Smushwick's Thesis

In Emerson Hall, they still whisper when they speak of Smushwick. It seems Smushwick got his Ph.D. in Social Relations in only one year, and held down a car washing job besides.

Smushwick had a new angle. He wrote his thesis on the eating habits of the merchants on but one block of Mass. Avenue. And for his research, he just looked into a row of garbage cans along Linden Street each morning before punching the clock at the filling station.

At the time, he was modest enough. When they gave him his orals, he never even mentioned the trouble it was to look through all twenty of the garbage cans each day. Of course, the merchants gave him some help: they always conscientiously left the lids off the cans.

There were occupational hazards, though. Every once in a while when he was bent over absorbed in research, sleepy undergraduates staggering up Linden Street for a ten o'clock class would knock him into the gutter. The undergraduates always apologized, and said they were terribly sorry, but there were only a few inches of sidewalk left that weren't taken up by the garbage cans, and they couldn't be expected to walk in the streets, could they? Smushwick always shrugged. Once he had a really narrow escape. The Cambridge Board of Health said that, henceforth, all the cans were to have lids. But the merchants again were on his side. A few of them talked a while with the little man from the Board of Health, and he evidently forgot all about it.

And then there was the stench. The first few weeks he almost died from it. Even in undergraduate, who, he thought, were very insensitive, choked every time they passed. After a while, he didn't mind so much. No one seemed to want to wash cars with him, though.

It's too bad about Smushwick. Just after the people in Emerson Hall gave him his degree, he had to take a leave of absence. They say he picked up some disease doing post-doctoral research.