My dorm room door burst open and in bounced my new roommate. I had arrived about an hour earlier and moved in some of my essential things. I didn’t have to pick which side of the room, because someone had their stuff on a bed and things occupied the adjacent desk. Dean was a very enthusiastic person and easy to talk with, being as he did all the talking. As it turns out, Dean was a pretty good magician. He was very quick with his hands and fingers. He could hold the attention of a crowd for hours with his tricks. He was also a pretty good joke teller. But the amazing thing about his jokes was that he rarely, if ever told the same joke twice. I lived with him for three months, and I don’t think I ever heard him tell the same joke, unless it was by request. Not only is that a lot of jokes to remember, but he also knew if he told the joke to you before. The guy was pretty smart, but that didn’t translate to the classroom. He washed out after the first term was finished.
I was then a solution to a sticky problem my next roommate had. After Dean left, I had an empty half of my room. Curt had a roommate who didn’t appreciate some of his habits and practices, and their friction was building. Curt loved to smoke Camel cigarettes. He smoked a pack or two a day; so consequently, he was a sprinter on the swim team. He was pretty fast in the 50 yard free. I was pretty naïve, unlike his first roommate, so I was a perfect fit for his other smoking habit. He smoked pot. I didn’t at the time and was completely unaware.
Marijuana was pretty much under the radar at the time. Haight-Ashbury was alive and well, but the hippie culture hadn’t filtered down to the small college town of Ashland, yet. To give an example, our dorm sponsored a concert for the college that year. Someone on the second floor had a dad who was a manager for rock and roll bands in the Bay Area. We brought the Grateful Dead, Quicksilver Messenger Service, and Jerry Abrams Headlights light show to our college auditorium. It was a pillow concert where you brought your own pillow to sit on the floor. Quicksilver Messenger Service played all of their songs from their first album, before it was released. They were a big hit. The Grateful Dead played for two hours, playing three songs. One of the songs was 55 minutes long. We were blown away by that experience. Our one lone hippie was dancing to the side for the entirety of the concert, which was seen as odd. The light show, consisting of old movies projected onto the walls, overhead projectors with pie plates and colored liquid projected onto the walls, and all sorts of other visual effects was “far out,” as well. We were still from an earlier era.
Forest Hall was part of the newest dormitory complex built on campus. It consisted of five men’s and five women’s dorms that were each four stories tall. They were about five years old when I moved in for my freshman year. The year, 1967, was a transitional time from the sock hops and garage bands of the 1950’s to the turbulent and revolutionary times of the 1970’s. College classes before us challenged themselves by swallowing live goldfish. We didn’t fully realize how transitional and transformative the times would become, but we did know that we didn’t want to swallow goldfish or live the fraternity/sorority type of college life that my older sister had just experienced. I think the atmosphere changed when they instituted the military draft, and the Vietnam War was ramping up. There now were students attending college that were there instead of being shipped off to boot camp. I was there because I had just graduated from high school, and college was just the next step. I really hadn’t given any thought to not going to college. My decision was between attending Delta College, my local junior college and playing water polo for an Olympic coach; or going to Southern Oregon College, a four-year college that had an energetic young coach and entrance requirements low enough for me to get in without having to take the SAT test. This was the setting for the big caper that was about to happen.
“Someone get the shotgun!” Shotgun? What? I was dutifully holding my hostage down on the ground and was waiting for the tie-up crew to arrive. As I looked around, I realized I was the only one from my group still at the bon fire. Everyone else had dropped all plans and was high-tailing it out of there. I dropped my prisoner and flew down the hill passing my fellow pranksters until I hit the bottom of the hill and fell flat on my face. I quickly got up and was still one of the first to arrive at the cars.
Dorm life was a lot of fun, especially for someone like me who lived under constant rules and paying attention to my mom’s fear of “What will the neighbors think?” The complete freedom of college life was liberating. Our dorm was full of people who had similar liberating feelings. Each floor of the dorm had a resident assistant, or RA. Our RA was quite a character. Roger was gung ho military. He signed up for the Marines and went through boot camp. He washed out at the end because his asthma acted up and prevented him from graduating. He didn’t lose his enthusiasm for the military and military structure, though. After a few weeks into dorm life, Roger called our floor together for a meeting. He was looking for recruits for a secret operation. Of course we all wanted in. He was making plans to prematurely burn down our rival school’s homecoming bonfire. This was super exciting. He had a planning team that developed an elaborate plan. We had about 20 of us to pull this off. On the night before the bonfire was to be lit for homecoming festivities we took off for our mission. Oregon Technical Institute was located about 60 miles away across a mountain pass. Remember, Roger was extremely charismatic. As we approached the campus, we pulled over and most of us waited in a field below the bonfire while Roger and four others left to check out the situation. The plan was to wait for a signal and then storm up the hill. There was a tie-up crew, a fire-lighting crew, and various other jobs. We knew they would have people guarding the fire to prevent what we were planning. Roger’s job was to thin their ranks.
When Roger arrived as an OTI student, there were about 20 people set to spend the night. Soon Roger and his crew were taking charge. He once got everyone excited and had a crew feeling car hoods for warmth in a parking lot to determine if any of the cars had recently arrived. After a couple of hours, Roger was sending people home, saying they had it covered. Some went home to come back at a later time to take their “shift.” On his last “patrol” of the parking lot, he visited the crew in the field. Several of us crawled into the car without opening the doors to avoid the interior light from coming on. When we arrived back at the woodpile, we now outnumbered the actual OTI guards two to one. We borrowed one of their flashlights and signaled to the crew in the field. Soon there was yelling and screaming and people running up out of the dark. I had positioned myself behind my OTI student and grabbed him and held him to the ground. That’s when all hell broke loose, and all the elaborate plans flew out the window in a panic. We were all supposed to have our person on the ground while the tie-up crew came and tied everyone up, putting them out of harm’s way. Then a fire-starting crew was to throw gas on the fire and light it while the rest of us have left. What actually happened was everyone did their job all at once. People were being held down, some were throwing gasoline on the wooden pile, while at the same time other people were throwing burning tires onto the pile. The person with the gas threw the can on the fire just as it exploded over the wood and the bonfire was officially lit. That’s when I booked it down the hill. We all gathered at the cars and got a clean getaway.
It was quite a feeling as we were driving away in the pre-dawn light next to Klamath Lake. As we drove from the scene of the crime, the eastern early morning sky was ablaze in orange looking over the lake. The orange wasn’t coming from the rising sun. It was gloriously coming from the bonfire, the OTI homecoming bonfire. The bonfire that was going to be glowing coals when the time came for it to be lit. No one got shot. No one got burnt. No injury, no foul! When we got back to Ashland, the sun was up, and people were just starting their day. As a precaution, we put aluminum foil on our windows. Maybe it was just to keep the sun out as we slept the day away. That night at dinner, we heard stories of several cars coming to our campus looking for us. They wanted to exact revenge, but we weren’t playing that game. All they had to do was look for the foiled windows to find us.
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