I think we’ve beaten high school and the farm years to death enough. Time to move on. In the fall of 1960, I left home for the first time in my life and traveled by bus to Ann Arbor, Michigan to begin what should have been four years at the University of Michigan.
Since I was Valedictorian of my class, I was guaranteed a scholarship to U of M. The school had a policy that they would give at least one scholarship to every high school in the state. The scholarship was given to the first student, who qualified, and applied for it from each school. It covered complete tuition and books and fees. I just had to figure out a way to eat and pay rent and I thought I could do that. Since we were broke, living on the farm and Floyd would have never parted with any of his hard-earned money to help me, I had to have the scholarship or I wouldn’t have been able to go at all.
The time I spent at U of M was short, only about 6 months. I didn’t even finish the second semester. I don’t remember much about the actual school life. I lived in a dorm with in a room with another guy. Don’t remember his name. I took basic freshman classes. the only one I remember for sure was Chemistry. I sat in this huge classroom that’s shaped like half a giant bowl. The room held about 200 students and you could barely see the teacher. You sat and listened and tried to take notes and you went to labs and dealt mainly with Teaching Assistants and never said anything to the teacher himself unless you really messed something up or needed something signed.
I doubt if anyone who reads this remembers the TV show “Dobie Gillis”. It was a black and white half hour comedy from the 50’s that was about this high school boy, played by Dwayne Hickman and his friend Maynard G. Krebs played by Bob Denver. Denver later went on to play Gilligan in “Gilligan’s Island” in the 60’s. Maynard was, what they called back then, a hippie. He had a little go-tee of a beard and said things like “Groovy, Man”. Well, my best friend at the U of M was a kid who could have been a double for Maynard Krebs.
He was a 100% hippie and I would go over to his apartment and we and some other friends would sit around and listen to weird music and talk about stuff like, what if the entire human race living on earth was contained in a drop of water that was in the glass of some giant in some other universe. We thought we were so cool. I never smoked dope, but I’m sure some of the other guys in the group did at some point. It was that kind of group.
More tomorrow….
Dad