My Ancient and Unusual Memories of Trinity College

I entered Trinity in September 1971, 10 years before Lorna Wing introduced Asperger’s 1940s research in Austria to the English-speaking world.¹

My best memory from the Main Quad occurred very late one night several months into my first semester at Trinity as I was standing at a pay phone outside Jarvis Hall on a deserted Long Walk talking to my former high school counselor, the late Mrs. Maurlea Babb (who was back in Illinois) as she struggled to talk this undiagnosed Aspie from precipitously dropping out of college and enlisting in the Navy the next day. My problems probably stemmed from having Asperger’s syndrome 10 years before it was even beginning to be on the radar of the English-speaking psychiatric community. My old counselor succeeded in her attempt and the next day made contact with Trinity to set up some counseling for me with a helpful administrator whose name I no longer remember but whom I would here like to thank, as I would also like to thank Trinity College because with their help I finished my freshman year, after which I went on to finish my sophomore year and junior years as well, still as an undiagnosed Aspie.  

The favorite place on campus for this lonely Aspie was the Trinity College Chapel, which I liked to scale late at night by pulling myself up the thick, rubber-coated lightning rod cable, up to what was then an unlocked window, which I would then climb into and spend some time alone down inside the sanctuary, which was for me indeed a kind of sanctuary from the confusing world of all the neurotypicals who swarmed all over Trinity, those many, many people who seemed to have a different way of communicating, a different way of relating to the world, and a different set of needs than I did.  

The professor who probably changed the trajectory of my life—perhaps twice—was physics professor Harvey Picker, with whom I shared some of my off-the-wall ideas about special relativity and tachyons, ideas which he very politely tried to dissuade me of but failed, eventually and unintentionally contributing to my dropping out of Trinity in the fall of my senior year, bent on my quixotic quest to perfect my ideas on my own, ideas that never went anywhere. I was in and out of Trinity over the next several years.  

I have a strong suspicion that Harvey Picker spoke up on my behalf about 3½ years after my first leaving Trinity and thus had something to do with a second and much more positive change in the trajectory of my life. This would have been on the morning of Commencement day 1978, when, as was the custom, the entire faculty, dressed in their magnificent gowns, met to consider important issues preceding Commencement. One of these issues was whether to grant a very recent request of mine—I was in Illinois at the time—to grant me a B.S. degree in physics based on the accumulation of college credits that I had earned elsewhere without first requesting Trinity’s preapproval for counting such credits toward my Trinity graduation requirements.  

Trinity very graciously granted my request for a B.S., thus changing the trajectory of my life by enabling me to go on to complete over the next two years a master’s program in physics at Northern Illinois University, which in turn enabled me to go on to hold what to me were some very responsible technical positions in the fields of space shuttle support, software engineering research support, national defense, and assistance to PCPs associated with a highly regarded U.S. hospital (twice ranked number one in the nation), in the support of these PCPs’ chronically ill patients. I am now enjoying my retirement thanks to Trinity and, I believe, thanks also to Harvey Picker.  

Cinestudio was the student group/activity that made a significant difference in my life by providing me access to many very fine movies, a large number of which provided an escape valve for the frictions, tensions, and confusions suffered by this undiagnosed Aspie living in a neurotypical world. These films included a two-night showing in two segments of three hours each of the 1966–67 ² Russian film version of Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace directed by Sergei Bondarchuk and starring him in the leading role of Pierre Bezukhov, alongside Vyacheslav Tikhonov and Ludmila Savelyeva, who played Prince Andrei Bolkonsky and Natasha Rostova, a film of which Roger Ebert wrote in 1969, “. . . the Russian version of War and Peace is a magnificently unique film. Money isn’t everything, but you can’t make an epic without it. And War and Peace is the definitive epic of all time. It is hard to imagine that circumstances will ever again combine to make a more spectacular, expensive, and—yes—splendid movie.” [It was a] film that gives you a little idea of the quality of films presented by Cinestudio during my time at Trinity.  

^{1. “In 1981, Lorna Wing launched the term Asperger’s syndrome in a scientific paper in Psychological Medicine. She described Hans Asperger’s “autistic personality disorder” and speculated about outcome and etiology. Thanks to this publication, Asperger’s findings from the 1940s also were introduced to the English-speaking part of the world. Since then, Asperger’s syndrome has become one of the most talked about diagnoses and concepts in clinical medicine. (www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4495836).} 

^{2. A film that was released in the Soviet Union in stages from 1966 to 1967, but which appeared for the first time in the United States in 1969 (www.rogerebert.com/reviews/war-and-peace-1969).}