Personal History (Pt 4)

In College (Undue Purversity, I mean Purdue University), I didn’t do much in sports. I tried out for the Crew team, but couldn’t hack it – especially since it was about 7 miles away from where I lived and didn’t have a car. But I did do a lot of bicycling, as it was the only kind of wheels I had.

I don’t have data on height and weight data for my Freshman year, but in my Sophomore year, I was 6’2” and weighed 115 pounds. This was in the early 80’s (during the Ethiopian Famine) and I was so skinny that I was called “the White Ethiopian”. For example, I didn’t have visible pectoral muscles (you could count ribs all the way up to my collar bones), my elbows were bigger around than my upper arms & shoulder. My knees were bigger around than my thighs, and I had a bad case of ‘empty saddles’, as my grandma used to say.

By my Junior year I had finished growing, topping out at 6’4” and weighed all of 135 lbs. By the time I’d finished my Senior year, I’d managed to get all the way up to 155 lbs (the extra weight was on my thighs & calfs due to all of the bicycling I was doing). Even at this ‘advanced’ weight, my Interview Suit had to have the 30” waist taken in by two inches!

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