By Scott Sullivan
Editor
Journal entries: 9/7– Speak not, walls have years. 9/15 – Know I did. 9/16 – Seeing. 9/18 – Get flow going, writing’s yours.
I.U.
Seeing corporate success stress Dad made be vow not to be a suit case. “History, son?” he asked.
“You studied that in college.”
“It can come in handy. Still, if you want to be a lawyer, why not business?”
“That’s why.”
Reading dust jackets I could write book reports in high school but wouldn’t take studies home; I wanted to read what I wanted.
“You’re as smart as kids ranked ahead of you,” Dad said of classmates fun to conspire with, laugh and learn from. Them’s fightin’ words as I was competitive.
I left home freshman year for Indiana University, state Purdue’s Big 10 rival in our hoops-crazed state. My parents helped me pack the back of the station wagon with dorm essentials. We drove past the PU campus south to Bloomington, then west off North Sunrise into the Teter Quad parking turnaround. Stereo speakers I could tote under either arm were two of them.
My roommate from West Lafayette was a straight shooter who played basketball like a dream. Ron tried out as a walk-on for still-young Hoosier coach Bob Knight’s team, which on scholarship had future NCAA Players of the Year Scott May and Kent Benson, NBA guards Quinn Buckner and Bobby Wilkerson. They were core of teams that went 31-1 in 1974-75, then 32-0 the next year, still the last unbeaten Division 1 men’s champions.
Ron didn’t make that team but did make our T-3 “Bearded Clams” intramural squad talented. I’d learned as a high school Red Devil teammate to feed him the ball, he could do the rest.
Worlds opened away from home. I began to try things.
The Tupperware Party candidate running for student president worked in our dorm cafeteria and used a magnet to win votes from pinball freaks; through the top glass he’d lift silver balls and drop them in bonus holes. I’d fill a machine with free games (some 16, some 32 before maxing out) and sell for triple the quarter I’d invested, learning business on my own time.
IU football teams were as bad as its hoops teams good, source of mirth for many. First-year coach Lee Corso rolled out his crimson and cream-clad warriors into Memorial Stadium on red double-decker buses to stoners’ delight as prelude to Saturday shellackings.
Watching sycamore, maple, oak, ash and hickory trees change hues on Jordan River banks framed by limestone buildings was a different campus experience than Purdue’s campus down our yard’s driveway hill, where my brothers and I parked cars while our Irish setter preened before Ross-Ade Stadium football games. PU was red bricks, smokestacks and practical engineering/agriculture curriculum familiar to me like blood flow.
Ron and I hitchhiked home one weekend, him to see his high school-now-Purdue girlfriend, me because my parents said doing so was risky hence irresistible. Shreve Hall where Sue was had a lounge where I could crash nights on a back couch and with others watch a TV screen turn to dancing color dots after midnight.
Bloomington was more static off campus too. A friend of Ron roped us into attending a post-church Baptist picnic at which hallelujahs and praise continued. From zen studies I knew nothing was enough; here was surfeit.
We attended a high school football game at which Bloomington South’s unbeaten Panthers smashed Martinsville 52-20. They might have scored more against Corso’s older clowns and better than we did appreciating girls with pompoms.
Elton John’s “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road” filled and emptied record stores. IU’s A.M. station played “China Grove” each morning when my clock radio went off. Sly and the Family Stone showed late and coked up as expected for their show at Assembly Hall concert, from whose top tier it was hard to see faces below afros of the time.
“Blow me” was the T-3 Boys’ standard greeting, “Eat me” the rejoinder. We’d yodel our obscene song before losing intramural bowling matches; only Q the Clown and I knew how to pick up spares. Bowling fulfilled my P.E. requirement and reminded me of the obvious math: sandbag early semester by missing pins on purpose, then show improvement.
For other classes wanting to show Dad I could get all A’s I’d read what profs required through book titles and first few lines, spin synopses then return to my own studies’ scattered focus. Pinball bowling and scamming grades didn’t make up to me for my basketball failures but showed Dad I had some value.
Ron wanted to transfer home to Purdue after first semester. I felt lonely for familiar too. Moving out we found an iguana-owning hallmate expelled by his parents, class absence record or both had splashed rainbow paint on walls and hung cotton-like cobwebs from the dorm hall ceiling, a “Blow me” T-3 farewell.
9/3 – “You do not do” led Sylvia Plath’s poem “Daddy,” which Muskegon Great Books friends and I took turns reading aloud. T.S. Eliot’s “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” too broke us into hysterics. But that was then.
To be continued