My Life at Age Eighteen

Wikimedia: University of Washington in 1922
Aerial view of the University of Washington circa 1922


I became a freshman at the University of Washington in Seattle WA USA, taking Latin and Greek classes as my major. In Freshman Honors English I met Larry Parr, who went on to fame in the world of American chess. I could not vote in the presidential election, but I was pleased to see Lyndon Johnson win against Senator Barry Goldwater, whose campaign had a neat bumper sticker with the lettering "AuH2O64". Later I found out that a girl from my Russian Three class in senior year had been a volunteer campaign-worker for Goldwater in Seattle. Goldwater was famous for saying something like, "Conservatism is no sin." [Note to self: find the exact quote.] His campaign suffered from an attack with what was forevermore called the "Daisy Spot Commercial," in which a little girl is plucking petals off a daisy-flower while a nuclear mushroom cloud goes off in the background, horrifically sending the message that a vote for Goldwater was a vote for thermonuclear war.

Vice-president Hubert Humphrey came to the UW campus and gave a speech in the magnificent old wooden Meany Hall, which was a building left over from the Alaska-Yukon Exhibit. Soon it was torn down and replaced with a non-wooden Meany Hall where I once attended a speech by Kim Dae Jung before he became president of South Korea.

After freshman year I sold ice cream one last summer as a Jolly Joe ice-cream man. I was allowed to sell ice-cream one day in downtown Seattle at a Seafair parade. I had a boy helping me who was the brother of First Love. I gave him forty percent of my earnings that day, because I did not want him to go home and tell my First Love, his older sister, that I was any kind of cheapskate.


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the Mentifex Autobiography at age:
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11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20,
21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30,
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