Dave finished at fifteen—and took an extra year to grow in, working nights at the delicatessen and reading, for entertainment, philosophy.
He has a remarkable memory. He might not be able to recall his laundry mark when he was in Virginia. But no one who knows him well would bet even on that.
A compact guy who—because he is loose-jointed—seems anything but solid. Indeed, his flexibility is such that he could probably learn a yogin's basic postures in one sitting.
Everybody liked him in Madison.
This was not true in Virginia.
He majored in psychology and went out for football. He'd played on his high school team. The backfield coach was impressed equally by the length of his accurate passes and the fact that he mastered the signals in one night's concentrated study. Letter-perfect and reflex-fast. But a pair of racially pure Nordic behemoths from Minnesota, sent proudly to the team by scouting old grads, decided that, although they had nothing personal against the yid, no yid would call their signals. In Dave's first game they managed to break both his legs.
Dave got the idea. He let his uniform hang there, the next year—when he'd got off crutches.
He made the newspaper—but not the fraternity he'd set his heart on.
He made summa cum laude.
He went next to Pennsylvania—tutoring, tending furnaces, minding babies, mowing lawns, as usual—and took both an M.A. and a Ph.D. in psychology. He got a job teaching it to pre-med students in Iowa. His thesis on "Formulations of Subjective Sexuality in Man" almost landed him the thing he wanted—a psycho-sociological research position with a big foundation. They wrote him, however, that they felt certain group attitudes (outrageous, but there they are!) would prejudice his fact-gathering efforts.