Cecil A. Partee Memoir - University of Illinois Springfield

A: But they said, "You can go somewhere else and we'll pay your tuition."
So I came to Northwestern and they paid my tuition. At Northwestern, they
asked me if I wanted a job and I said, "Yes," and they gave me a job in the
library. The job in the library paid my tuition. So they gave me that in
cash, you see. They just gave me--1 think the tuition was maybe, oh, three or
four hundred dollars a semester, something like that. SO I just got cash for
that.
I worked on the weekends. I waited table in nightclubs on the weekends. So,
I would go to school five days a week without working. I would work Friday
night and Saturday night, and sometimes Sunday afternoon or evening, waiting
table, but I had five days when I was going to school that I wasn't working.
Q: You could study.
A: So I went to day-school and they had an accelerated course over there. I
went to school forty-eight weeks a year so I finished Northwestern eight days
short of two calendar years. We had three semesters a year, you see. We
had a couple weeks out at Christmas, a week in the spring between the spring
semester and the summer semester and a week out between the summer semester and
the fall semester. So that's four weeks off during the year.
Q: Yes, sir.
A: So that's why I said forty-eight weeks a year so you could finish in two
years.
Q: Yes, sir. That must have been quite a grind. How many hours did you carry
for a semester?
A: Full, full semester.
Q: About eighteen hours or so?
A: Yes, because you know, I finished in six semesters.
Q: Did you have any real problem with that? Did you ever think you weren't
going to make it because of the . . .
A: Well, Monday was always a hard day because if I worked Sunday night,
Monday could be tough. I used to take these little tablets called No-Doz to
keep from going to sleep. But the trouble with that is you would go through
school but by the time you were close to the evening, Monday afternoon, you
were just really dead, you know, sleepy as hell. Because everything that
brings you up, brings you down, you know; you, there's a . . . But I made it.
Almost went back to Texas with the dean. The dean over there was a man who
had formally been dean at Yale and then he came to Northwestern. Named Leon
Green. He was a very outstanding torts professor, had written a book in torts
and had given birth to a theory called the "Rationale of Proximate Cause" in
torts. And he was leaving Northwestern, retiring, when I left, when I