I was first exposed to Randy Newman, as I wrote earlier, by David Steinberg’s version of Political Science (Let’s Drop the Big One), and had bought all his available albums by the time I went away to Blackburn College in 1975.
When I first showed up at Blackburn, I was assigned to the cleaning crew of the Student Den, B.U. (as it is known) being a work/study school, where everyone worked 15 hours a week to help pay for room and board. At the time, the mid 1970s, the cost to go to BU was comparable to the cost to go to a state school. A state school had low tuition and fees, high room and board costs. Due to the Work Program, BU was the opposite, and it’s smallness (600 students) and exclusivity (you were supposed to be in the upper quarter of your high school class with a “B” average) were the draws for me. (Though when I finally got there I found out that they had taken more than 90% of applicants)
After meeting and working with Mike H. in the den the first few days, I was transferred to the Dining Hall (Ding Hall in BU parlance). As a pathologically shy person, I had thus far only made the acquaintance of Mike H. and my roommate, Al A. (“Big Al” as he became known), a farm-raised, well meaning, but, ultimately, exasperating fellow.
Al was one of those people who cover their insecurity with bluster. I soon came to know to take everything he told me with a brick of salt. For example, he told me he was a starter on his high school basketball team, but when I played a gentle game of one-on-one with him the first week on campus, I knew by his lack of skills that that could not be so. I had been on the basketball team in high school, usually riding the bench until the game was in hand, but could easily out-shoot and drive him.
I was 6’3” and 195 lbs soaking wet in high school, but in 1970-1972, at my school, at least, that meant I could only be a center. A center played with his back to the basket and never, and I mean NEVER, put the ball on the floor. If you did, you found yourself on the bench so fast your head would be spinning. You were expected to keep the ball over your head and you could pivot and pass or shoot if you had a lay-up or short, 4 foot shot. That was it.
However, I had been playing with friends who were all guards, and my heroes were Pete Maravich (of the uncanny ball handling skills) and Bill Bradley (who came into the pros as a 6’5” guard and could shoot from outside with the best) and I could actually shoot from 15-20 feet away, though I was never allowed to. It wasn’t until I went to college that I was allowed to do what I knew I could, which was drive like a demon (my other hero was Earl “the Pearl” Monroe) and shoot from outside and I became an intramural “all star” after showing my skills off a little to my dorm mates in several pickup games.
Anyway, back to “Big Al”, in the mid 70s having a TV in your room (at BU, at least) was a rarity. I had a 12” portable black and white I had purchased 4-5 years earlier when I had sold my CB base station (We were into CB in 1969, several years before it became a national craze, “We got us a Convoy!” Call letters KBY-6317), which I had purchased with the proceeds from the sale of my Fender electric guitar when I gave up the guitar in 1968. I think I had one of only 2 or 3 TVs in the whole dorm of 20+ rooms. However, I rarely watched it those first few weeks, as I acclimated myself to life away from home. Al watched it more than I did, mainly sports, especially Monday Night Football. Later, people told me they had assumed it was his, because he watched it so much. During MNF he would pontificate on strategy, etc. as I studied at my desk.
One day I was going down the hall to my room and heard the strains of a Randy Newman song, sung by someone other than Randy Newman (I think it was “Dayton, Ohio, 1903”). I stuck my head into the room and asked, “Who is that singing? It doesn’t sound like Randy Newman.” Wes W. looked up from a book and said, “It’s Nilssen Sings Newman.” Cool! (for me, anyway). And I struck up a conversation with Wes and his roommate Tom W. and a friendship was formed. It turned out that Wes and Tom were good friends with Mike H. who I had started to befriend at the student Den. And they were all friends with Kevin K., who became my roommate after the first semester. All four had moved to Challacombe (North) Hall from Butler Hall to get away from the rampant partiers.
Randy Newman, therefore, served as an entry into friendships that in Kevin and Mike’s cases, at least, I still try to maintain, 37 years on.
Though North Hall housed few choirboys, it did occupy a niche between the party dorm (Butler) and the jock dorm (Jewell), where most of the varsity soccer and basketball players lived (BU’s fall sport was soccer, they did not have a football team).
We had our fair share of Dean’s Listers, and we won the men’s Intramural trophy both of my years at BU, and several after I left. Our touch football team was untouchable, our soccer team was so good I scored a goal in one game and I played goalie (Our halfbacks were so good the ball rarely even came into our half of the field, and they covered for me to let me go forward to score a goal). We played the varsity soccer team in a practice game (where they had to play one-touch, then pass) and won 1-0.
We had enough good players to put two teams into the basketball league. The “A” team won every game but one, never by less than 20 points, our “B” team won every game except the two where they played the “A” team. The only game the “A” team lost was when we only had 5 guys available and 4 of us fouled out. At one point it was 2 on 5 and we were still only 3 points down, but when the 4th guy fouled out, the remaining player had no one to inbound the ball to, so we stopped the game and forfeited.
After basketball season we had Hoc-Soc, played in the gym, which was slightly larger than a basketball court. Hoc, as in hockey, since they could check you into the bleachers that folded up into the side walls; Soc, as in soccer. The walls and ceilings were in bounds. I played goalie on that team as well, and saw a lot more action, since the wall behind my goal was inbounds, so that any miss bounced right back out to the area in front of the goal. In all other intramural sports the varsity players could not play on their sport’s team, but in Hoc-Soc they allowed the soccer players to participate and they could kick hard! One game I had 5 penalty shots, kicked by varsity players, and they hit them just to my right and hit the same spot on my right thigh such that the bruise I got from the stops lasted more than a week.
More about Big Al later, but things began to come together at BU for me, and I did watch TV on the weekends. And in October 1975, a new show came on: Saturday Nite Live, and it became another means for us to bond..
No comments:
Post a Comment