A tortuous journey through formal education

This page is just a memoir of what I studied shuffling through two high schools, three undergraduate colleges, law school, marriage, graduate law school, and a graduate university for the decade from September 1949 through August 1959.

During the summer of 1952, I worked full time as a farm laborer shoveling manure all day. I learned planed surveying on Saturday and Sunday.

During the summer of 1953, I worked all day as an instrumentman for a survey party doing the precision baseline for the Garden State Parkway in northern New Jersey. I commuted into Manhattan four nights a week to study Zoology and continued to study advanced plane surveying all weekend.

During the summers of 1954 and 1955, I worked full time as an engineering associate at the RCA Research Laboratories in Rocky Point down the road from Nikolai Tesla’s Wardenclyffe laboratory and the low frequency transatlantic transmission towers which formed the basis of RCA Communications. After work for an hour or more, I studied with Clarence Hansell, a co-founder of RCA with General David Sarnofff and William A. Miller whose PhD thesis had been classified top secret during World War II and whose breakthroughs in optics made possible the picture identification of the Russian missles in Cuba during the Kennedy administration.

During Law School from September 1955 through the fall of 1957 I worked full time as assistant to the Treasurer of Local 802, The Associated Musicians of Greater N.Y, AFL/CIO. I became a licensed Workers’ Compensation Claimant’s Representative and immediately began trying complex occupation disease cases through the fall of 1958.

I was married in December 1958 and passed the March 1959 New York State Bar Examination. While waiting for the Bar Exam results, I did post-graduate legal studies and post grtaduate study in Philosophy. While awaiting admission to the Bar I continued post graduate Philosophy studies through the summer.

During the Summer of 1959, while waiting for admission to the Bar, I continued graduate studies in Philosophy.

The following chart was necessitated after I was admitted to the New Yorik State Bar in October, 1959. As I made the rounds looking for work as an attorney, potential employers did not believe I had any education except the “trade school” education at a second tier law school. All they were interested in is the fact that I did not have an undergraduate college degree nor did I really have a college alma mater. However I did have an education, unconventional as it seemed.

Years later during the Agent Orange litigation the question of my lack of a conventional formal education much less the career path of the pampered princes of privilege who had moved from top 10 law schools through the Courts as Judicial Clerks and into partner track positions at the major law firms representing the chemical company war contractors, became part of the litigation.

1949-1959_VJYjr_formalEducation
1949-1959_VJYjr_formal Education