He was addicted to the radio, especially to one program on WHDH. Every week the announcer quoted from "Potter's Picks of the Week" sent to him by Stephen. One day he played a song called "Velvet Nights." Potter's friends knew someone who had been a delegate to the 1957 World Communist Youth Meeting, where "Velvet Nights" had been called "Midnight in Moscow" and had been the meeting's theme song.

Potter wrote the station a fiery letter denouncing the subterfuge involved in changing the name and not letting listeners know it was a Communist song. A while later, when the station played the song on a different label, which in fact did use the name "Midnight in Moscow," Potter wrote to the announcer that the song would be extremely popular now that it had an honest title. It was, because his friends sent one or two postcards a day, with different handwritings, requesting the song. By the end of the week, the announcer reported that "Midnight in Moscow" was the most requested instrumental in Boston.

WHDH offered a prize for the funniest saying sent in. Potter wrote, "In the Heisenberg representation of quantum electrodynamics, the radiative corrections to the scattering matri are best evaluated using the anti-commutater of the renormalized Green's function with its irreducible Spinner invariant." It didn't win, but the announcer read it on the air because "it sounded profound."

Potter, who was originally slated to graduate in '62, had his class changed to '61 so he could graduate and move into Child Hall with his friends. There, for two football seasons, he posted "Potter's Prognostications" outside his first-floor room. People got in the habit of walking by the room every week, because his system proved accurate about 75 per cent of the time (professional sportswriters average about 66 per cent accuracy).

But in graduate school Potter, like so many others, began to feel old and jaded. He sent an engagement notice to the New York Times, which did not print it; thus the engagement was broken. His name stopped appearing on letters. One of his creators got married and moved out of Child.

But Potter, in retirement, has achieved the highest form of immortality--he is now part of a computer program. His Eng Sci 110 friend, now a programmer for a California company, wrote a computer program so that, after the user had made an absurdly simple mistake in working the machine, the computer would print out, "Congratulations! You have just committed the impossible error. Please notify Stephen Potter immediately at this address..." The program got world-wide distribution and a few weeks ago Stephen received a letter from a very embarrassed French Army Minister.

With a little judicious blackmail, Potter could bring an end to the terrible waste of electricity in the City of Light