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

It was only a little while after that the sophomores brought their girlfriends and their girlfriends’ friends over to teach us to dance. Much later, one of the guys taught me how to drive his car. They worked very hard to get us intellectual characters to socialize and be more relaxed, and vice versa. It was a good balancing out.

I had some difficulty understanding what exactly it meant to be “social.” Soon after these social guys had taught me how to meet girls, I saw a nice waitress in a restaurant where I was eating by myself one day. With great effort I finally got up enough nerve to ask her to be my date at the next fraternity dance, and she said yes.

Back at the fraternity, when we were talking about the dates for the next dance, I told the guys I didn’t need a date this time—I had found one on my own. I was very proud of myself.

When the upperclassmen found out my date was a waitress, they were horrified. They told me that was not possible; they would get me a “proper” date. They made me feel as though I had strayed, that I was amiss. They decided to take over the situation. They went to the restaurant, found the waitress, talked her out of it, and got me another girl. They were trying to educate their “wayward son,” so to speak, but they were wrong, I think. I was only a freshman then, and I didn’t have enough confidence yet to stop them from breaking my date.

When I became a pledge they had various ways of hazing. One of the things they did was to take us, blindfolded, far out into the countryside in the dead of winter and leave us by a frozen lake about a hundred feet apart. We were in the middle of absolutely nowhere–no houses, no nothing—and we were supposed to find our way back to the fraternity. We were a little bit scared, because we were young, and we didn’t say much—except for one guy, whose name was Maurice Meyer: you couldn’t stop him from joking around, making dumb puns, and having this happy-go-lucky attitude of “Ha, ha, there’s nothing to worry about. Isn’t this fun!”

We were getting mad at Maurice. He was always walking a little bit behind and laughing at the whole situation, while the rest of us didn’t know how we were ever going to get out of this.

We came to an intersection not far from the lake—there were still no houses or anything—and the rest of us were discussing whether we should go this way or that way, when Maurice caught up to us and said, “Go this way.”

“What the hell do you know, Maurice?” we said, frustrated. “You’re always making these jokes. Why should we go this way?”

“Simple: Look at the telephone lines. Where there’s more wires, it’s going toward the central station.”

This guy, who looked like he wasn’t paying attention to anything, had come up with a terrific idea! We walked straight into town without making an error.

On the following day there was going to be a schoolwide freshman versus sophomore mudeo (various forms of wrestling and tug of wars that take place in the mud). Late in the evening, into our fraternity comes a whole bunch of sophomores—some from our fraternity and some from outside—and they kidnap us: they want us to be tired the next day so they can win.

The sophomores tied up all the freshmen relatively easily—except me. I didn’t want the guys in the fraternity to find out that I was a “sissy.” (I was never any good in sports. I was always terrified if a tennis ball would come over the fence and land near me, because I never could get it over the fence-it usually went about a radian off of where it was supposed to go.) I figured this was a new situation, a new world, and I could make a new reputation. So in order that I wouldn’t look like I didn’t know how to fight, I fought like a son of a gun as best I could (not knowing what I was doing), and it took three or four guys many tries before they were finally able to tie me up. The sophomores took us to a house, far away in the woods, and tied us all down to a wooden floor with big U tacks.

I tried all sorts of ways to escape, but there were sophomores guarding us, and none of my tricks worked. I remember distinctly one young man they were afraid to tie down because he was so terrified: his face was pale yellow-green and he was shaking. I found out later he was from Europe-this was in the early thirties—and he didn’t realize that these guys all tied down to the floor was some kind of a joke; he knew what kinds of things were going on in Europe. The guy was frightening to look at, he was so scared.

By the time the night was over, there were only three sophomores guarding twenty of us freshmen, but we didn’t know that. The sophomores had driven their cars in and out a few times to make it sound as if there was a lot of activity, and we didn’t notice it was always the same cars and the same people. So we didn’t win that one.