“Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman”: Adventures of a Curious Character

At last the dormitory was built. I went down to the place where rooms were assigned, and they said, you can pick your room now. You know what I did? I looked to see where the girls’ dormitory was, and then I picked a room that looked right across—though later I discovered a big tree was growing right in front of the window of that room.

They told me there would be two people in a room, but that would only be temporary. Every two rooms would share a bathroom, and there would be double-decker bunks in each room. But I didn’t want two people in the room.

The night I got there, nobody else was there, and I decided to try to keep my room to myself. My wife was sick with TB in Albuquerque, but I had some boxes of stuff of hers. So I took out a little nightgown, opened the top bed, and threw the nightgown carelessly on it. I took out some slippers, and I threw some powder on the floor in the bathroom. I just made it look like somebody else was there. So, what happened? Well, it’s supposed to be a men’s dormitory see? So I came home that night, and my pajamas are folded nicely and put under the pillow at the bottom, and my slippers put nicely at the bottom of the bed. The lady’s nightgown is nicely folded under the pillow, the bed is all fixed up and made, and the slippers are put down nicely. The powder is cleaned from the bathroom and nobody is sleeping in the upper bed.

Next night, the same thing. When I wake up, I rumple up the top bed, I throw the nightgown on it sloppily and scatter the powder in the bathroom and so on. I went on like this for four nights until everybody was settled and there was no more danger that they would put a second person in the room. Each night, everything was set out very neatly even though it was a men’s dormitory.

I didn’t know it then, but this little ruse got me involved in politics. There were all kinds of factions there, of course—the housewives’ faction, the mechanics’ faction, the technical peoples’ faction, and so on. Well, the bachelors and bachelor girls who lived in the dormitory felt they had to have a faction too, because a new rule had been promulgated: No Women in the Men’s Dorm. Well, this is absolutely ridiculous! After all, we are grown people! What kind of nonsense is this? We had to have political action. So we debated this stuff, and I was elected to represent the dormitory people in the town council.

After I’d been in it for about a year and a half, I was talking to Hans Bethe about something. He was on the big governing council all this time, and I told him about this trick with my wife’s nightgown and bedroom slippers. He started to laugh. “So that’s how you got on the town council,” he said.

It turned out that what happened was this. The woman who cleans the rooms in the dormitory opens this door, and all of a sudden there is trouble: somebody is sleeping with one of the guys! She reports to the chief charwoman, the chief charwoman reports to the lieutenant, the lieutenant reports to the major. It goes all the way up through the generals to the governing board.

What are they going to do? They’re going to think about it, that’s what! But, in the meantime, what instructions go down through the captains, down through the majors, through the lieutenants, through the chars’ chief, through the charwoman? “Just put things back the way they are, clean ‘em up, and see what happens.” Next day same report. For four days, they worried up there about what they were going to do. Finally they promulgated a rule: No Women in the Men’s Dormitory! And that caused such a stink down below that they had to elect somebody to represent the …

I would like to tell you something about the censorship that we had there. They decided to do something utterly illegal and censor the mail of people inside the United States—which they have no right to do. So it had to be set up very delicately as a voluntary thing. We would all volunteer not to seal the envelopes of the letters we sent out, and it would he all right for them to open letters coming in to us; that was voluntarily accepted by us. We would leave our letters open; and they would seal them if they were OK. If they weren’t OK in their opinion, they would send the letter back to us with a note that there was a violation of such and such a paragraph of our “understanding.”

So, very delicately amongst all these liberal-minded scientific guys, we finally got the censorship set up, with many rules. We were allowed to comment on the character of the administration if we wanted to, so we could write our senator and tell him we didn’t like the way things were run, and things like that. They said they would notify us if there were any difficulties.

So it was all set up, and here comes the first day for censorship: Telephone! Briiing!

Me: “What?”

“Please come down.” I come down.

“What’s this?”

“It’s a letter from my father.”

“Well, what is it?”