amazing -- because:

• an Engineering major winds up publishing 'stuff' for elementary teachers.
• your college major need not have anything to do with your lifelong career.

Feynman used to come down to Telluride (sort of a scholarship house) while I was there as an undergraduate at Cornell. I can't give you exact dates, but it was probably somewhere in the late '50s or early '60s. He was at CalTech at the time and had already won the Albert Einstein Award. He would return to Cornell from time to time -- probably to see his old friend Hans Bethe.

Anyways, he would sit on the floor, with his back to a wall, and play his bongo drums. He was a heavily lidded man, and he would sit there with his eyes half closed. I remember the first time I saw him, I thought he was drunk out of his mind. It turned out, of course, threat he didn't drink, and that this was just Feynman being Feynman.

He was a great dancer. I don't mean rock. I mean the kind of dancing that's filled with twirls and swirls and dips. Fred Astaire without the taps. He would whirl my ex-wife around the floor and talk to her as they whirled, while she looked at him absolutely entranced.

I asked her what Dick Feynman talked about while they were dancing. "The elements," she said. "He said I was fire, and he was earth, and oh, he was just wonderful." Dick Feynman was clearly a menace.

And not only to me. A friend of mine had a beautiful blonde Swedish wife ( the Greta Garbo type ) and after Feynman finished giving her the whirling elements bit ( he danced with everyone ), my friend was very alarmed. The wife just laughed at him and said that Professor Feynman was no threat at all.

Indeed he wasn't. I remember one coed, who was sort of an intellectual groupie, literally throwing herself at Feynman's feet and saying something like, "Take me, I'm yours." Feynman looked at her on the floor, laughed and walked away.

One final Feynman story. 'Thelma Lou' was a girl I knew in Ithaca. She was a pretty blonde -- kind, nice and generous, but not too bright. She worked in the local department store, I think. 'Thelma' frequently got into trouble. Con men would talk her out of the rent money, or she'd get drunk and smash a mirror in a restaurant. Things. like that. Each time there was a problem, she'd call Dick Feynman in California. He'd invariably help her out. In fact, I think he once flew to Ithaca to help her. It wasn't a sex thing. There was no romance of any kind. It was just that Dick Feynman was her friend, and friends are there when you need them.