Mr. Write's Page

I loved going off to college. I loved being on my own and making my own decisions. I loved the challenge, the excitement, the people.

A big school like the University of Georgia attracts the prettiest girls, the most popular boys, and countless eggheads from hundreds of little Georgia towns, then concentrates them on one campus.

In September 1960, Athens, Georgia, was a fine place for an eager young fellow such as myself, who wanted to have a good time and learn some stuff.

I think I succeeded in doing both. And if my leisure activities crossed the line now and then, if I sometimes drank to excess or acted the fool in public, I also never cut a class. Not once in four years.

In my day, all freshman and sophomore students were required to reside in university housing. The freshmen, those tender newcomers, were assigned to their own residence halls, segregated by sex.

The largest residence hall for male freshmen was Reed Hall, a battered old place perched on a hill overlooking Sanford Stadium.

I was assigned to Reed Hall, second floor, room 201. My roommate Paul was a boisterous, swaggering kid from Macon whose grandparents were Lebanese immigrants.

Reed Hall had been built in 1953, and the constant abuse from successive classes of freshmen had left it dingy and dilapidated.

But Reed was an institution, and it was organized into “communities” overseen by proctors — upperclassmen whose job it was to tend to our needs and keep us in line.

The day we all arrived in Athens was chaotic. It was a Saturday, and the campus was swarming with thousands of students, parents, and vehicles. The halls of the dorms were packed. The dads carted boxes up the stairs, and the moms futzed irrelevantly with draperies and linens. It was madness.

I must admit, Mom and Dad did well that day. They didn’t fawn, or lecture, or hover for too long. They helped me get moved in, expressed their love and best wishes, and retreated gracefully home. Not all parents were so considerate.

By late afternoon, Reed was beginning to settle down. The second-floor hall was still busy and noisy, but showing signs of what would become normalcy.

Paul and a few other new acquaintances and I walked next door to the Memorial Hall cafeteria for dinner.

The food was awful. Paul had a side order of sliced tomatoes, tasted them, and spat them out.

I reached across the table, speared a clean chunk, and popped it in my mouth. The tomato was virtually tasteless. The texture was a cross between mealy and crunchy. Yikes.

Then Paul added a dollop of mayonnaise and pronounced the tomatoes palatable. I did the same. Wow, mayo made all the difference!

From that meal forward, dining hall tomatoes were known in my circle of friends as test-tube tomatoes.

After a few days, most of us were beginning to get into the routine and hit our respective strides. Life at college was still fresh and exciting, but now it was a known quantity, not nearly as terrifying as in the beginning.

Then, late one weekday afternoon, as Paul and I relaxed in our room after classes, things got crazy.

A terrible scream split the air and echoed down the hall. Paul and I rushed to the door in time to see some guy running at full speed toward us, screaming, eyes wide with terror.

By then, the hall was blocked by six or eight people. Arms went out to stop the hysterical student, and he came to a halt, panting.

“He’s dead! He’s dead” the student wailed. “In my room — he’s dead!”

En masse, we surged down the hall to the room in question. We burst inside, jostling for position.

It was true. On the floor at the foot of the twin beds, flat on his back, eyes closed, arms at his side, was a young black man. He was, quite simply, as still as death.

Someone muttered, on behalf of us all, “Oh, shit!”

The unfortunate fellow was one of the Reed Hall janitors. It was a heart attack, we learned later. The man was overweight, but far too young for such a fate.

Someone knelt down to check for a pulse. Someone else ran to get the proctor. The rest of us stood there quietly.

I can’t speak for the others, but I was thinking about mortality, mostly my own, and the hand we are dealt, and how life is a crapshoot at best. I was thinking, too, that I had never before seen an actual dead body.

The janitor wore dark brown overalls and black shoes, the toes of which pointed toward the ceiling. He had big feet. His shoes were inordinately long, like clown shoes.

He was clean-shaven, and his hair was cut short. He was stretched out as if peacefully asleep.

Moments later, our proctor arrived in a rush. He sat on the floor next to the janitor and checked again for signs of life.

Finding none, he shook his head sadly and spoke the man’s name. I don’t recall it, I’m sad to say.

He looked up at the small group of his charges standing in a circle around him.

“Well, guys,” he said, “Welcome to Athens.”

Architect’s rendering of the proposed Reed Hall, 1952.

View from my dorm room showing Sanford Stadium and the Science Center beyond, Fall 1960.