“It was taken for granted that I would go to college, studying science, presumably chemistry, the only science we knew much about. “College” meant City College of New York, a municipally-supported institution then beginning its second century of moving the children of New York’s immigrant poor into the American middle class. I discovered physics in my freshman year and switched my “major” from chemical engineering to physics. Graduation, marriage and two years in the U.S. Army Signal Corps, saw me applying to Columbia University in the Fall of 1956.”