Chapter II College and Away From Home

Chapter II College and Away From Home (September 1961-65)

  1. I applied to Bowling Green State University, Kent State University and Mount Union College (Dad’s, Aunt Helen Curtis Haines’ and Sally Ann Haines Reigle’s alma mater). Having been accepted at all 3, I chose to attend BGSU. Dad took me to the summer orientation session, sight unseen by either of us. We stayed in the freshman women’s dorm for two nights and only remember how fast everyone walked on campus and Dad’s complains to me about needing to pickup the pace or get left behind. Also, he had a tuff time finding the urinals in the rest rooms down the hall. I guess he did not get the word about the dorm being for women only.
  1. Mom and Aunt Helen drove me to BGSU for the start of school in September 6, 1961. It was Aunt Helen’s family car and it took about 3 hours for the 3 of us to go west on the Ohio Turnpike almost across the state. I had 1 two-suitor hand-me-down really beat-up leather suitcase, 1 canvas val-pack (USN WWII issue) and my golf clubs. We had a 9 hole on-campus course. 
  1. My 2-man room was it the freshman dorm, but we had 2 bunk beds and 3 other roommates. Donald “Dee” Israel, good friend from Alliance, Robert Crowell and ??????, both from Solon, Ohio were my roommates for the first semester. Dee moved to room with a friend, ?????, flunked out and the 2 Bob’s pledged different fraternities (OX and DU) and finished the year together.
  1. My sophomore, junior and senior years at BG were spent on campus living in the OX house (owned by BGSU) and working in the kitchen for my board. This was nice since I only had to walk down the steps to get to work. One drawback was the chore of having to please my fraternity brothers when serving food, busing tables and washing dishes. That problem was minimized my senior year, since my only job was running the dishwasher and scrubbing the big pots.

The house was nice but more like a mini-dorm than a free standing building as all of the other smaller houses on campus. It was part of a U-shaped quadrangle with 4, 3 story connected houses on each side and an upper classman dorm on the end.  There was no drinking of alcohol on state property, so we never had parties in the house except during spring and fall fraternity rush which were very dry. Our hose mother, Miss Lillian Kuck, lived in a small apartment in the house and kept a close watch on all of 52 brothers (125 total) that lived in the house. 
 My OX little brothers are as follows to my recollection. I pledged spring’62:1) Tom Dalton fall ‘622) Doug Mower spring ‘633) Ray Trybus fall ‘635) Billy Belt spring ’64None fall ’64 or spring ’65 for me. They all went ATO or Sig. My fault!Any changes from you? Not real sure about you (Mike Hemmert). Who was your big brother?Petie?   

  1. Mom, Dad and Tom come to BGSU for “Theta Chi (OX) Parents Weekend” my fall sophomore year. I can’t remember too much about the event other Tom and I were fooling around and his tooth cap got knocked off and everyone was mad at me for causing the problem. I had a date for the weekend events and I think her name was, Dana (Eddie, Clair and ????. I met her and her 3 other roommates our freshman year and dated all of them at one time or another both years. I think we went to downtown Bowling Green to have drinks at “Meade’s Café” where the local drunks and OX’s hung out. Mama Meade loved the OX’s and hired many of the brothers to tend bar and close-up for her at night. 
  2. It was the classic downtown, main street, locals only, long straight dark wood front and back bar that served mostly shots and draft beers with 2 pool tables in the back room and wooden booths from front to back. No other fraternity guys ever came into Meade’s and we rarely went anywhere else either. A few of the basketball black guys (Nate Thurmond, Wavey Junior, Elijah Chapman) and Howard Komise USMC, would come in for rum and cokes. Getting served by my fraternity brothers and Dyber, Don and Mama Meade from 18 to 21, made things a bit easier when trying to get your under-aged date a mixed drink. 
  1. Mom and Dad come to BGSU for unexpected on time graduation on June 6, 1965. After four years of studying as a biology major and business minor I had exactly enough credits and GPA to graduate with my class. Seniors were not required to take finals for the first time in school history, so Bob Derbyshire and I went to Put-in-Bay, Ohio on South Bass Island in Lake Eire on Bob’s Harley-Davidson for a few days waiting on commencement. I really didn’t officially know if I was to walk until we ran into one of my graduate assistants on the island and he informed me that I was on the list. That is when I called my parents and told them the good news. They drove to Bowling Green and watched me walk across the stage in Anderson Arena on campus. My girlfriend and pin mate, who was a sophomore, Terri Lynn Sembach, from Fort Lauderdale, Florida and later Johnstown, Pennsylvania was with my parents in the audience. She had stayed on campus for me and I took her to Johnstown from Alliance a few days after we got home.

I spent the summer painting houses again and worrying about my soon to be new 1A draft status. At the end of the summer I enrolled in Kent State University for post-graduate courses in business administration. It was too late to register for classes on the main campus in Kent, Ohio, where my brother, Tom was enrolled as freshman. He was married to Trevia Cassidy and they had a 2 year old son, named Thomas Steven Curtis. My plan was to commute with Tom and his buddys to school. But that did not work out as classes were closed out, so I had to enroll in night classes at the KSU branch in Canton, Ohio and borrow my mother’s car to commute 3 nights a week for the first quarter.
The next two quarters were spent on the main campus at KSU taking business administration courses during the day and commuting with Tom for a month or so until I save enough money from my first real job as a grinder at the Transue & Williams Steel Forgings Company. Dad helped me get this job because he knew the President from the Alliance Country Club to buy a car. I worked the 3 to 11 pm shift, at an hourly piece rate, had to join the Shipbuilders and Boilermakers National Union’s local group and carried my dinner in a brown bag until I was ahead enough financially to go across the street to the “Busy Bee” restaurant for dinner with some of the guys. 
It was hard and dirty work for the high school drop-outs in town, but most of the men were much older and were supporting families on these wages and were really nice to me since I could work as hard as they did and never have to be carried. Most all grinding of flash from steel forgings jobs were done as teams of two so you had to keep up with your buddy since your piece count was divided by two and you were paid accordingly. Each job had a union set quota and that became the standard for that job. The guys knew after awhile that I had graduated from college already and was going to school during the day and try to figure out what to do about the military draft when the spring quarter ended. A few of the guys thought I should run for a union steward position and get an exemption from service since we had so many government contracts awarded to the company.
  So, living at home, paying no board and only $42 per month car payment for my brand new 1967 VW two door blue car made it easy for me to have plenty of money to spend. I worked this job at night and commuted to school in the morning an hour each way in order to stay out of the military since Vietnam was really starting to build up now in 1966.

  1. Mom connects me with area American Red Cross co-worker, who is a Reserve Naval Air Pilot, takes me to the Naval Air Station, Grosse Point, MI to take the aptitude and physical to become a Naval Aviator. I talked to the Marine recruiter, after scoring a point too low and only passing the eye exam to become a backseat jet radar operator.
  1. Mom and Dad come to Marine Headquarters, in Quantico, VA for my OCS graduation March 15, 1967as a 2nd Lieutenant in the United States Marine Corps.
  1. Mom has my Marine Corps 8×10 photo in dress blues placed behind the bar at their favorite restaurant in Alliance, OH. The main bartender, Joe Ferrlotti was my main special caddy job until mid-high school. So he and the owner agreed to this until I came home from Vietnam.

Came home on LSD Comstock (flag ship) and 2 other D’s with 3rd Marines Battalion flags as acting EXO and Embarkation Officer with a few of my short time officers and troops. This was part of Nixon’s big pull out plan I think. All show as we found out later. 
Sailed out of Dong Ha in Northern I Corps with short 24 hour refuel off White Beach in Okinawa. Some officers went ashore in the Captains launch to visit some old haunts from my Embark School days and almost missed the ship movement the next morning. An old Navy WO4 from the Comstock who I hooked up with for my 2nd time around town saved my ass
We put in at a shallow port at Camp Pendleton 32 days later in the middle of the night and not a dam soul around except some Navy black shoes to show us where to put all the shit in the boats and where to go sleep. No band, beer or broads!
I had 3 month left after a short Christmas leave and my new EXO at Pendleton would not let me get out early to start my MBA program in December at ECU. So I got El Toro orders for 3 months with no car and flew home March 20? and got married 4-4-70.
Guy was in the wedding party. Should have been my best man, but my younger brother did the job much more sober, but with much less flamboyance. 
Was that your O-course record time I faced the 1st day thru probable the toughest thing I ever had to do in my life? That 1st 7 foot bar and the rope on the 8 foot wall about killed me. I had NO upper body strength at that time and not much more now.