Alan Sivell's A Boomer Life

Hampden-Sydney had a great track record of booking musical acts before they burst onto the national scene. One year, the then little-known John Denver played at homecoming. Shortly after, he became the well-known John Denver.

The previously well-known Chuck Berry who had large catalog of hits in the 50s and early 60s was mounting a comeback when he came to campus. We knew his music – every local band played his “Johnny B. Goode” at the campus frat parties – but the British Invasion and acid rock had passed him by. He was just starting to get some airplay again (with the God awful “My Ding-a-ling”). We got him on the rebound.

Because of the quality of the past concerts, the music nuts on campus began buzzing excitedly when posters for the spring concert started popping up in February. The organizers were on a roll. But I doubt even they realized they had booked the “future of rock and roll.”

The headliner was Grin, a band fronted by Nils Lofgren. Lofgren was in Crazy Horse, a group that had been backing up Neil Young in concert and on his albums. And in our minds, anyone who played with Neil Young, who was making very successful albums of his own and with Crosby, Stills and Nash, was automatically great. Plus, Lofgren had gone to high school in Maryland with one of the Theta Chi brothers. They had been in rival, but friendly high school bands.

In addition to Grin, there would be a warmup act, a guy nobody ever heard of. Whatever. I didn’t care about the warmup act. I was excited to see Grin. I wanted to get myself primed for the concert by listening to their music so I drove into Farmville to buy whatever Grin albums I could find. The only place that sold records in town was the 5 and dime store, Rose’s, where the records often sat in the bins for years. Great if you wanted an out-of-print record at a bargain price, which I often did, but not if you wanted a record that wasn’t in the top 10 when Chubby Checker was doing The Twist. So I drove up to Charlottesville, home of the University of Virginia and several good record stores.

I found two of the group’s albums and played them for weeks, cranking up the volume with my windows wide open to prime others on campus for the concert. Winter was over and Lofgren’s music fit the optimistic mood of the beautiful spring weather, even when he sings about losing the slip of paper with the girl’s phone number.

The day of the show, we could hardly control our excitement. Remember, we had to drive 7 miles to get to a town called Farmville. We got excited about the arrival of mail.

We planned to drink and smoke just enough to get a nice buzz on and let the music take us away. We usually never drank wine, but someone made a huge bowl of Sangria and we started early because we wanted to leave the dorm early and get great seats in the gym.

Someone had some new pot that hadn’t been tested by our group before. Usually you knew what kind of high you would get, but every batch had little differences and we would discuss our feelings as if we were wine experts describing the year’s Beaujolais.

You did like to know the effects of the pot if you had to function in some way after having smoked, especially at an anticipated event that cost money that you couldn’t get back. It was another thing if you were just going to sit around a room and listen to albums with 6 other guys while drinking a quart of beer, drive to the truck stop, get a 5-day-old bologna sandwich and another quart of beer and call it a night.

By the time we were ready to head over to the gym, we were buzzing big time. I had the bright idea of wearing my sunglasses so no one could see that my eyes were spinning like a kaleidoscope. But the guys pointed out that by wearing the sunglasses at night, it just might be obvious what I was trying to hide.

We couldn’t wait for Lofgren. We arrived so early, we were seated right in front of the stage. We hoped we wouldn’t have to endure the opening act for too long. And right from the start we were sure we were going to be disappointed when we saw how big the band was.

For one thing, you don’t bring that many people if you are just going to play a couple of songs and leave. And we were suspicious of any group in those days that had different instrumentation than the Beatles. That was the gold standard. Why did you need more than 4 guys?

The Rolling Stones were a little odd in that they had to have a fifth, although their fifth, the singer, was pretty good. And the Dave Clark Five had an organ, which was kind of gimmicky, although it worked for them. But this guy had an organ and a sax. A lot of people, probably, I thought, to make up for the fact that they weren’t that good.

Then they began to play. Right from the opening note, they complemented the buzz I had in my head. Every time my mind anticipated a note, it was there. And when I didn’t anticipate a note, I was delightfully surprised by what was played. And the lyrics came a mile a minute and though I didn’t understand everything, it felt as if the singer was unlocking the universe to me. Nils who? I did not want this band to stop. I was completely absorbed, listening to this wall of sound band that was playing just for me, despite the fact that I was in a packed gym.

Mid-way through the first song I looked at Bert, who played guitar, and his eyes were fixed on the stage and his mouth was open in a smile of absolute delight. He was like a teen-age boy seeing his first copy of Playboy, discovering a great pleasure for the first time.

As the second song ended and the third began, the crowd was cheering wildly.

I turned to Bert and shouted, “Am I really, really high or is this guy really, really good?”  

Bert, who loved Dylan and had a poet’s sensibilities, didn’t want to take his eyes off the stage, but after a few seconds he glanced my way and quickly studied my face and stared at my eyes.

“Both,” he laughed and his eyes went right back to the stage.

We couldn’t get enough of that opening act that night, who we later learned was Bruce Springsteen. We wanted him to play forever. But he was the opening act. Nils Lofgren and Grin were contracted to play.

Eventually, Lofgren wandered into the power vacuum Springsteen had created on the stage. His light, airy pop melodies were no match for a crowd that had been revved up by the power of Springsteen and his band. After 3 songs, Lofgren, who seemed to be weaving a bit himself – again I wasn’t sure if it was the fact that I was loaded or he was  – and said something to the effect of, “Well, I think that’s enough” and he walked off stage. And the amazing thing was, the crowd agreed. We had been wiped across the floor by the power and shock of seeing someone who was destined to become one of the all-time greats of rock and roll and we hadn’t been forewarned.

What we also didn’t know until later was that our friend, Chris, the Theta Chi who had gone to high school with Nils, had gone back stage for a pre-concert visit. Chris was a man of mystery and he always had the best dope. It was not the garden-variety ditch weed that usually floated around campus. It was if he had it directly flown in from Vietnam, and then helicoptered to campus.

He and Nils began smoking backstage and discussing old times while Springsteen played. But they started too early and continued too long and by the time Nils got up to play, as the story goes, he was wasted. Completely. And Springsteen had just put down a powerhouse show. The beauty of the weed is that instead of clouding his mind, it gave Nils the clarity to see that the crowd had been hungry and it had been fed by Springsteen. They didn’t need the desert that Lofgren would give them. So he accurately assessed the situation and got off the stage.   

After that show, I joined the crew that helped set up the gym for the concerts. At one our first meetings of the new school year, instead of studying our Norton Anthologies of American Literature, we spent the entire evening trying to come up with a name for the T-shirts we would wear as we set up the stage. Not that anyone would see us, but this seemed very important at the time.

Since most of the crew lived in the Maples dorm, our ad hoc committee eventually came up with The Incredibly Delicious Sugar Maples Stage Company. Remember, this was a time when there were bands with names like The Strawberry Alarm Clock and the Peanut Butter Conspiracy. For the spring concert, Linda Ronstadt was booked. This was two years before she hit it big with Heart Like a Wheel. She had follower based on her radio hit, Different Drum – I was one – but mostly on the West Coast.

I was very excited. It was the main topic of conversation with me all Spring. I had been delightfully surprised by Springsteen, but it was great to be getting an act I knew.

I was taking an overload again, 6 classes, and 3 of them were English classes and needed a lot of time for homework but I was getting pretty disciplined by then of going to the library every night and studying right after dinner. 

So the Friday Linda was to show up, we all hustled to the maintenance area after classes to get the risers to set up. Because he was in charge of the crew, Ray was entrusted by the school to drive the truck. The rest of the crew put their lives at risk by riding in the back of the truck.

I say this because while Ray was very smart, his mind sometimes would wander. Like the time we went to the quarry earlier that spring to swim and he drove into a ditch. We were stuck in the middle of nowhere, long before cell phones. We were still wet from swimming and would surely miss dinner. Why did he drive off the road, we asked. There was no oncoming traffic. In fact, there was no traffic. Why?

 His explanation: He had seen a couple of pretty girls up ahead and was so struck by their beauty, he began writing a poem in his head. He didn’t want to forget it so he focused on only that and not his driving. Luckily a farmer happened by with a tractor and a tow rope before our teasing of Ray turned into anger about our plight and we made it back to campus for dinner.

Since there were no pretty girls or girls of any kind on the Hampden-Sydney campus on a Friday afternoon, we got to the gym safely and began evicting the guys who were there shooting hoops. I started pick up anything not nailed down which might be used as a projectile during the show if a drunken frat boy got his hands on it. I just had grabbed a couple of basketballs under the hoop near the front door when they opened and Linda and the band came in. I was stunned. I had never been this close to a star before. And it was one I was crazy about.

            I had been on the curb in Washington. D.C. just a few months earlier when Nixon was inaugurated for his second, doomed term. Because of the cold weather, but more likely because of who he was, we were among the very few on the street when he drove past only a few feet from us and glared. But he had been in a limo with the windows up and traveling about 20 mph.   

Linda was the opposite. In every way. She was this petite thing with huge eyes and she had a penchant for wearing cutoff jeans and going barefoot at that time.

“Oh, cool,” she said. “Basketball.” And held out her hands for me to toss her one.

I was too stunned to say anything – which would prove to be the pattern of the night. Although I knew my job was to clear out the gym, I stopped my preprogrammed duties and gave her one of the balls I had collected. Maybe she likes bad boys.

She caught it and took some shots and the band joined her. I had faded into the background to them. In my weakened mind, I was hanging with Linda and her band. This was my chance to talk to her, but in a pattern that would follow me for the first half of my life when it came to initiating that important, initial conversation with a girl, I didn’t say anything.

That’s because I was searching for the perfect thing to say and I was busy writing and rewriting that perfect conversation starter in my head. By the time I had it ready, the few times I did get it ready, the object of my desire had long since given up, gone home and gone to bed.

With Linda, I figured someone in the limelight had heard everything there was and they had also heard every “original” question that reporters and fans could ask. I knew I had only seconds to make my impression. My mind raced, trying to top all those that had approached her before. It raced so fast that it went completely blank, almost as if I had suffered a concussion. I was frozen in place.

My paralysis was broken when the gym doors burst open again and Ray and the rest of the guys with the staging and equipment burst in. I slowly regained my senses, just in time as several of the band members tossed balls at me as they downstairs to see their dressing rooms. 

We got the stage set up, went to dinner and then headed to our rooms for our usual pre-concert ritual of drinking and smoking. Although I cooled it because this was Linda! And my job was helping with security backstage. It wouldn’t have been good form to be completely loaded while trying to do that job.

Maybe if it was a wild rock band, they wouldn’t have noticed. Nils Lofgren certainly wouldn’t have noticed. The opening act for Linda was a band from Australia, Daddy Cool. They wouldn’t have noticed. They played a modern version of 50s rock, although they were originals. They were a loud raucous band that had the crowd on its feet after the first song and kept it there. It got louder and wilder with each song.

This was not the opening act that I would have paired with Linda Ronstadt. For a singer who specialized in ballads with a bit of rock and country sound mixed in, an up-and-coming John Denver type would have been a better choice. Someone with a sense of humor to ingratiate him or herself into the crowd’s good wishes. But no. The gym was packed with guys with their dates who had already been drinking for at least an hour – probably much longer – and would continue smoking and drinking until the wee hours of the morning after. They were there for a party. They had never heard of Daddy Cool and very few had heard of Linda.

I began to sense disaster ahead. And, apparently, so could Linda. I was in the stairwell between the basement locker rooms and the gym, up on the steps so I could see the back of the stage, at least part of it. I had a good view of the crowd. It was like the Romans getting the crowd whipped up for the show at the coliseum. Suddenly I realized someone was standing next to me studying the crowd with even more intensity than I. It was Linda. I tried to be casual about it as I watched her watch her fate.

“Are they always like this?” she asked after determining a lot of them were loud, obnoxious rednecks whose favorite past time upon graduation would be traveling the country going from one wet t-shirt contest to another. At least when they weren’t going to strip clubs and pouring beer on themselves. In fact, many of them would become doctors, lawyers and pillars of their communities. But that would be a few years down the road.

I tried to think of a witty remark, but I knew how long it had taken me that afternoon to try to say something and I failed. I wasn’t going to let that happen tonight. So after about 5 seconds, I finally had my response: “Yeah.”

That was it.

I like to think I said it with tremendous feeling and thoughtfulness and even though it only had one syllable and 4 letters, I believed I was saying, “These guys weren’t going to appreciate you the way I do. Get rid of Daddy Cool as the opening act. And by the way, I am the one for you. Come back to my dorm room with me. And wait for me until I graduate.”

She didn’t interpret my utterance the way I hoped.

Linda soon turned and went back downstairs. I followed a bit later and I could see her in discussion with some of her band. One very tall, very thin guy pulled her into a hug and I think it helped calm her nerves.

She came out on stage and since Daddy Cool were the only ones backstage now and I didn’t care if they were overrun by the mob, I left my post and went out front to watch. It was the disaster I saw coming. Linda sang a couple of her songs, but the crowd was still whipped up from Daddy Cool. Linda’s big thing, especially at that time, was to have a pretty stripped-down arrangement so she could highlight her voice.

She wasn’t very good at the witty repartee between songs that can win over a crowd. And she seemed nervous, facing this crowd. It was pretty much, “That was that song. Here’s another.”

When the band would stop so she could hit what was to become her signature, a big boom of her voice, the infidels in the crowd would yell that stupid Rebel Yell which was already fast becoming an unwanted staple of concerts. She lasted longer than Nils had, but not much. She sang about 6 songs and was gone. I couldn’t believe it. I was pissed, although not at her.

 I couldn’t really blame the audience, though. It was a crowd of young men in early spring, with their dates on a Friday night, whipped up by some pretty energetic, old-time rock and roll. Afterwards I bought a Daddy Cool album and I could see why the audience had been revved up. I placed the blame on the tour producers who had paired these two disparate acts.

We tore down the stage and cleaned up the gym and the rest of the guys headed down to fraternity circle to keep the party going. I, instead, trudged back to my room. I was disappointed because a night I had look forward to hadn’t turned out as I hoped. I wanted to be alone.

The disaster of that night didn’t stop Linda, though because after that, her career went in one direction – up – and Daddy Cool’s? They broke up four months later, shortly after they went home to Australia.

With the spring concert behind us, the seniors suddenly saw the semester end approaching. That meant starting adulthood: jobs, law school, med school, marriages, joining the family business. I didn’t have that worry because I had transferred and was coming back in the fall semester to finish up.

At least that’s what I thought was going to happen.

Next time: Going Out On a High Note

As a kid, I dreamed of getting a magic lantern and rubbing it to awaken the genie who could grant my wishes. Not surprisingly, I never got that magic lantern. But when I was 10, I got a magic box. It didn’t come cheap. It cost $10.

I earned the money mowing lawns. I got 35 cents reluctantly from Doom for our house, 50¢ from the next-door neighbors and $1.25 from the folks with the double lot two doors down when their lawn man didn’t show up after a night of drinking. Which happened fairly frequently.

When I finally had the $10 – which took all summer because I kept spending down my cache buying baseball cards at Perry’s drug store – I took the bus to the E.J. Korvette discount store in downtown Hartford and bought my box – an eight-transistor radio, a little block of plastic not much bigger than a deck of cards. It was made in Japan, which Doom didn’t think much of. He had spent his time in World War II on a ship in the Pacific. But I loved it.

It was my window to the world, expanding the universe beyond my bedroom on Beverly Road in West Hartford, Connecticut to baseball stadiums and rock and roll stations all over the country. I may have been part of the TV generation, but my transistor radio was as important to me then as a cellphone is to a kid today.

With a bedtime that started before the games on the west coast did, I happily crawled into bed clutching my prized possession and, staying up past midnight, listened as the Yankees played the California Angels.

I listened to the wit and wisdom of the disc jockeys who alerted the country to the rock and roll music that was bursting on the scene. On week nights, I tuned into the local stations. But on Sunday nights, as the country quieted down and there was less electronic interference, radio signals from stations like WOWO-AM in Indianapolis and WBT-AM in Charlotte, North Carolina clearly beamed into my third floor bedroom.

Eventually, I also listened to the news. Because of the federal regulations at the time, even the rock stations were obligated to keep the country informed. Every hour at the top and bottom of the hour, the stations’ newsmen – and they were only men – droned on about local and world events, sports and the weather for five full minutes. As a teenager waiting for a favorite song to be played, it was a very long five minutes.

I wasn’t happy about hearing the news at first, but because I had to, I began to learn about the war in Southeast Asia, the ongoing troubles in the Middle East and the political unrest in America that led to riots and the assassinations of our next generation of leaders. Just as I had favorite disk jockeys, I began to have favorite newsmen. They seemed almost as cool as the DJs.

After dinner, my big sister washed the dishes and I dried. It was the only time of day when we were allowed to change stations on Mom’s kitchen radio. We’d tune in to the daily countdown of the top ten hits between 6 and 7 p.m., hoping that our favorite songs, like Runaway by Del Shannon, would make it to the top.  

Later, if the Yankees were on, Doom would set a small Emerson plug-in radio facing out of the living room window and we’d sit on the front porch to listen while cooling off on hot summer nights.

My world was no longer limited to the area between my house and my school three blocks to the west or the city park four blocks to the north.

When my 10th grade speech teacher, Harold Riemer, told me my voice was a gift and predicted that one day I’d be on the radio, I was thrilled. It was something I had been dreaming about but had never told anyone. I didn’t think it was possible. Mr. Riemer thought differently.

But then Mr. Riemer’s and his encouragement were suddenly gone. When we came back from Christmas break sophomore year, there was a long-term sub in his place. No one told us why he left in the middle of the school year. With the sub – who was a brand new teacher – I was just another student in a class of students he would spend the semester trying to control but never get to know.

Without Mr. Riemer, my focus turned from a future in radio to his other, slightly more achievable and much more immediate goal for me: pairing up with Bethani. She became the passion of my life (as did Sam the next year) and a career in radio dropped down my list of interests.

I forgot about thinking of my future or nurturing my “gift.”

That neglect continued the first few years of college, too. Northeastern was such a big school, I was just trying to find my place in my wing of the dorm. I didn’t even think of going to look for the school radio station. It wasn’t until I transferred schools that the light came back on for radio.

WWHS-FM, the campus station wasn’t on the air yet when I got to Hampden-Sydney. A group of guys had formed a radio club a few years before and were working on it. The station was scheduled to sign on within the year. Like the baseball team, the radio station welcomed anyone who showed up.

The guys who built and wired the station and went through the licensing process seemed more interested in the behind the scenes aspects of the business. They were happy to find those of us who were more interested in the performance side.

They had titles like station manager and operations manager. I gave myself the job of record reviewer. Record companies sent us hundreds of records and they needed to be listened to before we went on the air. I also signed up for a three-hour shift on Sunday nights, playing oldies, when we finally went on the air.

But there was a catch.

Once we went on the air, someone with a broadcast license needed to be in the station. Since I didn’t have a license, I always had to have one of the few licensed guys in the station with me when doing my show. I didn’t like having a minder. I was determined to get my broadcast license.

The test for the federal 3rd class radio license was only offered a few times a year and in specific locations, kind of like the college entrance exams. The first available date that fall was in November, at the federal building in Norfolk, Virginia.  A van load of the station’s prospective on-air talent signed up to make the three-hour drive for the test.

At first, I didn’t take studying for the test seriously. I figured it was going to be like a driver’s license test. Heck, everybody passes those. But the club leaders kept telling us that this test was much harder.

Some of them, who were some of the top students at the school, had failed the first time through. This was a federal test. Of course it would be tougher.

Since I wanted to prove myself to the officers of the club that I was serious about radio, I began studying more for that test than I did for my academic courses. And the guys were right. The test was hard. My chance for passing it came down to correctly answering the one, multiple choice question I had skipped earlier and saved for last.

The question was about the placement of the meters on a transmitter in a one person/small station. Did they need to be visible from the on-air booth? I sweated over that question for the final 5 minutes of the timed test until it dawned on me that I could see them at our radio station when I was in the announcer’s booth. So I figured, yes, they had to be visible. Just before the timer went off, ending the test, that’s what I answered. And I was one of two in our group who got their license that day.

The long ride home after that test was much better than any of the bus rides home after winning a football game in high school. Those had been fun. But since I spent most of my time on the sidelines, I rarely had anything to with the game, let alone a victory. Here, I was now in the upper echelon of the radio station at Hampden-Sydney College. I had done what two thirds of the other guys in that van couldn’t do.

I could now do my show on Sunday nights solo. In those days, most radio personalities had on-air personnas so rather than go on the air as Alan Sivell, I needed to become someone else. The previous summer I had worked on a golf course with a colorful named Ezra Goupee. I had never known an Ezra before and was only faintly aware that Ezra was a biblical name. I just figured the name would be unique. So I became “Ezra,” host of “The Ezra Show.”

I would get a couple of friends to help lug boxes and boxes of my LPs from our house 50 yards across the parking lot to Winston Hall, then upstairs to the station. I had so many records that even with the help, we’d often have to make two trips. I also brought 45s, which weren’t as heavy, but still, it meant more boxes to carry. I wanted every record I owned with me. I never wanted to be inspired to play a song and then not have it.

My collection of 45s had started when I was in second grade. I loved “Charlie Brown” by the Coasters and Mom bought it for me. I loved it so much, I brought it to school for show and tell. That a sixth grader sat on it and cracked it on the bus ride home didn’t deter me. I was hooked on records.

By the time of my radio show, I had hundreds of 45s and a few dozen albums filled with oldies from the 50s and 60s that I kept buying (a pattern that would continue well into my adult life). I’d get everything ready at the station and then, with five minutes to go before air time, I’d run back to the dorm and set up an 8-track recorder to capture the show for posterity. And so I could relisten to the shows as I drove around on the 8-track in my car.  

Even though my memory tells me – as do my friends at reunions – that I produced an entertaining show, the tapes reveal someone so amateurish and unsure of himself, they are embarrassing to listen to today. That’s because the tapes reveal the hard truth. They don’t soften as a memory might.

The entire audience of the show consisted of probably 10 people at most – all my friends. But these friends acted as if I were a famous local personality and treated me as such.  They were disbelieving when we were at parties or at a bar in town if someone said they didn’t know who Ezra was. Or that they had never heard of The Ezra Show. It was perfectly understandable to me in that it was a 10 watt station that barely made it across campus, but to the guys who gathered back in the dorm every Sunday night to smoke dope and listen to me, I was a star. And everyone should know it.

In addition to my show, I also had the job of reviewing the stacks of albums the record companies were sending to the station now we were on the air. I was having trouble keeping up but I figured I’d have plenty of time to tackle them over Thanksgiving weekend.

I was going to stay on campus because driving 550 miles to Connecticut and then another 550 miles back seemed like too much driving for a four-day weekend.

By mid-afternoon Wednesday, the campus was deserted. So I headed over to the radio station where I had a KEY!!! And let myself in to be surrounded by hundreds of brand new albums. For someone like me, who has had a lifetime addiction to vinyl records, it was intoxicating.

I took a couple of deep breaths to drink in the pleasure of my situation and got to work. I was making my way through a stack of artists I’d never heard of when an intriguing album cover caught my eye so I decided to give it a spin.

The first song sounded OK. The next song sounded OK and the third song was OK. I started to skip around on the record and to my untrained ear, they all seemed to sound the same. Just OK. So I put it in the Do Not Play pile and forgot about it.

The next day I went to Harvey’s house for Thanksgiving and the day after that, I met Mom and Doom in Atlantic City where we watched Hampden-Sydney play in the Knute Rockne Bowl for the Division II Eastern Championship. Doom had been a captain on the 1942 team and he wasn’t going to miss the game. Unfortunately, Hampden-Sydney lost, 17-12, to Bridgeport.

When I got back to campus, I stopped by the radio station and one of the especially nerdy freshman had some music playing and it sounded great.

“What album are you listening to?” I asked.

“It’s a new group,” he said. “Steely Dan.”

He showed me the cover. It was “Can’t Buy a Thrill,” the album with the interesting cover and the songs that had all sounded similar and just OK to me. The album I had dismissed just a few days before.

Apparently, I needed to re-evaluate.

By the middle of the next week, it was my album of the moment. “Reeling in the Years” helped my typing speed enormously. It had just the right tempo for pounding out 10-15 page term papers.

I typed standing up with my little Smith-Corona on top of my dresser as I’d read that’s the way Hemingway wrote. This worked out great because standing gave me more energy to type and I could easily walk over to the turntable and start the record over and get right back to my typing.

Steely Dan made a lot of other very good albums. And yes, they sound similar, not alike, because, like a lot of artists, Steely Dan has its own “sound.”

The lesson I learned from my Steely Dan debacle was to try to have second thoughts – however fleeting – about everything. And that included The Ezra Show.

I still looked forward to going on-air every week, but after weeks of sitting in the studio alone, spinning records and trying to think of something to say in between records to an audience I couldn’t see and often doubted even existed, I began to run out of the energy needed to put on a good three hour show.

A new sound effects machine installed at the station inspired me to switch things up. Especially motivating was the echo function. It gave me the idea to put on special concerts each week, with me serving as the emcee, speaking to the multitudes. With a bit of electronic fiddling, I was able to make it sound as if I were standing on stage in front of a crowd the size of Woodstock. Each week, I hosted “live” a different group or artist: the Beatles, The Beach Boys, Bobby Vee and others made appearances on “The Ezra Show.”

Of course the real stars weren’t going to come to the 2nd floor of Winston Hall on the campus of Hampden-Sydney College on a Sunday night. Rather, I enlisted my friends to play the parts of John, Paul, Ringo, Brian Wilson, etc. and I wrote scripts for each show, loaded with facts and tidbits about the artists. I gave my pals the answers to the questions I would ask, but they invariably would lose their place in the script or not be able to read my handwriting even if they were paying attention.

Despite my best intentions, it didn’t take long before each show dissolved into a lot of insider hysteria, which surely left the audience – if there was one – wondering what the hell was going on. It didn’t help that most of my actors playing The Beatles had southern accents and seemed determined to prove they were not actors.

Still, I fulfilled the promise Mr. Riemer had predicted for me: I made it on the radio. And I learned how hard doing radio is. There is way more to it than just playing records and talking. For as glib as I thought I was in my everyday life, something about sitting alone in a studio with an open mic seemed to throttle down that glibness.

But just as my enthusiasm for a career in radio was flagging, the announcement for the spring concert pumped new life into the campus music scene. However, the headliner turned out not to be the headliner.

Next time: I See Bruce and Meet Linda

Extracurricular activities had been my thing in high school. Hub of the action, the yearbook proclaimed. I had expected that would be the case in college, too. But, at Northeastern, it didn’t work out that way. There were no sports, clubs or organizations for me.

Early on freshman year, I was too busy with my new found friends and passion for playing cards and drinking beer in my spare time to get my butt out of the dorm and into active university life. Besides, I thought, this school is so big, they probably have enough students to fill every role already. They don’t need me.

But I felt differently about the baseball team. My passion for the sport – then and now – is something I can’t explain. I decided to try out for the team. I actually went to the open tryout – at a Division 1 school.

I didn’t know the players that were going to make the team had been recruited and were already on scholarships. And even most walk-ons were there because they were invited to walk on. I thought everyone just tried out like high school. There was a line of a dozen or more kids – like me but likely more talented – at each position. I took one look at that and left. I knew my chances. I had barely made my high school team. And it was a small high school.

If you wanted to participate at Northeastern, you had to make the effort at several organizations to find you niche. At Hampden-Sydney, on the other hand, little effort was needed. Lots of organizations wanted your participation. You could pick and choose your extracurriculars and be assured a spot.

I played substantial minutes and scored a try in my first rugby game. At the campus radio station, I was accepted as an equal member of the group at the first meeting I attended. I was asked what my interests were and what job I’d like in addition to my on-air shift every Sunday night.  

Since I had had so much success in being a joiner at this small school, I decided to make one more stab at my passion: I went out for the baseball team.

What I didn’t realize was that at Hampden-Sydney, there were no scholarship players. There were no long lines of guys vying for every position. In fact, there were no cuts. Everyone who came out for the team, made the team.

I didn’t know about no cut policy when I convinced Harvey to try out with me. But I figured it was a small school. Surely they could use the bodies. We met in a classroom at the gym and the coach was the very successful, grouchy football coach. He was a hard-nosed guy with old-fashioned values who pushed the guys hard. But baseball was a more nuanced game and it wasn’t his primary game.

Two things Coach Fulton said stand out from that first meeting. The first was that we shouldn’t hang our arms out the car window while driving because the cold air will hurt them. As proof, he said he was 50 years old, never had a sore arm and still threw batting practice. And he could throw it all day, every day. Because he never drove hanging his arm out the window.

That seemed plausible to me, since, as a left-hander, my left arm was always hanging out the window on nice days. But I wondered how that made any sense for right-handers.

Then second thing was when he was talking about our uniforms and appearance. He suddenly stopped and fixed his gaze on me in the back of the room and my pile of hair. It was freshly washed and since I didn’t have a hair dryer, I dried it by putting the top down in my convertible and driving the back roads near campus while standing up.

Coach Fulton paused a beat or two while everyone turned to see what he was looking at.

“Son, I don’t have a hat that’s gonna fit you!” he said as his eyes bulged.

His delivery was part shock at how big my hair was, part admonishment, part instruction for the team. Everyone laughed at his unintentional brilliant delivery and timing. That was the moment that I realized that everyone made the team, no matter how bad they were. Or how big their hair was.

I was hoping there were lousier players than Harv and me. But no. Once we got on the field, it was apparent, Harv and I were at the bottom. He and I used to jokingly argue who was the 18th guy on the 18 man team.

I did get a nickname. Even though it was a bit long, everyday, invariably, one of the guys would greet me with “Son, I don’t have a hat that’s gonna fit you!” Eventually, it was shortened to just, “Son …” with the rest left unsaid.

Coach was a successful football coach, taking his team to the Knute Rockne Bowl two years in a row, but wasn’t as tuned in when it came to baseball. This is not the comment of a disgruntled player who didn’t get much playing time. Any time I got was more than I deserved. I’m guessing he was the baseball coach because he needed something to do in the spring. He often didn’t know who the baseball players were unless they also played football.

Fred Larmore, who was a junior and a baseball captain, did not play football. He was a very nice guy and on one of the first days of practice, Larmore and I were the first guys out of the locker room and were outside the gym warming up. The coach, since this was the first really nice day of the year, also decided to get out on the field early and chat with his favorite players while they warmed up. But as he came through the doors, he saw there was only Fred and me.

He was trapped. If he went back inside, it would look like he didn’t want to talk to us. I knew he wouldn’t make small talk with me. Heck, I didn’t have a hat that fit. But he knew Larmore’s name, at least. So he watched us for a few minutes and was formulating something to say. There had been several uncomfortable moments of silence since Fred and I weren’t talking now either.

“So what are you going to be doing next year, Larmore?” the coach asks, finally.

Fred was taken aback. He was a junior. And he was a captain of the team. However, he was the type of guy who respected his elders and his coaches. Didn’t question their sanity or the quirks of their personality.

“I hope to be here, sir,” he replied.

“Oh,” coach said and he turned and started walking toward the field. “Great.” Coach had no guile. He didn’t pretend that he knew that all along. He just took that answer in as if Fred had said he was going to law school or med school.

I just tried to stay out of the guy’s way while I watched with amusement. Which wasn’t hard as he acted as if I were invisible. That was fine. All I wanted was a chance to put on the uniform, play catch everyday, get some batting practice and have a seat on the bench at the games.

We were juniors but Harv and I mostly played on the JV. Which was fine with us. We’d rather sit on the bench with guys who were a little better than us than with guys who were a lot better. And we got into the games occasionally when we were way ahead or behind or when the assistant coach just felt like it.

Coach Zeno was a jock through and through, but he liked my sense of humor. And the fact that I was willing to drive the 2nd van. Since I had experience driving bigger trucks, an extended van didn’t bother me the way it did a lot of the guys at the school who only had experience driving their Corvettes or Citroens.

I got 10 at bats my senior year. One was against a guy at Lynchburg College who later signed with the Detroit Tigers. He was throwing the ball so fast you couldn’t see it. You couldn’t. It was just a sound that went by you. If it hit you, it would have gone through you. It seemed as if it was going 120 mph, but was probably only 90 or so.

I was so scared when I was up there. I didn’t know whether to swing every time with the hopes of hitting the ball, perhaps getting the timing down by the third swing. Maybe if I started to swing by the time he brought his arm back. Or if I should just stand up there and hope he walks me. He was wild and that was part of the reason he didn’t make the major leagues. And why people didn’t dig in against him.

I swung at a couple and watched a couple and in 5 pitches I was back on the bench. Happily. The guy was frightening. I was beginning to realize that my dreams of playing baseball beyond this level were fading. OK, they already had gone to black but I still harbored a fantasy. In truth, I held onto it until Dave Winfield, who was born the same year I was, retired. He was a superb athlete who had been drafted in three professional sports and if he could no longer play, then I reasoned, I probably could no longer play.

Then we played a double header at William and Mary, a division I school. In the first game, I hit the ball hard twice, but had grounded out and lined out to the second basemen. The third time up, Harv was on second, having singled and been moved over on a walk. Approaching the plate, I felt I deserved a hit after making good contact first two times with nothing to show for it.         

After throwing me a fastball and a curve that came nowhere near the plate, the pitcher threw a pitch that I could see coming the whole way. I saw it so well, a change-up coming in just a teeny bit high and and a teeny bit outside, that I had time to have a conversation with myself. Should I swing or wait for possibly a better one? But maybe I won’t get a better one. Maybe, this is it.

If I swing, chances are I won’t pull it and getting my arms up there to swing will take a lot of strength so if I do hit it, it might not go that far. But if I wait, I might not get another one this fat. All this took place in the less than two seconds it took for the ball to get from the pitcher’s hand to the proximity of the plate. Finally, late even for a slow pitch, I decided to swing.

I swung as hard as I could and got the fat part of the bat on the ball. It was one of those times when you hit the ball so squarely and so hard, you don’t even feel the contact. There is no backward jerk of the bat, just forward motion. The ball took off arcing toward left field. Unfortunately, the last I saw as I took off for first base was that it seemed to be heading directly toward the left fielder. Crap.

But I ran hard as we had been taught since we were kids. You never know. What I didn’t know as I concentrated on getting to first base was that the ball had tremendous spin on it because I had swung so deep in the strike zone. The ball was slicing away from the left fielder who didn’t realize it until it was too late.

As I neared first base, I saw the ball bounce just inside fair territory and continue to spin off the diamond into foul territory with the LF in hot pursuit. Harv and another runner scored and I made it to second base standing up. Anyone else probably would have had a triple, but I was very pleased with where I was. The bench cheered wildly as teams do when a not very good member of the team does the ordinary: scores a basket, goal or gets a hit. I was enjoying the moment, standing atop second base and thinking I never realized how tall the bases were. But I didn’t want the other team to know that I had just done the unexpected. We won that game 4-0.

In the second game, I started a rally by getting on base with a drag bunt. Reading the account of the play, preserved in the school paper, one might come away with the impression that this was a strategic play by a speedy player, “Big Al” Sivell. But I was never speedy and never strategic play in a baseball sense. But I always was strategic in a self preservation sense.

Their pitcher wasn’t tricky. He simply featured fastballs that I knew I couldn’t catch up to. So I just stuck out my bat and hoped he’d hit it. He did and, miraculously, the ball dribbled perfectly between him and the first baseman who both chased after it. By the time the second baseman got to the ball, there was no one covering first. I was safe. Sometimes, the tortise does indeed win the race.

An inning or two later, as I was standing in the outfield, the football team began to walk on the field. I tried to tell them to walk around but there were too many of them. And they were too big. Finally the William and Mary baseball coach went over to the players and told them to move. Then the football coach came over and gave a piece of his mind to the baseball coach. And in big time athletics, it is always football over baseball. So we had to call the game because football wanted part of the field.

My last career at bat came in a varsity game. It was at home and the head coach was gone and assistant coach Zeno was running the game. We were behind and the game was about over but we had a couple of guys on. He wanted to get me in the game because I was a senior, he liked my attitude and all my friends were at the game. In fact, they were the only people at the game.

Coach put me in to pinch hit. I decided to try the old bunt routine again. I knew if I tried swinging away and had the usual mental dialogue with myself that I had on each pitch, the catcher would be throwing the ball back to the pitcher by the time I had my mind made up whether to swing or not. With my pals coming alive on the sideline, I did manage to bunt the ball fair, dragging it down the first base line just as I had seen my idol, Mickey Mantle, do it dozens of times. But this time it wasn’t perfectly placed between the pitcher and first baseman and I didn’t have of Mickey Mantle’s speed. I was thrown out by a mile.

I didn’t care that I didn’t play much. I was on the team. I got practice everyday. Play catch. Take batting practice. Have a great seat in the dugout during games. My only disappointment during my Hampden-Sydney baseball career was that I was not in the team picture senior year.

There was a reason for that.

I had trimmed my hair a bit, but the coach was right. He didn’t really have a hat that fit me. Carefully positioned, and if I didn’t get too active while sitting on the bench, I could get it to sit right up on top. The coach never liked that. I’m pretty sure he made up his mind about me – a Yankee transfer – in that first meeting.

On picture day, Coach had told everyone on the team pictures would be taken for the yearbook a half hour before regular practice. So he told everyone to get dressed a half hour early. Everyone got the message – except for me.

I arrived on picture day at the usual time and was getting dressed for practice and the picture. It eventually dawned on me that I am the only one in the locker room. I wasn’t usually early but I was never late for baseball. I sensed something was out of whack so I dressed as fast as I could. When I burst out of the building to begin the long run past the football field to our diamond, off in the distance I could see the players gathering together near the bench.

Oh, crap. I was really late, I thought. Coach has gathered them for a meeting. Maybe going over signals for tomorrow’s game.

Then I saw the photographer. I suddenly realized what was happening and why everyone was early. In a desperate attempt, I tried to run faster. But it didn’t seem as if I was making any progress toward the diamond. Schools always seem to put the football field close and the ball diamond at the farthest reaches of the property. If I had been gifted with speed, maybe I could have made the last exposure. But just before I got to the field, the group began to break up and I knew I wasn’t going to make the 1973 team picture.

I wasn’t going to be in the yearbook. 50 years from now when I want to look back, it would be as if I was never on the team. Maybe that’s what the coach wanted. He had an idea of what ball players should look like and I certainly didn’t fit the picture.

Luckily, though, my disappointment didn’t last 50 years. I had friends in the press.

When I got back to the dorm that night I told the story. Some of the players on the team, who had seen me running across the field, felt for me and so did my pals in the dorms. Several of them were friends with the guys working on the yearbook. “Don’t worry,” they said, as if they were making a promise.

A few months later, after graduation, the yearbook arrived at my house. I quickly turned to the section on our season. There was the team picture without me. But … there was a very big individual picture of me in all my shaggy splendor, the glorious locks sticking out of a precariously placed cap. It looks as if I was, perhaps, leading off first base. Perhaps after a successful drag bunt.

I happen to know, though, I was coaching first base as I usually did to keep myself into the game. But it doesn’t matter. 50 years later and no one will know if I say I just hit a double at William and Mary. Or that it was taken just after I singled off a pitcher who threw a 100 miles per hour and had been drafted by the Tigers.

And I am sure, after all these years, even the editors of the yearbook and the guys who arranged the picture don’t remember why they featured that picture of the 18th player on an 18 man team.

Next time: Chapter 36: The Ezra Show

I was going to turn over a new leaf at my new school. Study first, then socialize. But I couldn’t help myself. During my first semester at Hampden-Sydney, that old leaf stayed put.

I had never heard the term “road trip” before I moved south. I had grown up in New England where everything you need is practically on the next block. Or the next town over. But I soon discovered, because Hampden-Sydney was an all-male college in the middle of nowhere, guys were always up for a road trip, in search of girls. Because there were none on the next block. And the next town over was miles away.

I’d only been at HSC a short time when the Theta Chis took a couple of car loads and a van full of guys down to Averett College, a women’s school in Danville, Virginia. One of the guys had gone to high school with some women there and it turned into a midweek mixer. We got some beer, picked up the girls and went to the woods just outside of town.

Harv and I were paired up with cute women and thinking that we’d finally discovered the meaning of college. We’d both been unhappy at the large schools we began our college careers at because we felt isolated. Now two weeks into our new school, we were in heaven. We could worry about the academics tomorrow. Although, truth be told, on that front, tomorrow never seemed to come that semester for either of us.

Harv could see that I was getting along very well with my date as he was with his. The problem was that all the couples were in the same area. The sun was setting, but we needed more privacy than darkness could provide. So we suggested to the ladies that we needed to split up a bit. They laughed and said they knew where we should go. So they began to walk us deeper into the woods.

Deeper and deeper we went. I didn’t really think about it as I had only one thing on my mind. Soon I couldn’t see Harvey and finally, no matter how single minded a 20-year-old I was, I began to think we would never get to where my new friend wanted to go. Just as I am about to complain, we came to a stream.

 “There’s a great spot just on the other side,” she said, suggestively. “Lots of pine trees and soft pine needles.”

Of course I held my complaint. We just had to get across the stream. The water was moving pretty fast and there were some pools of water, but it looked as if there were some rocks to step on to navigate the crossing.

I should been going to the library, not road tripping. I took a Dr. Crawley class every semester and you can see by the syllabus on the left, he assigned more reading than most professors. He expected you to have it read before class. The difficulty of his midterm and final exams was legendary.

I didn’t make the decision to cross the water lightly. I was wearing suede boots that laced up the side. I loved these boots from the moment I saw them. My love deepened when I slipped them on. Not only did they look great but they didn’t require weeks of break in time that other boots needed. They were conservative enough at first glance, but when you sat down, people could see that they laced up and had a little something extra.  So I could wear them for almost every occasion.

I’d never put those boots at risk lightly. But this was a cute girl, we were in the woods, we had beer and soft pine needles lay ahead – all the stars in my world were aligned. I gallantly offered to go first to test the way and would hold her hand to steady her. That was the plan and all was going well. Until we get to the middle of the stream, next to the deepest pool, about 3 feet deep. All of a sudden I was plunging into the pool of water, going completely under. I couldn’t believe it. She had pushed me. And she was running retreating into the dark night. Laughing.

Seconds before, I was in heaven with an angel. Now I was soaking wet, lost in the woods 90 miles from school. At first I thought it was a mistake. I called after her but I could only hear her laughter as it faded into the woods. Then I remembered my gorgeous boots which were now completely soaked. I tried to climb out but the rocks were slippery with moss. It took me 5 minutes before I was able to get back to shore.

Then I had the task of getting back to the group of guys. That didn’t prove to be easy. I hadn’t been paying attention to where we had been going in the woods. I was too busy being charming. But after about a half hour of groping through the woods, I came upon Harvey who had a similar story to tell. His girl had just quietly slipped away after leading him deeper into the woods. But we both wound up back at the rendezvous point about the same time. And no one was there. They had taken off. We couldn’t believe it. A night that had begun with so much promise had turned into a nightmare.

We walked a couple of miles back into town around 1 a.m., got to the main road and started to hitchhike back to HSC. There’s not a lot of traffic in and out of Danville even during the day. Still, a car would go by ever 10 minutes or so and we’d get our hopes up. We started walking just in case no one picked us up. At least we’d eventually get back there. After all, we had 8 a.m. classes. And you did not skip classes at HSC. The classes were so small – often just 10 to 15 students – your absence was noted.

It was very hard walking. Those great suede boots were very damp and no longer the soft supple slippers I loved. They were heavy, stiff and they were rubbing my feet in many different places. Each footstep was agony.

After an extended period in which we saw no cars either going in or out of Danville, we saw headlights coming from town. We had only walked about two miles and could still see the glow of the town over the trees. Before we even had to put on our “Please pick us up faces,” the van pulled over. It was the Theta Chi van, driven by Merrick. All he could do was laugh like a lunatic at our story. I was glad for the ride but did want him to shut up.

He had brought down a bunch of guys in his van, but had paired up with a girl who hadn’t ditched him in the woods. So he stayed with her and refused to drive any of the other guys back. They all had to squeeze into the other cars for an uncomfortable ride back while Merrick went parking with this girl in his van. That’s why he was leaving even later than we were. He was familiar with the Danville area and said we probably would have had to walk all the way back the HSC. There would have been no more cars that night.

Harv and I were in our beds by 3 a.m. and made it to our 8 a.m. class. But that was the beginning of the end for me. I had resolved not to go on that road trip but a lot of the guys who were going were upperclassmen. They road tripped all the time and they managed to keep their grades up. The driver of the van was well on his way to becoming a doctor.

What I didn’t realize was that because they were upperclassmen at the school, they knew what was expected of them to be successful at the school. They knew how to play and how to study. At that point, I just knew how to play.

Two weeks into that first semester and I was already behind in my classes. I did not recover. I wound up with a 1.4 grade point that fall. At least it was better than Harvey’s 1.2, who, by the way, eventually would earn a Ph.d.

I got a letter from Doom when the grades came home. Up to that time, he’d hollered at me when I didn’t meet expectations. This time there was no hollering. No threats. Just profound disappointment. And that really stung.

Doom’s disappointment proved to be an effective motivator. In the spring, I hit the books for the first time in my life. One class required reading a novel a week. Another reading a Shakespeare play every week. I took an extra class to make up for credits I lost when I transferred. I did all the readings before class, studied for every test and quiz without cramming at the last minute and handed in every assignment on time. It was all new to me, but I got a 2.9 the next semester, just missing the Dean’s list by a tenth of a point. 

Huh, I thought. I can do this.

P.S. To this day, I miss those suede boots. Much more than that missed relationship deep in the Virginia woods.

Next time: Chapter 35: I Make the Team

When school started, the fraternities started their pledge drives. All the frat houses were open every night after dinner and you could go by and meet the brothers. I had done this at Northeastern, pretending to be someone else. This time I went as myself.

Harv and I stopped at the first frat on the circle, the Theta Chi house. Within minutes, we were in a conversation with the president. Sammy was a senior and we hit it off right away. He spent some time selling us on the fraternity, but was just as enthusiastic about the rugby team he was the captain of. When he found out I had played football in high school, he said it would be a perfect sport for me. I didn’t bother to tell him I had finished my football career injured and on the bench.

We had such a great time and Sammy was so animated and fun to talk to that we tried a couple of other houses later that week, but wouldn’t spend more than ten minutes at each house. Pretty soon we were back with the Theta Chis. We hung out there the rest of the week and then we pledged. Sammy had gone out of his way and paid such special attention to us that wherever else we went, we couldn’t possibly be greeted with the same enthusiasm.

And Harv and I both signed up to play rugby.

Later we learned there were good guys in all the houses and good guys that had no fraternity affiliation. It just was that the Theta Chis seemed to have more characters that we liked and got along with in one house. And we liked the seniors. Well, most of them.

There was one who apparently had been really picked on as a freshman because now he was a senior, he was determined to exert his authority on all the pledges, even juniors like us. In the cafeteria, the fraternities had their own tables and we would all eat together. The seniors had the privilege of sending the pledges back for anything they wanted, whether it was seconds, a fork, salt or more desert. All of the other brothers used their power with Harv and me very judiciously because we were, after all, juniors.

To be fair, they had to make us do some stuff, but this one senior liked to harass us, especially me because he knew from his first look that he didn’t like me. And I didn’t like him. It came to a head one day in the cafeteria. He wanted me to go back through the dinner line to get him a second serving and I refused. He was pissed and wanted me sanctioned or whatever they do in fraternities to pledges who aren’t subservient. Most of the other brothers, realizing I was not a freshman pledge, tried to get him to ease up and forget about it. He never did nor did I.

It was around that time I began to realize the frat might not be a good fit for me. The main reason was money. I was able to pay for tuition and most of room and board but I needed help from loans and Mom and Doom to cover what I couldn’t cover. And Mom would periodically send me ten dollars for extras, which I usually spent on beer, ice cream or records. But I didn’t have enough for significant extras such as fraternity dues. So I stopped going through the initiation process.

I felt bad because I liked a lot of the guys in the Thet house and it was a great party house. Actually, on the weekends, a lot of the frats were great party houses. The houses were on the inside of a circle drive, facing out so many of the yards back up to each other, a great place to put bands and have a party. And there were lots of bands, parties, kegs and buckets of grain alcohol mixed with fruit punch.

To avoid any cover charges, I often would start the night at the country gas station just off campus, owned by a guy named Les. Les sold beer and some food but you had to be pretty desperate to try the food. You never knew what color the meat in his premade, cold cut sandwiches would be as he only got deliveries sporadically and the sandwiches could sit in his coolers for quite some time.

After my first rugby game, caked in mud. I discovered the sport was like football, but rougher. And with no pads. I had seen a guy’s eye get poked out and popped back in. The parties after the games were great, so, to stay safely involved, I became the team photographer.

I stuck to buying the cheapest 40 oz. bottles of beer that Les stocked and then would walk from house to house and try not to pay anything.

There were a lot of lawyers and doctors to be at Hampden-Sydney so on weekends, women were attracted to campus, coming from Longwood, Sweet Briar, Hollins and other women’s schools. This was still at the beginning of the women’s movement so getting married right after college was as viable a life choice as getting a career.

The problem with the fraternity party social situation was that you didn’t have a chance to get to know each other in a normal setting. You just had a few minutes at a party, yelling over a band at full volume, to make an almost instant favorable impression. Shouting my sarcasm proved to be a flawed strategy.

Sammy introduced me to his girl friend who said she had a friend, Cary, who was just like me: funny, with a side of sarcasm and bitterness. Cary and I did hit it off and we went out for a few months that fall and into January. I wasn’t ready for a serious relationship and Cary said she wasn’t either. But then she invited me to stop by and visit her family on my way back down to school after Christmas. That sounded serious to me.

Still, I agreed to stop off in her Washington DC suburb in Northern Virgina to meet her parents. Her dad was recently retired military and wore his crew cut as a political statement. He was very polite to me, but I am sure he saw my very bushy hair and beard as my political statement. For the war or against the war. Your hair said it for you. It was not a comfortable visit.

I headed back to school the next day. We didn’t see each other much after that and I have only one bad picture of her. You can’t even see her face because I am clowning around and have distracted her. She later gave me crap about that. And that was probably the thing that kept us apart. Within a few months of knowing her, she was already giving me grief about goofing around, acting inappropriately, not being serious. Imagine what it would have been like six months down the road when she really got to know how shallow I was. So I stopped calling her. And I never saw her again. Even when Harv and I were driving through Longwood every night after dinner.

Sammy got us out for the rugby team and that proved to be a great social experience if not a great sporting experience. We practiced out behind the commons, Winston Hall. Sammy and a couple of other seniors ran the practice and it was very low key. We spent a lot of time playing the game. It was fun as opposed to having Coach Chalmers try to twist your head and helmet off and Coach Robinson trying to motivate you by slyly implying that you were falling short, far short.

Team captain, Joe Samuels, on the left, dragged me onto the rugby team and into the social world of the Theta Chis and Hampden-Sydney. Jimmy Logan, on the right, introduced me and many others in the Theta Chi house to the show, “Soul Train.” I am grateful to them both.

It was a great way to meet a lot of guys from across campus. Some were great athletes, like Jimmy Logan. Logan was so good, he didn’t come to practice but once or twice a week and he was still a star on the weekends. You could get away with that in club rugby.

At first, Sammy thought I was very fast when he saw me run in warm ups. He saw my legs moving a mile a minute but what he didn’t noticed was the progress of my body in relationship to the earth. I have short legs and while my legs may have been moving very fast, my body wasn’t. When I had the ball, it didn’t take long for the opponents to catch up to me. Or for Sammy to realize I should play in the scrum, not the wing. But Harv and I had found another social circle.

Next time: Chapter 34: Road Tripping

The city of Boston was so vibrant, its pulse seemed to beckon me every time I stepped outside. That was a problem.

I prioritized exploring the city more than exploring my studies. I went to my classes, yes, but rather than going to the library afterwards, I went to concerts, ball games, protest rallies, walked the Freedom Trail multiple times and was diligent in my search for the city’s best pizza.

I loved the city but by sophomore year, I began to realize that I was learning more on the street than I was in the classroom. Stuck in a tenement in the fall and the suburbs in the spring, I found I didn’t love the city as much as I had. Plus, I wasn’t getting the education I was paying for.

That summer, while lugging that sheetrock, I had a lot of time to think about my life’s path. I kept hearing Irving Kravsow question my career choice as I carefully maneuvered the sheetrock around the corners of the stairwells. Bethani’s and her friend’s comment back in high school that I was “shallow” was on replay as I raced backed down the stairs to lift another load. And while I ate my lunch, my mind didn’t go silent. Former teachers and my parents appeared on that soundtrack, repeatedly telling me I wasn’t living up to my potential.

By the middle of the summer, all that thinking had turned my educational path 180 degrees. I decided I had to get out of Boston. Go somewhere quieter. Smaller. Where I could start over, concentrate on my studies for the first time ever and reestablish my identity and confidence.

But the Sivells weren’t a family that easily changed course.

I was sure Mom and Doom would tell me to stay where I was and finish. I would need a convincing argument to sway them. I spent the next few weeks of lugging that sheetrock arguing the case in my head as if I were a lawyer defending a prisoner on death row.

Once I had the strategy set, I had to wait for the right moment to put the plan in motion. It came at dinner, a week later.

We were talking about the upcoming football season when I asked Doom what it was like playing football in college. He had played and was a captain at Hampden-Sydney College, the small, all-male school in the middle of nowhere Virginia that he had attended. He had graduated in 1943, just before he went off to war. It was something he loved to talk about. The more he talked about his time at the school, the more the softer side of his personality came out.

I listened and then reminded him that I had originally wanted to go to a small school before choosing Northeastern. And I realized now, after sitting through large lecture classes where the profs and TAs didn’t care if you showed up or not, that maybe I needed to go to a school where I would be held accountable on an almost daily basis.

I said I wonder if a small school with small classes could do that for me. As I was clearing the dishes, I knew it was time to sink my hook. I said, as casually as I could, that maybe Hampden-Sydney could.

If there was a moment of hesitation, I don’t recall it. Doom had been after me to apply to Hampden-Sydney when I was in high school, but he knew my grades would put me on the admission bubble. This time, however, he realized getting me into that school could put me on the right track toward responsible adulthood.

Instantly, Doom was on a mission to make it happen. He didn’t want me changing my mind. A good friend and football teammate of his had become the school’s registrar. He said he’d make a call to his pal in the morning.

I really didn’t know anything about the college at that point other than its fight song that Doom had sung, over and over, throughout my childhood. “Here’s to old Hampden-Sydney, a glass of the finest, red ruby rheinest filled up to the brim …” And that he had loved his time at the school and still was in contact with several classmates more than 25 years later. The only thing I knew was that I needed to make a change in my life.

So Doom made his call and I sent my transcripts to the school. It was July. We didn’t have much time. I say we, because now Doom was 100 percent invested.

While waiting, I kept working. Since I had not re-enrolled at Northeastern, my future depended on being accepted at Hampden-Sydney. Otherwise, lugging sheetrock and hanging ceiling tile appeared to be my future.

With two weeks to go before classes started at Hampden-Sydney, I was on a scaffold in a crumbling school, chiseling old gobs of ceiling tile glue off the unlit corridor’s ceiling. As I worked, I could see this rather large figure approaching down the long hall. Usually, just the principal, the janitor and I were the only ones in the building. Considering the neighborhood, I was nervous.

Then I realized it was Doom. He had brought a letter from Hampden-Sydney. He was so excited when the letter came that he couldn’t wait until the end of the day to see what it said. Although, he had a pretty good idea that I’d be accepted because of his connections. I was. Doom was thrilled. Later Mom told me he’d been checking the mail everyday, as if he were the student, waiting to get into Harvard.

“Well,” he said, “it is the Harvard of the South.”

So I transferred from the largest private university in the country, with more than 12,000 students, in the diverse and cultural hub of Boston to one of the oldest and smallest private colleges, with 670 students, all of them men. It was seven miles outside of the sleepy town of Farmville, Virginia. Population 4,131. As for diversity, it was located in a county that had closed its public schools rather than comply with Brown v. Board of Education. A book was written about that.

 I wouldn’t have been ready as a freshman to drive 520 miles to Virginia. But two years later, in the fall of 1971, I packed my Volkswagen and drove there having never seen the place. I had no idea what I was getting into.

I didn’t know that the school had mandatory chapel until the year before. Or Saturday classes until the year before. Or that freshman had to wear beanies until the year before. Again, I was clueless as to what my future was and it was again because I hadn’t done any planning, just a lot of leaping. But it turned out that my timing was good, especially concerning chapel, Saturday classes and beanies.

HSC is located on a beautiful campus, about 60 miles south of Charlottesville and 60 miles west of Richmond. So, in the middle of nowhere. The nearest town, the aptly named Farmville, is 7 miles down the road.

One of the exciting things to do during the week was, after dinner, drive to town to get an ice cream cone and cruise Longwood Teachers’ College to look at the women. There were 7,000 of them. Then it was time to drive back to campus and do homework. That was a big night. Oh, the weekends were a bit more lively, with the frat houses booking bands from Richmond and Charlottesville, but it still wasn’t Boston.

My first room at the school was in the old gym. It didn’t look like a gym as we know them today – it was a long narrow building – because it was built before basketball was a game. Actually, at that time, many of the buildings on campus had been built in the early 1800s, some built by craftsmen who had learned their skills working on Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello.

When I called home that night to report in and told Doom where my room was, he was excited to tell me that he had lived in the same building when he was at the school. Doom lived in the basement and his work-study job was to clean the gym and set up the equipment for the next day.

I was assigned a room with two other transfers and there were several rooms around us full of transfers. The rest of the dorm was filled with freshman and that made it a really noisy place. Our room was right off the front porch so on the weekends you could hear everyone coming and going and getting sick.

Just like freshman year, I was stuck in another three-man room. Harvey was pure country, having grown up on a farm that was connected to his small town by dirt roads. He had brought a rebel flag to hang over his bed and I had shown up with a portrait of Abraham Lincoln to hang over mine. Neither was meant to be a political statement. Harv just like the colors of the flag and I was a presidential nerd and Lincoln happened to be my favorite.

Despite our differences in wall art, Harv and I hit it off right away. His dream had been to go to North Carolina State, but when he got there, he felt out of place and came back to Virginia. We both had the same dreams of athletics but, alas, had the same level of no talent.

Our other roommate was a real drag. All he did was stare at the picture of his girl friend and scratch his rear end. And study. Nothing wrong with the latter, but Harv and I were not that focused. Maybe that’s why that roommate became a doctor and made a sack of money and Harv and I eventually wound up with a sack of debt.

Within a couple of weeks, there was the natural shake out that colleges experience every fall with students leaving, realizing that they had made a mistake in coming to school there. Some rooms opened up in an upperclassmen dorm and Harv and I were able to escape roomie #3 and moved. Our “new” dorm had been built in 1835, before central heating and electricity. And the rooms had had fireplaces, although by the fall of 1971, they were boarded up. And the rooms were huge. Maybe the first Hampden-Sydney men brought their horses into their rooms.             

The wing we moved into had a lot of sophomores and, like us, a couple of juniors, Pops and Rich, with whom we became friends. They introduced us to Chris and Bert and some of others and pretty soon we had our own social circle, friendships that would span decades and include cross country visits, multiple weddings, godparenting and eventually, funerals.

Next time: Chapter 33: Socializing Before Studying … Again

I drove down Farmington Avenue shaking with excitement and nervousness. I was heading to an interview for a paid, three-month co-op job at the Hartford Courant. The only thing that could have topped this interview would have been one with the Yankees.

I’d been reading the Courant since I was a 9-year-old, searching for the day after recaps and box scores of baseball games. I’d graduated to also reading Dear Abby’s advice column and snipping the weekly top 40 record surveys the local radio station published. And I was beginning to read more and more of the news stories now that my interest in politics and the anti-war movement had been piqued.

It’s not unusual for readers to have an attachment to the newspaper they had grown up reading. I was no different: I loved my hometown paper. I viewed the reporters with awe. They were my celebrities.

The interview was part of the Northeastern plan. The first year at the school, students went full time. Then, for the next four years, we went to school for a quarter, then got a job in our field the next, then went back to school for a quarter and so on until graduation. The plan took a year longer, but the idea was to not only got experience for a career, but also to earn money to pay for school.

The school didn’t actually get you the job, though. It gave you leads and you had to interview and land the job yourself. Applying to the Courant and getting the job seemed, in my mind, to be my destiny.

Reading and writing were the two subjects I did well in without really trying. So when I examined all the majors at Northeastern (something I probably should have done before choosing the school), journalism seemed to make the most sense.

I knew I was good with words going back to 2nd grade when – just before Christmas – my favorite teacher, Mrs. Darrow, had a contest to see who could make the most words out of “Merry Christmas” and “Happy New Year.” I won a 5-pound box of candy that had two-layers of chocolates. And for the rest of my public-school career, when we had to write sentences as part of an English or grammar exercise, I would invent elaborate one-sentence stories in an effort to make the class laugh, cry or be grossed out.

And, truth be told, being a Superman fan also played a part in choosing my major. I might have been swept up by the Man of Steel’s powers, but I was just as intrigued by the folks at the Daily Planet who seemed to live at the center of the action in Metropolis.  

I hadn’t worked on my high school paper or had much journalism course work. In fact, I had taken only two journalism courses up to that point and one was a journalism history course. I was midway through my sophomore year, after all.

I skipped breakfast on the day of the interview. I was too nervous. Putting on a suit, which was not my everyday attire, didn’t help calm me down. I felt as if I was wearing my father’s clothes. When I found a parking spot two blocks from the Courant, I had to spend several minutes psyching myself up to get out of the car and keep my appointment.

When the guy from human resources sat down with me, he pulled out my resume and high school and college transcripts and studied them for several minutes. A very uncomfortable several minutes. It became obvious he was underwhelmed and didn’t want to give me the test. Why bother?

But finally, he gave me the test. It was an hour of grammar, editing and writing problems. When I was done, I waited, watching time on the big clock slowly tick by, while it was scored. The wait was interminable. It reminded me of the times I’d been in the principal’s office … or at the police station with Page.

Finally, the guy – whose sole job at this wonderful newspaper seemed to be giving grammar and writing tests to applicants – came back with the scored test with a surprised look on his face. He took another look at my transcripts and then at the test again. I had done so well, he felt as though he had no choice; he had to give me the position. But he also gave me a lecture – one that I had heard several times before –  about my grades and the importance of applying oneself.

So I got the job for $2.10 an hour, more than the $1.60 I had been making scooping ice cream at Lincoln Dairy two summers before but less than the $2.50 I had made at Genovese and DiDonno hauling ceiling tile. I was ecstatic. I would be working 40 hours a week, getting paid and getting college credit.  I was living at home so I was able to save money.

And I was working at the Hartford Courant.  

The actual, everyday drudgery of the job, though, quickly brought me back to earth. I was assigned, along with another Northeastern co-op student, Joe Nunes, to the obituary desk. Joe always had a smile and could see humor and irony in almost any of the situations we lowlifes found ourselves in. We liked each other instantly. For the 3 days that our shifts overlapped, the obit job was bearable.

“Best training job for rookie journalists,” we were told by our trainer. “You’re going to learn to type much faster and know your keys because obituaries have lots of names, numbers and punctuation. And, the obit page is the most read page in the paper, so if you make a mistake, you’ll hear about.”

Joe and I wore an old fashioned and uncomfortable headphone-speaker combo that you see telephone operators wearing in the old black and white movies and took dictation from funeral directors all day. We didn’t have a phone on our desk. It was a box built into the desk that you switched on whenever a funeral director called. For 40 hours a week, every story we typed ended in death.

These days, newspapers charge for families to put obituaries in the paper. Since these are basically paid notices, the funeral directors just fax or e-mail any info about the deceased they want … since the paying customer is always right. When Joe and I were manning the obit desk, obits were not paid death notices. They were considered “news” and everybody made it into the paper. But to maintain control of the space and decorum on it pages, The Courant had a very specific style for obits. No deviations.

All the funeral homes had the Courant’s style sheet and had been told to insert the name and basic life facts of the deceased into these forms. But Weinstein Mortuary, along with some others, was always trying to impress their clients by getting just a little more than allowed into the paper and they would add these flourishes to the obit – adjectives and adverbs – that just weren’t allowed.

Nunes and I would have to stop them every other sentence or so and say no, you can’t say it that way. And they would argue with us and eventually after wearing us down a bit with their parsing, we would compromise and continue. But there was no compromising in the Courant’s system. We’d drop off our copy at the city editor’s desk and almost instantly get called back up to fix the rule that had been imperceptibly bent.

So we got harder and harder with the funeral directors as we learned the system. In fact, we enjoyed getting harder because it was the only power we had. We were the lowest of the low in that newsroom and the building, in fact.

The dream job, in fact, rather quickly turned into a nightmare. Few in the newsroom talked to uthe interns. And when they did, it was to tell us to run an errand or to point out something I had done wrong.

Each story was returned multiple times smothered with bold, red revisions written with a grease pencil thicker than a toddler’s crayon. Even the woman who ran the snack room had complaints about me. I was on a cheese and orange diet (for the past 40 years, I’ve thought I needed to be 10 pounds lighter than whatever my weight happened to be). Even though I usually bought a drink to go with my cheese and orange, the old bat would exert the only power she had and bitch at me for not buying her food.

Joe fared a lot better. He got sent out on several stories. Many more than I did. A few of the editors liked him and asked him to come back again and again. He was still there almost 40 years later, having risen through the ranks to be an editor himself.  He has to have been there longer than anyone in that building.           

I did manage to get two bylines during my time at the paper. One was on the weekend when one of the neighboring towns, West Hartford, was opening a police firing range. Not that’s not that big of a story, but the beat writer for that town must have promised someone that it would be covered. Probably to make the reporter look good to the cops on his beat.

The call came in to remind the weekend city editor, Owen McInally (one of the few people in the newsroom who was nice to the interns). He and I were the only two people in the big football field of a newsroom. I could see him at the other end of the newsroom as he stood up and stared out at all the empty desks and consider his options. Who could he send on the story? He must have spent a full 5 minutes considering his options. His eyes seemed to stop at every desk and wish that there was someone sitting there that he could send on this story.

I know now he was probably thinking if he sent the kid on the obit desk, his life would be so much more difficult that day because he would have to hold the kid’s hand all the way through the story and even after hours and hours of work on an inane, simple story, he still might engender a lawsuit. On the other hand, if he didn’t send someone to cover it, he’d have to deal with the complaining of that beat reporter for week or months. Grudges last a long time in the newsroom.

Finally he called me up to his desk and gave me the assignment. And he did have to hold my hand, every step of the way – on how to get there, what to ask, how to write it. I read it now and it’s in a voice that is nothing like mine. It is much better than anything I could have written at that time.

I began to dread my days at the Courant. I wasn’t ready. I had taken a 3-month reporting class and we didn’t do any actual reporting. We rewrote stories out of a journalism textbook. We did take a tour of the Christian Science Monitor. I remember sitting in the lobby waiting to see someone important. But those 3 months at the Courant, I lived in fear someone would talk to me. Because the talk wasn’t going to be friendly. No one there had use for interns. Now, after having been in a newsroom and knowing news people, I realize it was nothing personal. Many news folks are busy and  don’t tend to be that welcoming to newcomers, especially interns because they aren’t going to be there very long. I guess it’s a way of weeding them out.

I eventually did get weeded out. The beetle-browed editor, Irving Kravsow called me in to a meeting near the end of my co-op. Up until then, he hadn’t said a word to me. Kravsow was dark and swarthy and wore a permanent scowl. I now know and understand that look. It gives away nothing and puts the receiver of the scowl on the defensive. It’s a look cops and hard-edged reporters use to their advantage in interviews.

As I approached his office, I was as nervous as I had been when I first drove down Farmington Avenue for my interview three months before. I knew I wasn’t doing that great but I had been trying as best I could. But I really didn’t know HOW to try.

I was 19, a year out of high school in my first stab at a real job. I was hoping that Kravsow was going to tell me what I needed to work on at school before coming back for the next co-op session in the summer. No such luck.

Like the chat I had with Mr. DeSalvo when he told me that Page had died, this meeting had a profound effect on my life. Kravsow told me I wasn’t being invited back, telling me bluntly that I showed little talent for the newspaper business.

And then, I guess to soften the blow, he tried to play career counselor. 

“Isn’t there something else you would rather do with your life other than journalism?” he asked.

“No,” I muttered softly, mostly to myself.

I was devastated.

Next time: Chapter 31: Should I Stay or Should I Go?

My education for sophomore year had started earlier that summer.  That’s because Northeastern only offered dorms for first year men and then they were unleashed on the city to find their own room and board. I had spent just nine short months removed from the safety and security of my parents’ home. Now I had to learn to navigate Boston’s very competitive rental housing landscape. I quickly realized the learning curve would be steep.

My first task was to find roommates. That should have been easy as I had made a lot of friends that first year. But Willis didn’t come back to school and because we were all different majors from different parts of the northeast, George, Pinky and I were on different fall schedules. And because the spring semester had ended so abruptly, there wasn’t much of a chance to ask around and be choosy about roommates. I just had to find someone. Anyone.

By mid-summer, I was getting desperate. Then, I heard that another guy from my hometown, who also went to Northeastern, was getting desperate while also looking for a roommate.  I knew of Harry because we had played baseball in the same league as kids and on opposing teams in high school.  When Harry and I met to seal the deal, he said he had a friend who could be our third roommate which would perhaps enable us to afford an apartment closer to campus.

That sounded good so the next task for me was to find the apartment.

Doom and I drove up to Boston early one day in July. We spent the entire day, going from one run-down apartment to another. Not one stood out. Stepping into those buildings and those apartments was like stepping into a Dicken’s novel. I was often surprised buildings that old and in that condition had electricity and indoor plumbing. Oftentimes, what we saw just barely qualified for those modern conveniences.

We found that anything habitable near the school in our price range had already been secured by savvier upper classmen. Although, decent near the school actually was sugar coating a scale ranging from horrible to less horrible with less horrible translating to “decent” as the day and the search wore on.

Still, we needed an apartment as close to school as possible since none of us would have a car in the city. Late that afternoon, we found a less horrible spot two blocks from campus: a teeny, tiny, one bedroom apartment. Doom and I, worn down by our long day, decided this hovel – even though it seemed as if the last tenants were the Cratchits – was the best we’d seen and so we signed a semester lease.

The bedroom was so small you could only put one bed in it, which was a problem since we had three guys and there was no other room, other than the living room. We solved that problem by stacking the beds to make a triple-decker. They fit but the top bed was claustrophobically close to the ceiling. When I say close, you had to really think about it when turning over.  It required a bit of maneuvering. And climbing down from there to pee in the middle of the night? Forget about it. At least you didn’t need covers when sleeping up there because that’s where the heat of the entire apartment settled.

In the living room, we could only squeeze in a small kitchen table with two chairs and one easy chair.  Walking though the living room to the bathroom required at least two “Excuse mes” as it involved a bit of high stepping like the rope drills you see football players do in practice but instead of stepping over ropes, you were stepping over legs. 

The kitchen was about the size of a front hall closet with appliances I had only seen before in depression era movies. In dust bowl kitchens. The stove was no more than a hot plate attached to a gas line. But because my roommates never ventured in there, it became my sanctuary.

At the start of the semester, when Harry and John showed up, they were less than impressed. For the rest of the semester, when anything scampered or skittered across the floor, be it a mouse or cockroach, or a fuse would blow or a window wouldn’t open or shut, the guys would say, almost in unison, “And the sad thing is, your dad was with you when you signed the lease!”

The three of us quickly fell into a routine. Because of my short order cooking skills I learned at Lincoln Dairy, I did all the cooking and shopping. However, due to the lack of space and equipment, I offered a very limited menu: hamburgers, hot dogs, mac and cheese and, of course, spaghetti. We all gained weight that semester.

I don’t know how we worked it all out financially, as I don’t remember any arguments over money. Arguments over beer, the bathroom and privacy when any of us had a date. But not about food money. My roommates were happy that I shopped and cooked and they willingly did the dishes.

Harry was a pretty good guy, although I did worry about him even at that age. He sucked on his cigarettes as if he were an old man and they were attached to his oxygen tank. He always looked pink and out of breath. If it had been just the two of us, we would have done fine.

Our other roommate, John, had an edge to him so sharp that you didn’t know if he would laugh or explode at any moment. And he was very strong and I knew I could never win any type of argument with him so I simply tried to avoid him. Which wasn’t easy, considering our close quarters. Harry would just see which way the wind was blowing and go with that. In other words, in any dispute, he always sided with John. I definitely felt like the odd man out.

We had all played sports in HS and watched a lot of it on TV, including the first Monday night football game. Then that became a ritual. We also watched a lot of the Homemaker Movies, which came on at 10:30 a.m. We probably should have spent some time at the library. But I had no idea where the Northeastern library was.

Because our apartment was so small we never invited anyone over. But we did have one consistent visitor, a football player from Boston College. At the time, BC was making an effort to ramp up their football program and seemed more focused on bringing in bodies than on bringing in minds. John had known this guy in high school. He was the negative stereotype of a football player. He was huge…and very simple. We called him “Tiny.”

You never knew what might happen when Tiny came to call. One night, John, Harry and I returned from a night out to find our apartment wide open. I mean really wide open. The door was gone except for a couple of shards of wood still attached to the hinges.

We found Tiny inside crying. 

He had come to look for us earlier in the night and when he knocked, no one answered. He thought we were playing a trick on him so he kept knocking. And kept knocking. Harder and harder until he broke the door down. Oooops.

“I’m sorry, man,” he sobbed over and over. “I’m sorry. I thought you guys were playing a trick on me.”

Hide and Seek?

I learned a lot that semester, as I began taking courses in my journalism major. But I also learned about landlords. I found that there is an underclass of landlords that prey on college students. Landlords who are NOT trying to provide a service so that you’ll come back and buy/rent from them again as a respectable merchant would. They simply are trying to make as much money as they can as quickly as possible. They couldn’t care less about their reputation with students. Yes, they needed the students, but the students needed them and their “maintenance free” apartments more.

Luckily, Northeastern was on a quarter system and even though I was living with guys I wasn’t overly fond of in an apartment I liked even less, the 13-week semester went by fairly quickly. Just before the semester ended, we got a letter from our landlord, cheerily asking if we’d like to come back for the Spring trimester.

I responded with a letter of my own, thanking him for his hospitality:

“Dear Mr. Kaplan:

“…It (living in the apartment) has given us a great many lessons on life, not the least of which were how to hunt and how to live in the great outdoors.

“For the first seven weeks, all we had to stalk were those man-eating cockroaches that you breed in the cellar but then you surprised us, Mr. Kaplan! How clever of you to send up mice when we were only prepared for coackroaches! We sure do enjoy hunting this larger game …

“Also, that was clever of you to have unclosable windows installed … not that you don’t have the best radiators in town. It’s just that you can’t turn them off. So we have a lovely combination of stifling heat and freezing north winds, depending on where you are standing in our spacious suite.

“…One parting compliment, sir. We appreciate your making fire hazards so the firemen won’t get bored and so your insurance man has something to do, but isn’t having only two outlets in the entire apartment a little obvious? Won’t they get suspicious when they see all the extension cords running all over the apartment? Don’t worry, we won’t tell. Besides, who uses an electric razor? Or an electric typewriter? Or an electric radio or TV?  They sure didn’t at the time this building was built.

“Speaking of electricity, we were without it from Tuesday morning (11/10/70) until Saturday morning (11/14/70). We realize this is just part of your game. Who needs to study when you are having fun? Right, Mr. Kaplan?

“In answer to you inquiry about coming back next semester, we would love to, sir, but our parents have reprimanded us for having too much fun this semester: hunting, mimicking Abe Lincoln study habits and singing around the campfire don’t mix with school. But don’t worry, sir. We will spread the word about you and your apartments.”

We couldn’t get out of that miserable place fast enough. As soon as our finals were over, shortly after Thanksgiving, we moved out.

I was happy to be heading home and happy that I had an upcoming interview for a job I had long dreamed of: working for my hometown newspaper, the Hartford Courant.

Next time: Chapter 30: The Nightmare of the Dream Job.

Irving Kravsow wasn’t wrong in his assessment of my skills at that time. It was the seeming finality of his words that made the message so cutting. I was a 19-year-old with one semester of journalism classes under my belt. He was used to dealing with seasoned, adult reporters who could better handle the unvarnished truth.

My dismissal from the Courant plunged me into a mental fog that shrouded my self-confidence for years.

I had figured my only above average skill in life was my writing. It was the only thing I’d ever been praised for in school. It was the only aspect of my life that I felt I had an edge in. My self-assessment was that I was an average face in the crowd when it came to everything else: athletics, arts, intellect, height. You name it. I was never picked first – or last – for anything. I always landed somewhere in the middle.

I dragged myself back to Boston for the spring semester but my heart was no longer in the city or the school. I had lost contact with my friends from freshman year and wasn’t involved in any school activities or outside political protests.  I only had a few acquaintances in my journalism classes and now that I had been told by a respected editor that I wasn’t going to succeed in my recently chosen field, I didn’t have much of a connection to them, either.

My roommates, not trusting me to find our next apartment, had signed us into a sterile, singles complex in a suburb about 20 minutes from campus. It further alienated me from the school and the city. It was a better apartment. Cleaner. And all the windows, doors and appliances worked. There were two bedrooms so we took turns getting the room with a single bed. However the walls were thin and one of the roommates snored like a saw mill and the other had a girlfriend that would often scream in the middle of the night. Sometimes it was the roommate doing the screaming. I charitably chalked it up to mutual nightmares.

I was either in class or back at the apartment. It was not the college experience I wanted. I was miserable.

Besides the sleepless nights, there are only a few things I remember from that semester. I went on another diet, this time a yogurt diet. Meaning I ate yogurt for every meal for a month. It worked. I lost weight. But to this day, I can’t stand yogurt.

Also, I dropped my reporting class for a creative writing class since apparently journalism wasn’t in my future. I didn’t realize the writing class was for seniors majoring in English. The professor thought I was too young and inexperienced for the course, and at first, tried to get me to drop it. But after hearing my comments during the first few classes and after reading my first short story, he decided I could stay. I’m glad I did. That professor’s positive feedback and encouragement were the first steps in the long road of rebuilding my confidence.

The semester, with my daily commute, lack of a social life, uncertain future, and the screams, moans and snoring coming from the next room, seemed like it would never end. Finally, when it did, Harry and John decided to throw a party, reserving the complex’s swimming pool. They invited some of their friends, including Tiny, the guy who had ripped off the door to our previous apartment.

At one point during the party, Tiny went back to our apartment to get more beer. While he was  there, the phone rang and he answered it. It was for John. The phone had a long extension cord so Tiny walked with it to the balcony and held it up.

“It’s for you,” he called to John. John was floating on a raft, beginning work on his summer tan. He did not want to get out of the pool.

“Well,” John said, “bring me the phone.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes. Bring me the phone,” John insisted.

I was staring at Tiny to see how he would handle this directive. I was sure that even he could see the cord wasn’t long enough. But I wasn’t sure that Tiny could realize that John was half joking with him and half trying to provoke him to do something outrageous.  

So Tiny thought about it for a few seconds and decided to double check if John really wanted the phone brought to him.  

“You’re sure?” Tiny asked again.

“Yes,” John answered forcefully, with a bit of an exasperated laugh in his voice.

 Tiny then suddenly jerked the phone cord out of the wall and threw the now unanchored phone across the parking lot into the pool.

Everyone at the party thought it was the funniest, craziest thing they had ever seen. Everyone laughed. Except me. The phone was in my name.

I headed into that summer knowing I needed to make a life change. I couldn’t take another year like that.

When I got home, I went belt and suspenders as far as jobs go. I got two of them. During the day I worked as a laborer for a contractor, one of Doom’s customers. At night, I worked at the East Hartford branch of Lincoln Dairy, working the grill during the dinner hour and then spent the rest of the night scooping ice cream cones for Little League teams. It was a pretty good summer financially. I made good money and had no time to spend it, but it was terrible for my social life as I had no spare time.

Working on construction sites that summer introduced me to adult men who were far different than any that I had encountered up until then. My experience had been with male teachers, Doom and his friends, my neighbors who were doctors, lawyers, ministers, insurance executives. Mostly educated and mostly refined. To put it mildly, the guys I worked with that summer were a bit rough around the edges. And they took it as their mission to roughen my edges up a bit. Especially the sheet rock guys, many of them French Canadians.

I worked on a crew that had an extended job sheet rocking an apartment building in Stamford, which was about an hour commute from our home base in Hartford. The beauty of this was that the union contract paid them for the commute.  The boss also paid me for the commute at double my hourly wage.  Not for carrying sheet rock up a narrow staircase, but for simply sitting in a car. I could do that all day.

We saved money by carpooling, but riding with that crazy crew, even at double my hourly wage, made me feel underpaid.

For one thing, they had a religious fanaticism about highway tolls. Like Catholics of the day refusing to eat meat on Friday, these guys refused to pay tolls any day. However, the toll road was the easiest and fastest way to the job site. So that’s how we went. The guys I rode with made it even faster because they didn’t stop at the tolls.

Each way, there were two tolls we passed and they were not that expensive. One cost 15 cents and the other was a quarter. Split four ways, it was only ten cents each. Even in 1971, that was not a lot of money.

Maybe it was the principle of the thing. But every morning on the way to the job and every evening on the way home, we would slow down at the toll plazas, but then the driver would stomp on the gas and we would speed through the toll. At that time, it was more an honor system and there were no cameras to catch who was going through.

After about a week of this, though, the toll collectors had called the cops and one night as we approached the first toll plaza on our return, we could see half a dozen state troopers surrounding the plaza waiting for the car. The good thing about us car-pooling is that we never used the same car more than once a week so the cops might have had a pretty good idea of what car we were in that day, they couldn’t be 100 percent sure.

Added to the worry of the cops up ahead was the beer in the car. We all had purchased a six-pack each or a quart for the ride home and were about a third of the way through our allotment.

While my friends and I had engaged in risky drinking behavior in high school, these guys were professionals. They worked hard putting up the sheetrock and taping it. My job was carrying the 4 foot by eight foot, ¾ inch thick sheets – two at a time – up four flights of back and forth stairs as quickly as I could to stay ahead of them. They were fast and good if somewhat unhinged. And after a day of walking around on stilts in an unfinished apartment building with the smells of drying cement, glue and new plastics with little air circulation, they wanted beer. I did too. At least a 6-pack. And that was just for the ride home. More would come later.

The crew would buy for me because I was underage. That I didn’t have to go looking for someone to buy me beer was about the only good thing about the whole trip. As soon as we were done for the day, we piled into the car of the day and drove directly to the package store that we had spotted the first morning on the way in town. These guys didn’t want to waste a lot of time, driving around after work, looking for a place.

As we approached the toll plaza with a car loaded with beer and lawbreakers, we knew we were cooked. At least I thought we were. I was already imagining Mom and Doom having to come to headquarters to pick me up. At least I could blame this on the sheet rockers. Doom knew these guys were crazy. They definitely weren’t his type.

The driver on this day, a guy who’s eyes seemed to be always spinning as if his brain could never settle down and think rational thoughts, spotted the cops first. Then the other guys saw the cops and there was a very brief, very loud and very animated conversation in French.

We were driving right into trap and certainly would be arrested. And, all the beer we had just bought would be confiscated. I don’t know which of those results would bother the guys more. 

Our driver broke into a slightly maniacal laugh. Then suddenly, he yanked the steering wheel hard to the left and for a second, we were sliding down the highway sideways. But then the sliding stopped and the spinning wheels took hold and we were off the highway, driving through the grass, dodging trees and ditches. We popped up in an adjacent neighborhood still going 50 miles per hour. All I could do was scream. So did the other guys. I was screaming in fear while the driver’s  compatriots were screaming with delight at the brilliance of his plan.

Now you would think we’d be captured pretty easily as we were now racing through the side streets of sleepy Wallingford, Connecticut. And the cops would be looking for the car. But no, our genius had this mapped out ahead of time. He actually had an escape plan on back roads and we eluded the cops and the trip home only took about 5 minutes longer than the usual route.

It turns out that running from the cops was a regular occurrence for these guys and they had eluded the tolls for years. I don’t know if they ever got caught, but during that summer that I drove and drank with them, they never did.

The hardest part of that job, though, was hauling that sheet rock up those narrow stair cases. The reason I was using the stairs was because our boss didn’t hire union workers and the union electricians wouldn’t let us use the elevators. And they hated those guys I worked with. Since our crew spoke French and laughed a lot, the other guys on the job site were sure they were making fun of them.

Once in a while, an electrician would take pity on me and give me a ride up or down. But that was just once or twice a day a day. Otherwise I was carrying two sheets of the stuff up the stairs a hundred times a day.

It was really hard work because the sheet rock was heavy and above all, I was not supposed to let the fragile corners of the product touch the ground or the walls because then the tapers had to use more mud and it weakened the sheet. It would have been easier to bring one at a time because it would have been lighter and more maneuverable. I would have been able to get up the stairs faster.

But not fast enough. The guys would have hung that one sheet by the time I got back with the next one. So I had to carry two at a time to try to stay ahead of them. But any foolishness like going to the bathroom or pausing after lunch to let my food digest and these guys would be screaming my name and cussing me in French.

On other days, I installed ceiling tile standing on a 4 by 8 foot plywood platform on scaffolding some 25 feet in the air of a soon-to-be grocery store. Until then, I never looked up and realized how high the ceilings in grocery stores are. Nowadays, that’s about the first thing I do when I enter a store. I found I couldn’t move very fast when I was worried about falling. It was as if my joints were lubricated by 40-weight motor oil in winter.

Once in awhile, I got sent on jobs by myself, either to deliver supplies to a work site or to do clean up or prep work on other jobs. My favorite job was working in an elementary school in the worst part of Hartford. Deep in the bowels of the empty corridors was the only safe place in the neighborhood. The boss had won the bid to retile the school and it had to be prepped. I was to remove the glue gobs that had been used to stick the old tile to the ceiling. I liked it because the ceilings were only about 10 feet so while I was on a scaffold, it wasn’t very high and I was by myself. I would just report there every day and get to work. I wasn’t as fast as a pro, but I think I gave it $2.75 per hour worth of effort.

Still, I watched the clock all day.

When I was done with my day job, I raced home, changed into work out gear and went up to the fields behind Plant Junior High about two blocks from home, where I had gone to school. There I would run around the field until my high school buddy, Ernie – who I had gone to Boys’ State with – got there. Ernie was doing the same thing, working two jobs so we didn’t meet every day. But at least 3 days a week our schedules matched up and we’d work out together. After running, we’d spend a half hour kicking the soccer ball against the side of the building. We made it a game and got in some great workouts. Then we’d split and head home to take showers. Ernie was working nights at AC Petersons, another ice cream place in WH. Same as Lincoln Dairy, really, but a little higher class.

Then I headed across the river to the East Hartford Lincoln Dairy where I worked the 6-11 shift as night manager. I didn’t really have time to eat and that was good in a way as I lost a lot of weight and was probably in the best shape of my life. I would treat myself to a small bowl of vanilla ice cream topped with strawberries after the dinner rush was over. And I drank a lot of Tab. It was awful, but the only diet drink around at the time.

It was a good summer in that I worked a lot, got into great physical shape, made a lot of money and had no time to spend it. I had no idea of where I was going, but Irving Kravsow’s words … and his eyebrows … were always top of mind: Change your major.

Do something else.

Next time: Chapter 32: Southern Man

At the end of April and during the first two weeks of May, 1970, my life felt like the crescendo at the end of the Beatles’ song “A Day in the Life” when there is this crazy whirl of noise and music that spirals up in energy, pace and volume.

During that time, I was squeezed into a basement bunker in Boston’s City Hall with dozens of other college students, energy and purpose filling the room as we organized a major rally, protesting the country’s war in southeast Asia. Then I was out on the streets, marching down Commonwealth Avenue shoulder to shoulder with thousands of other demonstrators, chanting our demands to end the war.

But the shootings at Kent State brought that war on the other side of the world directly to campus. School was suddenly out.

A day later, I sat in the quiet of my suburban, childhood bedroom. I felt as if I were on the backside of that last note of the “A Day in the Life” crescendo –the hurly-burly of the music having suddenly stopped – with the fade of the final chord a metaphor for fade of the excitement of my last  semester.

I was right back where I started the previous September. I questioned whether the last few weeks, the last few months, the last school year really happened. I again was alone, surrounded only by dozens of old covers of Sports Illustrated magazines that I had thumbtacked to the walls years earlier, images of a simpler world view that featured Mickey Mantle, Joe Namath and Muhammad Ali.

I had been so wrapped up in my new, revolutionary life, I hadn’t thought of my old, safe, suburban life. A life that featured my parents, sisters and a basketball hoop at the end of the driveway. The life that required getting a summer job to pay for the next year of college. Who needed summer job plans when a week before the plan had been to change the world?

I certainly didn’t plan to become a business owner that summer. And I most certainly didn’t plan to fire an employee. And I definitely didn’t intend to deliver the news while trying to push him out of my 1969 Volkswagen … while the car was moving.

But that’s what happened.

I had been too busy to make any effort to find summer employment during the spring semester, not even checking in with the new manager at Lincoln Dairy to see if I could work there. When I did finally check, all the summer jobs had been taken.

I commiserated with my friend, Jim Tehan, who had endured high school football with me. He was in the same boat. But Jim was a hustler and he had a plan. He said we needed to start our own company … and employ ourselves. We could do odd jobs and mow lawns, but primarily we would be a painting company, because Jim calculated that house painting could earn us the most money in the least amount of time. And that was important because we were getting a late start on our summer earnings.

The first thing we did was put an ad in the newspaper. Then we had some magnetic signs made and slapped them on the side of my car. We’d cruise around town, hoping that someone might see us drive by or at a stop light and realize that yes, they did need their house painted and we looked like just the fellows who could do the job. For cheap.

We weren’t sure if the signs would actually work, but the big benefit of the signs was that they gave us an excuse to get out of our houses in the morning, away from any potential hectoring by our parents about our lack of employment.

Luckily for us, within the first week, we had a response to the newspaper ad and had to prepare our first bid. While most people had an idea of what’s a reasonable charge for lawn mowing, few of our potential customers had any idea of what was a reasonable charge to have a couple of college kids paint a house. We certainly didn’t.

But Jim and I soon figured out what the market would bear. And we found out we were way under the market. We bid $500 for the first house, a one and a half story Cape Cod. That was so quickly accepted, when the next call came in for the same sized house, we bid $600. That was accepted relatively quickly. On the third Cape, we bid $700. On that one, the owner paused and said he’d think about it. Since we needed every job we could get to earn our tuition for the next school year, we sweated it out until he called the next day and accepted our bid. That’s when we figured we had hit our price point.  

Within two weeks, we had booked enough work to last us the summer – including one full two-story house that was going to net us $900 plus about $100 in kickbacks from the paint store for buying our paint there.  Neither Jim nor I liked heights so we put that house off until the last week of the summer, hoping each successfully completed house would eventually give us the courage to tackle it.

With all that painting lined up in addition to some yard work and odd jobs, we decided to really dive into the business world: We hired two of our unemployed friends to work for us. However, Jim and I quickly found out that while we could manage each other, we couldn’t manage other people.

Within a few weeks of being hired, one of our new employees decided he didn’t want to work full time because that would mean less time to see his girlfriend. He hitchhiked down to the city every week to see her. Jim and I were not happy about that demand since accommodating anything less than a full 40-hour work week would make it very difficult to complete all the jobs we booked before we had to head back to school.

We felt our new employee was taking advantage of us. There’s no way this friend would have made these demands successfully on a real job with a real boss. We argued about working a full 40-hour week. Since he was more my friend than Jim’s, Jim smiled and said: “Fire him.”

Sure. Easy for him to say.  I found it’s not as easy to fire someone as it’s portrayed on reality TV shows. So I delayed, worrying about how it was going to affect his ability to pay his college tuition and, frankly, how I was going to say it.

But the final straw came to a head one day as we were driving back to a job site after lunch.

The guy wanted to leave at noon the next day because the week before he’d gotten to his girlfriend’s place an hour later than he wanted to. Hitchhiking, he said, doesn’t run on a schedule. He wanted to get an early start at the highway entrance to give him more time and chances to get a ride.

As we drove along, inches apart in my 1969 VW Bug, I argued that summer was halfway over and we had several more houses to paint. That we needed all hands on deck tomorrow to finish the house we were working on and beat the rain that was forecast. Time was running out.

My friend turned employee said he didn’t care as he was just the hired help. Jim and I were “the Man,” the ones who had promised the homeowners we would do what we said we would.

The argument ramped up in intensity and volume and soon my erstwhile employee and I were screaming at each other –I may have been the only one screaming as I was so loud and so angry, I couldn’t have heard him if he HAD been saying anything.

 Suddenly I snapped. It doesn’t happen often, but every once in a while, I stop thinking rationally and react.

I quickly reached across my soon-to-be former employee and opened his door and gave him a shove. The move surprised him because I hadn’t slowed down. But I was so mad, I didn’t care. If he wanted to go early, he could go now. The only thing that saved him on my first attempt to shove him out was that he latched onto the grab bar that was just above the glove compartment.

I wasn’t done, however. With the dexterity of a 19-year-old, I lifted my right leg up over the stick shift and planted my foot on his hip and shoved again. Lucky for him – and me, I suppose – he managed to hold on to the seat and the grab bar and not fall into the street. And since my foot was no longer on the gas, we slowly rolled to a stop.

But he was fired.

I should say, in my defense, we weren’t on a major road. It was a sparsely traveled lane in an expensive, leafy enclave with thick carpets of grass running all the way down to the street. There were no curbs or sidewalks. So even if I had been successful in launching him from the car while it was moving, he might have only suffered minor bruising and a few grass stains.

Our other employee was a pipe smoker. Pipe smokers are a type, I discovered. Those that I have known, at least, are very careful, fastidious people. This particular pipe smoker would paint a stroke or two and step back – way back – and admire those few strokes. And by then, his pipe would need relighting, tamping, or reloading. And then relighting. With a few test puffs.

In his defense, I must say, he was a very good painter.

But he was so slow.

Jim and I would finish one side of a house and then we’d come around and find that our last employee had barely finished painting the trim around the windows.

Jim and I decided we could get more done without the chore of monitoring the extra help. So we found an excuse to let the other employee go, too, and, working long hours and on weekends, we finished the houses we had lined up by ourselves. We finally painted that two-story house, taking turns climbing the 24-foot ladder to the second story. I’d be up there in the mornings, painting what I could while stiffly clinging to the ladder. Then Jim reluctantly would make the climb in the afternoons.

Our dreams of a painting empire died that summer, but we did manage to learn to paint and to earn enough money to keep us afloat for the next school year.

In September, I headed back to Boston.

Next time: Chapter 29: A Forgettable Fall