Jesse, how is it we are old enough for 20 year college reunions?

I know, right? It's ridiculous.

I so wish I'd known to ask for stories. Daddy was 21 in 1940 and good-looking young man. Such a man in uniform in New York is a Broadway musical waiting to happen. But he died when I was in college and still getting my head around the potential of history.

Last year was my 30th college reunion. I've never been to a reunion.

My high school 10-year reunion was this past summer, and I was conveniently out of the continent. I can't even imagine going to one.

I have very much enjoyed all of the reunions I've been to! It's fun (IME) to see how people grow up.

I went to my 10y high school reunion, missed my 20th, and never heard anything about the 30th, which is sad because I really did want to catch up on people.

I never knew my maternal grandfather, he died less than a year before I was born. I never got to hear the stories. But after my mom died and I was going through her things, I found a fantastic letter that my grandmother had written her on VE day (I think). My mom was born in 1940. Anyway, the letter was all about the loud noises, people honking and that this was her lullaby that night, but it meant that Dad would be coming home soon. I need to refind that latter.

I also found a BUNCH of his military paperwork. I haven't gone through it yet, was so overwhelmed dealing with mom that I just kinda cataloged what I found without really lookin at every bit.

I've got my 25th (college) next May and I think I might go? I haven't been to one since the 5th, mostly because the years that end in 0 or 5 have been traumatic one way or another but a little bit because I always dread the "so what have you been up to since graduation?" conversations

I've never gone to any High School reunions, I don't even know if they've been happening.

My Dad was too young for WWII, though he and a friend hitchhiked from Oregon to Arizona to try to enlist at 16 years old.

But my Uncle Noel served in the Pacific on a battleship. My favorite story from him is that their ship was heavily damaged in battle so they limped back to Long Beach to get patched up. The Captain of the the ship was so eager to get back to the war because he was bucking for a field promotion, that he took the ship out of harbor when it was sea-worthy but not battle-worthy. The crew got wind of this, and knew they'd get blown to bits in action, and almost half the crew went AWOL including my Uncle.

Because he was in uniform with a military ID during WWII he just drifted around from base to base eating at the commissary etc. A friend of his recognized him, pulled him aside and said, "Hey, the Brass knows that guy was nuts. Your ship went down with all hands. So just turn yourself in - they'll give you a slap on the wrist."

So my Uncle turned himself in, served six months in the brig and while he was there he learned how to be a Radio Operator which is how he advanced his career. He spent 25 years in the Navy mostly serving on submarines.

My Grandfather, who was in his mid-forties during WWII was drafted late in the war to serve in the SeeBees because he was an auto mechanic. He served about 9 months in the Pacific.

One of my Uncles on my mom's side died in WWII. Not in battle, he fell off the back of a truck and whacked his head. Apparently the mortality rate just for mobilizing an army is higher than you'd expect.

My 90 year-old father recently wrote up a memoir of his Navy service in WWII, including North Africa, landing British commandos in Italy and partisans in Yugoslavia, the liberation of Marseille, and D-Day. It's a great read, and a wonderful gift to his children, grandchildren, and beyond.

By coincidence, I was just describing an anecdote about WWII service related to the history of psychology in a lecture this morning.

At one time BF Skinner was chairman of my department. One of the promising behaviorists he recruited as an Assistant Professor was Bill Estes. When WWII started, Estes joined the navy, and was sent to a pacific island where absolutely nothing of importance happened for the duration of the war. For some reason, a set of math books had been left at the island, and out of boredom Estes started reading them, even though behaviorists were skeptical of any math beyond arithmetic, because it distanced you from the observed behavior.

Sure enough, Estes learned enough math in three years that when he came back, he rejected Skinnerian behaviorism and set about founding what we now call mathematical or computational psychology.

In his autobiography, Skinner told this story and genially noted that Estes should have been awarded a "Service Related Disability" for what those three years of math books did to derail a very promising career as a behaviorist. They were both distinguished professors in the same department at Harvard by then.

Today, of course, mathematical psychology has far greater influence than the Skinnerian approach in psychological research, if not in the popular imagination. The math books won out.