There were also about 10 people in this company who were very advanced in fields like mathematics, and they had exercised the same option I had of joining this… passing a test to get into this program for radio training school. And like me, a lot of them… several of them already knew a lot of electronics anyway, and there were a couple of mathematicians from whom I learned a great deal of mathematics.  John Wermer became a professor at Yale, and… what’s his name? Parker was a… became a professor at Pomona College, and so that was almost like going to college.  These… Herbert Forrester, another; three fairly distinguished mathematicians in this group.

And then they dropped this atomic bomb and… we continued to hang around this boot camp, but there was nothing to do, and the… I guess the government had decided it couldn’t send all the soldiers back into civilian life until the jobs appeared, and so it was a strange year. But during this year I… instead of doing con… conventional military things I was learning more mathematics and electronics, and I had a part-time job making ice-cream sodas in the base camp and… it was surrealistic and bizarre to have such an experience.