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to meet Talcott Williams. Talcott Williams was a little man with a bushy white mustache who had spent most of his life in the Near East--in Turkey and in Palestine and in Egypt. That day he confused the two of us, and through the entire School of Journalism he thought I was Williams and Williams was me. About six times we tried to correct him, but we finally said, “The hell with it.”

Anyhow, teaching there that time were Pitkin, who wrote Life Begins at Forty; and Kendrick, one of the great history teachers of the country; and over at the College were Beard, and Odell, and Brander Matthews. It was a great faculty in those days. I had a new world opened up for me, an absolutely new world.

Did you have some administrative ability as vice-president of the class?

That didn't mean anything at all. But that's when I started to be a faker. The first essay we had to write was “a brief story of my life.” A week later, the prof said, “This is by far the best paper that was turned in. I'm going to read it aloud. It's a little bit unfair because this fellow's had experiences that are worth telling about, and the other fellows haven't.” So he read my paper aloud and gave me an “A” on it. And when it was over I went to him and told him that I'd lived in New York all my life and had made the whole fish-tale up. He crossed out the “A” and gave me an “F.”