In spite of irregular attendance, F took some part in high school activities. His main activities, of the extracurricular sort, were chess club, chess team, poetry club, debating society, mathematics club, board of publications, program committee. He was executive member of the debating society and of the law society, vice president of the poster club, and two or three times section president. His record, of course, shows no athletic history and no physical activities engaged in.
For the four years following 1930 F continued to frequent the public library, the chess club, and the bridge games. At one time a patron friend made it financially possible for him to enter college at the College of the City of New York. He quit before the end of the first term, again because he hated the required gymnasium work and said he always got a cold and felt bad after such exercise. Although he was again and again urged by people who knew his ability not to waste it at chess and bridge, he showed no apparent interest in going on with college. He replied that he could always make a living some way or other. Uncongenial home circumstances and the general unemployment situation prevailing at the time perhaps heightened this indisposition and lack of ambition. While other boys who had been in the same grade school and high school classes with him were finding part-time employment and working their way through college, F was contented with his chess games, with an occasional bit of money won at cards, and with his hours in the public library.
In 1934 he was asked to take the CAVD tests by the Institute of Educational Research at Teachers College, Columbia University, to help determine the highest scores to be expected on this scale. He and another boy, both selected because of their known phenomenal range of information and intellectual alertness, "went through the ceiling" on this scale, thus again confirming the earlier records of his mental level so far as intelligence was concerned. On the same occasion he was given the Coöperative General Culture Test, by Dr. Lorge. In this his score exceeded that of superior college graduates.
In September, 1934, F was again persuaded, through financial assistance practically forced upon him, and after much urging and long discussion, to try college. He enrolled in Columbia College, once more a freshman. He carried a heavy program, tried to do certain outside jobs as assistant provided for him, and probably overworked. He had declined one patron's offer to give him a stipulated sum of money for the year if he would abstain from chess for that period. In fact, only vigorous prodding led him to go to college at all at this time, even with the way opened for him.
The outcome appeared to be another fiasco. In January, as the examination period drew near, he became ill, developed pneumonia, and for the second time withdrew from college before completing a term of work. In this instance his illness appeared to justify the act.
In the autumn of 1935, having been nursed back to reasonable health through patrons interested in his case, he was urged by them to make a fresh start and to try the University of Chicago plan, under which students could progress as rapidly as they were able to satisfy the requirements through comprehensive examinations. He entered the University of Chicago that fall, for the third time a college freshman, agreeing to do this without any great enthusiasm of his own but as part of what was called an "educational experiment."
Of his record on entrance the following comment was made by the chief examiner:
The examiners have called my attention to a freak case in our records for the incoming students. . . . His performance seems almost unbelievable. On the freshman classification tests his performance was as follows: first in the vocabulary test; first in the reading test; second in the Intelligence Test of the American Council; third in the English placement test; third in the physical science placement test . . . in the freshman class of about 750 students.
In addition, he also took four Comprehensives with the following grades: Biological Science, A; Humanities, B; Social Sciences, A; Physical Sciences, D.
The year at Chicago was not without episode. F was held up by two gunmen, engineered the capture of one of these, and was advised to disappear for a time during the excitement. Impetuously, and without resources except the provisions made by his sponsor for his own subsistence, he married a young Jewish girl. But the "Chicago Plan" kept its word, and by the end of the year F had passed all the Comprehensives required to give him his B.A. degree. In doing this he acquired a good deal of newspaper and popular magazine notoriety, and his photograph, and that of his young wife, were often reproduced in the public prints.