St. Louis University 04

During that first year of college I had not the slightest idea of what to major in. Everything was a blur. But by sophomore year I hit on geology as the subject in which I was most interested. Actually, I had been intrigued by geology as long as I could remember. When we were little kids in fifth or sixth grade, Mom and Dad bought an encyclopedia. I was mesmerized by the article on geology, with its full-color photos of different types of rocks and minerals and a cross-section illustrating the various intersecting strata in the Grand Canyon. It simply took my breath away. I remember reading and re-reading that article many times. It held a special fascination for me even though most of the geological details were well beyond my understanding.

So, when faced with the decision of choosing two lab sciences at the beginning of freshman year and abhorring chemistry and fearing biology, I picked physical geology and physical geography. Today, I still cannot understand why students were allowed to take both as separate sciences. Fundamentally, they constituted the same course material. But, I did and really enjoyed both, earning solid Bs. Which was quite an accomplishment as I studied very, very little that year, even for the classes I liked. The Bs were measures of innate interest and not devotion to studying course materials.

All through sophomore year I focused on geology, taking the prerequisites and early requirements for the major. And then at the end of that year, in a conference with my advisor about next year’s course work, I ran head-long into a somewhat obscure requirement of taking at least four courses in chemistry and geo-chemistry if I was serious about majoring in geology. And chemistry I hated with an unalterable passion. We mixed like oil and water.

What a terrible shock that meeting was. It sucked the air from my lungs. I was stunned. I had even started thinking of myself as a geologist and about where I could get a job after graduation. For weeks I walked around in a daze, not knowing what to do. That’s when I hit on the idea of geography. I was taking as many geography courses as I had geology because I had selected it as my related minor. The subject matter was challenging and enjoyable as were most of the professors. So, in the end, the switch was almost painless. Geology became my related minor and geography my major.

It was at that time or slightly before that I met Bert McCarthy, or Professor Albert McCarthy as we undergrads called him. Bert was a middle-aged, short, banty-rooster Irishman from Oswego, in up-state New York, not far from Syracuse. He was possessed of a seemingly boundless physical and intellectual energy and truly loved the discipline of geography. He also filled his students with fervor to learn, to understand the world around us, in both social and physical aspects. Bert was my first college geography teacher to push me to excel, to force me to work hard, not just to earn high marks but to actually understand how the human-environment interface works. He was demanding as hell; if you failed to meet his expectations he would fix you with a piercing glare with those intense black eyes beneath extraordinarily bushy brows and demand to know, in the most direct terms, why you screwed up and what you were going to do to straighten out. What a marvelous character he was and a terrific teacher.

The other real character in the Geography Department was Lee Opheim, the professor who taught the physical geography and cartography courses. Lee was very tall, about 6’9” and a big man in girth as well. He and Bert were inseparable friends and drinking buddies. What a Mutt and Jeff pair they made, walking across campus with Bert gesticulating like a house-afire and Lee talking quietly and calmly. Opheim and I hit it off as well but I never had the same warm feelings for him as I did for Bert. But Lee was a very bright guy, with a master’s in geodesy and mathematics and ABD in cartography.

The Chairman of the Department was Professor John Conoyer, a man I neither liked nor respected. In my mind, he was barely a cut above a decent high school teacher, and that’s a very charitable assessment. His irritating, sanctimonious manner and attitude turned me off. But I took quite a few courses from him and earned all As. So, as an undergrad, I had no real complaints against him.

My last two years in college proved quite different from the first. My grades moved steadily up the ladder until I graduated with a 3.0 average, or so close that I have always rounded it to that mark. Which is not all that shabby if you consider in my first two years I worked at least 28 hours a week at the Dairy. By senior year I had two part-time jobs of 20 hours each, one at the Dairy and the other with Metropolitan St. Louis Educational Coordinating Council, where I was a research assistant to the Executive Director, Dr. John Forbes. That was a tough year as I also took 18 hours of course work in each semester but finished with a GPA of 3.3, my highest to that point.

Enough of grade point averages and all that dreck. What about my real college career? Those drunken, lost week-ends and all those loose, lascivious women who looked capable of sucking golf balls through a garden hose. HA! Fat fucking chance, or FFC as we were wont to say. The dates were few and those were awkward, stilted occasions. I remained very shy and retiring around women almost to the day I was married. The more attractive the young woman the more reticent I became. Sad, but true. I first noticed being more relaxed around strange females in Grad School, when I was a Teaching Assistant. But, that’s getting a little bit ahead of the story.

If there were not many young women in my life there was considerable drinking and celebration, the old fashioned “good times.” So much on my part I earned the nick-name, “Hootch,” after the word for illegal alcohol; not because the drinks I enjoyed were illegal but, at age nineteen, I certainly was. Our group of like-minded guys (no female members) was known as the Arts Lounge Good Times Society, or ALGTS. We had sweatshirts made up with a fake heraldic shield-logo that poked fun at all the frat boy crap and wore them every Thursday, all twenty-five or more of us. When we wore them quite a few people would ask us about it but we always said that we belonged to a secret society and were bound by an oath not to reveal it. Ha ha! The heraldic shield had four bullshit symbols, one in each quadrant. I think they were a rampant lion, a fleur-de-lis, a knight’s helmet, and a sword. Naturally they meant nothing whatsoever.

We picked the Arts Lounge as the place to hang for two reasons. First, it was close to the Institute of Technology (engineering) where over half of the guys were studying. But mostly because all the BMOCs, frat boys, and sorority chicks hung out at the ever popular Campus Club in the basement of the old Chouteau House (which is today known as Cupples House). We, of course, refused to be associated with people of that ilk. [Author’s Note: By way of clarification, most of us were border-line social outcasts and techno-nerds and were justly afraid of being treated with off-handed contempt by those beautiful people who constituted the “in” crowd. So we invented a plausible rationale for staying apart. Naturally, all that happened without conscious reflection or discussion.]

Through our association in ALGTS, Paul H. and I became the closest of friends. He was one of the many Institute of Technology students in the group, studying electrical engineering, the major that was for some reason the most popular among my friends. Paul was from south St. Louis. He grew up on Utah Avenue, near Grand Boulevard, not far from where my two aunts lived. Paul was tall, good-looking, very bright, had a wicked sense of humor, and was sarcastic as hell, which I enjoyed a great deal. The latter two attributes are certainly what attracted me to him. It certainly wasn’t his politics, which were to the right of Attila the Hun. We quickly became almost inseparable, closer than Jack and I had ever been, or so it seemed at the time. Probably because Jack and I had been slowly drawing apart for several years.

My other very close friend was Ed B., who I met as a sophomore in one of Professor Conoyer’s geography classes. The first day I met him, Ed introduced me to an attractive young woman sitting next to him, Sharon L., who later became his wife. Ed was easily one of the handsomest young men I have ever known. And one of the nicest as well, not to mention a first-class basketball player. A real prince. Although we were the same age he was a year ahead of me because I had worked at R.L. Polk. Both he and Sharon majored in geography so we saw a lot of each other over the next three years.

Not long after meeting Ed, I introduced him to Paul. Almost immediately the three of us started drinking and carousing together. Our favorite bar was Crestwood Terrace Lounge, a neat watering hole patronized by a mixed crowd of young and middle-aged alike. We found ourselves there most late spring and summer week-ends, drinking beer or gin and tonics on the outdoor terrace, listening to jazz and talking until all hours of the night about life, love, and what would cure the ills of the world. Ed, Paul and I also spent many week-ends on road trips throughout Missouri and Illinois, especially during the summer months when Sharon was home in Colorado and Ed was free to party-down. What we’d do was check out the scenery, drink rivers of beer, and have a fabulous time. On most of these occasions I drove the 1955 Ford I bought in the summer of 1964 from one of the guys who worked full-time at the Dairy.

Regardless of our transportation mode, we invariably drank beer until properly shit-faced. Remember, those were the days of returnable, long-neck bottles. Beer cans were relatively few and no one liked drinking from them because of the pronounced metallic taste, or so all the serious beer drinkers claimed. So, when we bought a couple cases of Miller High Life or Budweiser for our road trips, we had to save the bottles and return them to get our deposit back. At five cents a bottle it added up. Especially for impecunious college students. Consequently, during every trip we would simply toss the “dead soldiers” in the back and forget about them until the trip was over. I had purposely installed those awful clear plastic seat covers in front and back so I could take a garden hose to the inside of the car and wash off the sticky, stale beer after each trip. To facilitate that process, I drilled holes through the steel floor plates in the back seat so the water could drain out. My mother thought that was totally depraved and reprimanded me in no uncertain terms. But that didn’t slow me down one little bit. After all, I was an adult and they were paying no part of my tuition nor buying my clothes nor feeding me more than a meal or two a week. I was independent and let them know it in no uncertain terms.

On one particular trip we drove to southern Missouri on Friday night and spent most of Saturday driving around northern Arkansas. By Sunday morning we were out of beer, which is hard to believe since we started on Friday with two cases. Much to our dismay we found that we were unable to buy beer because all those northern Arkansas counties were dry. Boy, were we pissed because it was a long drive back to Missouri. Shortly after that I had the brilliant idea of stopping at a VFW hall I spotted off the road. So we pulled in a bought a case of Budweiser at an exorbitant price. But what the hell. We were desperately thirsty puppies.