Which One of You is Bob?

 

When it comes to life experiences that are tough to prepare for, the whole “meet your freshman year college roommate” deal has to be at or near the top of the the list. Start with the overall anxiety associated with moving out of your home into a whole new environment. Combine it with the the uncertainty associated with the pot-luck draw that is the roommate selection process and you have a pretty volatile mixture. Forest Gump’s proverbial box of chocolates indeed!

Today many colleges leverage sophisticated dorm and roommate management systems that match up interests of the prospective students and run various compatibility algorithms against those interests. In the late 70s, roommate selection was a tad less advanced, I recall filling out a very rudimentary application for student housing at Pitt and I am pretty sure that survey only covered basics such as Smoking/Non-Smoking and maybe religious preferences.

Then, and now, there were certainly provisions available for bypassing the selection process if you were fortunate enough to have a roommate already lined up – most likely this would have been a high school classmate who was also attending your same college. This approach was definitely a good one from a risk management perspective, but there is something to be said for making a clean break from those well-defined high school strata.

For those of us that weren’t really in any cool cliques in high school, that was one of the most attractive things about college – the social slate gets wiped clean. It was kind of a mute point for me – nobody else in my graduating class went to Pitt (though two guys in the class of 1979 from BGHS went there).

Freshman Move-in-Day for me was August 30, 1980. I was assigned to one of the primary dorms for freshman – Litchfield Tower A. Tower A was all double rooms and all freshman. The cylindrical nature of the Towers was such that that each tiny room resembled a small piece of pie – and I stress small. Each side of the room had a closet area (with a curtain hiding your stuff), a bed, and a desk. Unlike many dorm rooms, there were no options for configuring the furniture – for example, you couldn’t stack the beds in a bunk bed style to stretch the livable square footage.

My room number was 714 – interestingly enough my birthday and the number displayed on the badge shown in Dragnet, one of my favorite shows. On Move-In-Day, Dad drove me over – I think Joni and Laurey were along as well. Move-In-Days are always hectic at any school. There was a ton of traffic and Pitt is an urban campus so Dad was pretty frazzled by the time I got my keys and got moved in.

My roommate hadn’t yet arrived when everybody left to return back to Altoona around 1:00 or so. I had some orientation function that I needed to be at in the Cathedral around 2:00. Standing outside of the room before that orientation session began, I introduced myself to a kid from Leroy, NY named Dutch who was assigned to Tower A Room 712 and we ended hanging together a lot that freshman year.

The people you meet in those first couple of days at college are often the ones that you hang with for the next four years. Dutch and I had many of the same interests (sports) and he was a cool guy to hang with. Things got interesting when I headed back to Tower A after the orientation around 3:30.

As I approached good old Tower A 714, I noticed that there was a towel stuffed under the door. Hmmm. I was also picking up the wail of Jimmy Page’s guitar work on Whole Lotta Love from Led Zeppelin II emanating from the room. Insert key and open the door and I see three folks passing a joint around - one sitting on my bed and the other two on the other bed. I assume (hope) that one of them is my roommate.

So over high-volume Page and Plant and with the cannabis wafting through this tiny space, I introduce myself to my roommate Bob and his high school friends Kate and Foster, who were helping Bob move in. Bob was from Johnstown and went to Bishop McCort. Foster went to WVU – I think Kate did too – so there would be frequent visits from them over the following year.

All three of them had a pretty healthy buzz rolling, so it was quite an adventure carrying on the “get-to-know-you” conversation with the guy with whom I would be sharing this tiny space for the next eight months.

If you lookup the definition of awkward in the dictionary, you can see a picture of me on one side of that room  with Bob, Kate, and Foster on the other side. I can be seen straining to shout over the Zep while repeating every other sentence fragment – very slowly – for Bob.

• Bob: “Dude, do you toke?”
• Me:  “Ahhh – no – thanks anyways.”
• Bob: “So what are you studying?”
• Me:  “CompSci.”
• Bob: “What?”
• Me:  “Computer Science and Mathematics – How about you?”
• Bob: “Pharmacy dude.”
• Me:  “Interesting."