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College Night! You were expected to ‘dress up’ (which for some meant just wearing more than a tee-shirt). Sometimes they were rather sparsely attended, or people left right after finishing their meal.
I can remember a few of them:
Arie Haagen-Smit: the “father of air pollution control” who had figured out the causes of smog while at Caltech. I think Dr Thimann knew him, which is how came to be invited.A brass band (not the Canadian Brass, I think, but something like them) which played so loud my ears were ringing for quite some time after.
Participating in a “Western Night” show with corny cowboy jokes and silly songs, when Gauss House had the job of putting on the show.
I think it was my freshman year when Merrill had Clark Kerr as its college night speaker, and I ‘snuck’ over there to hear him. It wasn’t long after Reagan had ousted him as the UC system President, and he had a lot to say about the founding of the Santa Cruz campus, in which he had had such an important role..
But, by far, the most memorable of them all was in my senior year, when, after a year of begging, Tom Lehrer consented to perform his songs “because they let him play the Bösendorfer piano”. The dining hall was packed beyond capacity, and the cheers were loud and long. Definitely one of the highlight days of my time at UCSC.
If anyone else has any recollections, I’m sure those will remind me of others which aren’t coming to mind, but those definitely stand out in my memory.
Over the course of four years in the dorms I had three roommates:
Initially, I was paired with John Jackson in Gauss #216, a match not made in heaven.
He was, shall we say, more socially advanced than his naive 17-year-old roommate (me),
and I remember one day coming back to the room where he was making out with someone,
as her infant sat on the bed as a bystander. On another occasion, with the ‘aroma’ of pot rife in the room (which I had to ask what it was), I decided a change was in order. He had made friends with someone more amenable to his lifestyle, and I switched with that guy, and moved in with Russ Regnery in room #203. We were opposite Jack Engstom and Geoff Wong in #204 (they moved to #303 the following year). Russ was much more studious and quiet and we got along well. Later in the year, Russ got a single room, and I was left with the double to myself.Second year, I moved to Maxwell House (3rd floor) and roomed with Mike Miller, whom I had met through Pat McCormick (who then lived opposite us) and some vague family connection, the details of which I don’t recall. Part way through the year, he too, departed, for off-campus housing, and once again I had a solo double room.
Junior and senior years, I had single rooms on Maxwell first floor.
The various dorms certainly had their own personalities – my experiences in Gauss and Maxwell could hardly have been more different.
Ah yes, telephony in the 1960’s!
I only vaguely remember the pay phones, but there was also a ‘regular’ phone (with a dial, of course, and in everyone’s favorite color, black) on each floor, which could receive incoming calls, and call out to campus numbers, and maybe local numbers, and maybe the operator for collect calls?
Back then, “long distance call” meant something really, really important had happened, because making such a call meant you were willing to lay out some serious cash! That refuse-the-collect-call trick was not unique to your family, Lisa, I assure you.
