“Strength lies in differences, not in similarities” Stephen R. Covey

In one’s older years one can look back at some incidents of your younger days and wonder about your role – your reaction.  After college I was a naïve young man.  I’ve written about this characteristic before in my post of July 7^th.  This post reinforces that evaluation.  I went to college in New Mexico and had grown up in New Mexico (except for a year or so in the 2^nd grade spent in California).  I thought that the world was like New Mexico.

I wanted to go to graduate school – to learn more and see more of the world.  Via circumstances best told in a different post I got a research fellowship in nuclear engineering at The University of Virginia.  Off I went in my 1956 Ford driving across the country in the fall of 1962.

When I got to Charlottesville, it was if I had landed on Mars.  Everything was alien.  The first – and biggest negative factor – was due to my own ignorance.  In the southwest we don’t have gender segregated public schools.  New Mexico Tech was integrated – but just very few women found the curriculum attractive so, consequently the men out numbered the women – say – 20 to 1.  I wanted a school with lots of women!  Virginia, at that time, had colleges for women and colleges for men.  The University at Charlottesville was for men (except for the graduate school).  I hadn’t bothered to check out this significant cultural facet.  Strike one.

This period was also a transition time in the history of racial integration.  Blacks still faced enormous obstacles.  I had encountered racial - Hispanic/Anglo - prejudice before but it paled (no pun intended) in the face of what I found in Virginia at that time.  UVa did admit Blacks into the graduate school at that time and I formed a friendship with a Black math major with whom I was housed.  When we went to a theatre we had to sit in the balcony.  There were restaurants we couldn’t eat at.  Strike two.

I found that – as a physics major – I didn’t like engineering.  In physics courses we never worried about arithmetic on tests or in homework.  Derive the formula, circle it, and get full credit.  In engineering they expected me to put in the values and calculate the answer – say, 4.135 ergs/sec.  What kind of nonsense was this?  Strike three.

There were other cultural annoyances.  I couldn’t get decent Mexican food.  (See my posting of July 29^th) I couldn’t go rabbit hunting on the prairie.   The sunsets weren’t as pretty.  The mountains weren’t as high.  Strike four.

I left after one semester.

Since my youth, I’ve been back to Charlottesville and Virginia many times and fail to understand why I thought it was so alien.

© 2014 Lester C. Welch