She had grown up a Presbyterian in rural western Pennsylvania, and though she was no longer a Christian when we met-she was reading one of Bertrand Russell’s atheist tracts at the time-she was still a Republican. But what made my attraction to her so powerful was the things she said when our conversation turned to politics and religion. Her smile lit up the moody gothic halls of the campus in a way that left me in awe. Julie was as beautiful a girl as I had ever met in my life.
#AIR HOCKEY PUCKS FULL#
A couple of weeks later, we drove up to Harvard in a car full of students to take part in the off-topic debate tournament being held over the weekend. That was the first time we really talked. That night, we met at the student-run café under Murray-Dodge Hall, where the tables were lit with a single candle and the air was tinged with cinnamon from the cookies baking in the back room. The next day, we sat together in Professor Wilkinson’s introductory physics course, which the students called “the magic show.” We applauded as he successfully performed the experiments after describing them in chalk on the blackboard behind him. We ended up moving to an empty air table and doing the lab together. When Julie brought her camera over to my table, I responded to her by name and asked if her birthday was June 6, which was my birthday as well. There were three students in my class with the same birthday, all of them women, and I had memorized their names, thinking it might be useful in starting a conversation. I had dutifully looked up every freshman who had the same birthday as mine, June 6. Each photograph was accompanied by the student’s name, hometown, and birthday. In those days, before the internet, the university printed up a physical book called a face book, which had the pictures of more than a thousand incoming freshmen in it. I recognized her immediately from the face book. Julie had been assigned to the lab group working at the air table next to mine, and she came over to ask for help operating the camera. If you did it right, you could measure the velocity of the two pucks before and after the collision, and show that the total velocity times mass remained the same even though the speed of the pucks had changed.
#AIR HOCKEY PUCKS SERIES#
It was the conservation of momentum experiment, in which you used a camera and a strobe to capture a series of images of hockey pucks colliding on an air table. Julie and I had met in physics lab a few weeks after arriving on campus.
We’d been on the campus for only five months at that time, and our lives were already quite full. Why found a magazine instead of doing schoolwork? It cannot have been the obvious thing to do.
The magazine is still being published at Princeton today. The first issue of our magazine, The Princeton Tory, appeared in October and was followed by five more issues during the academic year. He smiled and said: “It looks like someone has been reading Burke.” We won our first year’s funding at this meeting. Once there, we were ushered into an office where a man behind a desk was looking over the paperwork we had sent him.
We were both freshmen at Princeton, and we were on our way to Irving Kristol’s Institute for Educational Affairs, where we hoped to find funding to start a conservative student magazine. In February of 1984, I took the train to New York with a young woman named Julie, who would later be my wife.
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