Gary Sloane:  

Early admission to Antioch College got me out of Great Neck and the fun of senior year (Mr. Davis, the health teacher, physically prevented Maya Doner and me from attending our own high school graduation) but it was an exciting year in Ohio, with civil rights demonstrations, trombone gigs at other colleges, and a co-op job on The Cleveland Press. I didn't have such a good time later at Stony Brook but did get some good offers for grad school. I swore to leave the country if Nixon got elected, so I moved to Montreal to take a research assistantship at McGill but left, after a very interesting summer of '68, for UC Irvine, where I was able to teach classes as well as explore my own interests, which turned out to be sociolinguistics, the sociology of ordinary life (think Seinfeld but not as funny), history of science (think Wilhelm Reich), and experimental psychology. When my doctoral committee crumbled (the first chairman quit to play piano in Europe, the second died in a traffic accident) and the Human Subjects Committee wouldn't authorize my social psychology experiments, I dropped the dissertation and took a factory job. My parents had always warned that if I quit school, I'd have to work in a (gulp!) factory, so it was interesting to do some stultifying, repetitive physical labor for a while and get a check at the end of the week. A short first marriage was less rewarding. I had also become more political by this time, and I stayed on that track for ten years, ...Expand for more