R: Prize. It was an alumni-funded prize scholarship in the sense that you
 won the prize.

D: You said sports or athletics was one of the considerations. Were you
 already playing basketball at that time?

R: Yes, I played. I had won a letter in basketball, two I guess, in high
 school. And I and another guy founded the golf team at the Oak Park High
 School.

D: I understand that you studied English?

R: Yes, by the narrowest of margins. Father really was business oriented by
 this time, and he thought I should study economics and that sort of thing.
 So I became an economics major, initially. But in my junior year, I
 switched to English as my major. I had what would be called a "thin"
 major. I did not take as many English courses as people who had started
 majoring in English.

D: What were your plans at that time?

R: When I was in college?

D: Yes.

R: I think in those days people, many times, had fewer long-range plans. I
 was trying to grow up. I really was not concerned too much about five or
 ten years from then when I was in college. I did think a little bit about
 it. When I got into English in my junior year, I suddenly got interested
 in studying courses in the English area, and I then thought I would like
 to go on and do graduate work in Engish and teach English. I suggested
 that to my father, and he thought that was a very poor idea. He was not
 domineering, so he did not veto it; but he thought that what I should do
 first was to go either to law school or business school. After I did
 that, I decided to do something else again, but he felt that I should
 study law or business first. That is how I went to law school. I
 respected his suggestion, and I thought that of the two, the lesser evil
 seemed to be law school. I did not go to law school charged with any
 great excitement or hoping to emulate Oliver Wendell Holmes. I just
 thought, it cannot be all that bad. I had friends at the University of
 Michigan Law School a year or two ahead of me, people that I knew well,
 and it sounded agreeable enough. So that is how I went to law school. I
 cannot claim any great excitement about it.

D: So when did you decide to stick with law and give up the teaching career
 in English?

R: Well, I do not suppose I ever did entirely. I think it always stuck in
 the back of my mind that maybe I would teach or write, or both. These are
 things that I had had an interest in for a long time but the war postponed
 the need for an immediate decision.

 I was in the navy, in their B7 V-7 program, and commissioned an ensign
 after ninety days. I went in in the summer and graduated from
 midshipman's school in New York in December of 1942. This was one of


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