said of his time in the Marines, "In the Marines, they don't have much use for humorists, they beat my brains in." Journalism On his return, Buchwald enrolled at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles on the G.I. Bill, despite not having graduated from high school. At USC he became managing editor of the campus magazine Wampus; he also wrote a column for the college newspaper, the Daily Trojan. The university permitted him to continue his studies after learning he had not graduated from high school, but deemed him ineligible for a degree. After establishing his national reputation and winning the Pulitzer Prize, he was invited as a commencement speaker in 1993 and received an honorary doctorate from the university. In 1949 Buchwald left USC and bought a one-way ticket to Paris. He got a job as a correspondent for Variety in Paris. In January 1950, he took a sample column to the offices of the European edition of the New York Herald Tribune. Titled "Paris After Dark", it was filled with scraps of offbeat information about Parisian nightlife. Buchwald was hired and joined the editorial staff as a restaurant and nightclub reviewer. His column caught on quickly, and in 1951 Buchwald started another column, "Mostly About People". They were fused into one under the title "Europe's Lighter Side". Buchwald's columns soon began to attract readers on both sides of the Atlantic. In postwar Paris, Buchwald met many American expatriate writers, going about with Janet Flanner, E.B. White, Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, and Thornton Wilder. He also had brief encounters with the artist Pablo Picasso, writer Ernest Hemingway, directors Orson Welles and Mike Todd, actress Audrey Hepburn, and attorney Roy Cohn. In November 1952, Buchwald wrote a column in which he attempted to explain the Thanksgiving holiday to the French, using garbled French translations such as "Kilometres Deboutish" for Myles Standish; Buchwald considered it his favorite column. He published it every Thanksgiving during his lifetime. Buchwald enjoyed the notoriety he received when U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower's press secretary, James Hagerty, took seriously a spoof press conference report claiming that reporters asked questions about the president's breakfast habits. After Hagerty called his own conference to denounce the article as "unadulterated rot", Buchwald famously retorted, "Hagerty is wrong. I write adulterated rot." On August 24, 1959, Time magazine, in reviewing the history of the European edition of The Herald Tribune,