The G.I. Bill and America’s Social Revolution

Every family has a set of stories that play, continuously, like a loop, or, better yet, that function like a prompt: a gentle caution, a corrective, a signpost. When I was growing up, my father’s collegiate experiences at Cornell assumed that role. It didn’t take much for him to regale my three siblings and me with wondrous, fish-out-of-water tales of how he, Irving “Itz” Weissman, a Jewish boy from Schenck Avenue in Brooklyn, found himself “far above Cayuga’s waters.”

He would tell, and tell again, of subsisting on a dreary diet of cottage cheese; of making ends meet by working in a dining hall; of inordinately lengthy bus trips back home to visit his sweetheart and future wife; of listening in awe to Professor Milton Konvitz as he held forth eloquently on industrial labor relations; and, most incongruously of all, of having come to Cornell in the first place to study botany.

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