A quarter century ago, when I was enduring a somewhat serious ailment for several months, my offspring raised the concern that I had never shared any serious information about my ancestry, my upbringing, my education, and my employment before they got old enough to think they knew what I did for a living.
“My father makes his living by talking on the telephone,” I remember hearing my little daughter tell one of our neighbors. Not wrong, in a technical sense. But what was I talking about, and with whom was I talking, and how did that put bread on our table?
As I got better from my ailment, I began writing autobiographical notes from my memory. I have a bundle of some 200 pages, getting me from birth in the depths of the Great Depression to my college years. Sometime, when I am not writing books and columns and speeches and other things, I should get back to my autobiography. But I realized that in writing from memory, I was beginning to have senior moments in the 1980s, and these days, I have many more of them.
Tell me, dear readers, how many of you, more than 50 years after your last academic semester, can recite the topics of all of your courses? Occasionally, on airplane rides, or in the course of a boring lecture, I have tried jotting down my courses. I never succeed. I suppose I could write to the three colleges I attended and get transcripts. But I have not done it, and it might not be possible, since my records preceded the computer age and might be mildewed in some back-campus storage building.
But I try it. Four years of high school. Four or five courses per year. Four years of English literature and composition. Three years of mathematics, algebra, geometry, and trigonometry. Three years of history and civics. Two years of Latin. One year of physics. One year of mechanical drawing. One year of typing. And I cannot remember the others.
In my first years of college, there were courses in English, history, political science, economics, philosophy, speech, more algebra, and some others faded from memory. When I transferred to journalism school, I added reporting, editing, advertising, typography, more history, political science, criminology, more speech, and others faded from memory. In graduate school, more journalism, public relations, speech, and history; political science several seminars; plus the months of effort to produce my thesis and, again, some which disappeared from memory.
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