Dorm life - stories for my grandchildren

Ran into an old friend last evening and he mentioned that his daughter - a classmate of our children - was bringing her daughter to college. It brought back a flood of memories, first from when our kids started college, and then thinking about my start in school -- and life in the dorm.

My job at the radio station was already waiting for me, so I packed what I needed for a few weeks and made the short drive to ACU, some two weeks before almost anybody else got there. The folks in charge weren't exactly thrilled to see me, but the dorm was open, so I paid a key deposit and moved in. There were three of us on the entire floor; two other guys were there early for football two-a-days.

As I recall, when the rest of the students got on campus and class started, I really missed those quiet days and evenings in the dorm. I was the only sibling living at home at that time - in effect an only child, and for two weeks I was almost totally alone in the dorm while the other guys on the floor were off doing football things. Then one weekend about 300 other guys moved in. Wow.

I worked nights - at first from nine to midnight and later eight to midnight but somehow that fact didn't make it to the right people. Back then, the RA came by periodically to see that you were tucked in - there was a curfew of sorts - and of course, I was never there when he checked. Far into the semester, about 1 AM in the morning, the RA came in and rousted me out of bed, telling me that the dorm supervisor wanted to see me. "Now?" "Yes. Come with me, please."

So I got dressed and followed him down to the office, where an unhappy supervisor waited. I explained that I worked nights, something that I had told him when I checked into his dorm two weeks before school started, and that every time the RA asked my roommate where I was, Skeet would tell him "Turn on the radio and you can hear where he is."  Skeet said the RA never checked our room again.

Working nights, I missed a lot of the hully-gully that went on of an evening. But I was there enough to get a good feel for dorm life, and to know that what I really wanted was to move off-campus.
Back then, all the dorms closed for Christmas break and when that time came, several of us who were working at various radio and TV stations in town all bunked together in a tiny "hutment" - housing provided on campus for married students that measured about the same size as a dorm room. The wife of the couple living there went home for the holidays, but he had to stay and work most of that time; at any given time there were five or six guys living in a space barely big enough for two. It was literally wall-to-wall bed.

In the summers, only the air-conditioned dorms were open, so I moved out of Mabee and into Edwards, rooming, of course, with a guy working at another station in town (who, by the way, made a career in broadcasting, retiring only recently).

Freshmen and Sophomores were required to live on campus at ACU. Even as a Junior, it was hard to get out out of the dorm, but my roommate Skeeter, our next-door neighbor Thayne (later my brother-in-law) and I began plotting our escape. Thayne's last name was Cuevas and Skeeter came up with the idea that we could claim there was prejudice against him in the dorm, which was a ridiculously transparent lie, but since we were going to rent an apartment from Rex Kyker, a faculty member, his good word and our bad lie got us out. Two rooms, a bath and a kitchen - well, at least a refrigerator - was a castle and we lived there, along with a stray boarder or two during the summer sessions until Barb and I got married.

Our last in-school residence was in a duplex owned by another faculty member, J. D. Thomas; Thayne and Ronny Fieke lived in the other half. It was a nice little apartment, except for the pink and green color scheme. What were they thinking?