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In 1961, three years after obtaining my doctorate at MIT, I was looking for the tenure-track faculty position I had always wanted. My first job had been a post-doctoral appointment at the Cambridge Electron Accelerator, a position made particularly attractive by the fact that the director, Prof. M. Stanley Livingston, had been my registration officer during my graduate years. But now the machine was finished, I was neither a machine operator nor a high-energy physicist, and in any case I wanted the combination of research and teaching that a faculty position represents. What did one do in such a case? Well, one went to the New York Meeting of the American Physical Society, so called because it was then held in New York's Manhattan Center and the neighboring Hotel New Yorker, the sixth floor of which was generally referred to as the flesh market because that's where all the people who wanted to hire physicists had their suites and thus where all the unemployed foregathered. I well remember looking down the list of prospective employers and noting that with one exception, all were offering positions on what is colloquially called 'soft money". In 1961 almost everybody had some sort of government-sponsored laboratory, and although the list of such establishments and the projects they were engaged in was impressive, none were what I was looking for. The exception, however, was Boston University, which was hiring faculty to replace the large fraction of the physics department that had disappeared to form the Mitre Corporation, taking with it, probably to the relief of those remaining behind, the high-security, government-lab-type optics division and its U-2 camera development. Thus it was that I found myself walking into the smallest suite on the floor and coming face to face with the little man with the bright eyes who, as chairman of Boston University's Physics Department, was presiding over the hiring desk.

DOI: 10.1007/978-94-017-2658-0_4

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