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About a week or two before I went to college, our apartment was burglarized, and I just assumed that was the end of my college dreams. You know, because everything was taken, practically-- the trunk and everything. We were living on St. Nicholas Place at the time, and in the back apartment, and it was obviously a burglary that was planned by someone who knew what was happening in our apartment. You know, it did not seem to me to be an accidental kind of burglary, that they -- They came to get what they knew was there.

A paranoid idea I had was that it was someone who wanted to nip this dream of college in the bud, among other things.

But again, I didn't reckon on the bullheadedness and the persistence of my mother. She said, “Yes, you're going,” and by the time it came time for me to go, she had enough clothes for me to go. I didn't have the trunk, I don't know-- I don't think. I don't remember whether they took that or not, but anyway, I not only was shipped off to college in September of 1931, but my mother came with me. I had all I could do to keep her from registering with me. But she came to see where I was going to live, and to talk with the people with whom I was going to room. I didn't stay in the dormitory. I stayed with some relatives of our priest, who lived in Washington.

This was the beginning of a new stage of life. The first bit of education that occurred to me -- I was 17 at the time -- was not in the college so much as in where I stayed. In that house, there were about three or four medical students. I think they were sophomore medical students then, older than the usual medical student, you know. These were men -- from where I sat, they were about ten years