Several factors went into my choice of Princeton Seminary for my theological training.

One was that I had stayed home for my undergraduate education, and going East for seminary training would broaden my experience.

Another was the prestige which was attached to the Eastern seminaries, compared with the Presbyterian seminary at San Anselmo in Marin County.

My pastor at St. John's, Dr. Hunter, was a graduate of Union Seminary in New York, so there was a pull in that direction. However, in discussing choices with John Oliver Nelson, who was a "recruiter" for the denomination, I concluded that the more traditionally orthodox seminary in Princeton, N. J. would give me another broadening experience.

Money was a problem even though I had saved some of my Quaker Oats salary. But I was assured through correspondence with Princeton that financial aid would be available to help me through, and I expected to work while going to school, as I had done during my U. C. years.

In planning my trip across the country to Princeton, I was helped by a friend of the family who was in the travel business. The cheapest way to go was by Trailways bus.

The buses were much less luxurious than they became later, and I found my knees were usually very close to the seat in front of me. There were no rest rooms in the bus, however, so we stopped every couple of hours, and I could stretch my legs during the rest stop.

The route was largely over terrain now traversed by Interstate 80, through Salt Lake City, Cheyenne, and Omaha to Chicago. In my first letter from Princeton to my parents, I expressed relief at being able to take a shower at the YMCA Hotel in Chicago after three days and two nights on the bus.

That letter also mentioned a conversation with a fellow passenger. She was from New York City, and was returning from South Dakota. Our discussion of West vs. East was climaxed when she came back from sending a telegram and commented:

"We're back in the East again. I'm sure of it now. Everybody's rude to you."

From Chicago I took a detour by way of Buffalo, N. Y. where my friends Kenneth and Margaret Davis were living. The route included going through Windsor, Ontario at night, with the idea (proposed by the tour guide) that I could see Niagara Falls on the way to Buffalo.

I slept fitfully through the night on the bus, not wanting to miss Niagara Falls. As dawn came, I discovered that the nearest we would come to the Falls was several miles away, and the intervening scenery blocked the view.

(This frustration made me enjoy all the more my first return visit to Niagara Falls with Carol in 1987).

After a pleasant visit with the Davises, I came on down to Princeton and settled into dormitory life, with Wendell Wollam as my roommate.

The dorm rooms were assigned by lot, and we drew a double room in Hodge Hall. The bathroom was two floors down, and the whole setup was very old fashioned even by the standards of the day. The electricity was 220 volt current, so I had to rent a crude adapter provided by the seminary to run my radio.

One immediate concern was getting a part time job. Church positions, called "field work" in seminary jargon, were available to most students later on. But I hadn't arranged for such work in advance, assuming I could do better after being on the grounds, or that I could get a "secular" job in Princeton.

Wendell Wollam turned out to be more enterprising than I was in landing a job, through fellow students who were giving up their jobs with a local residential hotel called The Peacock Inn.

The proprietor had been in the habit of hiring seminary students to take turns as night clerk, acting as cashier for the late patrons in the dining room, then manning the switchboard and acting as a sort of night watchman during the night.

As the job was explained to me via the "retiring" students (not by the boss), I would have to work only two nights a week, the duties were not strenuous, the ice cream in the kitchen was a fringe benefit, and one could either sleep or study during the wee hours.

After I was into the routine, I found myself working at least three nights a week, and the boss complained about the loss of "certain items" from the kitchen.

One night I fell asleep beside the switchboard and was aroused by the regular cashier who lived in one of the upstairs rooms. One of the residents, a Mrs. Stockton, had stuffed herself at dinner and was suffering from the consequences. She had tried to call a doctor, but calls from the rooms had to go through the switchboard, and I was too sound asleep to hear the buzzing. She finally got the cashier, who came down to rouse me. I put the call through to the doctor, and Mrs. Stockton was placated. But the owner, a Mr. Benham, made it clear that we were to remain alert throughout the night.

Sunday afternoon was one of the few periods during the week when I could relax, and I usually tuned in to Harry Emerson Fos dick's national broadcast. On Dec. 7, 1941 he had just started his weekly sermon when it was interrupted by the first news of the attack on Pearl Harbor. Then the sermon was put back on the air, only to be interrupted again. Finally the sermon was scrubbed and the network began repeating and expanding the news coverage of the attack.

Over the week end, the seminary students scattered to various church jobs, so the next gathering of the eating clubs was on Monday morning. One of our Benham Club members was Katsuo (Arnold) Nakajima, who was an American of Japanese descent from Berkeley. As we waited for breakfast at the Club, we were agreed that we should reassure "Naki" of our undiminished friendship and trust. But as the minutes dragged on and he hadn't appeared, we began to wonder whether he was staying away out of embarrassment or possible hostility.

Finally the door was flung open and a small figure appeared wearing an overcoat and dark glasses, with a hat pulled down over his eyes. He announced: "My name is Smith!" Everybody cracked up, and that eliminated further anxiety or discussion for the moment.

The war seemed much closer and grimmer when oil from tankers sunk by Nazi submarines began washing up on Atlantic beaches, and the nightly blackout restrictions were more rigorously enforced. When the evacuation of all Japanese from the West Coast was announced, I tried to tell everyone who was willing to listen that I thought this was unfair to American citizens of Japanese descent. But the general feeling was that this was one of many wartime restrictions on personal freedom, and that it probably protected loyal "Japanese" from attack by vigilante type citizens. The true nature of the "relocation camps" as prison type installations in some very unpleasant locations was not revealed until much later.

Desperate as I was to earn money, it seemed obvious that Mr. Benham was taking advantage of us. He was getting college graduates to do a job which involved being able to speak and behave as gentlemen to the patrons we met in the evening, or at the switchboard. We were also doing work which he would have had trouble getting any dependable person to do at night.

So I pointed out to him when I got to speak to him one evening, that he was paying us 21 cents an hour for eight hours' work. That was low even for those times, and I suggested a raise to 25 cents an hour.

He seemed shocked that men preparing for the ministry would be so worldly as to calculate our hourly wage, or to think that he was being less than generous. He announced that he would replace all of us. By that time, Wendell had gotten a job with the Presbyterian Church of Upper Montclair (N. J.), so I was the main job loser. I suspect that Mr. Benham had trouble finding adequate replacements, but at that point my main concern was finding a replacement job for myself.

Fortunately, the seminary field office arranged for me to begin preaching on Sundays at a little church near Princeton in the village of Monmouth Junction. The "junction" was where the shuttle train from Princeton connected with the main line of the Pennsylvania Railroad, which at that time carried a heavy load of passengers as well as freight between New York and points south. The shuttle train was locally known as the P. J. & B. (Princeton Junction and Back). Some of the residents of Monmouth Junction were former railroad employees, and the general flavor of the congregation was working class rather than the kind of Presbyterian Church that many of my colleagues seemed to assume was the proper reward for a Princeton graduate.

One evening the retiring pastor and a couple of his elders came to call on me formally in my seminary room, and solemnly offered me the position as pastor. They explained that they could only offer $600 a year as salary, and when I pointed out that this would require me to do other work as well, they said they understood.

I began this new work a few weeks later, and found it a real challenge in many ways. The people were mostly elderly and very conservative compared to my West Coast experience. The organist, for example, looked over the copy of the "new" (1933 edition) Presbyterian hymnal but rejected it in favor of the gospel song book the congregation had been using. Her comment was: "Most of them songs (in the official hymnal) just ain't purty.".

Another problem was that the pulpit was low and close to the front row of seats, and I felt the people sitting there could have read my sermon notes almost as well as I could, if they could read upside down. So for that reason as well as for the sake of more direct communication with this non scholarly group, I developed a more informl style of preaching than the style being taught in the seminary.

The friendliness of the people was a big factor in making the job easier, and there were some surprises.

For example, one day during the summer I was taken to Ocean Grove, where the Methodists had established a "Christian" resort (no cars on Sunday, etc.) and where various evangelistic preachers and Bible study leaders held forth. My host from Monmouth Junction seemed like the epitome of the pious patriarch, but he confided to me as we walked on the beach that he had decided to choose his wife as a marriage partner because she refused to have sex with him on Sunday. She was evidently less squeamish on the other days of the week. The other girls he dated seemed to be willing to violate the Fourth Commandment as well as the Seventh, so he decided that this was the girl for him.

I made no comment on this, but it seemed more shocking at the time than the attitude and behavior of some of my fellow salesmen from Quaker Oats days who took such pleasures where they could while on the road.

Before I started my official duties at Monmouth Junction, I went down to Trenton to give an Easter breakfast talk to the youth group at the First Presbyterian Church there.

The night before, I dropped in to see my old friend from Berkeley, David Newhall, who had come with his new bride Geraldine to Princeton for graduate study in philosophy. David was in the university infirmary with a temporary ailment, but his cousin Carol had come down from Englewood to visit him, and had been persuaded to stay with Gerry overnight. In reporting this in a Ietter home a few days later, I couldn't remember her last name, but I remembered the visit very favorably.

The next morning, I missed the 6:10 a.m. bus to Trenton, and spent an anxious hour waiting for the next one while cars sped by me at the bus stop. Fortunately, the breakfast was slow to begin, and all went well for the rest of the day until I decided to save the 30 cent bus fare by hitch hiking home. But I walked in the wrong direction and had problems in getting home. That evening I had more bus trouble when I went down to the little town of Ewing where I had been working with the young people of that church, and I wound up getting back to my room at 10:30 p.m. I mention these details as examples of the problem of getting around without a car during those war years, even in a part of the country where bus service was much more extensive than it was on the West Coast then.

In order to get to my church at Monmouth Junction, I rode a bicycle back and forth. When the weather got warm, I had some interesting experiences in trying to conduct services and visit parishioners while feeling as though I had taken a shower with my clothes on, because of sweating so much in pedalling my bike.

That Spring (1942) I worked part time in the seminary library. During the first part of the summer, while the dormitories were closed, I had a room under the attic in a house belonging to one of the seminary janitors in the town of Kingston, just north of Princeton.

One of my memories of that experience was waking up to hear a strange sound coming from the roof. After a moment of confusion, I realized the strange sound was rain on the roof. As a Northern Californian, I wasn't prepared to experience rain during the summer.

The weather was hot and muggy on the day late in July when I took off for California. I must have looked silly to the natives as I walked down the street carrying my overcoat on top of my suitcase on the way to the train station. But I knew I would need the overcoat when I got off the train in S. F.

When I got back to Princeton in August, I stayed in the home of a vacationing seminary professor until the dorms reopened. A senior student was looking for a roommate, so I moved two flights up from my former room, 215 Hodge Hall, to room 403. My new roommate was Harold (Jack) Ogden.

In a letter home shortly after school started again, I mentioned having enjoyed a picnic with Dave and Gerry Newhall and his cousin. I reported: "Dave's cousin, Carol Burroughs held up her end of the discussion (and mine, for the most part), very well too." Note that our discussion had not included the proper spelling of her family name.

However, the "big" news in the letter was that I had bought a 1936 Olds coupe for $175, borrowing $115 from the bank and agreeing to pay $20 a month for six months, with interest total ling $3.75. This seemed like a great luxury. As a "clergyman", I got more gas rationing stamps than most drivers were allowed. On Sunday mornings when I drove out to the church, mine was often the only car in sight on U. S. 1, a crowded highway during peacetime before and later.

During the Christmas break, I tackled another job: working as a laborer at Camp Belle Mead, an army supply depot near Somerville, a few miles north of Princeton. I was assigned to a crew that was supposed to clear brush and trees, but the snow on the ground and the cold air made such work almost impossible, especially since the crew was not dressed and equipped for the job. Since I had done office work and could type, I spent the rest of the time working in a warm office at a typewriter, instead of suffering in the winter cold. It made me think of the British celebrating Christmas at Trenton, while Washington and his men were crossing the Delaware. Fortunately, the Second World War was more successful for the Americans than the Revolutionary War was for the British, despite the more favorable conditions for our side (or at least for me) in the latter case.