Autobiography of a Maquoketa Boy-2.pdf - Microelectronics ...

Autobiography of a Maquoketa Boy
Richard B. Wells
That was the situation one night when I had just gotten up to go off somewhere and screw around. Don
looked up from his desk and snapped at me, “Don’t you have a physics test tomorrow?” I did, but I hadn’t
told either of them that. I don’t know how Don knew about it. I acknowledged it, and Don said, “Then
don’t you think you ought to be studying for it? How do you expect to get a decent grade if you don’t
study?”
I made the mistake of waving him off with a laconic, “Grades don’t matter.”
You’d have thought I’d insulted his mother. Don sprang out of his chair like a Jack in the Box, shoved
his face right up in mine, and started reading me the riot act. I’m not that big, but Don was even shorter
than I am and it gave the whole thing kind of a funny-but-serious air. I didn’t get a word in edgewise. Don
threw one question at me after another, answering each one himself before I could even open my mouth.
“What are you studying? Engineering! What do engineers do? They solve problems! What do you think
your grades are? They’re an indication of how well you solve problems!” All the while he was doing this,
he was waving his arms like Leo Durocher arguing with an umpire. If anybody else had yelled at me like
that I’d have gotten madder than heck. But somehow, with Don, I didn’t feel angry at all. The more I
listened, the more sense it all made. I actually started grinning, and the more sense it made the more I had
to grin. He was completely, totally right. It hadn’t even occurred to me that when it came time to look for
my first engineering job companies were going to go right to my GPA and look at it first thing. I hadn’t
had the first clue that low grades would block me from getting into graduate school. I was screwing up
badly and, even worse, I hadn’t even known I was screwing up.
Don turned me around completely that night. I began watching how he studied and started trying to
copy how he did it. I wouldn’t take a break unless Don took one. I also slowly figured out that, so far as
those eight o’clock classes went – it was physics that quarter – I was going to have to find some way to
stay awake in them or I was going to flunk out of this place. My solution to that problem turned out to be
No Doz, the little caffeine pills they sell over-the-counter. I wouldn’t use them to stay up at night; I used
them to stay awake in lecture. Eventually I was able to condition myself to staying awake, regardless of
how droning the professor’s voice was, and didn’t need them anymore. It was already too late to salvage
much of my grades that quarter; I got a 2.73. But the third quarter I pulled in a 3.67 – which boosted my
cumulative GPA all the way up to a 3.02 – and never got less than a 3.43 ever after that. When I
graduated, my cumulative GPA was 3.53, high enough to graduate with distinction. I owe that to Don.
The biggest event on television in the winter of 1972 – so far as eighteen year old males were
concerned –was the draft lottery. I gathered along with my pledge brothers on February 2nd to discover
what our fates were going to be. Only the other Rick, Rick Lyons, wasn’t personally concerned how it
came out. He was in Navy ROTC, intended to stay in ROTC, and go on to service in the Navy after he
graduated. As an ROTC cadet, he had a student deferment from the draft. Although all of us were
classified as 2S (college student), Nixon had canceled student deferments some time earlier for all college
students except those in ROTC, and all the rest of us were eligible to be drafted.
Everybody knew the days of the draft were numbered. The end-the-draft movement was having an
effect and in 1971 a senator, Mike Gravel, had filibustered against renewing the draft. What none of us
knew yet was just exactly when it would end. It was widely expected that this draft lottery was going to
be the very last one, and just as widely expected that meant my age group – those born in 1953 – would
be the last group who would ever be drafted. After all, why would they hold a lottery if they didn’t expect
to use it? The most optimistic estimate was they would draft only about the first thirty-five numbers; the
most pessimistic was that Nixon would find some way to keep the war and the draft going. Pretty much
only the diehard radicals thought the latter, but none of us expected the draft to actually end as soon as it
eventually did. We were all certain numbers one through thirty-five were goners for sure.
I had done a lot of agonized soul searching about what I was going to do personally if my number was
called up. In the summer of ’70, when I was sixteen and before I knew the extent of the army’s My Lai
cover-up, before I knew only one man would ever stand trial for it, before I knew even that man would be
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