considered sexual harrassment for a young faculty member like myself to sometimes ask students, his own or otherwise, to dance.
At Humboldt State, I probably did some of the best teaching of my lifetime. It was certainly the most ambitious teaching I ever did (except for two graduate courses I later taught at Kansas) and I had a real sense of accomplishment about it. The students were not superbright by any means, but they were way above the level of the students I have now in Hawaii, both in ability and in attitude. (To be admitted as a freshman to one of the California State Universities, students have to be in the upper half of their high school class.) They were real troopers, which was fortunate, because many of the things I demanded of them were quite unreasonable.
At Humboldt State I was treated as absolutely equal to the other faculty. There was only one respect in which my status was inferior -- without a Ph.D., I could never be given a permanent position. Furthermore, since I didn't have a permanent position, I couldn't even take an unpaid leave of absence to go back and get my Ph.D.
So I had to leave Humboldt State. I looked through a lot of catalogs and applied to four universities which seemed to have some reasonable faculty in algebra and where it would be at least technically feasible for me to get my degree in one year. New Mexico State University was my first choice. For one thing, I'd never lived in New Mexico. (I'd gone to Arizona as an undergraduate, though, and liked it.) And one of the older professors at Humboldt State (Marshall Ruchte) had family in Las Cruces and told me that the faculty at NMSU were reasonable human beings, even if a little on the crazy side. (I rated the latter as a plus.)
One of the big recreations in the area was going out to White Sands National Monument where there was... lots of white sand! You put on your bathing suit and spread out your beach towel and pretended you were at the beach. I guess it was pretty good, if you'd never been to a beach that had water.
Probably the best thing about Las Cruces was the Mexican restaurants. The problem there, though, was that New Mexico has no such thing as a tavern license, and the full liquor license was so expensive that none of the Mexican restaurants (or pizza parlors) could serve beer.
I think there were only four bars in town, in fact. You also couldn't buy beer or wine in the supermarkets either.
As far as I was concerned, the city of Las Cruces sucked. (My values are highly urban and bohemian.) There was no real bookstore in town. (The campus bookstore was a joke.) The movie theatres showed films that were six months to a year out of date, and the idea that anybody might actually want to watch a movie with subtitles was totally beyond their ken. But people in the Mathematics Department didn't pay much attention to the rest of the town.
Mostly, though, I had a pretty good time in Las Cruces, because the Math Department was a lot of fun, (although not as wild as it reportedly had been in days gone by). Whereas at San Diego it had been the graduate students that drove the social life, at New Mexico State it was the faculty. At the end of every week there would be a "Friday Afternoon Seminar." This "seminar" consisted of one of the faculty members having a keg of beer at his house and welcoming everyone -- faculty and graduate students -- as of about four or five in the afternoon. The party might last a few hours or, depending on whose house it was at, might go on till past midnight. It was a good chance for graduate students to become friends with the faculty.
Nonetheless, I rushed to get my thesis written so I could get my Ph.D. and live somewhere else in the world. I did manage to write a dissertation and get my degree after one year at New Mexico State. And then I sent out 400 letters applying for jobs at every conceivable kind of college, and initially got three responses indicating that they were willing to consider me for a regular position. One was from Texas Tech in Lubbock, TX, and another was from someplace in Florida. The third was from Kansas, which was not a state I'd ever imagined being willing to live in -- Wizard of Oz territory -- but after seeing what the other choices were, it started looking a little more reasonable. The University of Illinois also made me an offer of a two-year temporary lectureship, but that seemed too risky to accept.
After I accepted the offer at Kansas, two other universities expressed interest in hiring me. I don't remember what they were anymore, but they didn't make me regret agreeing to go to Kansas.
My original idea, when I'd started graduate school, was that I wanted to teach at an elite four year college like Swarthmore, Goddard, Bard, or Reed. Nobody was offering me that kind of choice, though. Apparently I had a talent for doing mathematical research. The faculty at NMSU were simply taking it for granted that of course I wanted a job at a major research university. So I became a mathematician.
People say that Taos and Santa Fe are pretty nice places. I wouldn't know. They're a long ways away from Las Cruces.