When college became a commuter school ... by choice

We four freshmen became good friends almost immediately, roomed together as sophomores but drifted apart soon thereafter.

College had a way of reshuffling the deck of life like that.

Stuff happened, some of it silly, some of it serious, all of it lasting.

By the time we were seniors, one had moved into married student housing, another was headed to South America to study abroad and a third was planning to live in town for a second straight year.

That left me.

To be honest, I didn’t have a lot of options. I could have moved into a single — seniors got first dibs on those choice digs — but by that time, I’d had about enough of things like parietals and the Latin dictum, “in loco parentis,” which, roughly translated, meant that as long I was a resident in a dorm, the university ran my life.

There weren’t then — and aren’t now — fraternities at Notre Dame, a policy that all but guaranteed dorms became the focus of all activities and social interaction. That was fine when it came to interhall football and Bookstore Basketball, but the Catholic hierarchy took a dim view when it came to, um, sinful behavior.

I’m not suggesting it was a police state — far from it. We were free to make our own mistakes, which is exactly what we often did.

The school, which had only begun to admit women a few years earlier, was still getting used to what can only be called a gender gap, converting decades-old male structures into those in which female students would feel more comfortable, though ND drew the line at providing laundry services for the ladies. Early on in the experiment, those industrial-size washers and dryers created so much shrieking and shrinking that soon enough it was guys only.

I had an aunt who lived 10 minutes from the front gate, and every Friday evening for three years, she picked up a suitcase filled with dirty clothes and returned it Sunday afternoon, usually with a six pack of Ballantine packed inside, along with a bag of Chips Ahoy.

She, obviously, was a lifeline, my favorite relative of all time.

Anyway, her loyalty was about the only thing that remained unaltered after I made the decision to join my old roommate in a turn-of-the-century house in which he had offered me a bedroom.

Oh, Mom wasn’t at all pleased, asking things like, “Why in the world would you ever want to leave that beautiful campus?” or “How will you ever get up in time for your classes?” or “This has something to do with that same girl, doesn’t it? She’s just trouble!”

Dad, of course, was much more pragmatic, sensing my mind was made up and there was no shifting it. He wondered about my share of the rent, how I would get back and forth to campus, the cooking arrangement, and how reliable the furnace was. Being a native of South Bend, he knew all about how harsh winters were.

Somehow, I managed to assuage their concerns before I moved in, reassuring them I could handle things, being all of 21 years old.

I packed some clothes, with an emphasis on winter wear, along with assorted T-shirts, jeans and sneakers. I didn’t have an actual bed, but a secondhand set of box springs and a ratty old mattress sufficed. I needed a desk, my typewriter and a chest of drawers, along with my stereo system and close to 300 albums and tapes.

I was one of five guys invited to live in that house, but aside from my onetime roommate, I knew none of them. If what I was seeking was the polar opposite of dorm living, then I was in the right place.

The neighborhood itself was a revelation, situated as it was on the needier side of South Bend, and there was a blend of blacks and whites on the block, along with a smattering of grad students. A grocery store was within easy walking distance, and there was a bus stop on the corner, which gave us convenient access to downtown.

My first vital purchase was a lime green Schwinn Varsity 10-speed bike, which I bought with savings from my summer job as a playground counselor/groundskeeper. It served me well through the fall and early winter, but once the snowy season set in, my favorite aunt sold me her 1969 Chevy Impala for one dollar, which is all it took to transfer the title. It was a life-saving birthday gift.

As far as our day-to-day existence went, the five of us started off well enough, adhering to a communal pact of cooperation and shared responsibilities, with a kitchen rotation that lasted for about six weeks. After that, life got complicated, and meals were potluck.

One of the guy’s eating habits fascinated me. Every night, almost without fail, he’d bake a chicken breast and take a bowl of cottage cheese into the living room where, wearing a generic wide tank top, he’d settle in and watch the news on the black-and-white TV set that another dude had donated to the collective cause.

“You eat the same thing every night?” I asked him once, probably the only conversation we ever had. “You must really like chicken.”

He just kept his focus on the screen, so I walked upstairs to my room, wondering if he might be onto something. My eating habits were a scattershot endeavor, just enough to keep me functioning.

Students who moved off campus forfeited the benefits of dining hall cuisine, though there were ways around that prohibition, provided you knew an underclassman who’d share his ID card.

Winter 1976-77 proved to be the coldest on record, which, considering South Bend’s exposed and vulnerable location, was remarkable in and of itself, but when the school shut down entirely for the first time ever, owing to sustained subzero temperatures, even the old-timers were impressed. Of course, it was precisely at that juncture that the house’s balky furnace gave up the ghost, which forced us to seek shelter in the house next door, also rented by students who graciously shared their sofas and floor space.

Eventually, spring arrived, bringing with it renewed life and energy, but before we could fully appreciate it, graduation loomed.

It was so strange the way everything accordioned into small increments of hustle and flow, the last burst of final exams, lighting one last candle in the Grotto, getting frisked by Secret Service agents in advance of President Carter’s commencement address, walking around the lake, saying goodbye to a few friends.

As you might expect, there were kinks in that fire hose of pomp and circumstance, the most vexing of which involved tickets to the ceremony itself. Each graduate was allotted five of them, which should have been easy math: my parents, my sister, my brother and my favorite aunt. But there was the matter of my girlfriend — yes, the selfsame one Mom had warned me about months before — but I said a quick prayer and was rewarded with a viable solution.

She watched the whole thing on TV at my aunt’s house and joined the family in time for photos and one last meal at Sunny Italy, the one South Bend restaurant that had always been quite special to us.

Looking back, leaving the leafy quads and Gothic architecture of the campus was absolutely the right decision, if only because when the rest of my fellow grads were choking up as they bid ND adieu, I’d already been gone for a long time, eager for whatever was next.

Mike Dewey can be reached at Carolinamiked@aol.com or 1317 Troy Road, Ashland, OH 44805. He invites you to join him on his Facebook page, where his record collection now exceeds 1,000.