Baltimore Polytechnic Institute
Class of '56

A meeting of the Poly56 reunion committee was held May 27, 2009 at the Olive Garden Restaurant in White Marsh, MD.  In attendance were Fred Altman, Bob Calder, Ed Koehler, Denny Meadowcroft, Yogi Savetman and Chris Vale. The agenda was:
  1. Classmates found: Howard Colligan - February class president, Kenneth Cerf and John Hamilton Cox.
    Classmates deceased: Andrew "Paul" Cox - 2009 and Wally Albach - committee member 2008, both were at the 50th reunion.
  2. We decided to add a list of deceased members to the website.
  3. We will hold our 55th reunion in 2011!  It will probably be a bull roast at a site to be determined at a later date.
  4. We discussed Poly's "E2 Club", for those that graduated more than 50 years ago.
Yogi and Chris brought us up-to-date on our website.  Yogi will add a guestbook so that classmates and visitors may leave notes, and Chris will be writing a new column for us.
50th reunion pictures
June 17, 2006
List of the Lost
Yes, we still have classmates that we can't find!  Help!
Deceased Class Members
Classmates & site visitors,
sign our guest book
E-mail the Committee
Use this link to contact
Denny and/or Yogi
Visit the Poly Website
We are sure proud of our school!
See Chris Vale's new!article regarding Poly's lack of biological science courses when he attended the school.
Additional articles by Vale have been archived here
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Desert of the Bi-Sci

by Christopher Vale ©2009		 Christopher Vale (after)

From studying the curriculum offered back in the 50's it is clear that Poly's purpose was to convert wild spirits into technologists.  Counting the courses (A, B, and G) and tallying over four years:   there were 33 engineering classes, including 18 various drawing disciplines; 12 science and 18 practice classes.  An ancient colleague styled mathematics as "the queen of science", and we had a royal array of 28 classes in math.  There were no offerings in biology or in any life-science.
 
   Of course, you might count physical education and hygiene as biology.  I recall sitting around the gym in our phys-ed skivvies hearing about the dangers of catching diseases from girls.  They handed out pamphlets which, to me at least, were incomprehensible at the time.
 
   In the 1890's the school taught anatomy and physiology.  I don't know if the biology gap has been closed.  For me the lack of life-science courses meant I couldn't tell the difference between etymology and entomology.  Speaking of which, I presume the fishermen in the Sportsmen's Club knew how to selectively put insects and worms on fish hooks to catch the desired fish.  And the same folks probably knew how to gut and skin their catch.  The Aquaria Club, on the other hand, studied how to preserve and propagate fish--presumably inedible.  It would have been interesting if the aquarists had raised trout and bass for the sportsmen.
 
   In addition to the actual curriculum there is indeed the "something else" effect.  That is, if getting a passing grade depends on working your ass off, and you do, then you will learn all your biology (or art, or management, or whatever) in college because you learned how to learn in high school.
 
   That this must be true was demonstrated at the 50th reunion of Class of 56.  Some of our classmates are MDs and others have careers biology related fields.  My earning career didn't require biology.  A youthful ideal was to achieve the engineering in Figure 1; but my actual design efforts contributed to the useful device of Figure 2.  The closest approach to biology for me is gardening by the trial and error method.  I need more trial and less error.
 
Figure 1 - Steam
Figure 1 - Steam (woooo-woooo!!!) 		Figure 2 - Radar
Figure 2 - Radar (beeep-beeep!!!)

Christopher Vale - Poly '56
06/02/09
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