As it turned out, I didn’t stay a psych major at Stanford.  Psychology was such a popular subject there that by the time I arrived, pre-registrations from the previous year had filled up every last class.  Then, when I got into a few classes the next quarter, I found the nationally- and globally-known faculty were so caught up in their own professional rivalries and jealousies within a still-infant science that the last thing they wanted to hear was what an undergraduate thought—especially if this involved questioning whether their experiments had actually proved what they claimed they had.

I re-targeted my career ambitions elsewhere, but I still needed a way to graduate.  Kath had been raving about one of her history professors—an internationally-acclaimed scholar who also had a great sense of humor, and started every lecture with something like the opening monologue of the Tonight show. One morning I consented to her dragging me into one of his lectures.

I was hooked immediately.  In addition to being a hoot and a spellbinder, Dr. Spitz specialized in the history of the Renaissance and Reformation—both tumultuously transformative times that turned out to have a lot of relevance to the turmoil of our own generation in the late 1960s.

I formally enrolled in the class—and even though I wasn’t a history major, Spitz picked me for inclusion in his own small discussion group, where (partly because I was too ignorant of what a big wheel he was to be afraid of intellectually locking horns with him), we got into some wrangling discussions that we both enjoyed immensely.

We also turned out to have some other things in common, including having worked for the student food service, and habitually bumping into each other in the hallway outside the large lecture hall where hordes of students packed his lectures—both of us a bit late, and with hair still wet from the shower.

I changed my major to history, and he became my faculty advisor.