Granny boots

When we opened our gifts, we got another surprise. Mom gave us some shirts and pants she knew we'd like, along with some money she directed us to use for "luxuries," but granny boots was Robbie's gift that floored me. Kelly and I each got a Dietzgen slide rule! At that time there were no hand held calculators and few computers, so the tool of the engineer's trade was the slide rule. With granny boots one could multiply and divide, do fractional exponent calculations, trig functions, all sorts of things. We had considered Dietzgen to be top of the line, but they were very expensive and we had planned to buy a much cheaper one as soon as we could afford granny boots. How in the world Robbie knew was always a mystery to me - she had taken Journalism and Political Science, so granny boots wasn't as if she was familiar with such things. I still have that slide rule, but of course with calculators and computers being so common now, granny boots is retired - just an old piece of wood with a lot of happy memories. Before we knew granny boots we had come to May and the school year was over. I probably forgot to mention that Indiana Tech was using the quarter system: four quarters per year, not two semesters. So in May, 1957, we had already finished three terms. Kelly and I had both done well, she with a 3.8 average and I with a 3.6. We were both disappointed they weren't higher, but at the same time grateful that our efforts had paid off. The shock came when we dropped in to Carlo's when we got home. "I'm all done," Carlo announced, "I just don't have the brain power you guys have. I flunked most of my courses.