Just Another Background Story

I have been asked, “Did you get to go to college?”
A short answer to that question is, “Only by osmosis.”
I, along with a handful of our fellow SHS students, and similar groups from high schools around the state, attended a summer seminar in drama at Kent State University between our junior and senior years. Many of them, especially those from further away geographically, stayed on campus. I of course, due to lack of funding had to commute. That was my initial exposure to a college environment, limited as it was, and I also LOVED it.
It wasn’t until a few years later after my trip to California (the first trip, when I actually made it there) that I again came in contact with that type of academic stimulation. I was living in a 5 bedroom house with 7 other people in the hills on the eastern side of the San Francisco Bay. Directly down the hill was Berkeley, with Oakland just to the south and USC to the north. I was making my living by working part-time with a crew that came in after new apartments were constructed and did the clean up stuff (washed windows, mopped floors, cleaned kitchens and bathrooms, etc.). We got paid per unit instead of by the hour, the pay wasn’t that great but I got pretty good at it so, on an hourly average, I made out pretty good. Like I said it was part-time so to help pay rent, and since most of the others had “real” jobs (one was even a professor), I also doubled as “house-boy” (same work, different location). The point is that I had a fair amount of free time, which I used to explore the winding hillside roads and trails in search of “the perfect view” of the Bay. It was during one of those excursions the I discovered, not far from the house a trail that wound down the hills through a place called Strawberry Canyon. That canyon (which was actually more of a gully) opened up at the bottom to the eastern end of the USC Commons on the north end of Berkeley. It quickly became one of my favorite morning walks. I would make my way down the hill, go one block off campus, get freshly squozen orange juice (sometime papaya) from a sidewalk vendor, pick up one of the many Free Press publications and go find a bench back at the Commons. There I would listen to and sometimes participate in whatever discussions that were going on at the time. So I guess that was my second exposure to the “university state of mind”.
During a return extended stay to Ohio, I was living near Akron University. Still living on a meager income (this time as dishwasher/cook at an Italian Restaurant), one of the cheapest forms of entertainment I found was going to the University Library and reading. Occasionally there would be a guest speaker visiting the campus for one ceremony or another and he or she would wonder around afterwards and have impromptu discussions with small groups of students. Sometimes there were even free films shown in the Library (mostly documentaries or “art” films). Let’s see, that would have been my third year of “higher education”, right?
Several years later the organic foods restaurant I was helping to run in Albuquerque was right across the street from UNM. About 70% of our clientele were either students or professors (sometimes it was difficult to tell the difference) and many of the employees were also students. I was there for 7 years, so that would have been my senior year, as well as where I did my post graduate studies.
A less fanciful answer to the question would be that I almost got a Scholarship to OSU in theater (placed number 7, but they were only giving out 5). So, no scholarship meant no college.