Autobiography of a Maquoketa Boy-2.pdf - Microelectronics ...

More documents

Recommendations

Info

Autobiography of a Maquoketa Boy Richard B. Wells The high school senior (spring 1971, age 17) As spring of ’71 arrived I started receiving all kinds of different brochures from a bunch of different colleges. I’d look them over even though I’d already made up my mind to go to Iowa State. For one thing, I had it straight from Bill that ISU was the place to go for electrical engineering. For another, these other colleges were out of state and there was simply no way I could afford the extra tuition they charged out of state students. There was one brochure I remember in particular, though. It was from some tiny liberal arts college in southern California and their catalog was laid out in psychedelic artwork. Their pitch wasn’t too inspiring, though. Boiled down to the essentials, it basically said, ‘We’re just looking for bodies to fill the seats.’ I couldn’t imagine anybody being attracted by that pitch, but I was wrong. One of my friends from Marquette thought they were so weird they were cool and he did decide to go there. I’m sure old Father Schmidt over at Marquette must have had an attack of indigestion when he heard about that decision. I didn’t know Father Schmidt all that well. Melody knew him a lot better than I did. Just as Danny and Ricky were my friends, Melody’s best pal was their little sister Doris. I have a hunch Doris might have been a more regular Catholic than her brothers were, and maybe that’s how Melody came to know Father Schmidt. Even though Melody had already been baptized into Mom’s church, she eventually converted and became a Catholic. But while I didn’t really know Father Schmidt, he knew me. That didn’t surprise me all that much. I was ‘the baker’s boy’ and everybody in town seemed to know me. But I came to find out from Melody a number of years later that Father Schmidt was always worrying that I wasn’t getting a good enough education at P.S. 1. It was mighty nice of him to care. I’m not even Catholic. Now, if Marquette had had a football team . . . My Marquette pal who ended up going to the psychedelic college and I were over at Marquette a couple of days after graduation. There was something he needed to get from his locker there. As we were walking down the deserted hallway a voice from the briny deep issued from Father Schmidt’s office: Wells, get in here. Curious, I stepped inside his door and gave him a friendly, “Hi, Padre. How’re you doing?” He gave me what passes as a friendly look from a priest, leaned back in his chair, and growled, “What are you going to be doing with yourself now?” I told him I was going to Iowa State to study electrical engineering. He frowned. Senior priests really know how to frown, too. He looked me straight in the eye and said, “Do you know what you’re getting into?” I was a bit taken aback, but I replied that I thought I did. He snorted and waved me out of his office. I said to my friend, “I wonder what that was about?” He just laughed. About six months later I thought maybe I had a pretty good idea about what Father Schmidt was probably getting at. My senior year seemed to pass with lightning speed. My junior year had seemed to last forever, and I’d expected my last year of high school to do the same. I guess it is true that time flies when you’re having fun. Almost before I knew it, it was graduation time and there I was getting my high school diploma. I’d been accepted at Iowa State and would be starting there at the end of August. Only one last Bellevue summer remained, and I’d be spending most of that working and trying to scrape up enough money to pay for that first year of college. For quite some time, one of the anti-war slogans had been ‘Old enough to fight, old enough to vote.’ I was a hundred percent in favor of that one. I was plain tired of not having any rights at all under the Constitution. On March 23rd Congress had passed the twenty-sixth amendment: The right of citizens of the United States, who are eighteen years of age or older, to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of age. The amendment was ratified on July 1, 1971 – just three days before Independence Day. Suddenly there was a huge new block of voters and come September I’d be one of them. I’d also be registering for the draft. And there was an election coming up in 1972. Maybe 135
Autobiography of a Maquoketa Boy Richard B. Wells at last something could be done to put an end to the war in Vietnam. An unexpected benefit of the twenty-sixth amendment was the lowering of the drinking age by a number of states. Iowa changed its law by lowering the legal drinking age from twenty-one to nineteen. Being seventeen, I was going to have to wait awhile longer to benefit from that. On the other hand, it happened there was a very strange fringe benefit from having gone to P.S. 1. Most people in town seemed to take it as a matter of course that most of the graduating seniors had taken a little longer than normal to make it through school – especially those of us ‘south side’ seniors. Consequently, just about every tavern in town took it for granted I must already be nineteen because I had just graduated. They didn’t even bother to ask me for ID. That made those ten cent drafts of beer, consumed while sitting right on a bar stool in the tavern, taste extra good. And it beat black market prices to boot. The fraternity pledge (fall, 1971) I had started a growth spurt about midway through my senior year and so by the time I arrived in Ames, IA, to begin college I was almost five feet nine inches in height and weighed in at one hundred fifty-five pounds. I had also started wearing contact lenses and shaving every couple of days. Since it was unthinkable, for a number of reasons, to take my truck with me to college, I scraped up three hundred dollars and was now driving a used 1966 Buick LeSabre. The bakery truck would stay a bakery truck. In addition to being large enough to hold everything I owned, my ‘new’ Buick was also able to thumb its nose at speed limit signs so it only took just a tad more than three hours to drive from Bellevue to Ames, rather than the four-plus hours it would have taken the truck. Bill was still with IBM and had been promoted to their office in Des Moines. He had gotten married when I was sixteen and since Des Moines is only thirty miles south of Ames I came to visit him and my new sister-in-law, Maryann, when I came out for a summer orientation trip to Iowa State. Bill took one look at my wardrobe and pronounced it unsuitable for a college man. He insisted on hauling me down to a clothing store and supervised my re-outfitting. I protested that I couldn’t afford it, but he waved that aside by simply paying for everything himself. No brother of his was going to appear at college looking like a Bellevue river rat. I began to get the idea school at the college level wasn’t going to be much like high school. One of the main purposes in my trip to Ames was to decide on a place to live. Bill had been a member of a fraternity, Sigma Nu, when he was in college and he sold me on the idea that belonging to a fraternity was infinitely superior to all other forms of college life. So when I went up to Ames and succeeded in being accepted as a pledge at the Sigma Nu chapter there, he was absolutely delighted. I have no doubt he credited my sartorial renovation as playing the central role in this success. The fact that Bill was a member of Sigma Nu was one factor in my choice to pledge that fraternity, but it wasn’t the only factor. A more important factor was that the ISU chapter’s members were mostly science and engineering students and the guys there had emphasized to me how big an advantage that was going to be for me. Then as now, electrical engineering was loaded to the gills with tough science, math, and engineering courses, and in the Sigma Nu house I would find plenty of older guys who had already been through the same courses I would be taking and who could tutor me when necessary. Another factor, not quite as important but a factor nonetheless, was the location of the Sigma Nu house. It was the one and only fraternity house on what was known as ‘sorority circle.’ Back when the house was first built at the start of the twentieth century, the original guys had owned all the land around the house and over the years had sold off lots exclusively to sororities. Any outfit that demonstrated that kind of sage planning for the future had my complete respect. Of course, it would not have been possible for me to join a fraternity if the cost had not been more or less equal to the cost of living in a dormitory. Iowa State prided itself on having one of the strongest 136
Page 1 and 2: Autobiography of a Maquoketa Boy Ri
Page 37: Autobiography of a Maquoketa Boy Ri
Page 89 and 90:
Autobiography of a Maquoketa Boy Ri
Page 91 and 92:
Page 93 and 94:
Page 95 and 96:
Page 97:
show all

Autobiography of a Maquoketa Boy-2.pdf - Microelectronics ...

Create successful ePaper yourself

Delete template?

Save as template?