(MORE) PARTY TIME! (PART V)

APRIL 10, 2025 – (Cont.) To draw as many people as possible to campus wide events, I developed party themes, gimmicks, and special attractions. The “Harvest Moon Dance,” for example, featured classmate Jerry Bryant and his Bowdoin Swing Orchestra. For the Halloween masquerade party, I retained another popular student band, Plateful of Food—and sponsored a custom contest “with prizes.” To round up the prizes without having to spend a nickel, I called on a gamut of local merchants and traded advertising at the planned event in exchange for donated gift certificates or various freebies. With this approach I harvested a bumper crop of significant prizes for a variety of costume categories. It was all a big hit.

Other events included a winter weekend champagne party, a lobster bake, an Ivies Weekend Party, and the “First Annual Senior Walk from Library to Harriet’s Place.[1]” I don’t know if the class behind us continued the tradition with a Second Annual Senior Walk.

One of the most memorable events, however, was a “Computer Date Dance” featuring computerized match-up for blind dates to the party.[2] This was wildly successful. The year was 1976, mind you, wherein “computers” were mostly the stuff of science fiction or the domain of certifiable nerds. Although the college had acquired a large computer which was parked in the basement of old Hubbard Hall, only a handful of students spent much time at the machine. In the evenings if you walked past the right side of Hubbard, you could catch a glimpse of one of the usual “space cadets” talking to Hal.[3]

Among them was a classmate, Alan F., whose distinctive gait was in my personal repertoire of impressions with which I was known to entertain on demand. Once you got to know Alan and got yourself past his vastly superior I.Q., he was actually a likeable guy. I approached him with the idea of using the computer that he seemed to practice at with his face as close to the computer cards as Glenn Gould sat at a piano with his nose to the ivories. Alan was happy to assist, and once I presented him with a prototype questionnaire with personal attributes and preferences,[4] he built a matching program. In an interview conducted by The Bowdoin Orient, Alan described how the program worked:

[W]hen all the individual questionnaires are submitted by the deadline . . . information on each participating student will be punched out on separate computer cards, and the cards will then be sorted into a pile of male and another pile of female respondents.

The first woman to be randomly picked will be matched by the computer with the most compatible man, and the process will continue until all the female respondents have a date. Since more men are expected to fill out the questionnaires than women, males who were not paired in the first round will be given a date in a subsequent round, so that the women at the dance will have more than one date.

The twelve questions on the computer forms will be weighed, hence a conflict in, for example, hair color, will not be as important as a conflict in say, “Likes to Dance.” Each individual will be rated on a point scale ranging from 0 to 100 where a score of 200 for a couple would indicate maximum conflict and a score of 0 would point out perfection.  

At the bottom of the mimeographed questionnaires was a space for comments.  A parenthetical next to the words, “Additional Comments” read, “(The computer programmer will accept bribes.) When asked about this by The Bowdoin Orient, Alan was quoted as saying, “I’m not going to comment on that now.”[5]

The response was beyond my wildest expectations: nearly 800 questionnaires were picked up by students—roughly 75% of the entire student body. Six hundred—50% of the student body—were ultimately completed and submitted. The turnout was one of the highest for any campus event of my four years at the college. Posted at the party was Alan’s printout describing (in plain English) his computer modeling and algorithms. It was all quite brilliant. Not to detract from Alan’s critical contribution, I later joked that the biggest factor in driving crowd size was probably my homemade mimeographed sign plastered all over campus. The most prominent items on the sign were “PRETZELS” and the volume of beer to be served: “20,000 oz.”[6]

It was the only campus party I can remember in which the surges of laughter were greater than the flow of beer. I don’t know if any of the match-ups led to serious relationships, let alone matrimony, but if the latter, the couple would’ve had fun responding to the question, “So, how did you meet?”

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© 2025 by Eric Nilsson

[1] The popular bar just off campus; adjacent to the Stowe House Inn and Restaurant. (“Harriet” being Harriet Beecher Stowe, wife of a Bowdoin professor of the 1850s. (See footnote to 4/7/25 post)

[2]

[3] The infamous rogue computer aboard the spaceship in the movie, 2001: A Space Odyssey.

[4] Questions included: 6. WHICH DO YOU PREFER:  _____ City _____ Country; 7. WHICH DO YOU LIKE MOST (check 1): ____ sports _____ art and music ____ politics; 8. RATE YOUR PROMISCUITY: ___ HH ___ H ___ P ____ F [The letters referred to the Bowdoin grading system, High Honors; Honors; Pass; Fail. Just to shake things up a bit, how one might apply this scale to one’s promiscuity (i.e. which end of the scale represented more or less promiscuity) was intentionally left up to individual interpretation]; 11. WHAT IS YOUR STRONGEST POINT? ___ intelligence ____ personality ____ physical attractiveness; 12. ARE YOU: ____ out to lunch ____ romantic ____ down to earth. (The questionnaire included the same set of questions for the person completing a questionnaire and for the blind date that the person preferred, the latter set under the heading, “Qualities preferred in date.”)

[5] To the best of my knowledge, Alan accepted no bribes. No slouch he, after Bowdoin he attended medical school at the University of Massachusetts and became a surgeon and also obtained masters degrees at the University of Pennsylvania—Wharton School and Moore School of Electrical Engineering.

[6]