On Monday we first visited Bates Colleges in Lewiston where the then Cassius Clay, in 1965, defeated Sonny Liston. Bates invented affirmative action before it was affirmative action. It’s a very interesting school. Then we visited Bowdoin College that now ranks near the top of the US News and World Report’s list of best liberal arts colleges. Tom reminded me that one of the characters in Michael Shaara’s Killer Angels (I highly recommend this account of the battle at Gettysburg and so did the Pulitzer folks in 1977) was from Bowdoin but time was getting short and we left without further investigation.

In the evening we arrived at Logan Airport in Boston, turned in the rental car and relaxed. At 5:00 the next morning I called United to see if we could catch an earlier flight (we were booked at 11:15 am) and they had seats on a non-stop at 7:30. So we caught the early flight, arriving home at 11:46 am PST to my wife and partner Jenny who came to pick us up. Two hours later we were on the way to Ikea to buy 190 linear feet of shelving. Fifteen thousand dealer catalogues, auction catalogues and bibliographies were just going into trucks and one week hence we’ll need to be ready.

All in all, it was a very nice trip. We visited old friends and made some new ones. Tom came home with a better understanding of east coast schools and I came home knowing that a railroad car of database material would soon arrive.