=== Fall 1959 (I was 22)
Empty Niches (U. of Chicago)
The less said about my year at the University of Chicago the better.

The campus had a lot of empty statue niches, I don’t know why. It was stupid, cold and squalid; the university had a few hundred women and thousands of men; and I constantly felt my father’s curse like a sunlamp close to the back of my neck. I thought of suicide all the time, but I knew what that would do to my grandparents, and so I kept on. To purge Ralph from my life I seriously considered going back to the name I had lived under for ten years of my childhood, Theodor Holm II but I knew it was too late; in college I had irrevocably become (i.e., became known as) Ted Nelson, and I figure that was who I had to stay.

I had gone to Chicago in sociology because I didn’t want to be too far from my grandparents, and I thought U.Chi was the closest to the romantic anthropology I had enjoyed. I was thinking of William Foote Whyte’s work there, decades before. But changed, getting somewhat strange and stupid. Most of the graduate students in the department wanted t be social workers; I was interested in deep theory, and heard none. In fact, the sociologists of that department kept denouncing theory of any kind.

I had to leave that place. But after such an awful start in graduate school I had to get at least some advanced degree, so I applied elsewhere. I took a test called the Miller Analogies, and, amazingly, that got me a fellowship to Harvard for the following year.