Back to School

Warning: This post contains a bunch of links to my other posts about school and college.

Most of the area schools systems have already started classes. Few public schools or colleges until after Labor Day any more. A couple of years ago, I blogged about my first day of elementary school. A few years before that, I blogged about my last day of school. Lately, I've been thinking about when I went away to college. I haven't blogged much about that. So here goes:

In September 1963, I left Roanoke to attend Richmond Professional Institute (now known as Virginia Commonwealth University). My mother got our next-door neighbor, Mrs. Moffitt, to drive me there in her bronze-colored Bonneville. This was only the third time I would be away from home for more than a day. The first time was when I was nearly ten and my mother, my older cousin Marty, and I went to the beach in the Willoughby section of Norfolk. The second time was when the seventh grade at Lee Junior High spent three days touring Richmond and Williamsburg.

For weeks, I'd been packing the stuff I'd need: a trunk and a suitcase full of clothes, a Remington Quiet-Riter (a typewriter I'd used all through high school and which must have weighed a good 30 pounds or more), a radio, a hair drier, and a new copy of The American College Dictionary. The old typewriter and the hair drier are somewhere in the attic. The dictionary is still on my bookshelf. I don't know what became of the radio.

Anyhow, I moved into a room on the first floor of Founders Hall, an old Richmond mansion-turned-dormitory which wasn't air-conditioned and had few, if any amenities. Each hall shared one pay phone. There was one black and white TV in one of the two parlors. Private bathrooms? Hah! While some rooms had connecting baths, most of the facilities were a pretty good walk down the hall.

In those days, girls weren't allowed to wear slacks or—heaven forbid!—shorts without wearing a trench coat over them. Dresses and skirts were the only accepted attire for young ladies. We had a curfew of 11:00 PM on weeknights and midnight on weekends. Male visitors were allowed only in the parlors, unless they were carrying something heavy upstairs for a resident. Then said resident was expected to yell, "Man in the Hall!" at the top of her lungs so no young ladies would be caught inappropriately dressed or with their hair in curlers. (In those days of bouffant hair-dos, we rolled our hair—usually on brush rollers—and sat under our hair driers.) A housemother (who lived next to one of the parlors) made were we adhered to the rules. 

I lived in a small room on the first floor during my freshman year. My window overlooked Shafer Street, which was pretty much in the middle of campus back then. A little over two months after I'd moved in, I looked out that window and noticed a consternation in the street. It was then I heard that President Kennedy had been shot. We didn't have instant news delivery in those days, so we tuned in to our radios or gathered around the little back-and-white TV in the parlor to listen to news reports as information dribbled in. 

Today, of course, the news would have traveled instantly via Tweets, blog posts, video from the scene, etc. But 1963 was a much slower time in a lot of ways. We wrote letters (in actual ink and on paper!) and mailed them to our friends and family, who'd get them a few days later and reply. If a dire emergency arose, we might call from the pay phone in the hall, but that required money. The 3-cent stamp on our letter was a better deal. 

Times—and things—have changed considerably in the last 48 years. Although my baggage filled the Bonneville's big trunk, but compared to what college kids pack today I was traveling light. I didn't have a lot of electronic gizmos. Nobody did. Now—when kids leave for college with iPods, iPads, laptops, appliances, furniture, curling irons, and goodness knows what else—they need to use a van or pull a trailer. 

I guess kids today are carrying a lot more baggage. Somehow, though, a song that was popular during my freshman year still holds true. Maybe more so than ever.

Times change; they always have, always will.

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