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In particular he ran to chemistry. His native curiosity made him a standout, especially after he discovered that he had an intuitive sense about molecules, an ability to mentally manipulate the tiny structures faster than most people could work them on slide rules and paper. "He was by no means a nerd," recalls Janos Lanyi, his best friend and the man who ran for the border with him. Lanyi recalls days when the two would row out to the center of a country lake, fold in their oars and study science in the springtime sun. "He was very outgoing," Lanyi says. "You could always hear him singing--in gym class, in lab."
This was another Grove passion: opera. Seduced by Carmen's "Toreador March" as a youngster, Grove dreamed of becoming an opera singer. He took lessons and sang around school. And in the weeks before he fled Hungary, Grove and a handful of classmates sang the first, murderously lovely scene of Don Giovanni in a Budapest recital. Grove can't remember if he took the part of the footman Leporello (who beseeches, "Potessi almeno di qua partir!" [I wish I could escape!]) or the blackguard Don Giovanni (who bellows, "Misiero! attendi se vuio morir!" [Wretch, stay if you would die!]) in the performance. He took the Don's advice.
When the Soviets entered Budapest, Grove knew that was the time to leave. "There were growing rumors of people being rounded up on the street," he recalls. "I said, 'I could sit on my ass here and go out for a loaf of bread one day, and you'll never see me again. Or I can get out.' In today's terminology, one had an upside and the other didn't." Grove, not for the last time, bet his ass on the upside.
The young man made his way to New York City, where the apparent equality of American life astonished him. "I grew up to be 20 years old, and I was always told I was undesirable for one reason or another," he says. "I got to the United States, and I expected there would be some of the same because I was an immigrant. And there wasn't." From his spot in a cramped one-bedroom apartment in Brooklyn, where he was housed by an aunt and uncle who had left Hungary in the '30s, Grove devoured Eisenhower's America.
He enrolled at City College of New York, a free school that had become a kind of immigrant Oxford. He tore through the place--nearly all A's--and finished just shy of summa cum laude. (He totaled his car shortly after getting that news from a dean. "I got a C in Faulkner," he explains today, still annoyed. "My third year speaking English, and I'm reading Faulkner!") But when he graduated in 1960, the New York Times trumpeted the success. His professors knew they'd hear from him again. "I was a little astonished by that kind of ambition," says Morris Kolodney, now 86, a CCNY professor who was Grove's freshman adviser. "There's some advantage in being hungry."