User:Robbie
Robbie's User Page[s]
My personal profile for the Tech committee
I was born in 1939 in Manhattan, where my parents lived and worked, unusual types -- Depression YUPPIES, father on Wall Street in investent banking and mother on 7th Avenue, designing Junior Miss dresses. In 1942, they decided to try the commuting life, 6:45am to 7:30pm, 5, sometimes 6 days a week. That left me, an only child, to develop a taste for independent living, overseen by a maid and a caretaker, both none-too-attentive, to explore the secrets of our 65 bucolic acres, much expanded by the watershed of a shallow stream which reassuringly always flowed in a direction pointing away from my backyard.
In 1945, I was introduced to formal education at the Buckingham Friends School.[1] After 2 years, results were sufficiently disasterous to convince my parents, along perhaps with other, unstated reasons, to get us a NYC apartment and find me a better school, the Buckley School for Boys [still!].[2] I got along — I'd already developed an observant eye and a lively mind, I took to sports and developed comraderie with others, and despite indocility did well enough to move on academically.
Hence, in 1953, I went to Deerfield Academy where I did well enough academically and better in sports, playing football and lacrosse and becoming captain of the a highly ranked swim team. Owing to legacy status and excellent test scores, along with academics that consistently showed "great promise," I was an early admit to Princeton, Class of '61. Freshman year, I managed to do, not enough, but far too little, right at the brink of flunking out. After a rare heart-to-heart with my father, I resolved to buckle down and to figure out what in life was actually worth working for. Princeton lived up to the idea that a good university was a place where you could make mistakes and learn from them. I worked my way back and graduated with high honors, having majored in history and the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs undergraduate section.