Part I-Early Years, Chapter 11-College

CHAPTER 11
College
1953-1957

Washington State College (WSC; it is now WSU) had a two year associate degree in farm management, and when I went over there that fall I thought that was the course I was going to pursue. After finishing the first semester I became aware of “Farm Mechanics” a four year degree the school offered. It was similar to the “Agriculture Engineering” without the higher math. I had my mind set on a career in farming. I had no idea how I was going to do it but I fully expected to buy an irrigated farm when I got out of school. I had always felt that Dad should have and could have bought a farm in the Moses Lake area; now that I look back on it I think his reluctance was probably due to his experiences during the Great Depression where he saw so many people lose their farms and everything else.
College was hard work, but I found I could cope. I had never heard of ROTC before but learned that in a land grant college (which included WSC), two years of military training were required by all male students. The last two years were optional, but if you elected to take them, you were commissioned as a Second Lieutenant in the reserves upon graduation. I had never been around anything military before and didn’t really know the rank structure. We had a choice of either Army or Air Force ROTC; when I found out that officers got to fly the airplanes I chose Air Force. To continue Air Force ROTC the junior year we had to pass the flight physical. I had trouble with the color blind test; we had to read the numbers that appeared in a sea of spots on a printed page. I missed one number more than the passing point. There were two doctors there and one said to the other, “That’s close enough don’t you think?” They agreed and I got in the program. Otherwise, I would have either transferred to the Army or not got the commission. I really wanted in because the last two years of ROTC paid $30 per month; this went a long way in paying expenses.
During the summer after my freshman year I worked for Pete Valdez during the week and for Dad on weekends (without pay). Pete always had a house or two in some phase of construction. I helped with everything except plumbing and electrical; he had someone else do that. I never did any taping and bedding either, that was another crew. One time I was on a scaffold painting the soffit of a two story house when one end of the scaffold collapsed. Lucky for me a 60 year old man was standing on the end that fell and I just scooted down the board we were standing on and he cushioned my fall. He was banged up but nothing serious.
Dad liked me to cultivate the beets. The cultivator would cover six rows at a time; when the beets first came up we would set the plows with about a one inch gap for the beets and plow up everything between to kill the weeds. It was a tedious job because if the tractor got a half inch off to either side you started plowing up six rows of beets, which would leave a big gap in the field. You couldn’t watch just one row because a rock or stick would often get between the plows and start pushing up beets. When you switched your eyes from one row to another on the other side of the tractor, it was hard to not slip off all six rows. We ran the tractor just as slow as it would go for this job; when I would come in after doing this all day I would have a terrible pain between my shoulder blades because of tension.
During the summer after my sophomore year I fell into a good job. I made enough money that summer to help me make up for time lost the next summer while in ROTC summer camp. We had a Japanese neighbor named Bill Hatori. He had a model 55 John Deere combine with about a 12 foot header on it. It had an open operator platform but was state of the art at that time. He didn’t like to run it because it was a dusty job; he told me if I would cut his wheat for him, the combine was mine for the rest of the summer. Any money I made after fuel costs were taken out was mine to keep. He even lined up the neighbors for me to cut their wheat. It really worked out well for me and he seemed to be happy, too. When there was no wheat to cut I did some other things for Bill. One time, he had me beating the tops off potatoes getting them ready to harvest; this was a dirtier job than running the combine because the rubber arms that knocked the tops off the plants also shot a big dust cloud into the air. I had forgotten to take any drinking water with me that day and we were a long way off from any house. Bill had a watermelon patch there and I finally broke down and busted one open. It was the best watermelon I have ever tasted, and the only one I ever stole.
All ROTC students were required to go to a summer camp between their junior and senior year. I was sent to McCord Air Force Base near Tacoma, Washington. It was a rough “spic and span” six weeks but not without rewards. (See figure 17.) I got to fly in a T-33 jet trainer, and about half of us got to Eglin AFB, Florida for a fire power demonstration. The main thing I remember about that show was a B-52 coming in low dropping 500 pound bombs; they were coming out about as fast as they could push them when the plane came over the horizon and they were still falling when he disappeared over the opposite horizon. We were paid some while at the camp but not much. It was a good thing I worked for Bill the summer before. I spent most of the rest of the summer working for Dad.
I washed dishes during my junior and senior school year. It paid 85 cents per hour and I put in about 12 or 15 hours per week. This was in the cafeteria just across the street from Pioneer Hall where I lived. There were several perks to the job. For one thing, we got to eat early and didn’t have to wait in line. For another, it was nice to get out from behind the books and sweat a little. But the best perk was that it was a good place to meet girls. At that time boy’s and girl’s dormitories were on opposite sides of the campus. Girls were never, never allowed in boy’s dorms and only during certain hours could boys go into the waiting room to pick up dates in the girl’s dorm. We each had separate dining facilities. One time a sorority house burned down and the girls there were assigned to our cafeteria until other arrangements could be made. They were put in one corner of the room and boys were not allowed to sit at their tables or to even speak to them while they ate. About half the crew in the cafeteria was girls so by working there we not only got to eat with them before the cafeteria opened, we could talk to them, too. The girls served the cafeteria line and the boys washed dishes; full time help did most of the cooking. I remember going out with Sandra Wilcox, Mildred Ladwig, Marilyn Farrell, Betty Top, Jackie Boursaw, Donna Kuhn, and Gladys Wahl all of whom worked in the cafeteria. (Each of them except Gladys Wahl has their picture in the annual.) We would either go to a ball game (which was free with a student ID) or go to a movie and have a coke afterwards. I was never serious with any of them but I liked Sandy and Millie best. One year during Christmas vacation, I borrowed Dad’s car and went up north to the little town of Wilbur and met Millie’s folks. They were big dry land wheat farmers. A few months before I graduated I bought a 1949 Oldsmobile 98; that made it much easier to date.
We had gurneys about six feet long and two feet high that we used to take the dishes back to the serving line after they were washed. One day the boss was out of the cafeteria so we laid a man on the gurney, covered him with dish towels (some with lots of catsup on them) and wheeled him through the girls on the serving line. He looked like he was going to a hospital operating room with a bad injury. The girls all screamed while the boys in the food line laughed. I don’t think the boss ever found out about it; if she did she never said anything.
Roy Calvert and I lived in Pioneer Hall; this was a temporary, two story wooden dorm built right after the war to house the big influx of men going to school under the GI Bill of Rights. There were a few single rooms, but most of them had two students per room. During our sophomore year, Roy lost interest in school and started reading paperback western books; he would read two or three a day and before long he was skipping classes to read. He decided not to come back his junior year. That year I roomed with Roy Davis, a pitcher for the school baseball team. My senior year I got to move into a single room, but only for a little while; they opened a new dorm, Kruegel Hall, and condemned Pioneer. There were no single rooms in the new dorm; Bob Gromko, a dairy science major and I moved in together.
Just after finishing my sophomore year, Carl was born on June 11, 1955. Darwin also graduated from high school at this time. Carl was such a good baby you didn’t know he was in the house. But if he wanted anything, he had three sisters ready to get it for him.
Jack Reese either dropped out or transferred after two years. He was the only one of us from Moses Lake that had a car. Whenever we went home for Thanksgiving or Christmas vacation, three or four of us would give him a dollar each way for gas. Gas was about twenty cents per gallon so that more than paid for his trip. After Jack left, Dad came to Pullman to pick me up for Christmas vacation one year. I was driving back and we were about half way between Ritzville and Moses Lake when all at once there was ice on the road; I lost control of the car, did a couple of loops in the road and got stuck in the ditch. Dad hitchhiked on into Moses Lake, got the beet truck, came back and pulled the car out. That incident gave me a new respect for ice.
Bing Crosby, the famous singer, had twin boys and another son that went to school at WSC while I was there. I didn’t know them but I did have a Field Crop class with one of the twins; I think it was Lindsey. The best thing about having him in the class was he made it easier to get on top of the grade curve. I don’t think any of the brothers finished school at WSC. When we moved to Kruegel, Gail Cogdale lived right across the hall from me. He was an end on the freshman football team and later played for one of the pro teams; we used to play sandlot volleyball after class sometimes and he was always there. Another classmate, Lewis Turner, was in my ROTC classes; he was also an end on the football team. After we went on active duty he was killed in a B-52 crash. Please forgive the name dropping.
There was a small Church of Christ on the far side of the campus and I went regularly. Someone would come by and give me a ride. I would guess there were about twenty people in attendance on average.
College was a lot of hard work. I took 16.5 and 17.5 hours the first year, 19.5 and 18.5 the second, 19.5 and 18.5 the third and 17 and 16 my senior year. I graduated with a 3.30 grade point average. I believe a college degree proves that a person can complete and stick with a job and that is more valuable than the knowledge you pick up while there. Not all was hard work and toil. I did some things that might be better off left untold; but I am going to tell them anyway-at least some of them.
I learned in chemistry class that if you burn iron filings with sulfur and drop the resulting rock in acid it makes a great rotten egg stink bomb. I decided that would be a good thing to put in one of the guys rooms. I didn’t want to just put it in there and run; I thought it would be more effective in the middle of the night. I took the bell out of an alarm clock, set it to go off at two in the morning, put a paper clip on the knob that wound the alarm, tied the iron sulfate rock to a string, wound the string around the paper clip, and set a glass of acid under the rock. When the alarm went off, there was no bell to ring, but the string unwound and the rock hit the acid. It worked even better than planned because the odor got into the heating system and woke up the whole wing of the dorm.
All the dorm doors had locks on them but we went into each other’s rooms at will with a table knife. A couple of us got into a neighbor’s room and hung his bed out the second floor window with a rope. We then took the pins out of his door hinge, tied the rope to the door handle, and put the door in place. The lock held it there and everything looked normal. When he unlocked it, the door made a bee line across the room. What more can you say?
I wasn’t always on the giving end. Roy Calvert worked in Alaska one summer, and while there, he shot a mountain goat and had the head mounted. One day I came back to the room and someone had tucked that goat in my bed and it looked like he had enjoyed a good sleep.
The worst thing they almost did to me was the senior ride. But that one backfired. The tradition was that just before graduation the underclassmen would overpower a senior in the night and dump him about 30 miles north of Pullman on top of Steptoe Butte. Bob Gromko, my roommate, was the instigator one night. They got me in his car and Gene Perini in another. They took off with Gene and we followed a few minutes later; I was between two guys in the front seat and there were three in the back to keep me under control. We were about half way there, just going down the hill into Colfax when I saw my chance to escape. The weather was warm so we had the windows down. I reached over, turned the ignition off and acted like I threw the keys out the window. I then stuck the keys into the cuff of my pants without them seeing me. One of the guys didn’t think I threw the keys out so they searched me and the car but didn’t find them. I was hoping they would get out to look for the keys and I could jump in the car and take off without them. Someone always stayed too near the car for me to do this so I started acting like I was helping look for the keys along the side of the road. Of course it was dark so as soon as I was out of their sight I took off walking for Pullman. By this time I was afraid the other car would be coming back from Steptoe Butte but I was able to catch a ride with an eighteen wheeler before they returned. When I got back to the dorm I went to my room, locked the door and blocked it because I was afraid they might want to make a second run to Steptoe that night. I found out later that when the other car came through Colfax they helped look for the keys a little longer and finally gave up. They got back to Pullman about three in the morning without Bob’s car; Bob couldn’t get in our room so I think he slept in Gene Perini’s room that night. By the next morning we were all friends again and I never did get to go on a senior ride.
Mom was pregnant with Chuck when I graduated from high school. She was pregnant with Allan when I graduated from college. On the second day of June 1957 I was commissioned a Second Lieutenant in the Air Force and graduated from WSC with a bachelor’s degree in Agriculture. Mom, Dad, and the kids came over for the ceremony. I drove from Pullman to Moses Lake by myself that afternoon, and never did I have such a feeling of relief as I did on that drive; I felt like the weight of the world had been taken off my shoulders. (When I came home after a 13 month unaccompanied tour to Korea the feeling was similar but not as intense.) I knew I was going to be called to active duty before the end of the year. I went home to work for Dad until I was called.
That summer I remember Carl trying to sharpen the back side of a hoe (instead of the cutting edge); I laughed at him but he got back at me later. One day I was half under my car, lying on my stomach, trying to fix something. I didn’t have a shirt on and all at once I felt something warm in the small of my back. About the same time I heard Carl start to laugh. That is when I realized he was relieving himself on me. I bumped my head trying to get out from under the car and came out yelling at him. The yelling seemed to upset him a little but I think the satisfaction he got out of the deal outweighed his disappointment.
In August I got orders to report to Lackland AFB, Texas on the third of October for preflight training.