Boston Trip: MIT Memories Part 2

We began our walk down memory lane by walking inside the MIT Chapel. The wind caught the heavy wooden door and it banged open. Whoops! We broke right into a wedding in progress. Beating a hasty retreat we decided to break for lunch and ate at a pub type restaurant near Kendall Square called the Cambridge Brewing Company.

This is not us in the picture but you get the general vibe that this  pub style restaurant gives off.

After lunch we make a short detour to the MIT Museum before going back to campus. Alumni get in for free by showing your brass rat or spouting off the number of your course major. Sound off:

     Diane       Course 2.0, Mechanical Engineering,
     Margaret  Course 6.3, Computer Science
     Sue          Course 7.0, Biology
     Frank       Course 8.0, Physics
     Joe           Course 8.0, Physics
     John         Course 16.0, Aero and Astro Engineering

This may not be the exact route we walked but you get the idea.

One of the first exhibits on the main floor of the museum is a tribute to slide rules. Here is the exhibit. Look closely at that picture second down on the left. Recognize anyone?

In my finals we were not allowed to use hand held calculators since not all students had the advantage of owning one.

Yup. The photo captures me intently working away in one of my mechanical dynamics labs. That is pure analog equipment there – none of that new fangled digital stuff!

I am memorialized as a part of MIT history!

After touring the MIT museum we went back to campus to see the chapel, interface, and dorms. Surely that wedding must be over by now! Frank and Joe pulled on the chapel doors and they were locked. Oh, well. I tried and must have had the right touch because one sprung open. I peeked inside gingerly. Another wedding! This time I backed out inconspicuously. We moved on to McCormick Hall.

McCormick Hall was dedicated to offering a female only residence option to MIT coeds.  The first floor even provided "date rooms".

Since I'd been an undergraduate living there, McCormick Hall had expanded to encompass the neighboring building, previously called the Interface, and now called it the Annex. We used to have coffee and donuts after Catholic Mass there every Sunday. Margaret and I made the coffee. At first Joe brought the Dunkin' Donuts. Once Frank learned there were coeds involved he volunteered to help Joe. I remembering saving the chocolate covered donuts for the kids, much to their parents' dismay. That is where Frank and I met, and Joe and Margaret met, and the rest is history. TCC, the Tech Catholic Community, held work parties during which we painted the kitchen area and the seating area where students socialized after Mass.

John and Frank are inspecting and displaying pride in what they had worked on painting so many years ago.

John and I are pretending we are holding donuts. Hmm. I think donuts may have been bigger back then.

We continued our McCormick Hall tour after our diversion to the former Interface and Sunday morning memories. Here is the parlor where a social get together was hosted for the incoming freshman (no parents). Sue and I were the first person each of us met respectively right after our parents left after saying goodbye. We were both feeling a bit nervous, a bit scared, mildly abandoned, kind of excited, cautious, jittery... you name it – you get the picture.

This large parlor was the hub of many meetings and parties.

Sue and I talked to each other, really hit it off, and clung to each other as the first college friend we had made. Even though freshman year I was in the West Tower and she was in the East Tower, we would carry our food down the elevator, across the lobby and up the other elevator to have dinner together.

Sue (right) and me 42 years after we first met. Yikes!

After McCormick, Frank and I tried one last time to see the MIT Chapel. The chapel has a unique architectural design.  It is surrounded by a moat and has clear panels on the periphery of the circular building that look down at the water. When the sun is shining and the breeze is blowing, light bouncing off the ripples on the water is reflected back up onto the interior walls of the chapel, giving it really cool presence-of-God effect. Irreverently, one of our pastimes was calculating just how many packages of Jello would be required to immobilize those ripples into a big solid blob.

A wedding was just being dismissed and there was a receiving line. I respectfully and quietly walked behind the receiving line into the chapel. "What's the matter..." I whispered to a chagrined Frank, "...the bride and the groom will each think we are a guest for the other person's side... kind of like in the Wedding Crashers". I was bound and determined to get a picture of each of us in that chapel.

The sculpture behind the altar further enhances the dancing lights on the walls created by the ripples of the moat.

We attended many a Mass here.
One Christmas, the priest allowed Frank to read "How the Grinch Stole Christmas" as the sermon.

While Frank and I participated in our chapel shenanigans, John went to get the car. We drove past the tennis courts, past some of the other dorms, and around Tang Hall, the graduate dorm where Frank and Joe had lived. We were to meet up for dinner with Sue and John's son and his girlfriend and with our Boston area friends Norma and Stan, also from MIT days. Norma was a year behind Margaret, Sue, and me and Stan was a grad student and still is a co-worker of John's. Norma had made  5:00 pm dinner reservations at Strega's Waterfront known for its celebrity customers, stunning architecture, and authentic Italian cuisine.

We had waterfront window seats at the far end of this photo as you look through this grandiose tiled arch.

We enjoyed good conversation, great food, and had the great pleasure being joined by John and Sues' grown son John and his girlfriend Sasha.

Sasha and John were instrumental in selecting the restaurant.

Here are the eight MIT grads gathered for our photo op on the Boston waterfront. I think we look happy and damn good after all these years!

The grad school guys Joe, Stan, Frank, John
The undergrad gals Margaret, Norma, me, Sue

The red building in the far background is Anthony's Pier 4 restaurant.  That was Frank's and my special place for the occasional fancy dinner when we were at MIT. Our timing this trip was a bit off. Anthony's Pier 4 closed just one week before we arrived due to Boston Waterfront renewal project. Hopefully they will re-open and we will catch them on another trip back east. I remember waitresses there would walk around in colonial garb and hand out buttered corn on the cob and huge popovers that were to die for.

Frank and me in front of our special place, Anthony's Pier 4.