My Life at Kings Point: The Longest Days and The Shortest Years

I graduated from Kings Point in 1971. It was the last engineering class in our history to graduate using only a slide rule. Portable calculators were not available until September of the year I graduated – a few months too late! It was not my intention to write a book about my four years at Kings Point – it was a chapter of a different book I’m writing. I was urged by my college roommate, close friend, and confidant, Tom, to focus my attention on the US Merchant Marine Academy four-year period and tell some stories about those experiences. A huge number of books about the other U.S. service academies both fiction and nonfiction have been written, but very few about the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy. You’ll discover, Kings Point is an unusual military college to attend, and all alumni treasure the experience for a variety of reasons. I came of age in the 1960s and lived through the assassination of some of the most influential people of our time, grew up in the exact location where the Woodstock event of 1969 took place, and I watched as our brightest people worked with a national purpose to land men on the moon and bring them back to Earth safely. This is an accounting of how I first decided to attend Kings Point and the four years I spent learning the Kings Point way. I hope to show how Acta Non Verba becomes a way of life for so many of the graduates which helps explain why Kings Point/USMMA is a quiet treasure.