Achilles Perry, president of the Brooklyn Tech Alumni Association, and the proud graduate
Happens that I never graduated from high school, the reason being that I quit school as soon as I was old enough, which was 17. I had several reasons for doing that, but the one I prefer to give when asked that question is the one given by my friend John Brunner when he quit in England, at about the same age. That was, “I had to leave school, because it was interfering with my education.” (In case you wonder, I didn’t go to college, either. I did teach at several and lectured at scores if not hundreds of them, all the way from local community two-year schools to the Ivy League, in maybe a dozen different countries as well as our own, but I never attended one.)
My diploma
Anyway, this summer, along comes a letter from a man named Jeffrey Haitkin, who is a successful businessman and an officer of the Brooklyn Technical High School Alumni Association. He states that he had been reading me since he himself was in Brooklyn Tech, but he had had no idea I had been to school there until he read the novel I co-wrote with Arthur Clarke, The Last Theorem,
I was flabbergasted. It was one of the kindest things that any total stranger had, without warning, ever stepped up and done for me. I showed the letter to Betty Anne and she was as touched as I was. So I wrote him to say I would be honored to accept and so on August 20, Jeff Haitkin, with Achilles Perry, the president of the Alumni Association, and Ned Steele, their volunteer press person, flew out from EWR to ORD and wound up in the library of my home, where the presentation was made before their cameras and one from the New York Times.
And I couldn’t be more pleased.
I do have one problem, though. I remember matchbook ads for a correspondence school, back in the days when people still carried matchbooks, which promised that people who got a high-school diploma would get $25 more a week. The problem is I don’t know whom to bill.
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