Tag: New Paltz

40 Years Ago: First Day of College

That night, I went to my room and cried myself to sleep.

With colleges now starting before Labor Day, I’m fascinated to note that I didn’t begin my college career until September 12, 1971. As noted, I was attending the State University College at New Paltz only before my high school girlfriend was attending there. And well before I got there, but too late to apply anywhere else, she had dumped me for another guy.

So what to make of the place? I’d been there before and had had some affection for it. There were three red-brick dorms at one part of campus. Scudder Hall was where I was assigned, room B-2. My parents and sisters helped me drop off my stuff, which included bedding, a few books (a Bible, Roget’s Thesaurus, Robert’s Rules of Order, a complete Shakespeare among them), my record player, and about 30 LPs (all the Apple label Beatles, The Band’s eponymous second album, Pet Sounds by the Beach Boys, Daydream by the Lovin’ Spoonful, the Supremes Sing Holland-Dozier-Holland, The Temptations with a Little Bit O’ Soul, a Mamas and Papas greatest hits album, Aftermath by the Rolling Stones, and a few others).

But my roommate wasn’t there yet. It turned out, when I met him the next day, that Ron was a graduate student. So why on earth would they match him with a freshman? Maybe it was because we were the only two black males in the dorm.

At some point, we were directed across the grass to another red brick dorm, Bliss Hall. I knew Bliss all too well; that’s where I had gotten dumped four months earlier. The food the college was serving was in the basement.

In the line, I met this weird guy who also was assigned to Scudder, Room 110. It turned out that Uthaclena collected comic books. How does a grown person collect comic books? I had given them up years earlier. Of course, he got me into collecting, seriously, for about two decades. He also had a weird habit of squatting off his desk as though he were Peanuts’ Snoopy as a vulture; it was very peculiar.

That night, I went to my room and cried myself to sleep.

The next night, there was a mixer, and Uthaclena introduced me to a friend and classmate of his, originally from Durant, Oklahoma. I started throwing peanuts in her beer; oddly, this was an effective pickup technique. And by the end of the month, the Okie and I were seriously dating.

40 Years After: May 1971

She apologized but said she had started seeing someone else, so she had to break up with me.

Here’s a new thing I’m doing on this blog: a periodic recollection of my freshman year, into the beginning of my sophomore year, of college. These were significant events that had medium-to-long-term consequences in my life. If I had the discipline, it’d be an essay or one way-too-long blogpost.

I won’t be writing them even every month, but in September of this year, then in February, May, June, August, and October of next year; maybe a couple of other times. I’ll probably link back to the previous episodes, but I’m not going to write the whole thing then chop it up. But the background from the previous segments should inform the subsequent pieces if I do it write, or right.

I went to college where I did because my girlfriend was already there. But that didn’t exactly work out as I planned.

In the fall of 1970, I was in the second half of my senior year at Binghamton (NY) Central High School, and I would be graduating in January 1971. Meanwhile, my girlfriend, who was six months older than I, was a freshman at the State University of New York at New Paltz, about 150 miles away, in a small town along the Hudson River about halfway between New York City and Albany.

I would visit her at the all-female Bliss Hall when I could, which was difficult because there was no direct bus there. There was no train, and I would have had to take two buses, through New York City or through Albany, to get there by that mode.

The easiest way was to hitchhike. But this not to say it was simple. I had to go from Route 17, an interstate-type road to these series of local roads (52, 209, 44/55, and finally 299) to New Paltz.

I visited her once or twice in the fall and saw her at Christmastime, and perhaps once in the winter.

Then I got a job working at IBM in March 1971. It was allegedly 40 hours a week, from 5:12 p.m. to 2 a.m., with a 48-minute lunch break, but business was good, and I generally worked a 56-hour workweek, i.e., 5:12 p.m. to 4 a.m., then Saturday from noon to 6 p.m. As a result, I was very tired but too tired to spend any money, and I socked away enough for my first year in college by the time I quit in August.

One weekend in May, I must have had a rare Saturday off, so I decided to surprise the girlfriend by hitching out to New Paltz. I got to Bliss Hall, and her hall neighbors said that she wasn’t there. But I had met them a couple of times and they seemed a little weird.

Finally, the girlfriend shows up. She apologized but said she had started seeing someone else, so she had to break up with me. Needless to say, I was devastated, and left. I contacted my friend Steve, who was across the river in Poughkeepsie, hitched over there (or maybe she gave me a ride; I’m not sure), and he commiserated with me. I specifically remember him going on and on about this great singer/guitarist named Bonnie Raitt, who I had never heard of, but who he had seen perform in the area; her debut album would come out later that year.

Then I hitched home.

Did I mention that New Paltz, where I had been accepted, was the ONLY college I applied to? So I’ll be going away to this particular college in the fall for, as it turned out, no particular reason.

 

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