I got my first taste of what college was going to be like when I was invited to pre-register for my classes for the Fall 1982 semester at Eastern New Mexico University in Portales, NM. My Dad and I drove up to the campus one of the two weekends they held the event and spent the night in the dorm where I would be living the first three years I went to college.
First, we showed up at the Campus Union Building and checked in. I had my photo taken for my student ID. I remember this one guy ahead of me who was talking kind of loudly toward someone else in the line. Dad and I ate lunch in the cafeteria. My cousin Rud was also at the pre-registration. He sat and ate lunch with us.
After all the orientations, we met with our faculty counselors. Mine was Dr. B. He was the head of the Radio/TV department. There were a few of us in his group. He gave us the class schedules and we were supposed to go through and select the classes we wanted to take. I looked at my degree plan and saw which general education credits I needed to get out of the way and which classes in Radio/TV and Theatre I could take.
I thought I was taking forever to figure out my schedule. It was a lot tougher than coming up with the one for high school. I finally determined the classes that seemed to work and went over to the Administration building to register. I went in and went straight to an open window where someone on the staff manually entered in my schedule. This actually took about 10 minutes. After she gave me my print-out of my classes, I looked behind me. There were HUNDREDS of students waiting in line inside the building. I had just missed getting caught up in that. I have no idea how long they had to wait because I wasn't sticking around.
At some point during the pre-registration, dinner was served in the cafeteria. I met up with three guys, including the loud guy in the ID line and we all started talking. The loud guy was named Ged and he claimed that he had gone to Park Junior High School in Artesia for a brief period of time, about the same time I did. But I didn't remember him. Another was Bard, who had already done a year of college at a Christian school. He said he was a bit of a screwup, but the Christian school was the wrong place for him to go because everybody partied really hearty there. It was actually too much for even him. The third guy was Dred. He was from Ohio. He had considered going to Ohio State University, but took a tour of the classes and noted that some of the classes involved students in this large room watching the professor give a lecture on videotape. He also mentioned that OSU tried to stress that everyone there was a person, not a number. However, the first thing they would ask you is "What's your Social Security Number?"
That night, they had a "Let's Meet" dance in the Snack Room at the Campus Union Building. Ged, Bard, Dred and I sat at a table. The place started filling up. These girls came in and sat at the table with us. We started talking amongst ourselves. There was a live band performing. They played for about ten minutes, but no one was dancing. The lead singer, a female, tried to get people to get on the floor. She actually came up and tapped me on the shoulder, but I tried to ignore her. After a few more minutes, it was apparent that we needed to dance so I asked this one girl at our table if she wanted to dance and she agreed. Ged, Bard and Dred asked the other girls to dance, so we were all on the floor and other people joined us. Throughout the night, I danced with a number of different girls, including one I had already met before.
Dred danced with the girl I first asked and sort of fell in love with her. He spent the rest of the evening hanging out with her. Ged, Bard and I decided to go to the fraternaties and see what they were all about as they all had planned open parties for the new students during pre-registration. Even though we were all underage, we were all able to get beer served to us at the houses. I didn't drink the beer. The three of us walked back to the campus. We went to the fountain outside the library. There were a couple of women there. We started talking to them. Apparently, they had their tops off when we got to the fountain and rushed to put them back on, but we didn't see anything.
It was after midnight when we went back to our dorm rooms. Dad was already asleep. I crawled into bed.
There were still some orientations to go to on Sunday. I met up with Ged, Dred and Bard at breakfast. We were joined by a couple of girls, including this one from Albuquerque named Lorz. (I will go into more detail about Lorz in a later post.) After the orientation, Ged, Lorz and I went to the dorm. Ged wanted to check out the room where he would be living.
And the whole pre-registration was pretty much over after that. Dad and I went home and I prepared to return to college in August.
I'm just going to update what happened to the three guys I hung out with in college as we did not become very best friends.
Ged never showed up for classes. He was still registered and had his dorm room reserved, but he never arrived. I never heard from him again and there are too many people on Facebook with his name for me to figure out which one he is. I found someone with his name about my same age who died about five years ago. He went to the University of Arkansas. I don't know for certain that it was the same guy. I saw that his remains were being interred in Texas, which is where I think he was from at the point I met him at ENMU. I will likely never have closure on him.
Dred was able to catch up with that girl when we returned to ENMU in the fall. However, she decided to pledge one of the sororities and that pretty much kept him out of the running as a potential boyfriend. I hung out with Dred here and there over the next couple of years, but we weren't really good friends. I recently located him on LinkedIn. He now lives in Phoenix, AZ and is a Senior Manager for DHL Express. He has a wife and daughters. His photo is included on his profile. If I were to see him today, I wouldn't recognize him.
I have information on what happened to Bard because he is listed in my Alumni Directory. He married this girl from college that I had a crush on (but will not go into further detail about). Like Dred, we saw each other from time to time, but weren't really friends.
However, the strangest thing happened at graduation with Bard. We saw each other before we were to march out. We shook hands and started exchanging pleasantries. Suddenly, we both went silent. THE EXACT SAME THOUGHT OCCURRED TO BOTH OF US AS THE EXACT SAME TIME! I had thought about how we had met at pre-registration a little less than four years ago and how that seemed like yesterday. "Did four years just go by?" was the question we were asking ourselves. I realized that as slow as high school appeared to go, college just seemed to whoosh by. We knew that time would continue to pick up speed as the years went on.
Aaaaaand, that was college. Let's get to my adult life in the next post.
Wait, I have a lot to tell about college. Tune in tomorrow for that.
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