Stanford — at Long Last!
Through friends of my parents, I rented a bedroom in a home a few blocks from the Stanford campus. My parents drove me down for the orientation week for freshmen and transfer students. A jovial professor hosted a presentation that my parents and I attended; he stated that Stanford students were in the top one tenth of one percent of the smartest Americans. My parents beamed at each other; I wasn’t so sure.
That evening at supper at a local steak house, I brought up the other Stephen Jordan who was languishing in Bakersfield. My mother look worried; my father was as annoyed. “Look Steve, you love history and you know more about World War II than I do, and I was in it. If the Stanford self-proclaimed geniuses are as smart as they think they are, they couldn’t have confused you with the Stephen Jordan in Bakersfield. Right?”
“I guess.”
Mom took my hand, “You’re terrified, aren’t you?”
“I don’t belong here.”
“Study hard like you did at Menlo, and you’ll be fine,” she said.
“What if I flunk out?”
“Steve,” my father said, “the trick is getting into schools like Stanford; you almost have to try to flunk out.”
“How do you know that?”
“A lot of my high school classmates went to Ivy League colleges; all of them graduated. Some of them I didn’t think were all that bright.” I was about to speak when he talked over me, “And you’re a lot brighter than several of those guys. Work hard and you’ll do fine, just fine. And I don’t want to hear about this Stephen Jordan in Bakersfield, okay?”
“Well, someone has to live there.”
He patted my shoulder. Mom looked worried. Dad said, “Marge, how about another Manhattan?”
Two days later, a Sunday, they dropped me off in my room and helped me unpack. I hugged Mom, shook hands with Dad, and off they went. I stood there thinking. Much later, my parents reappeared in front of me in their Buick. My mother was crying; my father approached, “Steve, what’s wrong? We drove down to the end of the block and watched you for about fifteen minutes; you were just standing here, not moving.”
“I was thinking about what I have to do tomorrow.” I went over to the car, “Mom, don’t worry, I’ll be okay. I’ll call next Sunday and let you how things are going. Don’t worry.” Mom gave me a crooked smile as they drove away.
The main part of the Stanford campus is arranged in quadrangles. My first class was the following Monday morning at 9:00. I walked over to the campus and History Corner at the southeast side of the outer quadrangle to find out where the class would be held. I found the lecture room in the basement and surfaced. Looking north, a familiar woman was walking toward me. She was Susan Bailey, the valedictorian of my high school class. I had met her in kindergarten.
Susan approached said, “Oh, hi, Steve. What are you doing here?”
“I go to school here.”
“Here? Stanford?”
I pulled a registration card from my wallet and showed it to Susan. She studied the card. “Steve, I was in second year algebra with you. Those were…What’s the word I am looking for?”
“Gruesome? But I don’t have to take any math to graduate from here.”
“Well, good luck. I’ll see you around, I guess.”
“I guess,” I said as she walked away.
Stanford was on quarters; my first quarter was over before Christmas. I managed a 3.5 average; two As and two Bs. Before the Vietnam grade inflation, Stanford’s all men’s average was 2.5 and the women’s was about 2.7. My parents and I were relieved. Napa at the time had a population of around 16,000; privacy was a scarce commodity, and news spread fast.
I had gone from a boy with a severe intellectual deficiency to a boy who had become quite intelligent. Napa High was cliquey, and I was not part of it. However, as a Stanford sophomore who was doing well, I started receiving invitations for various gatherings from the smarter clique members who had been accepted at colleges such as Cal, Pomona, the Ivy League, the service academies, and Stanford.
I joined a fraternity; and, for the first time in my life, I developed a social life. Stanford became a pleasant experience that more than made up for my Napa High days. An algebra teacher once asked me: “Steve, how do you expect to get through life without understanding algebra?”
“Well, my mother doesn’t understand algebra either, and she seems happy and content. She married an engineer who handles the numbers in our family.”
One last point: I spent most of my professional life as a banker. People have asked me: Doesn’t banking require a great deal of math? No, not really, the math people learn in the eighth grade such as percentages and ratios is about all one needs to analyze financial statements. Much to my surprise, I did well at accounting at business school. Who would have guessed?
