Going Away To College

     The title to the final blog post I might write here could easily read: "Going Away To College"

     Going away to school meant you were an adult, you had to figure things out for yourself. You even had to be prepared to do your own laundry! I thought it was quite the extravagence when I learned that the college would launder your sheets for a small fee every week if you carried them across campus and picked them up the following week.

     I arrived at Dickinson College with a dreamy image of what college life would be like. I was looking for transcendent performances, ones I could never forget, where a professor fully-formed comes out and offered us truths or just a single bit of truth that I'd always remember. Fortunately, I attended a four-year residential Liberal Arts college in the late 1970s and the professors who would mold the rest of my life were all in residence! Not only do I remember their words, mostly those completely unrelated to course work, but I can recall quite fondly seeing them doing the normal things of life like collecting their mail, walking to work, and have a laugh with a colleague or student in the academic quad. It was quite idyllic and certainly worth every penny, $5000 for my entire freshman year.

     For that princely sum there was one pay phone per dormitory building wing and one local phone per floor. It was an event when an outside call was forwarded to our floor and we scrambled to find the person the call was intended for.

 Denny Hall--first class: American History

Believe it or not this was the Gymnasium! Later reconfigured into an Arts Center.