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All life is a fantasy, but one of the most fantastic periods of my life was my eventual trip to Paris, France and reunion with my college roomate, Bob Cannaday.

As the great writers say, "it all happened like this".

Bob, my friend since high school, had after some graduate work after our college days and military days together, gone to France with only a few dollars and his steerage passage ticket on a Polish liner.

Arriving in Paris broke, he appealed to me, who was making $125 a month teaching in a remote mountain hillbilly high school, and I relinquished $25 each month for a couple of years to him, sent by air mail in cash. He could in the Paris of 1948-49 live OK on that plus his $75 a month from the GI Bill as he was enrolled for a doctorate in Old French at the Sorbonne.

I finished my stint at the hilltop high school, somewhat reluctantly, as I loved the students and our association. I also bought a steerage ticket, but on the Queen Mary, and arrived in France with $125 I won playing poker with not-so-adroit Harvard grauduates in First Class, visiting my steerage only for clean clothes.

Bob and I met and repaired to the Brasserie Lipp in Paris to plan our lives. He NOW had a job as visa consul at the American Embassy and was rolling in dough. But I had nothing so far. We planned as follows:

I had been awarded a Fulbright scholarship by a mix-up of names, my scholarship not being of that value, and through its publicity when the rightful Bill Cobbs was finally located, I had enrolled in the Sorbonne for two degrees, one in linguistics, and one in law, and had enrolled at the Pasteur Institute of Medicine for a cheapie MD. But all that required a deep and complete knowledge of French, so prior to the classes in the three universities starting, I enrolled in the Instituts du Patheon, to take eight languages simultaneously, but with the emphasis on the target language, FRENCH.

This school was typical of ones that had sprung up to cater to Americans on the GI Bill in order to feed hungry Frenchmen, and the Director and sole teacher in the Instituts as far as I know was Monsieur le Docteur Bleriot. A tall and highly disciplined French despot, he ruled by the rules and found me to be a loose cannon. My French was becoming fluent but my accent according to Bleriot was "distressing". The other seven languages I worked at and was fluent in German, operatic Italian, modern Greek, classic Latin, and some Basque.

Bleriot was serious and demanded arrival on time and strict

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