Massachusetts Maritime Academy - Muster Yearbook (Buzzards Bay, MA)

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LIFE . 7 On a bright, clear day in June, 1965, the Class of 1968 entered the gates of MM A. Had we been looking for omens, the fact that the barbed wire on top of the fence was ap- parently arranged to keep people in, not out, would have given us pause! Our reasons for coming were as varied and different as we were, yet, whether we realized it or not, even then we had something in common: we had as our common goal the acquisition of the deep water seaman ' s trade. Only a few weeks before, most of us had been seniors in high school. Now we were about to become something very special: ca- dets in a real militarv school. We soon found out what this reallv meant. We were not ca- dets, but YOUNGIES! Young Man! Brace! Spout! Tang! The Course! They are only memories now, but what those words meant then! In the list of human types, the classification youngie can be found between slave and beast of burden. It ' s near the bottom. We made it through the first week by existing only for the weekend. Weekends were some- thing we lived for and existed until. They were a chance to return to life as we had known it before that ' ' bright, clear day in June. During those first weeks the size of our class dwindled as those who could not force them- selves to accept things as they were decided to get out in time to go somewhere else. Things have to get better because they can ' t get much worse. we told ourselves. We stood up constantly, sitting only in class and at meal time. Though it is said that food, when prepared in mass, is always terrible, we knew from the beginning that we had something special awaiting us at the head of every mess line. The food isn ' t so bad! After all, some of the world ' s healthiest cockroaches live off this chow, we were told. We soon found this to be true. And, of course, there were the upper-jobs. A consensus shows there never was a more sa- distic, animalistic, or vicious group of people ever before assembled in the history of West- ern Civilization. But youngies have always thought of their upper-jobs in that manner, and always will. 21

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THE PAST THREE YEARS OF OUR

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' A, SIR, YOUNG, SIR, MAN, SIR . 9 And if we didn ' t have enough worries al- ready, there was that fellow with three eye- brows who taught Algebra. He would stand in the front of the room with a defiant look in his eye, almost daring you to give him an in- correct answer to one of his probs. Accord- ing to our schedule we were majoring in cat napping, because we had ' ' Bunny classes five times a week. It was sort of an insiders joke, we felt, when we would go home and explain to our amazed listeners that we were carrying ten subjects in twenty-six semester hours and had a 3.25 average. But in our minds we couldn ' t help but wonder who the joke was really on.