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			Bob Angus Senior Lecturer University College What age would you assign to the youngest instructor in Northeastern’s history? Twenty-five? Twenty-three? Try nineteen. I know the exact age, because I was that instructor. My first class was in 1947, just three weeks after my nineteenth birthday. I was quite nervous—I could feel everyone’s eyes on me. Suddenly, though, I just knew this was my calling. And students confirmed it: In 1948, they rated me one of the top ten teachers at Northeastern. I’d had a lot of practice being the youngest. I entered Northeastern at fifteen. The class baby. The age gap was further widened because most of my classmates were World War II veterans who had returned to campus to complete their education. But you might say my parents had already established a tradition of “firsts.” Mom was the first woman accounting graduate from Bryant and Stratton’s night school. After my father apprenticed as a machinist, he went to work at the first auto-repair business in Attleboro, Massachusetts. They met in 1925 while he was working for her father. I was their first child, born on August 13, 1928. I remember how my mother’s math abilities fascinated me as a little boy. I would watch her do bookkeeping, rapidly adding numbers downward and upward, not tolerating errors of even a penny. Her fondness for math rubbed off on me and my two younger sisters. Meanwhile, my dad’s line of work kept our family on the move. After the Depression hit, my father went to work for the local bus barn, where he took care of repairs. He was so good at it that the company moved him from one town to another to keep their buses rolling. In 1939, Dad was sent down to Alexandria, Virginia, to reopen the torpedo station. Two years later, President Roosevelt addressed the nation about “a date which will live in infamy,” and my dad joined the Navy and went off to New Guinea with the PT boats. The rest of the family returned to Attleboro. We ultimately moved so often I lived in a total of twelve houses and attended twelve schools during the span of thirteen grades. I was such an inquisitive pain in the butt, public-school teachers couldn’t handle me. The solution? They had me skip two grades to get rid of me earlier. I graduated high school at age fifteen. Because of its co-op program, Northeastern was the only school I considered—family funds were tight. When I went to Northeastern to be interviewed, a wonderful admissions officer named Ray Fennell asked what I liked most about high school. “Math,” I replied. He first recommended I try the math/physics program. But when I told him I was a slow reader, he steered me toward electrical engineering, because it required more math courses and fewer liberal arts courses. During that five-minute interview, my lifelong career was selected. In a class that included many early-enlisted veterans who had returned from Europe, I felt alone. Eventually, I became friends with another unusual student: Rayfield Randolph, E’50, one of the first black students to major in electrical engineering. Pressure from older draftees caused Northeastern to cancel all but one term of co-op during my undergraduate years. I spent my co-op, in late 1945, working in Boston Edison’s drafting department, assisting another fellow in laying out all the night lights for Fenway Park. We later had the distinction of being the only two workers who didn’t receive tickets to the first Red Sox night game. Even without that bonus, I survived my first few years of school, thanks to scholarships and my one-term co-op earnings. Later, I took three jobs so I could afford to live closer to campus. Just before graduation, the head of the electrical engineering department, Roland G. Porter, offered me a job as a teacher. Now I was the faculty baby. And because there were so many ex-GIs, the average age of my students was twenty-six and a half. I knew I needed to establish credibility. I told my students that, if I couldn’t answer a question, I would have the answer by the next class. When I needed to, I stayed up late and got them their answers. I found moral support in several corners. Some of the older professors gave me good guidance; math professor Joseph Spear, in particular, mentored me and gave me a good deal of teaching advice I still use today. And my college pal Ray Randolph, who was still a student when I became an instructor, continued to be a good friend. When I taught a lab, he served as the lab assistant. (Coincidentally, our paths would cross again years later when we both worked as engineers at Sylvania Electronic Systems.) I now have been teaching at one college or another at Northeastern for fifty-four years. I’m also involved in electrical engineering consulting and textbook writing. But it’s the teaching I still enjoy the most. I feel I am returning to others what was given so freely to me in my youth. One of many blessings Northeastern gave me was a great (not to mention early) start in my dual career as an electrical engineer and a teacher. Although I could retire completely, I want to pass on all I have learned to younger folks. And these days, they are finally all younger than I!