Guest Posts on County 10 are provided by contributors and the opinions, thoughts, and comments within are their own and may not necessarily reflect those of County 10.
If you have a college-age student in your house, or maybe a grandchild you may have noticed that the process of moving into the dorm is substantially different than in previous generations.
I’ve been in Laramie a few times over the last decade during the check-in period at the six dormitories along Grand Avenue on the east side of the UW campus. Suffice it to say that parking is at a premium as 24-foot cargo-hauling trailers line up to pack the dorm rooms in McIntyre, White, Orr, and Downey Halls.
These rooms are as crammed with as much stuff as the worst hoarder you’ve ever watched on the Discovery Channel.
This is the generation of self-esteem, over-indulgence, and needless extravagance, all funded by those same overzealous snowplow parents that plagued your local school district for the previous 13 years. It’s hilarious to witness and sobering to ponder as a societal trend.
How times have changed.
It can’t be possible, but I arrived a half-century ago on the UW Campus this upcoming August. Even the most pampered sorority girls we knew couldn’t compare to the kids these days.
When I left home, everything I owned was in a duffle bag along with a nine-inch black and white TV, a few dozen LP records, and my 8-track, AM/FM radio with a turntable. I made two trips from my 1969 Rambler American to my first-floor room at Crane Hall. In the Rambler’s trunk was a 12-gauge single-shot shotgun, a bolt action .22 rifle and a few boxes of shells.
Sobering on an entirely different level, is realizing that 1925 was as close then as 1975 is to us today.
Laramie was a very different place when I enrolled. There was only one fast food chain in town, a Shakey’s Pizza franchise on East Grand.
No McDonald’s, Arby’s, Wendy’s, Burger King, or Jimmy John’s, just the Big Scotsman for hamburgers, Fonta’s Pizza for the world’s greatest hot subs and square pizza slices, and of course, Snorts, the greatest college bar that ever existed.
One night, five of my buddies crammed into my Rambler, pooled five bucks to fill her up and we headed to Ft. Collins, not to a party, but for an hour or so at a couple of 3.2 beer joints and to eat at Arby’s.
We were an uptown group of guys.
All that weight strained the tiny Rambler engine as we climbed the hill to Virginia Dale late that night. We pulled into the dorm parking lot around midnight on a Friday.
When I tried to start the car two days later, it wouldn’t fire, I was out of gas. The battery died in the Rambler before Christmas, but it had a manual transmission, was very light and a couple of friends could get it rolling down the street with me popping the clutch a couple of times to get her running. They hopped in and off we went.
That first summer I worked odd jobs for most of June before signing on with the Louisiana Pacific Planing Mill in Riverton. I started at $3.73 an hour and made just enough money to pay for my first year in just eight weeks of work.
I was chronically short of cash that first year, a problem I didn’t have after that since steady raises and 50+ hour work weeks became the standard during the following summers.
Today, the Washakie Cafeteria offers various cuisines, specialty salad bars, short-order sections, and an amazing variety of food.
In the 70s the Crane/Hill and Washakie Cafeterias were sketchy at best, and inedible at worst. We often speculated how much money was changing hands in the food service department to short-change the kids so badly. But that was only speculation fueled by hunger and indigestion.
We found ways to compensate. A hoagie from Fonta’s sold for $2.08 and was delivered to your dormitory floor.
I had an aluminum popcorn popper, and a one-pint, orange, plastic, electric hot water pot.
Popcorn was cheap. We lived on it.
A friend from Cleveland, Ohio had his father sending him 10-pound, full-sized bologna a couple of times a month. His dad owned a packing plant. Another kid, from Albin, grew up on a farm and would pick up dozens of eggs on his trips home once a month.
We fried eggs, and thick slices of bologna in my popcorn popper. You eat what you can find when you’re a starving 19-year-old.
The orange electric pot cooked endless cans of soup. As I recall, you could buy 10 cans of Campbell’s soup for a buck at the Laramie Safeway.
It might sound horrible today, but life was good.
Later, we grew more sophisticated once we moved off campus.
Wild game was often the meal of the day, the only meal on most days.
My roommate and I ate deer, antelope, rabbits, grouse, trout, and tons of ducks.
Our apartment had a kitchen, so the popcorn popper just made popcorn.
My parents gave me a hog each fall, and a 100-pound sack of Oral White’s potatoes. With the hog, we got a couple of pails of lard.
No matter what we had or did not have in the freezer, we always had potatoes. We kept the lard in a one-gallon saucepan. If you put it on the burner, turned the gas on high, and waited five minutes, it was boiling hot. Drop in a few sliced potatoes, and you had a meal fit for a king – ok, maybe a king with coronary artery disease in later life.
When the fries were done, we put the pan, lard, and all back into the refrigerator. We discovered lard lost its boiling quality after about 10 batches of fries and we had to change it.
Doing the dishes was on the honor system. If you used them, you cleaned them. There was no honor at our place.
One night, we made spaghetti with some deer burger. All the dishes were dirty and neither of us was going to be the guy that washed them.
Instead, we drained the noodles, added a little sauce to the deer burger, and pulled out some LP record albums. They were still wrapped in plastic, so we didn’t damage the cardboard, and used them as plates.
It worked. Who would have thought of using record albums for dishes?
That spring, we were off to the adult world. It was a big step from the end of the spring semester four years before when I had to take pop bottles from the dorm machines and trade them into Green’s Grocery in West Laramie for 10 cents a bottle.
The $4.80 I made that morning was just enough to fill the Rambler with gas for the trip home.
Those distant days would scar a kid for life today. There are still a few hard-nosed youngsters but overall, we’ve created a pampered, privileged, soft generation.
Hopefully, they’re never challenged in life, I’m not sure they could handle it.