College Boy

Abstract

I arrived at the University of Chicago in September 1985. Its campus, constructed largely in the collegiate Gothic style, occupies a two-hundred-acre site on Chicago’s south side. The northern and southern parts of the campus are separated by the Midway Plaisance, a broad mile-long park that was constructed in 1893 for the Columbian Exposition. Whether by chance or design, I was assigned to Santa’s former residence, Burton–Judson Courts, just south of the Midway. I had a room in a first-floor corner suite in Dodd–Mead House, one of the six houses that constitute Burton–Judson. The neo-Gothic architecture, the leaded windows, the view across the Midway to Harper Library, all enhanced my already overbrimming confidence in my success as a college freshman. Several of the older students remembered Santa, and I was delighted to learn that my hero astrophysicist Carl Sagan had lived in the same dormitory in the 1950s, a few doors from my own suite.