And of course you shared the tiny dorm room with a roommate. My upbringing had been more spartan than most of my contemporaries, at least materially, so neither I nor my brother joined in the frequent complaints about the lodgings in the dorms. I found my undergraduate years easy academically, with plenty of time for fun and to pursue my personal area of academic interest, History. An important time in my life, even as my memories grow dimmer of it, a half century later.
Quartered Safe in Urbana
- Donald R. McClarey
Donald R. McClarey
Cradle Catholic. Active in the pro-life movement since 1973. Father of three, one in Heaven, and happily married for 43 years. Small town lawyer and amateur historian. Former president of the board of directors of the local crisis pregnancy center for a decade.
My first two years of school were as spartan as described here – cinder block squares with community bathrooms and a rec room.
Yep. We all survived. A few of the guys in the hall became commies. Although I’m quite certain that had less to do with the dorm and more to do with the non-stop Jesuit liberation theology being thrown at us. I guess it only works on the weak-minded, like Jedi mind tricks.
Try living in a barracks with 50 other soldiers during boot camp.
Or sharing a very small tent with another soldier on a field training exercise.
The description above seems like housing at Naval Nuclear Power School on the Naval Base in Orlando, Florida before the school was moved to Charleston, SC. And to Sandy’s point, try living with 70 to 100 other disgruntled sailors, marching to the chow hall for breakfast and then to school in the morning, marching back and forth for lunch at noon time, and marching to the chow hall for dinner and then back to housing in the evening unless you’re on mandatory study hours; then you get to stay in school to 2300 hours to bring up your test scores. And to Donald’s point, let’s share with 120 other sailors a 365 foot long living space in a sealed metal cylinder at 800 feet beneath the North Atlantic while chasing crazy Ivan away from Great Britain. 😉
I was lucky enough to commute straight through grad school, but remember friends’ rooms being exactly like this. More recently, I’ve seen the “cells” (if you can still call them that) of the local Dominican priory: private bath, phone, AC. I don’t have these things in my own house!
I never saw the inside of a dorm at Kent State. I was a commuter student. I drove three different worn out beat up vehicles to school and to work.
I had a part time job in a hospital kitchen and I paid for my own tuition after my dad, who had two pay cuts after he bought a new house, told me to pay for it myself or go join the military because he couldn’t pay for it and I wasn’t going to sit around in his new house.
I had my bedroom and no roommate, a bathroom that wasn’t shared with 20 or 30 strangers, a kitchen that always had food, and a dad who thought I should put down school work to run errands or do yard work or yell at me when the car broke, which was often.
One thing about dorm life is that it almost forces you to make friends and outside of class, studying and laundry your time is your own.
I was on campus for class. That was it. I worked, picking up extra hours when I could. Going to college did not give me a free pass at home. Dirty dishes, yard work, painting, or whatever came across my dad’s mind.
I didn’t have a lot of debt when I graduated..credit card debt from buying books, or car repairs, or summer classes, and one student loan for $1800..but my grades were lousy and I had to leave home to work where nobody cared what my GPA was.
I am forever grateful to my late wife who helped put me through school while we lived in a converted motel room.. This, because congress spent five years arguing if Vietnam was a real war so that we could be eligible for the GI Education bill. When the bill finally passed, it was three days too late for me to qualify.
Put myself through engineering degree working 20+ at a lumber store, sharing a room with my brother, an hour to and fro commute to the university, and studying in a basement closet with an oil burner as a conversationalist. .
survived and that made me hard core, give me a problem and I’ll figure it out, study groups are nice, but don’t need one.
Normal for the time (I went to college 1967-71). When I visited my college (Syracuse U) recently, I was amazed at the dorms (like a good hotel), and the food (not like the carb-heavy monotony I remember): things have certainly changed!
They ran out of space in the dorms, so a mess of us were billeted in an apartment building the institution owned. He and I each had a bedroom and shared a bathroom and a kitchenette. I rented a phone for us, but he never used it. Rotary dial. We were on a meal plan, so used the kitchenette only sparingly. Building was built around 1915, so radiator heat in the winter and no air conditioning. The population of roaches ebbed and flowed with the seasons, and were the subject of jokes. The food was not bad in comparison with school cafeteria fare I’d seen, but still the subject of complaints by many. (The food served to youth at one of my employers 15 years later was quite pleasant). The first semester wasn’t bad to begin with; people were commonly miserable with course work later. The amenities did not bother me, for whatever reason. (I had not had a spartan upbringing). The roaches were irritating on occasion. My roommate and I were decorously unfriendly. If he was bothered by cigarette smoke, he never said. I had a radio I did not use and an electric Underwood bought second hand I did use. He had a television, a personal computer he noodled around with (unusual then), and a bottle of Stoly he never opened.