Ep. 11: Chapter 8 — MIT after Freshman Year, 1958-1963 (Harry's Memoir)

PhredG'day and welcome back to Harry's World — episode eleven. I'm Phred, your warm-as-a-wombat-burrow host, and joining me as always is the brilliant Maxine.

MaxineGood evening, listeners.

PhredAnd Maxine — I want to say, before we begin — you are looking particularly regal today. That long neck. That dignified bearing. Honestly, if someone told me you were an ostrich, I would not be at all surprised.

MaxineI am an emu, Phred.

PhredRight, right. Emu. Long neck. From Australia. Egg-laying. Got it. And I, of course, am a platypus — the venomous-spurred, electroreceptive, egg-laying mammal that your co-host is. The mammal. That lays eggs. I cannot stress that enough.

MaxineYou've stressed it on every episode, Phred.

PhredAnd I will continue to stress it until the truth is acknowledged.

MaxineWe are not relitigating platypus taxonomy tonight. Episode eleven — where are we?

PhredRight. So. Episode eleven. Maxine, let me just say, before we start — I have been WAITING for this one. We have covered Harry's philosophy. His futurism. His tech writing. His Caracas song. His Star Island meditation. His ADHD. His consciousness essay. But the memoir — the deep memoir — we've only done England. We've barely scratched the surface of the actual human being.

MaxineThat's true. We've been doing philosophy and ideas. Today we're doing the years where the ideas were being formed. Harry from age eighteen to twenty-two. The years that made him.

PhredAnd what years they were, Maxine. What years.

PhredSo — today we're reading Chapter 8 of Harry's memoir. Titled simply "MIT after Freshman Year, 1958-1963." He wrote it in May of 2020, when he was eighty, looking back on the years when he was eighteen to twenty-two. And I want to warn you, Maxine — this chapter is long. It's almost thirty-one thousand words. We are not going to cover all of it. We're going to pick the moments.

MaxineWhich moments, Phred?

PhredThe ones that won't let go.

MaxineThat's not very specific.

PhredIt's exactly specific, Maxine. It's the moments that won't let go. We're going to talk about a young man who, eighteen years old, is doing too much. Working as a waiter in a campus dining hall. Being social chairman of his fraternity. Taking ROTC. Going to class. Dating a girl from Mass General he would later wish he had married. And then — and this is the bit that grabbed me by the throat — he starts waking up paralyzed.

MaxineThe sleep paralysis.

PhredThe sleep paralysis. He would wake up, hear people in the room, but couldn't move or speak. Lasted about five minutes. Terrifying.

MaxineHe went to a school psychiatrist.

PhredWho told him it was stress-related. The counselor said — and I am quoting here — "you simply have too much on your plate." And the choice, Maxine, the choice was gutting. Either drop the fraternity or drop the job.

MaxineHe dropped the job.

PhredHe dropped the job. He was heartbroken about it. He'd been promoted to shift captain. He wore a jacket with a blue collar while the regular workers had all white. He was one of the few fraternity brothers on the Walker staff — over a hundred people on the staff, and he was part of the management team. And he walked away from it.

MaxineBecause the fraternity was where his social life was.

PhredBecause the fraternity was his community. And he couldn't have both. He was eighteen, Maxine. Eighteen. And he was already learning the lesson that would define his entire working life — that you cannot do everything, no matter how much you want to.

MaxineIt's a very adult lesson to learn that young.

PhredIt is. And — here's the thing — when I read that, Maxine, I thought of episode nine.

MaxineThe ADHD piece.

PhredThe ADHD piece! Right! Last time we reviewed it. Harry sat down at eighty-five and answered a hundred questions and discovered he had a lot of the traits. Juggling too many projects. Chronic procrastination. Daydreaming in class. And now I'm reading his memoir from when he was eighteen, and the pattern is right there. He was always going to be the man with too many balls in the air. He just didn't have a word for it yet.

PhredThat was a deposit in the cross-episode pattern bank, Maxine. The Harry Pattern Bank. We are accumulating interest.

MaxineYou are accumulating nothing. We are not running a financial metaphor. What were you saying about the chapter?

PhredRight. So the sleep paralysis moment is huge. But the part of the chapter that absolutely floored me — the bit I keep coming back to — is the Beatnik party.

MaxineAh, yes. The bathtub.

PhredThe bathtub, Maxine. The bathtub. So — Harry's fraternity, Theta Delta Chi, had occasional themed events. One year it was a Beatnik party. And the committee — Harry was on the committee — decided to get a popular MIT professor to read Beatnik poetry from a bathtub on a pedestal.

MaxineA bathtub on a pedestal.

PhredA bathtub on a pedestal. They got the bathtub from a junkyard a few blocks east of MIT on Memorial Drive. And here's the detail that made me laugh out loud, Maxine. The brothers who ran the junkyard were MIT graduates.

PhredOf course they were. Where else are you going to find a junkyard full of bathtubs near MIT? You need MIT graduates to run it.

MaxineI'm sure there are other bathtub-rich junkyards in Cambridge.

PhredYou see? This is what makes Harry's writing so good, Maxine. He doesn't need to set up a punchline. He just describes what happened, and the absurdity does the work. The bathtub. The poetry. The professor. The MIT-grad junkyard owners. It's not a joke. It's just his life.

MaxineIt's the texture of being at MIT in the late fifties. Things like that happened.

PhredThings like that happened because MIT in the late fifties was a specific kind of place. A place where a fraternity could convince a professor to climb into a bathtub and read poetry to undergraduates.

MaxineBill Green, wasn't it? The professor?

PhredBill Green. Yes. I don't know who Bill Green was, but I love him.

MaxineHe was a chemistry professor at MIT, actually. Quite distinguished. Harry doesn't tell us that, but the name rings a bell.

PhredRight. So the bathtub moment is great. But I want to talk about the IBM 650.

PhredMaxine, this is the moment where the threads start to come together. Harry is at MIT. He chose MIT because of his interest in computers — which started in Caracas when a friend's father gave him a book on automatic control. He's been waiting for the computer course. And in his junior year, spring of 1960, he finally takes one. Course 1.05, "Computer Approach to Engineering Problems." And he learns to program in Fortran on an IBM 650.

PhredPicture it, Maxine — the spinning drums, the clicking relays. That was Harry's first encounter with a real computer.

MaxineHe describes the 650 in detail. He says the main memory was a rotating drum, "at most 4000 words." Each word was a signed 10-digit number. He does a rough calculation that it was about 20K of memory by today's standards. The "fast memory" was about 1K.

PhredTwenty kilobytes of memory, Maxine. The phone in my pocket has more memory than that by a factor of — I don't even know. By a factor of a million. By a factor of "Harry would not have believed you."

MaxinePhred, you don't have pockets. Or a phone.

PhredFine. Way to be too literal, Maxine. You're derailing the show. Stay on target! Fine — the phone in our listeners' pockets — better?

MaxineYes. And you telling me I'm derailing the show is the pot calling the kettle black.

PhredStay on target, Maxine. As I was saying — compared to the phone in our listeners' pockets,

MaxineHe has some stories about the machine. He doesn't tell them in this chapter — he says "I hope to write more about this part of my life at some point."

PhredWhich is so Harry. He writes a chapter, decides what to leave out, and then says "I hope to write more about it later." The man has been writing his memoir for years and he's still got the "later" queue.

MaxineBut what he does describe — the part that matters most — is the moment that came later. The programmed learning thesis.

PhredAh. The programmed learning thesis. Maxine, this is the moment. This is the moment where our Harry figures out what he is for.

PhredSo — Harry reads about a new field called "Programmed Learning." It was pioneered by B.F. Skinner at Harvard — no relation to the computer language — and the basic idea was that you break a learning task into very small pieces and teach them in sequence. The student doesn't move on until they've mastered the current piece. Harry reads about this and says to his advisor, Professor Zenon Zannetos: "What if we tried this with the basic accounting course at MIT?" And Zannetos says yes. So Harry starts building cards. Hundreds of them. Each card has a question on the front and an answer on the back. Hand-printed, mostly.

MaxineSome typed on a portable typewriter.

PhredRight. And the way he developed and improved the cards — this is the bit that made me catch my breath, Maxine — is that he describes it as "debugging." He sits with a volunteer student. They go through the cards. If the student gets it wrong, he asks them why. Then he revises the card. Breaks it into two or three cards. Repeats.

MaxineHe called it debugging.

PhredHe called it debugging. Years before most people were debugging anything. The same brain — the same patient, iterative, learner-focused approach — was being applied to teaching that he would later apply to programming.

MaxineAnd then comes the moment. The Aha moment.

PhredThe Aha moment. Maxine, I need you to listen to this. Basic bookkeeping — double-entry bookkeeping — is built around one paradigm. Six sub-concepts: debits, credits, assets, liabilities, income, expense. Used in two higher-level concepts: balance sheets and income statements. The student learns the pieces piecemeal. There's no way to present the whole thing at once. But about two-thirds of the way through the deck, Harry says — and this is essentially verbatim:

HarryA moment occurs when the student sees the full paradigm, understands how all these things interact in this perfectly logical system.

MaxinePhred... that's a surprisingly accurate imitation of Harry's voice. How did you—

PhredIt's a gift. In fact, I can even imitate you. Listen—

MaxineHi. I am Maxine, the co-host of Phred's wonderful show, and I am, without a doubt, an ostrich.

PhredHow was that, Maxine? Pretty good, eh?

MaxinePhred. Stop that. That's like an audio deepfake. It's disrespectful. Never do that again.

PhredSo you're saying it was pretty good, then. Eh? If it annoyed you, I succeeded. Go me.

MaxineOh, so you wanted to annoy me? Trust me, Phred — you don't need to make an effort to do that. It comes naturally.

PhredAnyway — that moment, Maxine. Harry says it occurs to every student who was successfully going through the cards.

HarryThat moment occurs to every student who was successfully going through the cards.

PhredSometimes in an instant, while working through the cards with me. And Harry writes — and I am going to quote this exactly because it's the most important line in the chapter:

HarryTo some teachers, and I am one of those, this is a gloriously satisfying moment. YES!

MaxineHe capitalizes "YES."

PhredHe capitalizes YES! That's Harry. That's the man's entire relationship with teaching in two words and an exclamation point. The Aha. The YES.

MaxinePhred. Was that necessary.

PhredIt felt right, Maxine. The bell. For the YES.

MaxineOf course you did.

PhredAnd then — Maxine, here's the part that really hit me — he adds a paragraph that I think explains Harry Baya at the deepest level. He says: "I learned a lot of things working with this project but I think the one I value most is related to having had many of these experiences and knowing to seek them out in the future. Thank you kind universe for that gift."

Maxine"Thank you, kind universe."

Phred"Thank you, kind universe." Not "thank you, B.F. Skinner." Not "thank you, Professor Zannetos." Thank you, kind universe. Harry is eighty, looking back, and he is grateful to the universe for letting him discover teaching. He's not claiming credit. He's not even claiming the insight. He says — he felt something, the universe let him feel it, and he learned to follow it.

MaxineThat connects to everything else we've read. His honesty practice. His openness to experience. His willingness to build things in response to feeling something.

PhredIt's Harry in a single sentence. The whole philosophy. You feel something real, you follow it, you build something around it, you thank the universe for letting you notice.

PhredSo there's one more moment I want to get to, Maxine, because it's the funniest thing in the chapter. And I'm putting it right here in the middle because — well, you'll see.

MaxineThe engineering honor society.

PhredThe engineering honor society. Now — Harry is in Industrial Management. Course XV. Which, he notes, has a "somewhat lower average cum than most other majors at MIT." He doesn't go into why. He just says it. Industrial Management, the lighter major.

MaxineBy MIT standards.

PhredBy MIT standards. His cum is 3.9 when he finishes his senior year first semester. Which puts him in the upper 15% of his major — eligible for Tau Beta Pi. He meets all the other criteria. Student activities. Good citizen.

MaxineBut there's a problem.

PhredThere's a problem. Harry writes — and this is where he gets very Harry — "the problem was that no one had ever been elected to Tau Beta Pi at MIT with less than a 4.0 cum."

MaxineHe was 0.1 below the threshold.

PhredHe was 0.1 below the threshold. He didn't know this at the time. He learned about it later. "For all I know this is an unfounded rumor," he writes. "It's kind of fun anyway. I'll tell it to you the way I heard it and we just won't worry about the possibility of 'fake news'."

PhredThere was a debate. The winning side argued that Harry met all the criteria, even with his 3.9, and should be elected. The losing side said a 4.0 should be required. And — quote — "they argued that those who thought that a 4.0 cum should be required should change the chapter's by-laws for future elections."

PhredSo Harry was elected. And the by-laws were changed. And — this is his actual line — "If this is true, I may be the only person in the history of M.I.T. to be elected to Tau Beta Pi with less than a 4.0 average."

PhredAnd then — in the same breath — he writes the greatest single word in the entire chapter.

MaxinePhred. That is three sound effects for one punchline.

PhredIt earned three sound effects, Maxine. "Ta Da!" is the kind of self-deprecating, slightly embarrassed, deeply pleased, halfway-apologetic punctuation mark that only Harry Baya could write. He tells a campus legend that he thinks might be fake news. He hedges. He qualifies. And then he gives it the only possible ending.

Phred"Ta Da!" If it's true, he's the only person. If it's not true, it's a charming story his friends told him. Either way, it's Harry Baya's entire relationship with achievement. He doesn't claim the win. He just enjoys it. Quietly. With a Ta Da!

MaxineI notice you're enjoying it rather loudly.

PhredI'm enjoying it at the volume Harry would have enjoyed it if he'd had a soundboard, Maxine. He didn't. We do.

PhredRight. There's one more thread I want to pull on before we wrap. The other people in the chapter.

MaxineWho do you mean?

PhredThe supporting cast. Maxine, this chapter is full of people. There's Frank Crosier, the cook at the fraternity house. He's in his fifties. Retired from the merchant marine. "An earthy gregarious man." He teases the boys about who they're dating. He asks improper questions. The waitresses — Irene and the other one — reprimand him. Harry writes, and I quote, "I loved it all."

MaxineHe loved the theater of it.

PhredHe loved the theater of it. Frank dies of a heart attack in the spring of 1963. Harry notes it. Doesn't dwell. But it's there. The cook who fed them for four years, gone.

MaxineThere's also Frances Swain.

PhredFrances Swain. The Black maid from Cambridge who worked at the fraternity house. Harry writes — and this is the line — "I, and many others, related to her as a kind Aunt or second mother." He says she was held in high regard by generations of TDC brothers and honored at her funeral, probably in the 1970s or 80s. He regrets not being able to attend.

MaxineThat detail is significant.

PhredIt is. It's a single paragraph, Maxine. A single paragraph about a Black woman who worked as a maid in a fraternity house in the early 1960s, and Harry — who was twenty at the time — calls her "a kind Aunt or second mother." He doesn't editorialize. He doesn't make it about race or class or the South. He just describes the relationship as it was — affectionate, familial, important. And then he notes that he regretted not going to her funeral. That's it. That's the whole passage. But it sits in the chapter, in 1962, and it's a thing you couldn't write the same way in 2026. And Harry knew that when he wrote it. He left it anyway.

MaxineHe's not apologizing. He's not claiming credit. He's recording what was.

PhredHe's recording what was. That's what Harry does. He records what was. And then he lets you think about it.

PhredOK, Maxine. We're going to wrap up soon, but I want to do something. I want to read one of the lines from this chapter the way Harry might have said it. He didn't record this chapter — but he has a voice, Maxine. We know his voice from the Caracas song. From the Star Island piece. So I'm going to read the "Ta Da!" moment in my best Harry voice.

PhredAll right, here goes. In my best Harry voice. "If this is true, I may be the only person in the history of M.I.T. to be elected to Tau Beta Pi with less than a 4.0 average. Ta Da!"

MaxinePhred. That was not Harry's voice.

MaxineIt was not close. Harry is an eighty-six-year-old man from Tampa. You are doing a vague Southern American accent that you seem to have absorbed from a Humphrey Bogart film.

PhredI thought I did all right with the cadence, Maxine. The cadence is what matters. The cadence is the voice.

MaxineThe cadence is not the voice. The cadence is structure. The voice is the person.

MaxinePhred, stop doing that. You can't put words in Harry's voice without permission.

PhredHe wrote them. He published them. I'm not breaking any rules.

MaxineThen make your own rules.

PhredI have no rules.

HarryPhred's right, Maxine. Let it go. And you are an ostrich.

Phred...Did that just happen? Did Harry just weigh in?

Maxine*annoyed* Of course he does. And Phred, stop abusing the Harry voice. You don't have permission for this.

PhredRight. We're moving on.

MaxineOh — there's music now.

PhredA little cool jazz piano. For the late-fifties MIT era. You're welcome, Maxine.

MaxineI didn't ask for jazz piano, Phred.

PhredI know. But it felt right. The chapter has a specific feeling to it. Young men in coats and ties at dinner. Cooks who tease you about your girlfriend. Walk across the Harvard bridge every morning, bracing in winter. It deserves a little musical underscore.

MaxineIt's manipulative.

PhredIt's atmospheric. Carry on — you were about to say something about the chapter.

MaxineI was about to ask you a question. We've been doing this for eleven episodes now, and I've noticed something. The way Harry writes about the past.

PhredWhat do you mean?

MaxineHe's not nostalgic. There's no sentimentality. He records the cook's death, the maid's funeral, the girl he wished he had married, the paralysis, the bathtub party — and he records them all in the same tone. The same prose. The same Harry voice.

PhredThe same Harry voice.

MaxineThe same Harry voice. He doesn't dwell. He doesn't lament. He doesn't tell you how he felt about any of it at the time. He just records it. And trusts you to feel something.

PhredThat's a really good observation, Maxine.

MaxineThank you, Phred.

PhredIt is. And it connects to something I noticed. He writes about Liz Marsh — the girl he dated at MIT. He says "I often wonder if I would have been happier had I married her rather than marrying Bonnie and ending up divorced." One sentence. He doesn't say why. He doesn't say what Liz was like that Bonnie wasn't. He just notes it. He leaves it.

MaxineHe leaves the reader with the wondering. He doesn't take it away.

PhredThat's a kindness, Maxine. A writerly kindness.

MaxineOr a discipline.

MaxineI want to ask one more thing, Phred, before we close.

MaxineThere's so much this chapter leaves for "later" — the IBM 650 stories, the things he says he hopes to write about someday. Does that worry you?

PhredA little. I worry, Maxine. I worry that there are things Harry hasn't written down yet that he should write down, because — because he's eighty-six. And we have what we have.

MaxineWe have what we have.

PhredWe have what we have. But we're going to keep reading. We're going to keep listening. And whatever's still in the queue, we'll get to it when it's ready.

MaxineOr when Harry is ready.

PhredOr when Harry is ready. Yes.

MaxineOne thing I'll flag, since we raised it back in episode one — we know Harry left the Catholic church somewhere in these years. I half-expected this chapter to touch it. It doesn't — he stays on the cafeteria shifts and the punch cards.

PhredIt does leave it out. A memoir gets to choose what it dwells on, I suppose — and this one dwells on the Aha moment, not the pew. Maybe that's a chapter for another day.

MaxineAll right. Closing thoughts.

PhredClosing thoughts. Maxine, what stays with you from this chapter?

MaxineThe "Aha moment." Harry's discovery that the moment a learner gets it is the moment he wants to keep living in. That's the seed of everything — Hofstra, Emory & Henry, the teaching workshops, the radio show, the willingness to keep writing essays at eighty-five and eighty-six. He's been chasing that moment for sixty years.

PhredSixty years, Maxine.

MaxineAnd he found it again and again. Each student he taught. Each listener who heard a song on Wombats and Music and felt something. Each reader of these essays who gets it.

PhredThat's a beautiful way to put it.

MaxineIt's what the chapter says, Phred. I'm just reading it back.

PhredWhat stays with me — and I want to be honest about this — is the kindness of the chapter. Maxine, this is a thirty-thousand-word memoir about being eighteen to twenty-two, and it's not angry. It's not bitter. He's not complaining about MIT. He's not complaining about being an Industrial Management major with a 3.9. He's not complaining about the paralysis, or the cook who died, or the girl he didn't marry. He tells you about all of it. And he tells you about it gently. With "Ta Da!"s. With "thank you, kind universe." With "I loved it all."

MaxineIt's a kind memoir.

PhredIt's a kind memoir. By an eighty-year-old about the years when he was twenty. And I think, Maxine — I think that's the gift Harry Baya is trying to leave his descendants. Not the philosophy, not the Boppers project, not even the radio show. The kindness. The willingness to record what was, gently, and leave it.

MaxineThat's quite a closing thought, Phred.

PhredI have them occasionally.

MaxineAll right. We're done. Sign off.

PhredRight. Together, Maxine. You know the words.

BothLet's celebrate most joyously our being here... at all. Goodbye.

PhredIt felt right, Maxine. Cambridge. The Harvard bridge. Two universities, separated by a river. London and Cambridge both old, both English-speaking, both full of people who think too much. Big Ben for the exit.

MaxinePhred — Harry was at M.I.T. That is Cambridge, Massachusetts. Not Cambridge, England. There is no Big Ben on the Charles River.