Finally, there were three universities that seemed interested. One was Texas Tech, in Lubbock, Texas. There were a couple of abelian group theorists there, and they really wanted to hire me a whole lot. I was saving Texas Tech as a last resort. I thought that after living in the sticks in Arcata, and then being in the dismal ``Land of Enchantment,'' if my next step was to be Lubbock, TX then surely my life was in a downward spiral.
The second possibility was somewhere in Florida, maybe Gainesville. That sounded a lot better than Lubbock, but I didn't really want to go back to Florida.
If the letter from the University of Kansas had been among the first replies I'd received, I would have been really depressed about it. Wheat fields, dust, and tornadoes were certainly not what I was looking for. But by the time KU wrote me, I was in pretty total despair, even to the point of thinking of staying in Las Cruces another year. And people told me that Kansas had a very pretty campus and quite a bit of real intellectual life.
Maybe if my expectations hadn't been so low, Lawrence wouldn't have looked so good to me. But instead of wheat fields and dust, it turned out to be a sleepy little mid-western town with tree-lined streets and charming little clapboard houses. And the campus was indeed very nice looking, with a number of old stone buildings that made it look a little like an Ivy League school. It was easy to believe that there was intellectual life there.
The campus was on top of the only hill in Lawrence. Approached from the steep side (along 13th or 14th Streets), the hill was about three blocks high and steep enough so that they had to close the street when there was heavy snow. This hill was called ``Mount Oread.''
In Lawrence, for the first time in our lives my wife and I bought a house. We were both rather horrified at the risk and the commitment involved in this step, but it seemed to be the only way to get a reasonable place to live, and ultimately it turned out to be an extremely good investment.
The most fun thing about Lawrence, for the first year I was there, was auctions. We started going to auctions because we needed furniture for our house, and then later went mostly for the fun of it. Auctions were a big thing in Lawrence. When somebody was moving away, or when somebody died and the estate had to be sold off, or when a shop went out of business, instead of having a garage sale or yard sale, they'd hire an auctioneer. The auctioneers in town were extremely good, and fun to listen to.
My wife and I usually spent at least one afternoon each weekend at an auction. Occasionally I'd see one of the senior members of the Math Department at one of these and feel a little guilty that I wasn't home doing research. But somehow or other I managed to prove several good theorems that year anyway.
The other good thing about Lawrence was the public library. Lawrence and Berkeley are the two places I've lived after I left the East Coast that had really good libraries.
Mostly I was reading mysteries while I was in Lawrence. That and some science fiction, and occasionally some non-fiction, mostly political -- David Halberstein, Garry Wills, James Barber. I used go through about a book a day. (Later on in Lawrence, I would read several novels in Russian. I needed to go to the University library for them, of course, and it took me about a month to get through a novel by, say, Turgenev.)
Nobody involved in working this out, me included, had any doubts that I would want this arrangement. For me as a mathematician it was a great opportunity, and other considerations were simply irrelevant.
I bought a second car, a used Volvo, and went to ``Chambana'' alone. Leaving my wife and daughter in Lawrence meant that my daughter wouldn't have to change schools two more times, and also we wouldn't have to worry about arranging to rent the house while I was gone. My wife seemed to feel okay about this arrangement.
The University of Illinois had a massive enrollment. Between classes, one would have to fight one's way through a sea of students in order to cross the quad. The city was really flat -- much more so than Kansas -- and bicycles were very popular. There were bike paths all over the campus and on some of the streets in town. A continual war went on between the pedestrians and the bicyclists, and between the bicyclists and the motorists. I left my car parked at my apartment most of the time and was definitely in the pedestrian camp.
The student bar district in Champaigne starts right at the edge of campus. Green Street is the main bar street and was just around the corner from my office.
A lot of the math faculty liked to hang out at a Green Street bar called Murphy's. About half the department would go to Murphy's after the Friday afternoon colloquia, and a smaller number (including most of my friends) would also go after the more topical seminars during the week. One of the department traditions was the ``John L. Selfridge Award.'' What this meant was that the department member who had been the latest in turning in his grades past the deadline the previous semester got the privilege of buying beer for the whole department after the first colloquium of the semester.
I was lucky in that one of the department members, Phil Griffith, had originally been an abelian group theorist and had seen some of my work. Phil immediately took me under his wing, and since he was one of the leaders of the beer drinking crowd, I got to know the Math Department people that hung out at Murphy's fairly quickly, and got invited to a lot of very good parties during the year.
Phil had an incredibly pretty wife named Judy, who turned out to like me a whole lot. Judy and I used to flirt quite outrageously at parties, until she got very drunk on New Years Eve and sat on my lap and then later decided she'd gone over the line, and after that, to my great regret, she cooled it. (Everything we did was always in plain sight. We never went off somewhere private to do any really serious necking.)
Among the other people I remember as frequent habitues at Murphy's were Jerry Uhl and Alec Matheson. Alec was a graduate student, a Vietnam vet with an incredibly long beard that made him look like the ``It's'' character who starts off Monty Python shows. He seemed to spend most of his life at Murphy's and some of the other Green Street bars, but he was also apparently extremely good at mathematics.
I was living in a tiny dingy little one-room apartment in an old brick house that had been remodeled into an apartment building. It was in the fraternity house district, and when I had rented it in August I had looked at those fraternity houses with their beautiful well-kept lawns and thought that they would be really nice neighbors. Once school started and students moved in, though, I realized what I should have known from the beginning, that there's nothing nice about living next to a bunch of fraternity boys.
The year I was in Champaigne was the year ``streaking'' became a craze across the nation. The students at UI were fairly enthusiastically into streaking. One weekend in particular in early spring, March or April, was set aside for a streak festival. I don't know how the word was spread, but absolutely everybody knew that it was going to happen. And by some miracle, the weather that particular Saturday night turned out to be absolutely balmy, in sharp contrast to the cold weather a few days before and a few days afterwards.
People were driving around naked in their cars, a few in convertibles. There was later a picture published in the campus paper of a guy standing naked at the water fountain in the Baskin-Robbins on Green Street. But the main event was on the campus quad, which was overflowing with naked males, and a few naked females (and of course lots and lots of clothed spectators). One woman actually managed to show up naked on a horse -- a la Lady Godiva.
The mayor of Urbana, who by some bizarre coincidence was actually a faculty member in the Math Dept, was there in the quad, essentially giving his silent blessing to the event, although carefully not saying anything he might be quoted on.
While I was at Illinois, I sat in on three seminars each semester, wrote up a set of notes on torsion-free groups which for a while were fairly useful to a number of people, although they were never published. I also did quite a bit of mathematical reading and proved several good theorems. And yet about all I can remember of that period is drinking beer with mathematicians and graduate students and a few other people I had somehow managed to make friends with, and being generally fairly lonely and depressed.
Despite this, though, contradictory as it may seem, in retrospect this seems like one of the most satisfying periods of my life, unhappy as it often was. And mathematically it was a paradise.
I think that not being able to stay at Illinois, and knowing that I'd never be able to find the same sort of thing anywhere else I went, was probably the decisive factor in my ceasing to be totally dedicated to being a mathematician. However it was probably another ten years before I fully realized that.
During the year I was Illinois, I went to the annual American Mathematical Society meeting, which was in San Francisco that year. I remember going out to dinner with some the Illinois crowd from Murphy's and some of the Kansas algebraists. The Illinois group were being their usual outrageous, irreverent (I can't think of a word strong enough) selves. The only part of the conversation I remembered was that we were talking about students falling asleep in class, and then the Illinois people started talking about falling asleep in seminars and colloquia, and finally at least two of them acknowledged having once or twice come to class so tired that they'd actually fallen asleep for a few minutes while teaching. My Kansas colleagues just sat there looking very uncomfortable. The Kansas faculty were all pretty much straight arrows, although certainly nice people in a lot of ways. My Illinois friends talked more like something out of J.P. Donleavy.
The three younger algebraists on the faculty, Rutter, Montgomery, and Brewer, all sat in on the course. It was really them I was giving it for, but I also had four advanced graduate students enrolled, who were all reasonably good.
There was also an ex-student named Steve Butcher sitting in
on this course
who had got his Ph.D. the year before,
but was still staying in Lawrence as a lecturer in the Math Dept.
One Friday afternoon I was in the Catfish Tavern, just off campus,
sitting at the bar and drinking beer
and wondering if I would ever figure out a way
to make friends with any of the people who hung out there.
Butcher came up to me and said hello,
and I said hello back politely.
I didn't know who he was,
because I was so shy in my teaching that year
that I never looked at the class.
So he had to explain that he was one of the people
sitting in on the course,
and asked if I'd like to join him and his friends.
Getting to know Steve Butcher was one of the really good things
that happened in my life,
and it certainly changed my relationship to Lawrence.
Steve had grown up in Baldwin, about ten miles from Lawrence,
and had gone to KU as an undergraduate as well as a graduate student,
taking off a year or so to live in New York and Amsterdam.
He was former president of the SDS (Students for a Democratic Society),
and knew all of the old radicals on campus.
In fact, he knew pretty much everyone on campus
who, from my point of view, was worth knowing.
He had a very likable girl friend named Peggy Morrison,
who was a TA in the Spanish Department and also
was a student helper in the library.
Later on, he and Peggy would get married
and she'd go to library school at Ann Arbor,
and then later take an internship at the Library of Congress.
(Still later, they both wound up in Arkansas
where he got a teaching job.)
After I met Steve, I started spending quite a bit of time
at the Catfish
(just off campus, formerly known under a variety of names,
most especially the Rockchalk), especially Friday afternoons,
and I got to know a wide assortment of people.
Some of them were students, in a variety of departments,
some of them were former students now surviving as best as they could
in town.
There were a number of faculty from the Philosophy Department,
most notably a guy named Art Skidmore who was an excellent
social organizer and also a young professor named Bronstein
who worked out with weights a lot and had quite intimidating muscles.
Another philosopher named Warner Morse occasionally showed up,
adding a conservative dimension to the company.
Warner seemed to have a certain fascination with us,
even though I had the impression that as a matter of principle
he didn't approve of us.
My wife also liked Steve and Peggy a lot
(although I think she wasn't quite so keen on the philosophers)
and she also showed up on Friday afternoons fairly frequently,
although not as regularly as me.
No mathematicians except me ever came to the Catfish.
When I had first come back from Champaigne,
and kept talking about how great it was to go out for beer
after seminars,
the algebraists for a few weeks tried to indulge me
by going out to another bar,
much more plastic and antisceptic.
But they just didn't quite get the hang
of sitting around and drinking beer,
so that didn't last for long.
One philosopher who never came to the Catfish
was Richard Cole,
whose son was to later marry my daughter,
several years after I left Lawrence.
(Warner's very pretty young wife Jane, an excellent photographer,
would take the pictures at that wedding.)
Steve and Peggy lived in a ramshackle old house
in the country.
During my last year in Lawrence,
they gave a big party to which they invited,
among others, the whole Math Department.
A few younger faculty actually came,
and one said to me,
``Gee, I'm seeing a part of Lawrence
that I didn't even know exists.''
The way he said this stopped short of disapproval,
but certainly didn't express approval.
And I thought,
``Boy, I'm glad I know this part and not the part you know.''
The thing that I really disliked about Kansas
was the same thing that I had most disliked about
Arcata and Las Cruces,
namely the feeling that I was a long long ways away
from the places where important things were happening.
At least there were a few more movie theatres than there had been
in Arcata and New Mexico,
but they very rarely showed foreign films.
The film series at the University was good,
but it was quite limited
and didn't show the really recent foreign films
I saw reviewed in Newsweek and the New Yorker.
When the University decided to deny me tenure
(over the strenuous objections of the Math Dept,
and on quite unfair grounds),
my first thought was that this would give me a convenient justification
for doing what I'd wanted to anyway,
namely look for a job elsewhere.
But when I started getting letters back
from the mathematicians I knew who had praised my research so much,
saying that they would just love to have me at their university,
but there were no jobs at all available,
I began to think that my life as a mathematician might be over.
I even looked at a tavern and a used furniture store
that had been advertised for sale in Lawrence,
because I had no idea how I could manage to get a job
and support my wife and child except by teaching mathematics.
I also eventually talked to a local attorney
to see if there were any legal grounds
for disputing the university's decision.
But by the time he got through looking into the matter,
I had been offered a job in Hawaii.
While I was in Lawrence, I started working hard
on improving my ability in Russian.
The reason for this is worth noting.
I had gone to a ring theory conference at Carleton University
in Canada,
and I rode back to Toronto (to get my flight home)
with a Berkeley algebraist named George Bergman.
He had been part of a group
that I had gone out to dinner with
at a Chinese restaurant earlier that week,
and there he had exchanged a few words with the waiter in Chinese.
In retrospect, I suppose he didn't say any more than
``How are you?'' and ``Isn't this nice weather?''
but it impressed me at the time.
I had also observed him talking in Russian
to some of the Soviet delegates at the conference.
I don't remember whether we talked about languages
on the train trip to Toronto.
(He's an extremely nice guy, and I remember that we talked
about a lot of things.)
In any case, after we went our separate directions,
I thought, ``Damn it all!
I've studied so many languages,
and I've never learned any of them really well.
I ought to choose one of my languages
and work on it to the point where I'm fluent.''
I thought about which language which be the most worthwhile
to become fluent in.
And although I knew both French and German fairly well,
and had read several novels in both of them
(and at that time could almost read French without a dictionary),
I thought that it would be more valuable to master Russian.
The Russian Department at KU was fairly strong,
so I could find in the bookstore lots of the famous little
Bradda readers,
with the stress marked on the words
and a vocabulary in the back.
Later on, I sat in on a second year Russian course
which took up about where I had left off at the University of Maryland.
Eventually, as I've already mentioned,
I moved on to reading novels by Turgenev and Tolstoi
in standard editions printed for Soviet readers.
Then during my last year at KU,
I took a course in Russian-English translation,
taught by a delightful woman named Galina Bismuth.
Galina had grown up in the Soviet Union
and now had dual Soviet-British citizenship
due to a marriage.
She worked for Occidental Petroleum in Kansas City
managing their translation department
and also acting as the personal translator for Armand Hammer.
Since by then it seemed clear
that there would not be any last minute reprieve
and I would not get tenure at Kansas,
and since there didn't seem any prospects for jobs at other universities
on the horizon,
it seemed quite possible that my days as a mathematician might be
at an end.
And I started thinking that it might be really nice
to actually put one of the many languages I had studied to work.
So I took Galina's course very seriously.
But despite her encouragement,
I didn't think I really knew Russian well enough
to use it professionally.
Most of the students at KU who seemed fairly fluent in Russian
had been through summer courses at Indiana,
where one lived in a Russian-speaking dorm
and ate meals with Russian-speaking students at the cafeteria.
Deciding that this was apparently the way to really learn Russian,
I applied to Indiana for that summer.
Bizarrely enough, I had also applied for an NSF grant
through Kansas, even though they were firing me,
and that application was successful.
By the time I got the response from the NSF,
I had also got my present job at Hawaii,
so it seemed that there might still be a life for me
in the academic world after all.
But by then, I had firmly set my heart on learning Russian well,
so I turned the NSF grant down
(realizing with a certain satisfaction
that this was depriving the University of Kansas of some money,
although of course it was depriving me of a lot more)
and spent the summer of 1977 at Bloomington
taking their fourth year Russian course.