57 – Do Ya – ELO – 1976

Do Ya - ELO

       This song takes me right back to Tom W’s room at Blackburn College in 1976. We played the living crap out of ELO’s “A New World Record” and it was always played at 11. The only other song I remember playing this loud was the Beatles’ “Back in the USSR” (especially that jet plane sound effect at the open).

       Tom had one of the better Amp/Speaker/Turntable set-ups in our dorm (very few cassette players in 1975, though I had my TEAC deck). Tom also had a master key, passed down to him from a graduating senior the year before that gave him access to every building on campus. This led to two of my favorite pranks at BU during my 2 years there (being a transfer student from Elgin Community College).

       1. One weekend, Tom got us into Hudson Hall, the three story classroom building where most classes were held. Tom, his roommate Wes W, Mike H, some visiting friends, and I carried every desk and chair from the third floor onto the roof. (I know, but it seemed funny at the time). There were 4 classrooms on the 3^rd floor as I recall, the most important being Dr. John V.G. Forbes’ (see #33 – Six Months ina Leaky Boat) tiered room used at 8:00AM Monday for US History.

       As was later reported back to us, Dr. Forbes walked in, saw not a single stick of furniture in the room (we moved teacher’s desks as well), turned on his heel and walked out to place a call to campus security.

       I was in a classroom on the second floor at the time and recall hearing a huge amount of banging and scraping at 8:30 or so as the desks and chairs were returned to the classrooms above. Someone asked, “What’s that noise all about?” I looked around like Ralph in “A Christmas Story” when the teacher asked, “Has anyone seen Flick?”, and Ralph, knowing his best friend Flick was outside with his tongue stuck to the flagpole due to Ralph’s triple dog dare, internally asks, “Flick? Who’s Flick?” glancing around with total innocence.

       2. I don’t know if it was as a result of story 1, but campus security began to lock a student into each building at night. It was actually one of the jobs of the Work Program. You’d be locked in for 3-5 hours and you could read or study for that time. My senior year at BU my roommate, Kevin K, worked security and one night he was scheduled to be locked into the Olin science building. Tom W. decided we would get in there before him and wait about an hour for him to get settled in before we would try to scare him by making noises, etc.

       We hid in the lecture hall where Biology and Chemistry were taught, ducking down behind the teacher’s desk in front of the chalkboards and waited for Security to bring Kevin in and lock him in. He came into the lecture hall and sat down and began reading as we tried not to laugh as we prepared to make noises and throw things around the room. I had a roll of toilet paper I wanted to lob around. However, trying not to laugh or make a sound became a losing proposition. Trying not to laugh only made me want to laugh more and I was about to wet myself when we finally started moaning and tossing things around the podium.

       Instead of scaring him, Kevin got pissed at us, and after having a good laugh we went back to our rooms and went to bed (it was about 2 AM by then) while Kevin stayed behind to do his job, make the building safe for the next day’ classes.

       Funny how I can recall the goofy stuff we did in our downtime so much better than classroom stuff. As I sit here I can think of about 10 things that were done to my first roommate, Big Al (#5- God’s Song), and I can remember almost nothing of 2 years of French classes.