Fall

I made a few friends in Princeton but I spent a lot of time with myself. There was an IBM 650 computer across the street that my dad got to use, and he brought home boxes of Fortran program cards that I used to build labyrinthine card houses. We moved to another house on campus at the end of 1963, during my fifth grade year, where I founded a toy soldier empire on a rugpad in an attic room. This empire, modeled loosely after the Roman Empire, coincided with an unusually good period of my life. In fifth grade I was a Cub Scout, a school Safety Patrol with my own street corner (back then a ten year-old could stop traffic), and I was editor of a classroom newspaper. My favorite books were Encyclopedia Brown, Tom Swift, and Brains Benton.

However, I did not adjust well to sixth grade, the first year of junior high school, the following autumn. I still had a crush on another boy from the year before who did not want to be particularly close to me. I also did not understand why the school had separate teachers for separate subjects. My empire ended in December 1964, when I had to clear the rug. I tried to start new empires and city-states but none lasted for more than a few days or weeks.

In the summer of 1966, our family moved to The Hague, administrative capital of The Netherlands (Holland). My father had a National Science Foundation grant to study civil engineering there for a semester and my youmger brothers and sisters and I enrolled in a British day school. I was lonely but being with students from all over the Commonwealth was interesting. I learned eleven subjects instead of five. I also learned some Dutch. Kaan U spreekt Nederlands? I loved the beach at Scheveningen (when there was sun we went to the beach). I also fell in love with royal pageantry and built a castle and a palace for my sister's miniature stuffed animals. This photo shows the castle.

We came home in early 1967 and I returned to eighth grade, where I ran into trouble. I was not interested in girls, and I aggravated this by wearing white crew socks, which was not cool. I was starting to realize that I was gay. A friend from childhood arm-twisted me to attend the eighth grade dance at the end of the year. I went and to my surprise I had a decent time and nobody treated me badly. But I felt more and more alone. I was able to be invisible in high school the next year, where there were too many students for everyone to know everyone else.

Over the summer of 1967 and again in the summer of 1968, my parents were able to send me to a summer camp for boys in Maine. Here I experienced nature for the first time. I also learned to contribute to the efforts of others and be recognized for some of my own.

I only spent one year in high school because my grades were low. My dad had attended a boarding school, The Hill School in Pennsylvania, during World War II, where his uncle was a teacher and soccer coach. With some scholarship support, I went there for my tenth grade year, 1968-69. The students were friendly and I was particularly close to the fourth form (tenth grade) European history teacher.

The school enabled me to excel in history but I failed in mathematics. I got through another year at the school but continued to fail math. The school allowed me to return for a senior year as a non-degree student, and I did much better since I no longer had to take math. But I had a nervous breakdown over the winter that I was able to conceal until late spring, when I felt unable to continue and withdrew.

Over the next two years, I attended some classes at the University of Pennsylvania for two semesters. During the academic year 1973-74, I sat in on a senior seminar and then a graduate seminar, both in history, at Princeton University. This was at the invitation of Professor Cyril Black, who believed I had potential as a historian. I did well in these courses, which encouraged me to return to Penn for a final time in the fall of 1974. I found a room on the top floor of a rooming house in a suburb for $20 a week and took the train into Philadelphia.

But I was lonely and had another breakdown. I had no prospect of a diploma beyond the eighth grade, and I concluded that minimum wage would not support a single person living alone. I also faced a bleak future as a gay person at a time when that carried an enormous stigma.

I decided that it would be best to bring my life to an end. At around 6:00 PM on February 10, 1975, I dived off the Verrazano Narrows Bridge in New York City.

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