Missing My Life-long Friends
Bill Ku and I were schoolmates at Cornell in 1948-9. He was a graduate student in Architecture while I was an undergraduate in the junior year. We became instant friends after we met. I got a new driver license shortly after I threw away my learner's permit; and Bill had driven in Shanghai for years but had no driver license yet in the US. We decided to travel together to Detroit where used cars were supposed to be great. Without much experience in buying autos in the US, Bill purchased a coupe and we drove together from Detroit to New York. The coupe turned out to be a lemon. With broken piston rings, it burned almost as much oil as gasoline during our long journey. I guess that's the kind of things young people would do in any country.
Sometime after the coupe was fixed, we drove together to see Angela (Chow), a family friend of mine, to spend the Spring Weekend together at Keuka College, not far from Cornell. After a 4-month wirlwind romance, Bill and Amgela got married and I turned out to be the match maker. I was glad that they had a long and happy marriage. The picture I entered was their photo in 1949 at Michigan, where they were destined to settle later. We visited each other frequenty while we were together at MIT in Boston and later in Michigan where I became a professor in Ann Arbor while Bill had a long successful career at Yamasaki. Now you can understand why my wife Lillian and I miss them so much as life-long friends.