What made Stuyvesant High School so good?
JDT: From Stuyvesant, it was Amherst College. Why? SL: Mr. Hart, the assistant headmaster at Stuyvesant, had gone to Amherst. My sister Florence, who is 3 years older than I am, was dating someone who had gone to Amherst and seemed very sophisticated at the age of 24. He said that Amherst was the best college in America. Mr. Hart thought it would be a great place for me to go, and he offered to write me a letter of recommendation. I was accepted without an interview! I arrived at Amherst by train with a big trunk, never having been out of New York State. I walked about utterly stunned by the beauty of the surroundings. I felt I was in a foreign milieu. JDT: What was foreign? SL: It was culture shock for a Jewish boy from Brooklyn. I would stay up late at night writing letters to my parents as if I had landed in the central highlands of New Guinea and was describing the habits of other tribes. Everybody drank-heavily. A huge proportion of my classmates came from divorced families. I had
