John (Doc) was my roommate and best friend at OSU for two years, starting in fall 1965. Doc was an extrovert, a leader, normally jovial and laughing, never boastful, and a loyal friend. We had lower middle class upbringings in similar small towns in SE Ohio Appalachia and had learned early to appreciate the value of work.
In our freshman year, we were roommates on the ground floor at the Scott House dormitory on North campus. There were four of us living in a suite of three small rooms – a bedroom, a bathroom, and a sitting room jammed with four desks and two stuffed chairs; there were about 30 suites on the floor. Scott House was a freshman dorm where all the residents were away from home for the first time, and the floor hallway was always a noisy bedlam. Students from the floor yelled or talked loudly on their way through; many doors were open with loud music playing from within; there were water fights with hoses from chemistry class; and the RA, who was supposed to keep order, stayed in his room with his door locked. I often had to go the study room in the dorm basement, or the nearby University High School, or the OSU Library to find a quiet place to study. Men and women were housed in separate dormitories. All the North Campus dormitories ate together in the large Royer Commons cafeteria.
I brought everything to college in a single suitcase; and I’m sure Doc was the same way. Back then, there were no PC’s, word processors, Internet, World Wide Web search engines, email, Xboxes, or cell phones; they would not be invented for another 10 to 40 more years. There were only two telephones in the lobby for the whole dormitory. We wrote reports in longhand and did research using printed books in the library. I don’t remember anyone who had a TV in their room so you had to go somewhere special to watch TV; but we were so busy we hardly ever bothered. By contrast, I had to load up an entire SUV to take my kids to college 20-some years later, and now 50-years later, many young people can hardly go five minutes without working their cell phones.
As many freshmen bumpkins did that year, I brought all white socks to college, just after the campus fashion had changed to dark colored socks. Some upper class “fashion police” wrote letters to the campus newspaper “Lantern” condemning us freshmen who were committing this fashion faux pas. About the same time, Lantern staffers wrote an editorial decrying student “apathy” citing the “white socks controversy” as one example. I remember this because I wrote a 500-word essay for my freshman English class saying that the fashion police weren’t “apathetic” because they were passionate about something, but what they were passionate about was stupid and arrogant. The instructor liked my essay so much he read it to the class.
In our sophomore year, Doc and I were roommates at the Delta Sigma Phi fraternity house. I think there were five in our pledge class that went through Hell Week together in fall 1966. We all had nicknames; John was “Doc”; I was “Satch”; Paul was “Lucky Chicken”, Roger was “Mung”, and Steve was “Gaper”. Two incidents have stuck out in my mind. As I was painting the baseboard in the basement of the fraternity house, Bob came to me and said severely “You’re painting too slow”, so I hurried up. About a half hour later, he came again and pointed at something and said severely “You missed a spot”, so I slowed down and tried to be more careful. As we repeated this pattern more times, I became more apprehensive. Much later, I realized Bob didn’t really care how I was painting but was heartily laughing about this subtle torment with his buddies. At night, we were exhausted and I thought they were going to finally let us go to bed on mattresses laid out on the floor of a room with a narrow door, but first we took showers. When we came back, the mattresses were stuffed in the doorway and several brothers were behind them blocking us out. I was discouraged, but Doc immediately led us on a charge of the mattresses, and we finally fought our way back into the room. At the next Hell Week, after I was a brother, I was tough on the new pledges until I finally realized that I had to curb my enthusiasm.
The fraternity house was actually two buildings on Iuka Avenue; one building had the individual rooms and the common living room; the other building had the kitchen and dining room. We had maybe 30 people living in the fraternity house; it was more civilized than the dorm with enforced quiet hours for study; and we had to put on a coat and tie and to socialize before dinner. We played a lot of sports, especially football, basketball, and softball. There was a pool table in the basement and a ping pong table in a room next to the dining room that we used a lot. There was a TV room we hardly ever used. We had a full-time house mother, and we had “Cookie” the cook who came during the day.
On the weekends we drank the 3.2%-alcohol beer that was legal to serve to 18 year olds in the dingy bars on High Street. Ohio was the world epicenter of 3.2 beer. Two or three times each quarter, we had fraternity parties with harder liquor. I didn’t drink until my sophomore year, and I don’t think Doc ever drank at all. At the time, there were about a dozen bars along High Street that were packed with college students. After the Ohio legislature repealed the 3.2 beer law years later, all the bars on High Street disappeared.
My biggest memory is our sports competitions; Doc and I would compete at anything. In our dorm bedroom there were two rows of metal bunk beds with just enough room to walk between them. We would brace our hands and arms on the hard metal frames of the upper two bunk beds and push ourselves up in the air. Our competition was to see who could hold himself up in the air the longest. The hard metal bed frame would dig into your hands, and it would become painful very quickly. We ran the competition a few times over the year, and I think Doc beat me every time; he just refused to lose.
We played a lot of handball at the Intramural Sports building; and he beat me most of the time. We played a lot of table tennis (ping pong) at the dorm and the fraternity house; and he beat me most of the time. In ping pong, Doc had a strong forehand but a weak backhand, so he always played from his extreme left corner of the table; but he was quick enough that he could also cover the right hand side of the table from his extreme position. If you hit a weak shot to his forehand, the ball came back at you so hard at you that you had no chance of hitting it; I hit to his backhand so much that he got better using it. One time when playing Doc, I got so mad at missing a shot that I flung my paddle across the room and almost hit “Toad”, who was waiting to play; Toad didn’t blink an eye but I was shaken and never did that again.
The fraternity had an “A” and a “B” basketball team with the better players playing on the “A” team in the “A” league. Doc made the “A” team, but he decided to play with us lesser players on the “B” team. We only had five (and sometimes maybe six) players: Doc, Bruce, Steve, Doug, and me. Doc would drive the lane, draw everybody to him, and then sometimes dish off to me under the basket for an easy layup; and that was about the extent of my offense. We had a successful season in the “B” league, finishing first I think.
There was three-quarter mile loop up Iuka Ave from our fraternity house to North 4th Street and back to our house. I had been running the loop a little bit and was starting to get in shape when Doc decided he would run it with me. I think we were getting ready for the fraternity bed race on the OSU Oval. We ran at a slower pace on the way up but started to pick it up on the way back, finally sprinting all out over the final quarter-mile. I was gasping for air and was about ready to back off and quit when Doc finally slowed down. One thing you can be sure of when you beat Doc at something is that you have beat his best effort, but I won only because I had been training ahead of the time.
The late 1960’s were the waning years for Woody Hayes as head coach of OSU Buckeyes football. In 1968, the Buckeyes had a great team with Rex Kern, Jim Otis, Jim Stillwagon, Jack Tatum, John Brockington, and Rufus Mayes; they won the national championship, beating USC with OJ Simpson in the Rose Bowl. The Buckeyes also had good basketball teams with Dave Sorenson and Jumpin’ Jim Cleamons; I sat court-side at St. John Arena to watch Ohio State play Michigan with Cazzie Russell. In that era, players stayed all four years; and we students were able to get excellent seats at all home games relatively inexpensively.
In spite of it all the fun we had, my memory is that we were both serious students, spent a lot of time studying in our room and elsewhere, and did fairly well in our grades. Doc was in pre-med and thus got his nickname. After trying different majors, I finally settled in Computer Science, which was brand-new in the mid 1960’s, because I liked the pure logic of writing programs. It took hard work for me to get good grades. My angelic Mother didn’t understand computing and worried that I would not be able to get a job after I graduated; but, when I had retired in 2013, I had worked steadily in the field for 42 years.
These were the days before the grade inflation of the past couple decades, and we knew numerous fellow-students, especially in the dorm but also in the fraternity, who flunked out. Two of our fraternity pledges escaped “finals” reality by going to a bar the night before final exams and, when they came back drunk a few hours later, told of a woman patron dancing topless on the tables in the bar; in this way they flunked out. Brother “El Choto”, who had a respectable 2.7 GPA, just stopped going to classes one quarter; he sat in his room all day and smoked cigarettes; and he hung around with girlfriends or with us in the evening. After a couple of weeks, he told his professors how he had been travelling out west for a far-fetched reason; but they agreed to allow him to make up the work. After this burst of creativity, El Choto went back to sitting in his room, ended up with a 0.0 for the quarter, and flunked out.
Years later after I had retired, I was a part-time Computer Science instructor at a local university. I always gave open-note exams to my students because I remembered pulling some late-nighters before final exams to memorize information that I immediately forgot after the exams. I think I heard almost every excuse in the book from my students for not attending classes or not completing assignments, but none were as creative as El Choto’s.
In 1965, college students got “student deferments” from the military draft as long as they stayed in college, as this was in the buildup era of U.S. forces in the Vietnam War. OSU strongly encouraged males to take Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) courses in their first two years of college. After the first two years in ROTC, you could freely decide to go “active ROTC” for the final two years of college and then automatically be commissioned as a 2nd Lieutenant in the military reserves when you graduated; and soon after that you could be leading platoons through the rice paddies, mountains, and jungles of Vietnam. Doc joined the Air Force ROTC, and I joined the Army ROTC for the first two years only. So we marched, studied military strategy, learned how to read maps, practiced shooting rifles, and got some easy A’s. We had to wear uniforms and to spit-shine our shoes for the ROTC classes. Five years later, when I was in graduate school, there were student riots against the Vietnam War on many college campuses that lead to the Ohio National Guard shooting and killing four students at Kent State and to OSU being shut down for a week.
Doc was working his way through college and had a job as a UPS package handler in the evening during school; this was when college was affordable and you could actually work your way through college without racking up big loans. I could not have kept up his schedule. One night he brought us cigars that had fallen out of one of the packages. Doc had a summer job as an inspector on the building of Interstate 70 through Zanesville; he said it was the easiest job he ever had. He would sit on a hillside and periodically measure the compaction of the soil in the roadbed. If he found a problem, Doc would write an incident report; and then the construction foreman would write a variance to avoid doing anything about it. I worked on a summer maintenance crew in the Stainless Steel plant in Coshocton.
Doc drove his old car, a white 1960 Ford Falcon stick-shift, to his job. Doc told me this story after he got back from work one icy winter night: He had followed an upscale sports car up the small hill from our house to the stop sign on the hill. After stopping, this sports car slid backward on the ice into Doc’s old car. The driver, a skilled boxer, started pummeling Doc. After getting his road-rage out in this way, the boxer came to his senses, realized it was his fault, and apologized. Doc being Doc did not press charges; he said to me something like “Anybody can make a mistake.” Another time, Doc loaned me his old car to go on a date, even though I had never driven a stick-shift before. The car jerked hard each time I popped the clutch to shift gears. The girl was not impressed but didn’t say anything, and I was relieved when I returned the car to Doc intact.
After that second year, Doc’s Mother died; he was so dedicated to his family that he dropped out of college to go home and take care of his younger brothers and sister. He eventually completed his degree at a local college while working full-time; then he raised a family with Jane and led a local manufacturing plant for many years. I’ve been fortunate to see Doc again many times over the years here in Cambridge; if I don’t see him first, he comes up behind me, surprises me with a bear hug, and laughs his distinctive laugh.
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| Me in front of Fraternity House. Nov, 1966 |
