Back in the summer of 1971, when I was 17 and not really legal yet, I anxiously left my home in Rome, Italy (actually skipping my high school graduation) just to get myself to, of all places, Cleveland, Ohio. It was my first real summer job since leaving the States in 1968 and it was at Case Western Reserve University, so it felt like the start of my college career even though I was just learning about coding sociology research forms. At the end of the summer I hitchhiked to Ithaca wearing my old army jacket (purchased at the Porta Portese flea market in Rome) and carrying all my belongings in a duffle bag. This was not the way most of my fellow Cornell freshman started college. There was no mom to make my bed with hospital corners, no dad to carry up and build a bookshelf or help me rent a mini-fridge, and no younger sibling to cause havoc with the other people on the hall. I got put on the third floor of University Halls #4 with a west-facing double room, which I was to share with a guy named John Plunkett from Ireland (some brain trust in student housing figured Ireland and Italy were both in Europe and started with I, so that made sense). Some of the other guys on the floor were also randomly housed with one another and yet some had chosen their roommates from their high school classmates who were also attending. By my recollection, there were about a dozen double rooms on each wing of the three wings in the Hall. There was a central bathroom for the floor and a good-sized lounge, both in the middle of the three wings. We had two RA’s (Resident Advisers) on our floor, who each got a double room to use as a single. On our wing we had Wiley and on the western wing there was Greg. So, I recollect that there were about 24 freshmen on our wing.
Besides our “international room” (me and John), there was a jock room (Bill – football and Ben – baseball), a geek engineer room (Jim and Steve), an artsy-fartsy room (Gary and Mark), a LongggIsland room (Rob & Henry), a hippie room (Frank and Chuck ) a pre-Med room (Marc and Mike P.) and a Syosset room (Cliff and Craig). I’ve conferred with my memory and for the life of me, I cannot remember two or three rooms worth of floor mates. I guess the effect of 54 years will do that to a person’s recollection. But the rest of the gang I remember very well. You see, we not only spent a very formative year together in U-Hall 4, but many of us went on to live together for the next three years as well.
That freshman year began as most do, with eyes wide open with anticipation and yet, I sense it was a quite different experience for us all in our own ways. There were people who had been planning out their career at Cornell for many years. Some had done summer programs there and many had taken Advance Placement courses to prepare them in things like Calculus. Many came from Long Island and Metro NYC, but many came from upstate New York as well. The outliers were those who came from distant parts of the country and even more so those of us who came from the other side of the world. Don’t get me wrong, I felt as American as any of the guys on that floor, but it was just that by comparison to the pre-collegiate preparation most of them had and the familiarity they had with what to expect at Cornell and what they planned to do at Cornell, I was in a different universe. I had only decided to attend Cornell a few months before. My familiarity with Ithaca went back to1968 and before and was less focused on the campus and more on my aunt and uncle’s Red & White grocery on Aurora Street, way down at the bottom of East Hill and all its academic prowess. I had graduated high school, but hadn’t even heard of an Advanced Placement course much less Calculus. Most of them were there to launch their well-defined careers, I was there to explore what the hell life in America was all about for a seventeen year old.
Right from the get-go, for some reason, the people I gravitated towards that year were Mark & Mike P., across the hall, Rob, down at the end of the hall (he was always asking me to play my Bread records on my cheap stereo), Cliff, who was a fellow engineer (but not of the geek squad, more of the engineering-as-a-stepping-stone variety, much like me), and Gary (because his year spent in Thailand globalized him more than most). My roommate John, like me, was at Cornell less for vocational purposes and more for cultural adaptation reasons. The big difference between him and me was that my time in Italy informed me that I cared little or nothing about alcohol and his time in Ireland convinced him that he needed to get as much Guinness Stout in him as humanly possible. I cared about learning and John didn’t seem to care one whit about it. I was fascinated by all my courses (even those that perplexed me like Chemistry and Calculus) and John simply didn’t bother to go to class hardly at all (literally).
The dynamic on the floor was most interesting. The jocks played hall hockey, using their mascot, John, as their goalie/punching bag. The hippies were busy organizing for the McGovern presidential campaign and protesting the Vietnam War, Nixon and everything else that seemed capitalistic or imperialistic. Chuck did it with a soft touch and Frank did it brazenly with an in-your-face manner. Rob walked down the hall to the bathroom with his soap and towel what seemed like dozens of times each day and overanalyzed everything that touched our world. Some of us went into pinball hell over at Noyes Center to amuse ourselves. Those like Cliff and Marc, came pre-packaged with girlfriends from high school (but who were respectively located in Cortland and Rochester) to fill their free hours. Others like Mike P. And Gary went further afield and tested the dating waters in very different but normal fashion (Mike P. found our good friend Debbie and Gary had a way of finding young women who shared his unique sense of the world and came and went accordingly). Meanwhile the others of us put dating on hold while we got our bearings. Whatever we lacked in female companionship, was made up for us by the wails coming from Wiley’s room (“Stop it Wiley! Stop it!…Oh, Wiley….”) and Greg’s squeeze Louise, the sweet blonde American Beauty who used the communal men’s bathroom shamelessly as if it were her own, much to the shock and pleasure of us all.
A big part of the gang decided by early Spring Semester that sophomore living would mean joining a fraternity, so those of us not really looking for a frat experience, but needing a roof over our heads, took the path of least resistance and found a rather casual fraternity, Phi Sigma Epsilon. It was there where all those friendships from freshman year either solidified or fell away as new ones were also added. Mike P. was an exception in that he and we stayed friendly through our love of golf and skiing despite his being at a more “serious” fraternity on campus. While I try to stay in touch with all from that gang, I seem to do that best with Cliff for some reason. He and I share the same organizing and herding instinct when it comes to these Cornell friends. Maybe its because I spent so much time watching TV with his wife, Linda (his high school sweetheart) while Cliff was stuck in the rigors of engineering, I having escaped to Arts & Sciences. We have both lived very different lives from those days on, but have stayed in close touch nonetheless. He became a global business warrior like I was, but on a very different path. I called him yesterday and we spoke for an hour just catching up on any and every thing, having laughs along the way. There are few things for some reason that I like more than catching up with Cliff.