Beanies and Bright Ideas
I graduated from high school in June of 1967. Having never cared for school, the thought of doing four more years of schooling after high school was not an appealing one. It had been a long haul just getting through 12 years of public school. Higher education to me was just a fancy name for even more wasted time sitting in a classroom. However, my parents always considered college for me as a given. Coming from them it seemed to be a requirement if one was going to be a success in life, so the master plan was for me to go to college. The only question was where?
Where ended up being Valparaiso University in Indiana. That fall my parents drove me out to Indiana and delivered me to Valparaiso University. Valparaiso was and still is a Lutheran affiliated school. Among other things it had a good engineering program but it's most notable claim to fame at that time was a large beautiful campus chapel. We arrived at the dorm I was assigned to, found my dorm room, and unloaded my stuff. It was an older dorm. The rooms had cinder block walls painted a pale yellow with dark linoleum tile floors. There were a few shall we say “dents” in some of the walls. My Mother was less than pleased. However it looked fine to me. Two things I liked right away was the furniture was movable and the windows all opened. I also liked that it was a corner room and a sort of odd shaped trapezoid rather than the usual square/rectangle shape. After unloading we went to the dorm cafeteria to eat after which we returned to my dorm room. Shortly after that it was time to say goodbye and we all walked back to where the car was parked. My father left me with the following cautionary advice - “Just don't be coming up with any of your bright ideas”. They should have already known that you shouldn't tell a Backus they can't do something.
My roommate, Rick, was also from Long Island and we got along right away. Rick was more talkative. I was on the quiet side. We, all the freshmen, were required to be at school a week before the start of classes for what the University called “Orientation Week”. What the “Orientation” turned out to be was a week of hazing and instruction from upperclassmen on how we, the new freshmen class, were expected to behave particularly towards upperclassmen. There were multiple activities throughout the week that we were “required” to participate in. One I particularly remember was a trip to the Lake Michigan Dunes. That sounded great! However once there, we were herded up and down sand dune after sand dune after sand dune. I don't think we ever got a chance to even dip our toes in the lake. Oh yes, to start the week off we were all given beanies to wear on our head. We were expected to wear these not just for orientation but also into the first semester through Homecoming weekend. The reason we were given was to make it easy for all the upperclassmen to identify us as freshmen so they could help us out. Many upperclassmen did indeed go out of their way to be “helpful”, but it was rarely the type of help or assistance one might be looking or hope for. What it all seemed to boil down to was we were expected to be their lackey. As you can tell, I did not have a proper attitude and hence had a little trouble getting into the spirit of it all.
Included in the orientation week were a few social activities like a picnic and a dance. Rick was also struggling to get into the spirit of the beanie wearing thing. We both noticed that at the picnic there were a generous number of upperclassmen guys. They apparently showed up to look over the freshman girls. Since there seemed to be a good number of upperclassmen at the more social activities, I figured that we could probably get away with not wearing our beanies to them. I saw the dance as our first opportunity to test going beanie-less as I figured it was unlikely all the upperclassmen knew each other. We attended the dance without our beanies. While a few of our fellow freshmen questioned our recalcitrant behavior, warning us that we would be in trouble if caught. (What were they going to do, make us wear beanies?). We found that freshman girls were suddenly more willing to talk with us sans beanie. However, we also learned the conversations came to an end once they realized we were freshmen like them, just dressed up as upperclassmen. We emerged from the gatherings unscathed and we vowed not to wear our beanies after “Orientation” week.
Like most colleges the food in the cafeteria was pretty decent on the day the parents brought us to school as well as any other weekend that would draw parents to the school, but the rest of the time the food was downright awful. Rick noticed that there were always those individual Kellogg cereal boxes on the shelf behind the counter. They were one of the options for the breakfast meal. Rick and I decided to start requesting a box of cereal for dinner in place of the main dish when the food looked particularly bad. After a couple of weeks of this, we were told they could no longer accommodate our requests. When we inquired as to why, the reason we were given was if others see us doing this then they too might start requesting cereal. “Well then”, I replied, “might that be an indication that the food needs to be improved?” Evidently they didn't understand the question as all I received back was a blank stare. They never bothered to ask us why we had been asking for the cereal replacement. Hey, if there is a concern that boxed raisin bran is a threat to be a more popular option than the main course of the dinner meal itself, it should be obvious that there's a problem. The school officials concluded the problem was us, not the food. When it became apparent that we were not going to be so easily dissuaded we were admonished and given pink slips. (Wow, what was the next step – Take away our beanies? - Ban us from the dinner meal?) Well we started skipping a number of the evening meals and began to eat in our rooms on our own. We were not alone as a number of the guys in our wing started doing the same. Hot plates were forbidden but Valpo had a large engineering program and a majority of guys in our wing were engineering majors. They came up with a number of ways to cook or heat up food but my favorite was using the base of a popcorn popper. Rice-a-Roni, mac and cheese, and canned chili became standard dinner fare in our neck of the dorm on those bad dinner meal nights.
Students, or at least freshman, were required to attend a mid-day 30 minute chapel service Monday through Friday. You could get excused for various reasons like you were not a Protestant which was what Rick did. I did not really think of myself as one but I had applied to the school as a confirmed Lutheran with a recommendation from the pastor of my family's church, the church I was confirmed in back in the 8th grade. I didn't feel I could get away with claiming a religious exemption so I went to the mid-day chapel that first week. There were a lot of people there because, of course, it was required for so many of the students. It quickly dawned on me that they really had no way of knowing who attended and who did not. There was no sign-in and it's not like they took attendance, heck, that would have taken up the whole time. Plus, I was no longer dressing like a freshman, i.e. no beanie. As you have no doubt surmised, I stopped attending mid-day chapel.
Lastly, Valparaiso required freshmen take a Saturday class their first semester. The thinking was that freshmen being away from home for the first time would tend to get homesick. Having a Saturday class would discourage students from going home on weekends. They believed this would aid in the student's transition to being away from home. Valpo was over 800 miles from my home so there was not much chance of me heading home for a weekend. Regardless, the requirement was for everyone. Another requirement was freshmen and sophomores had to take one religion class each semester. Valpo used the old style registration system where you walk around a big room finding the class you want and then request to have your name added to the roster. During registration I saw a religion class that was scheduled early in the morning on Saturday. It was getting late in the registration period and many of the religion classes were filled. I noticed that this particular class had just a couple of names on its roster. So, I signed up for it. My friends told me I was crazy to sign up for an early morning Saturday class but there was a method to my madness. I figured worse case the class would be small. That should make the class better and at least I'd be done early in the day. Hopefully though, the class would be canceled due to it's very small size and if it was canceled maybe I would get out of having a Saturday class. The class was indeed canceled. I now had to find a another religion class but there were no other Saturday religion classes. I was left with only the ones that met only on weekdays. I now had no Saturday classes. The administration let me, really didn't have much of a choice, skate by and hence I managed to escape taking a Saturday class.
So let's sum up. I'd been in college for just a couple of weeks. The “bright ideas” my Dad had cautioned be about just seemed to come to me naturally. Of course my “bright idea” to drop out of college and head to Canada to see about emigrating to avoid the draft the following year was destine to become my Dad's least favorite of my “bright ideas”.
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