The Cast of Characters

After sending out the story last week I got and email from Pam.  She wondered what I meant in my list of questions when I wondered what we all would have done without her in our little group.  Also how it was amazing how we all thought the other person was so outgoing and we wanted to be like them.  

To say the least the eight of us were a very diverse group of eight girls. Without telling too much about the years in between 1964/65 and now I will say that Pam, Cathie and I managed to stay friends all these years.  Cathie and I found Erin in the eighties and just in the last year we added Sally. The whereabouts of Paula, Mary and Woodie are unknown but they still may pop up one of these days. 

Before I tell all the silly stories of the year at Stephens I need to give a brief description of the eight of us that were thrown together.  These are my observations looking back fifty years with some insight as to how at least five of us turned out as adults.  On the whole it is a lesson that people really don't change much even with life's challenges.

I will start with Mary and Erin who were Cathie and my suite mates which means we had a connecting bathroom.  Mary was actually rather quiet, very pretty and at times very dramatic. Do I remember her saying several times she wanted to kill herself? I can't remember why or how we talked her out of it but maybe she was just lost in the dynamics of the group and it was a good way to get attention.  It could also have been living with Erin. 

The best way to describe Erin was that she was a mess. I must say that I loved her clothes and lucky for me we were the same size. She had the world's largest collection of plaid pleated shirts, matching sweaters and knee socks. She took her shirts to the cleaners and had triple starch put in them so you could wear them for days and they never wrinkled.
She was very smart with a dry sense of humor that made us roll on the floor in laughter.  It seemed like she had a date every night and Cathie accused her often of dating the entire army based at Fort Leonard Wood
She would just laugh and go on.  It was amazing to see her twenty-five years later and hear about her life. She still had the triple starched shirts and knee socks.

Paula, in front, Erin and Mary, in back

Woodie and Sally were two who had their differences and living together was a challenge - a funny one to all of us - but still a challenge.
Best way to describe Woodie is to say I have never in my life met someone so naive.   She had these huge puppy dog eyes that sort of said to everyone that she did not have a clue as to what was going on. When I think about it now I think she was just overwhelmed by the rest of us.  If left on her own she would have been very quiet and maybe a loner but there was no way she could do that especially living with Sally. I have to give her a lot of credit for hanging in there and being an integral part of the group.

Woodie and Cathie

When I think of Sally the only thing I can think of is laughter.  Sally was from Montgomery, Alabama and had the biggest southern accent I had ever heard.  There were very few days that went by that she did not say or do something that was totally stupid and funny.  I have pictures of the night she decided everyone should stuff pillows under our clothes to see what we would look like being pregnant. How did Sally break her nose? As I remember she was breaking a couple of those "get expelled" rules by being at a party in a motel drinking bathtub purple passion.  
Guess they also had beer since she was jumping on the bed trying to stick beer cans in the popcorn ceiling when she fell. I will have to ask her if that is the correct story.  Pam said when I found Sally that she always imagined her growing up to be a true southern belle with beautiful clothes, gloves and drinking tea each afternoon.  What did I say about us not changing much?

Sally

Next to Pam and Paula. Both from the Los Angeles area but as different as night and day except when it came to academics where they both excelled. Paula was a dancer and gone a lot for practises.  Of all of the eight of us she was the quietest and the only one who did not pledge a one of the local campus sororities.  Also beautiful and very poised.

Pam wondered about my statement of what would we have all done without her in the last story.  My first opinion of her was how sophisticated and worldly she was compared to little bumpkin me from Muskogee. Funny that I actually thought she would not like me and here we have been friends for fifty-one years. Pam traveled a lot and really hated flying and the rest of us were always amazed how she took all her clothes in a carry on bag.  In the group she was the voice of reason, the one who took care of everyone else through thick and thin and never showed her disapproval when one of us did something stupid. I do not know if she ever broke a rule at Stephens but maybe now she might tell me.

Pam

There is no way to describe Cathie in a paragraph.  She was one of a kind and I feel very lucky to have had her for a roomie.  Cathie was one of those people that everyone loved except parents who looked at her as a terrible influence. She in turn, never met anyone she didn't like and found good in everyone.  There have been many times in my life when some situation would come up and I would actually ask myself "what would Cathie do?". The next few stories will begin to give you a look at how living with Cathie didn't change me but gave me the ability to be a lot more carefree and daring than I had been before.

So there is the cast of characters.  Set these people in a town of 35,000 residents and 16,000 college students.  This was an era when "nice" girls did not do a lot of things or admit to it. This was before student protests and the Feminist movement but during the race riots and the early stages of the Vietnam War.  Sitting in the middle of Missouri with no television or computers or cell phones life was simple and a heck of a lot of fun.

The Start of the College Adventure

Cathie breaking the rules

With my computer being offline for most of the month of December due to my own stupidity I had lots of time to think about those first few weeks of being at college.  Usually I can sit down and write these stories in a couple of hours but this one has been started and erased many times over the last week.  It really never dawned on me until the last couple of weeks how much that year at Stephens College caused a lot of changes in me.  Maybe that is called growing up or at the very least, the beginning of that transition from childhood to being responsible for one's self.

Arriving at Stephens was actually quite devastating. I have always told people I am really quite shy which no one believes.  It has always been an effort to meet new people and know what to do or say. But at the same time there has always been the desire to be liked and to have friends. Growing up and living in the same town for eighteen years made it easy for me to have friends just because I had known them all my life.

So, here I was in a group of eighteen hundred girls I did not know, who appeared to be so self-assured, had beautiful clothes and came from exciting places.  To top it off I had Cathie for a room mate. There were many times in those first few weeks that if I would have had the courage to ask to change room mates I would have.  As time passed there were many times the dorm mother asked if I wanted to room with someone else that I would laugh to myself and tell her that maybe I could help Cathie be a better person. Some how Cathie's constant antics, total disorganization and love of people drew me in.  It got to the point where I was almost as good as she was at getting us into trouble.

Looking back now I have begun to realize that the eight of us living at the end of the hall together probably all wondered what we were doing there.  Somehow we all managed to blend together in a little group we called "the Big Eight".  Although we all made other friends at Stephens we relied on each other in the good and bad times and spent a lot of our free time together.  

Pam, Sally, Woodie, Donna, Cathie, Marty Mo

When classes started I realized that perhaps I had gotten in over my head.  All the classes were fine except for the ones in Theater and Drama which was my intended major.  Five minutes into the first class I was trying to fade into the chair dressed in my plaid wool jumper and weejuns.  Everyone in that department was dressed in black tights and ponchos, had long flowing hair and wore sunglasses even at night.  Sorry, I had gone through the "beatnik" phase when I was in the ninth grade and did not find it very appealing.  Besides with the affected speech patterns everyone had I hardly understood anything they were saying.

Thankfully after the first week of classes you had a meeting with your advisor for him to see how your classes were going.  I hope I did not sit there and cry since I was so unhappy but he did get the idea that I did not fit well in Drama department.  By a stroke of luck he was the head of the Television, Radio and Film department and instantly switched all the drama classes to TV, Radio and Film. Have to say that I felt at home in that genre.  The only class that was challenging was General American Speech.  It was difficult to rid myself of the Okie accent that I did not know I had.

The student-advisor relationship at Stephens was pretty impressive.  Mr. Wheeler, my advisor, not only kept check on you - to the extent that if you missed a class he called you on the phone to see what the reason was - but he also had a little get together with all his students once a month.  Usually we were invited to his home for a cookout or dinner on a Sunday evening with his wife and three small children. I guess this gave him a chance to study us and see how we were doing. It gave me that little touch of home and family life that you tend to miss on your first adventure away from home.

Driving through Norman recently on a football game day I realized how much things have changed since I was in college.  The second weekend I was in Columbia there was a University of Missouri football game. Stephens girls were not allowed to have or to drive cars.  Going to the game meant walking to the stadium, which was quite a hike, with your girl friends or a date.  Everyone dressed up to go to the game and if you were lucky enough to have a date you sported a huge mum in the black and yellow colors of the Missouri Tigers.  I can remember walking to the game with a boy named Skip in my pleated skirt, sweater, knee socks and loafers with that flower pinned on my shoulder. After the game we had dinner and then went to a mixer (dance) at Stephens.  It was the first college game I had ever been to and the whole day was so much fun.

Perhaps the most startling difference in going to college then and now was phones. Of course there were no cell phones and there were no phones in the dorm rooms. Each floor had a phone on both ends of the hall on every floor. Calls could come in from the outside or from the desk in the lobby of the dorm.  It may sound awful but actually it was rather nice.  If you decided going out with someone was not a good idea then you could happen not to be there or if your parents were calling to complain about money you didn't have to take the call. Everyone was good about leaving notes on your door stating what calls you had while you were out.

It may be that a lot of girls going off to college for the first time, away from parental supervision, would take the opportunity to become a little wilder than they were at home.  In some ways perhaps we all did but basic lessons and morality instilled at home kept us pretty much in line.That is not to say we did not have a heck of a good time.

Did Cathie and I really exit a party through a bathroom window?
How did Sally break her nose on a date?
Was hitch-hiking to a banned night club the really smart thing to do?
How does one smuggle someone out of a hospital right after surgery for a pizza and beer?
Can a person drink 23 pony cans of Colt-45 and still walk?
If your father is the President of a bank did he really teach you to switch to a red pen when you are overdrawn?
Jefferson City is within the city limits of Columbia isn't it?
Why do I know so much Hebrew when I am not Jewish?
What would we have all done without Pam?

Lots of questions to figure out the answer to.