A Life of Comically Calamitous Close Calls: New Haven, Connecticut (Summer 1972), Part One

Victor Davis Hanson

I was teen-aged, broke, had never been out of the state, or flown anywhere. And I quickly learned the Greek class was mostly for graduate students in history, philosophy, and linguistics, with a few undergraduate Latin students who wished to take Greek.

The course was designed to help students master all of Greek grammar in eight weeks, with classes from 8:00 AM to noon five days a week, and then homework for the afternoons.

Note: I knew very little about grammar, syntax, or etymology. My ignorance was not that “accusative,” “nominative,” and “dative” were unknown terms, but rather I was shaky on things like “indirect object” in English and transitive versus intransitive verbs. But at that point, I thought learning Greek in eight weeks would be no more difficult than driving a Ford Jubilee with a lightweight disk down the vine row.

The immediate result when I landed in New Haven in June and soon thereafter checked into the Yale dorms (after the kindly professor picked me up at the tiny New Haven airport and let me stay with his family over the weekend), was that I was in cultural shock.

The summer dorm was mostly empty, but I was unprepared for campus life. I had just enough money to pay for the ticket and tuition. My parents agreed to give me $1,500 dollars, about $3 a day for food, and I had saved $1,000 from wages on the farm. So I did not buy Yale health insurance, nor the Yale meal plan, nor any add-ons from Yale. Before I left Fresno, I had no idea what Yale was, or even where it was.

I was completely overwhelmed the first week. We were by the first Friday already on the Greek third declension and had finished all the forms (person, singular/plural) and tense and mood of active and passive regular verbs (360 or so possible different prefixes and suffixes to the root).

Everyone there except me had four to five years of Latin while I was trying to figure out what the word declension meant. The solution? I went over to a burger place every afternoon after class, ate a greasy cheeseburger and coke, and then went to my room and studied and did homework until 7:00 PM. Then I went back and had a greasy pizza for dinner. I then returned and studied from 8:00 PM to midnight, and rose at 6:00 AM for class prep.

By week three, I recall I was no longer the worst of the 10 students but only second worst (a young Wellesley girl blew off her homework and just winged the class). This went on for seven weeks. I climbed to B-status and started to be able to read simple sentences from the New Testament. (The graduate students were already reading Xenophon on their own and bored with the easy Greek of the New Testament.)

Then Nemesis arrived. On the seventh Monday, I woke up with a fever and sore throat. No problem: lozenges and aspirin and back to work.

By Tuesday, I could hardly walk. No problem, just drink liquids. By Wednesday, I bought a thermometer, and it was 103.5, so I walked well over a mile down to a clinic.

It was a wild part of town. At the ER, very quickly, they diagnosed me with “advanced strep, with possible rheumatic fever.” They inserted a tube in my throat and sprayed something in it. I stayed there until 9:00 PM, had a penicillin shot, and then walked out with 21 days of antibiotics.

Then, when I turned the corner back to Yale, I was mobbed by a gang of 10 or so African-American youths—all girls with sharp brush handles pointed toward me! It was a sort of clownish circus rather than a mugging. A few began kicking me and grabbing at my wallet. I yelled, “I just got out of the hospital. I’m sick and contagious. Get away, or you’ll die.”

All but two fled. The two who didn’t almost politely asked for a $10 “we’re saving you ‘fee’.” I had nine dollars, and they left with what little I had.

I walked to the dorm, slept the next two days, and tried to finish the seventh and eighth weeks. I even got a B in the class. I lost 20 pounds and came home at 6’1” and 127 pounds. My poor parents, whom I told I had a “tiny sore throat”, were aghast and took me to the local doctor. He said, “Enough antibiotics,” and assured my parents I didn’t have rheumatic fever, at least not anymore. And then he pumped me up with painkillers and a steroid and told me to go to bed for a month. I did for two weeks.

A few weeks later, I enrolled for my second year at UCSC in fall 1972. I vaguely remember I had zero energy until Christmas, a pattern I would experienced for the next half-century following any viral illness.

In any case, for the fatigue, I went to the UCSC clinic, and a quite young intern, after all sorts of tests, said, “You have post-viral fatigue, not serious, but you may have this problem every time you get sick. Your white blood count is very low, etc.” Quite prescient.

Looking back, why would one not simply take a week off from the class or withdraw? Or not visit a doctor at the first sign of a sore throat? Or not join the Yale health plan, no matter what the cost?

I have never answered those questions or learned from my initial brush with fate, but had I, life would have been just a bit easier.

So, first brush with a serious bout of illness passed without warning of far worse to come…