When I was little my family would sit around the table at dinner (remember dinner with your family!?) and ask Dad to “Tell us a story about when you were little”. My daughter has asked me this question a lot of times. I thought that I’d pass along some of the stories I remember my Dad telling me when I was little.
Dad was what I would call a self made man. He grew up in Scranton, PA (think “The Office) where his mother was a stay at home Mom and his father was an Industrial Arts teacher. Dad graduated Valedictorian of his High School class and enrolled at MIT on scholarship. One evening he told us the story of Oliver Smoot, a fraternity pledge who was used as a measuring stick to see how many “Smoots” it took to get across the bridge from Boston to Cambridge. I remember the story as if it happened when Dad was at MIT in the early 1940′s but it appears that it happened in 1958. It seems a Fraternity brother thought it would be a good idea to use Smoot’s 5′ 7″ body as a unit of measurement and they painted a mark on the bridge for each 5′ 7″. Those marks are repainted every year by pledges to the same fraternity. You can check out the story in more detail here. Enjoy!