International House Berkeley

70 Getting back to I-House, many students had jobs in the cafeteria. Mrs. Hughes ran the cafeteria, and she was wonderful! Lottie had a memorial service for her in the Blaisdell Room, and all sorts of people came and spoke about Mrs. Hughes. A lot of people thought that Mrs. Hughes was starchy, and she was, a bit, but she thought of the students as her students. I remember Jeanne worked in the cafeteria, and Jeanne said that Mrs. Hughes one day said to her, "You look too tired to come to work today. Go get into bed." She looked after them! She did her best with the food, but some people grumbled because there was a great deal of rice served – and with good reason, since there were many Middle Easterners and Indians. But some Americans chose to comment about how awful the food was. It was slander. Americans talked about the rationing in the US – it did not amount to much at all. I mean if you were a passionate coffee drinker – yes! And if you ate only meat – yes! But otherwise it was nothing. What other fun things did we do? Stinson beach was one. Also, once Lottie organized a weekend down on Carmel Beach with a Norwegian, a Swede, and me, and somebody else. We drank glogg – which I hated then, and I hate now – and I can remember camping on the beach – just on the sand. Oh, and then there was a Mexican doctor, who became a well-known psychiatrist in Mexico City. He had a big open car, and Lottie and I and two other men were in the car. He had wheeled his car through San Francisco. On the highway south, he passed another car over the double line. I was sitting in front with him. I said, "You can't do that! That is absolutely illegal!" And he said, "Who cares!" And so he did it again, and I said, "No, no!" A highway patrolman was coming our way. After he did not stop us, the driver grinned at me and said, "Nobody cares!" Then we went to Stanford in the afternoon and had a flat tire. We all got out of the car – we had to – one couldn't keep going! Well, of course, none of these men had ever changed a tire in their life! You couldn't expect Lottie to have. Daddy would not give us driving lessons until we changed a tire, but I thought, "I am not going to indicate that I know how to change a tire." So we stood there in Stanford, and a policeman came along. The Mexican psychiatrist – I can't remember his name – he was flamboyant – appealed to the policeman in his "not understanding the language" gambit. His English was better than mine! The policeman, though, was no fool. He said, "I will show you how." The Norwegian did it. These were fun excursions! Lottie was marvelous at instigating fun functions. Were we carefree and careless? Oh, I was just trying to think of the flamboyant people. There were plenty of nerds, and some even both! The English were very good at this. The Great Hall was the center of social life. They would loll around the Great Hall, and you would not notice that the rest of the time they were in the library or lab, but when they appeared, they would be very amusing, very amusing! How did I-House change me? Well… I began to see finer distinctions of ethnicity than I had before, and I realized the importance of ethnicity to people. How did I-House shape the path that I took in life? Well, I might not have gotten a Ph.D. if I hadn't lived in I-House, because, amidst all these characters that I've told you about, there was a

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