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During these years Sidis, fiercely resentful of his reputation as a freak, kept away from his family. The friend who told him of his father's death was berated for. wasting his time. His business associates shunned him, office girls sniffed that he needed more baths. In the mid-19305 he went back to Boston.
Sidis liked to call himself a peridromophile (lover of ways roundabout). At 14 he had written a mnemonic masterpiece on Boston transportation:
From subway trains at Central, a transfer get, and go To Allston or to Brighton, or to Somerville, you know.
On cars from Brighton transfer to Cambridge subway east, And get a train to Park Street, or
Kendall Square, at least. His adult intellectual passion was the collection of trolley transfers. In 1926 he wrote & published a book (Notes on the Collection of Transfers) describing its delights.
Ambition: Normalcy. By 1937, when The New Yorker picked him up and dusted him off, Sidis was almost forgotten. At 39, a bachelor clerk in a Boston office, he was described as "a large, heavy man, with a prominent jaw, a thickish neck, and . . . a mustache. . . . He seems to have difficulty in finding the right words to express himself, but when he does, he speaks rapidly, nodding his head jerkily to emphasize his points, gesturing with his left hand, uttering occasionally a curious, gasping laugh." He promptly sued The New Yorker for invading his privacy, lost. Then he sued for libel. The magazine had wrongly charged him with attending Tufts College and skipping his $5,000 bail in the Roxbury affair. More offensively, it had intimated that he was an eccentric genius. In deposition, Sidis attempted to prove that he was a perfectly normal human being. The New Yorker settled out of court.
Total Victory. Some who knew Sidis at this time thought that his mind was "burned out." But one observer considered him something of a success: he had achieved a total victory in his rebellion against his father's ambitions for him.
Two weeks ago his Boston landlady found him in his furnished room, lying in a coma. Last week, without regaining consciousness, he died of an inner cranial hemorrhage. He was a few months past 46.
At Stanford University, Psychologist Lewis Terman, who began studying a group of 1,400 precocious children in 1921 and has seen almost all of them grow up to much more than average success and happiness, pronounced his epitaph. Said he: "Sidis' case was a rare exception. I think the boy was very largely ruined by his father, giving him so much bad publicity. The Quiz Kids radio program has done a lot to dispel the popular notion that gifted children are queer."
† Her sister became the mother of slightly prodigious Quizmaster Clifton Fadiman.