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By Root 1264 0

even, with the Elvis song “I Feel So Bad” caroming around in his head. He lived on campus and campus was hemmed into Kenmore Square, where he resided in the men’s dormitory, Leavitt Hall, 645 Beacon Street, room 629—a few blocks from Fenway Park, where some other men played baseball. So he had no choice but to find new bushes in a nearby park, wedged between college buildings, enclosed by a wrought iron fence, where he could keep himself company. “I would occasionally see Andy after eleven o’clock at night alone in the park and we would speak briefly,” recalled fellow Leavitt resident Jonathan Kleiner. “Several times, rather than return a greeting, he would speak in a high-pitched tone, with words that did not seem to be words at all, and certainly not English words. And at times he would not use words at all, but just a collection of sounds, as if he could convey his thoughts or expressions without putting voice to them.” Um, eee-bi-da? Sebella gussh! Sebenye metitemya yaderni nidee terma. Kleiner, who worked the Leavitt Hall switchboard graveyard shift, would come to withstand strategic advances of same foreign fellow, no longer foreign, latelate at night before switchboard closing—“Andy would be returning to the dorm and would ask me to watch him try out things. He would want the lounge area around the switchboard cubicle darkened, and at one point asked me to look at his pants. He was wearing what appeared to be lime green satin pants with a strip of tape running down the outer seam of both legs. He then proceeded to set up an old phonograph, put on an Elvis Presley record—‘Hound Dog,’ if I remember correctly—and launch into an impression of Elvis, which included removing the tape to show a dark black stripe down the outer seam of the pants, similar to what would be on a tuxedo. The impression was not very good at first, although he obviously kept working on it.”

Funny place, this Grahm Junior College, which had been the Cambridge School of Business—a small secretarial school, really—before an eccentric businessman named Milton Grahm took command in 1950 and slowly began adding broadcast curricula and buying the finest broadcast equipment (Bell and Howell everything) and building extraordinarily professional broadcast studios (two studios for black-and-white transmission, one for color, and one fully operational twenty-four hour stereo radio facility), which beamed closed-circuit signals throughout a stately red-bricked colonial campus that kept growing, as Grahm Junior College, as it was renamed that very year, 1968, advertised its straightforward-hands-on-get-to-work-then-get-out-and-get-a-job-already policies in various trade publications. “Learn by Doing” was the Grahm motto, emblazoned on all seals and stamps, carved into granite and bronze abounding. A steadfast student body of approximately one thousand aspirants weaned on/enthralled by the cultural birth of television itself, with Howdy Doody as their logical progenitor, were not required to be previous academic marvels of any sort as long as each could fork over a most stiff annual tuition of nearly five thousand dollars across two extremely focused years of Learning-by-Doing. Grahm was thus awash in grown children of some privilege, all eager to transmit themselves via frequency and cathode ray into American homes as quickly as humanly possible.

So Andrew G. arrived that autumn to apply himself as never before and would soon shock loved ones and self by making the dean’s list, while struggling to keep from missing his den and those who had dwelt and buffeted him there. He was known to skulk about forlornly—unless opportunity arose to display familiar oddball hubris. Often, he wandered in late for classes and reprised his penchant for removing layer after layer of clothing, not ever to be funny, and enjoyed the chuckles this would incite, pretending to look hurt by the chuckling, sometimes conjuring wetness in his tear ducts, which was a matter of adroit practice and concentration. “Andy was extremely shy, didn’t talk much, was kind of a loner,” said instructor