Later, during my senior year, I and a group of other students, with apparently little else to do, organized a student/faculty croquet match. During the lead-up to the match, I had written a story on the upcoming contest for the IWU newspaper to promote the event.
In the completely fictional article, I explained that the match was expected to be hotly contested. I wrote up a fake interview with the IWU chief of security, James Ater. I attributed several quotes to him, including that IWU security would be “ready for anything.”
On the day of the match, the participants and spectators were milling around waiting for the games to begin when suddenly there they came—the entire IWU three-man security detail—striding across the quad, decked out in full riot gear, batons in hand, ready for anything. It turned out to be the highlight of the day.
I ended up rooming with Cowboy for two and a half years, at the end of which I was sad to see him graduate, as that would be the end of our daily association.
But those two years turned out to be the most beneficial education I would get at IWU.
What Next?
By May 1974 my matriculation at Illinois Wesleyan University had come to a close. I probably didn’t want it to, though, if my level of preparedness for life after college was any indication.
Only as the commencement ceremony ended did it become clear that the prospect of employment commensurate with my degree was at best questionable—or any employment at all, for that matter. I hadn’t exactly been spending all my time looking for work.
Jobless, homeless, and desperate to keep expenses low, I hooked up with another similarly hopeless IWU student, Tom Patterson. In reality Tom’s life was far from hopeless, and although he was homeless, his prospects were much greater than mine.
It’s interesting how homeless guys gravitate toward one another. Seeing Tom wandering around campus, I was immediately drawn to him and walked up, asking, “You got anything lined up?”
“No, not yet,” he said.
It was around two o’clock by then, and not having any plan for that night was not encouraging.
“Got a place to live?” I asked.
“Not yet.”
“Me either. Got any ideas?”
“No,” he replied, and with that, off we went together, homeless, jobless, into the unknown.
Our predicament called for some creative thinking, so we decided to clandestinely move back into our old dorm, Magill Hall.
Magill was just sitting there empty with open doors and windows, so technically it wasn’t as if we were breaking in. It wasn’t until years later and multiple tours of college dorms filled with eighteen- to twenty-one-year-old males that the reason for all the open windows at the end of the school year became apparent.
Though Tom and I showed up at Magill only to sleep and used no lights, we hadn’t fooled the IWU security force, who, despite our seemingly stealthy ways, appeared before a week had passed and gently suggested we find other accommodations as quickly as possible. That we hadn’t been forcefully booted out on the spot was fortunate and probably due, at least in part, to my past association with Gary and the IWU security force.
As it was, Tom and I took advantage of the graciousness shown to us by security by staying put. No, we took our time in leaving Magill Hall and, again, could have done so only through the good graces of IWU security. I have always been thankful to them for that.
Even so, by the end of the second week, we found the doors to Magill Hall closed and the windows locked. That necessitated us having to actually break in just to recover our few belongings.
The prospect of homelessness or of returning to my parents’ home was looming ever larger but proved to be a substantial motivational force. Yet it was only through spectacularly good fortune that Tom and I found both a place to live and jobs to pay for it.
Incredibly, I found a job the next day as the new snack shop manager at the first place I visited, the Bloomington Country Club. It was either through a lead that Tom had provided to me or a job that he had held previously, but in any case, I had employment.
The homelessness problem was solved that same day when Tom and I and yet two more wandering former students, Paula Raibley and Marc Brown, combined our resources to land a small furnished apartment. Things were looking up during the summer of 1974.
Snack shop manager at the Bloomington Country Club was a truly wonderful job. The shop, located at the ninth hole of the club, was staffed by me and two coworkers, the brothers Nick and Terry Trang.
Nick and Terry had come to the United States as refugees. The Vietnam War was coming to a close, and they had been lucky enough to get out and had been transplanted to Bloomington.
Both of them were students at Illinois State University in the nearby city of Normal and were just as happy to be working that summer as I was. We were a great crew.
Nick was perfectly happy with his Americanized first name, but Terry not so much. I don’t know if the brothers were on the opposite sides of the war, but they surely could have been from the sound of things I heard that summer.
The Trang brothers and I came up with innovative ways to keep beer cold, invented several new sandwiches, and waited the better part of the summer for the appearance of M*A*S*H star and avid golfer McLean Stevenson.
I was assured by my boss, Mr. Boetcher, that Mr. Stevenson played at least one round of golf a year at the private club and was reminded often of Mr. Stevenson’s preference for very cold beer, suggesting I “be ready.” Taking that directive to heart, we in the snack shop were always standing by with a full trash can of beer on ice.
When we weren’t preoccupied with keeping beer cold, the three us spent many hours experimenting with new sandwich creations, some of which became quite popular with the membership. The beer on ice was a hit too and much preferred over the beer stored in the cooler.
We entertained ourselves by using the snack shop sound system to play tapes of Nick’s favorite artist, David Bowie. My guess is that there might be some members of the Bloomington Country Club that remember the summer of 1974 as one of very cold beer and of The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars.
Nick, who, in addition to Vietnamese, spoke several Chinese dialects, was a constant source of interesting information.
While the Vietnam War was winding down and the Kissinger peace plan was dominating the news, I, having been a political science major at IWU, took this unique opportunity to learn from Nick how to curse in Vietnamese and Chinese. Nick was thoroughly helpful in that regard, and the profanities I learned that summer were put to good use over the years.
Terry, on the other hand, was not interested in teaching and remained quiet and rather sullen, probably missing home.
As the summer wore on, it began to look like McLean wasn’t going to show up and that our ice and beer in a trashcan idea wasn’t going to amount to much other than a spike in beer sales among the regular members. That is, until one day during the final week of the season.
There came McLean, instantly recognizable, strolling into the snack shop in search of a beer. That was when a summer of hard work paid off. Looking our way, he lifted his can in salute to the three of us with the smiling observation we had worked so hard for: “This is cold beer.”
A few days later, the snack shop closed, but having seen it coming and with no desire to again be confronted with the specter of homelessness, I had lined up another job as a graveyard-shift security guard supervisor for Wackenhut Security, which had the contract at State Farm Insurance corporate headquarters in Bloomington.