MIT Department of Electrical Engineering & Computer Science

MIT's Building 20: The Magical Incubator Story, Anecdote, or Reminiscence

They're Coming -- Lock it up!

Paul Penfield, Jr.
penfield@mit.edu

After getting my doctorate in 1960 and joining the MIT EE department faculty, I was assigned an office in A Wing. It was a small office, shared with Abe Bers, another young Assistant Professor. Within a couple of years we both moved to B Wing, close to the offices and labs of Lou Smullin and Hermann Haus. I welcomed this because I had done my doctoral work with Hermann and was starting to look at some fundamental issues in electrodynamics of moving and deforming media with him. Others in this office complex included faculty members Ron Parker and Dick Briggs, who were working on plasma fusion, and Gary Bernard, who was working on the electrodynamics of insect eyes.

After a while I moved across the hall to share an office with another young faculty member, Paul Hoff. These were the late 1960s and early 1970s, a time that came to be known as the "times of trouble," when student unrest was high because of the unpopularity of the Vietnam war. There were constant threats of student protests and occupations of offices.

Our offices were close to ROTC headquarters in E Wing. One day I was sitting in my office, peacefully minding my own business. There was a massive student meeting under way in Kresge Auditorium. All of a sudden I heard some running in the hallway. It was Charlie Bella, the RLE Facilities Officer. He was coming down the corridor yelling, "All right, everybody, they're coming! Lock it up. Lock it up."

Indeed, the student protestors were on their way to occupy the ROTC offices. We immediately set about to lock the door to the office suite.

In times of stress, people occasionally do bizarre things. For some reason that I cannot to this day fathom, I put on my raincoat, even though it was not raining and was not even cold. I then went out, mingled with the students, and tried to be a calming influence. All the while wearing my raincoat!

The students stayed a few days in the ROTC offices and then got tired or bored (or both) and left. It really did not disrupt our activities much, except I kept wondering why my raincoat had seemed so important at the time.