Where there is a will - 11. Second Quarter at Northwestern

Second Quarter at Northwestern

I survived the winter quarter!

The Ambassador shoe from Bata is no match for the snow and slush. I bought a used shoe for $6. I am looking for cheaper accommodation and some source of extra income. As a student on an F-1 visa, I cannot legally be employed off-campus. I find an ad where they were ready to give a room in exchange for carpentry work. I go and meet the landlady. Subsequently I learn that a school teacher at 1221 Forest Ave, at the intersection of Forrest Avenue and Burnham Place, is looking for a student to help him. Arthur Kahn is a recent widower with two sons - 9 and 5 years of age. As it is illegal to leave children under 12 without adult supervision, he needs somebody to be home in the evenings. He has a spare bedroom on the third floor of his house which he was giving in exchange for this help. Though it was about a mile from the Tech Instt, I decide to take this as the weather is getting better and I can save the $80 I am paying at Loder Hall. Mr. Arthur Kahn, the school teacher, was getting a $2000 a month salary. He has a three level house, two cars and a pedal bicycle. He let me use the bicycle to go to NU campus.  (Later I bought a used bicycle for $40 from a student. That bicycle had a working dynamo light! It was a multi-gear vehicle and was purple in colour.)

Mr. Kahn also hired a lady to take care of his sons.  During this time Late Dr. KSR (Guindy 60/Civil) once called as I had given him the phone number of this place.  He was surprised to hear a lady answering the phone and I am sure he had serious doubts about me at that time!


1221 Forest, Evanston:  My second stay/ a room
On the top floor of this house - Free of charge for just
Agreeing to stay home in the evenings when the Owner
Is away leaving his 2 sons - 9 and 7 home.
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I sign up for 12 hours again, thinking I will drop the tough one later. But I could not decide which one to drop (they were all equally tough) and end up carrying 12 hours of course load. Research work involves the prediction of the demand for recreation in the city of Evanston. This is Dr. Peterson's project. The surveys were finished and I am to use the statistical technique of Factor Analysis and Multivariate regression model to establish the demand model.

I am realising the (additional) mistake of mine - starting a graduate program in the second quarter. I had to take courses out of sequence, and invariably the second or third part of a two- or three-part course! It is also a mistake to sign up for a senior undergraduate course. I signed up for "Theory, Value and Distribution", essentially an advanced Microeconomics course. There are nearly 50 students in the class, two of us being graduate students. The other person is Mike Couture, a "straight-A'' local (all American) student. Both of us ended with a "C" in the course!

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Travel forecasting was all FORTRAN programming for the newly developed "Behavioral Choice Model" from MIT professors. I thought I knew FORTRAN II. I had gone through the 6 page handout given to me by my cousin-brother-in-law, Shri. Rajagopalan. He got it as part of a short course at Burmah Shell Company. I read through the handout on my trip to A.C. Tech on bus route 5-B in Chennai, and started using it to develop one-page or 2-page FORTRAN codes. My friend and Guindy classmate Dr. Arockiasamy helped me debug errors. I punched the code using one of the two card-punchers newly acquired at A. C. Tech. But on coming here, I find card punchers and remote terminals are strewn all over the place! I punch my code and give my card deck to the operator. I get a printout later in the day or next morning, invariably with a bunch of errors. The errors are given in cryptic codes and I need the operator to interpret them for me. I fix them and resubmit. Woops! I get more errors - one of them is I missed the second card which is the password! I know I had the password card!! (The computer eats the password card on each submission, and I need to add it everytime I submit the deck for processing!) The Data card for the survey data of Dr. Peterson's study is another story! I needed to use a "programmed card" to speed up my data punching.
A card deck containing IBM keypunch drum card used
one program to program tabs and skips

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I am getting letters regularly from my wife and my father. With four courses and demanding work for the research project (I tell my colleagues that I am paid for doing 20-hours a week of research work EVERY DAY!) Some days, I don’t even have the time to sit and read the letters!
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I find all the clocks are ahead by an hour! I comment to my friend Gokman how all the clocks are running fast by one hour. "No! We have switched to daylight saving time" he says. "What is that?" "We switch the time twice a year. So far we were observing the "standard" time. Now, for about the next six months, we will be observing daylight saving time, which pushes the clocks one hour ahead." Glad I asked him. I would have missed my class, had I gone with my watch time!

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Mr. Kahn is a nice person. Some nights he cooks for me. He obliges by buying me milk and bananas when he goes for groceries. But, understandably as a High School Teacher in downtown Chicago, he comes home stressed out and is irritable. He tries hiring stay-home help - but the ladies do not seem to last long. I saw two during my stay there.

The younger son is not well. I ask him if he took any medicine. "We are Christian Scientists. We do not take any!"

"How is your financial situation?" - Mr. Kahn asks. "I am doing alright. I am getting my assistantship paid regularly. Only the work is demanding and I am asked to do odd jobs" Later I learnt he had lost $20 which he thought he left on the table - the reason for his asking me that question!

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