Acknowledgements -- Preface -- Prologue -- Part I -- The day the world changed -- ROTC can be fun -- Life before 4F, the earlier years, 1932-45 -- Life before 4F, the later years, 1945-51 -- Chemistry does its thing -- The end of innocence -- Why you should never send your clothes to a laundry -- Poor Dutch; Dig him out of there, boys -- The key to success in nipples is in their distribution -- Chemical confusion -- A hard-fought battle -- 3,600 miles, fourteen days, fourteen flat tires -- Settling into college flats -- The demise of the SCR-270 radar -- House building -- Building the counterpoise -- The geomagnetic fluctuation coils fiasco -- A successfully completed surveying project -- More house building -- Amateur scientific report writing -- Dealing with dirt -- Going airborne -- Lead and brick don't mix -- Furnace problems -- Rethinking the future -- Demotion to the working class -- Flying by the seat of the pants -- Dissension among the troops -- No head, no tail, no guts -- Journey on the Kougarok Queen -- Culture comes to the campus -- Gauge transformations and other mysteries -- A technological breakthrough -- IGY 1957-58 : auroral all-sky camera concept -- Windy's scams -- Building the British model all-sky auroral camera -- Thinking about graduate school -- John McCall, the Ph.D. who couldn't write -- Ge..t..t..t your g..g..goddamn motorcycle out of here -- Making new friends -- The McKinley traverse -- More hiking and mountaineering -- Part II -- Settling in at Caltech -- Taking some tough courses -- Slaving for Beno Gutenberg and Charles Richter -- Northward ho again -- Another failed scientific experiment -- Back to Pasadena -- Tilting with J (for nothing) Harlen Bretz -- Continental drift and other geological nonsense -- Decision time -- Part III -- Northward ho yet again -- The international geophysical year begins -- The farewell field station -- An Aleutian tragedy -- The house gores on up -- Sputnik I flies -- The great Huslia earthquake -- Hey, Bill, there's the tree! -- Into the bush with Rosemarie -- Arrival at Huslia -- Assault on Mt. Illiamna -- The even greater Yakutat earthquake -- Into Lituya Bay -- Getting railroaded -- Classes resume with vengeance -- My freshman chemistry class -- Mathematics 611-612, the toughest one of all -- Sydney Chapman -- Got data, will analyze -- Attacking the language barrier -- To digitize or not to digitize, a lesson in modern computational technology -- Examination hell -- Off to Finland -- Back to the grind -- The end game -- Afterword.