What Were the Most Memorable Sounds from Your Time at Caltech?

In our Summer 2015 issue, we asked alumni to share the campus sounds that most remind them of Caltech. We printed only a few of the responses we received. Here are several more, some of which were edited for grammar, spelling, length, and clarity.

¶ I am not sure about the other houses, but in Fleming, Handel’s Water Music usually accompanied someone being thrown into the shower.

¶ I grew up in southern New England, where everything was naturally green, and it was months before I realized that punctual daily predawn rainfall outside 209 Page was the sound of automatic sprinklers.

¶ For me it’s the high-pitched ding-ding-ding of a bell rung repeatedly. That always brings me right back to the Fleming dining hall.

¶ The sound, a sharp crack, of a baseball being struck with a well-swung bat; I was a pitcher on the baseball team for three years.

¶ Back in the early ’50s, a string quartet gave a series of Dabney Hall concerts where they played all the Beethoven string quartets. I had never been exposed to chamber music before, but that started me off as a lifetime fan.

¶ Songs from the musical Camelot. I was the patch bay operator for the TACIT production (around 1990) and heard those songs sung many times during the rehearsals and shows.

¶ Waking up on the Blacker sleeping porch on California Boulevard and hearing the birds cough. (I actually wrote this to my folks freshman year—the smog was terrible!)

¶ Occasionally on Fridays at noon, there was a classical music performance in Dabney Hall, which had some of the most charming music that one could hear on campus. Those Fridays I would take my lunch with me to Dabney Garden and listen to the charming music played close by.