Letters
"Now that the joke has been had..."

Back to the future
Robert Harper's "3 rooms, future vu" (October/02) evoked so many memories of those prefab days in the mid-1950s! An additional one I remember so clearly was having to take along our own chair if we were to be at a neighbor's for an evening. We lived in the block west of Lying-In, where Wyler Hospital is now, while my husband, Richard [AB'53, SB'54, MD'57], was in medical school and serving his internship in Billings Hospital.

When he came home from helping an elderly friend the day the October issue arrived, I had him sit down while I read aloud the nostalgic article. Afterwards I served weiners under mashed potatoes for supper, a hot dish we had frequently in those early years of marriage.

With all of us on the brink of poverty, it didn't seem so hard. And, yes, that vision of the future let us see beyond the forest of drab plywood units. Our future eventually took us to Springfield, Illinois, where Dick became the founding dean of the School of Medicine of Southern Illinois University. Now both of us are emeritus professors with many wonderful memories, the best of which are of those days in the prefabs.

Thank you for helping us remember so vividly.

Caryl T. Moy, AM'69
Springfield, Illinois

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