Home Away From Home
My first year of college was at the University of Wisconsin – Stout located in Menomonie, Wisconsin. It was a one and 1/2 hour drive from where I was living with my folks during the summer in Luck, Wisconsin. I shared a dorm room with a sophomore on the third floor of Callahan Hall – Room 314. This was my first adult experience living away from home. I drove back to Luck every weekend for the first month before I realized I should be finding things to do in Menomonie.
Roommate
My roommate, Erik, was a tall, pasty-white redhead. He wasn’t a geek, but wasn’t that out-going, either. I don’t remember us socializing that much or even having any existential conversations.
Music
I didn’t study very hard, but got decent grades. I remember spending a lot of time with a reel-to-reel recorder that my dad brought back with him while overseas in the military. I used it to record music being played on the college radio station. I went down to the local record store to rent albums and recorded the songs to tape on the reel-to-reel. I had this strange idea I wanted to work at a radio station, perhaps as a technician or a disc jockey. That was a crazy pipe dream since I have never had the personality or wit of conversation to pull off a job like that. I had probably watched too many movies about pirate radio stations and the romance of talking to people over the airwaves from a dark basement room took over my imagination.
Letters to Home
My mother saved all the letters I wrote to her while at college. I found them in a drawer a few years after she died. I digitized them and read through them for this blog. I had forgotten that I was trying to learn to play the guitar and wanted to start a band. That all ended abruptly the next year and never came back into my mind until reading my old letters. What a moody and depressed young man I was! I wrote about my feelings in every letter! See snippets from the letters, below.
The Rockford Files
I brought a small color TV with me to college. The only place it would fit in the dorm room was on the top shelf in a closet on my side of the room. In the evenings, my roommate and I would watch reruns of The Rockford Files. He had never heard of it before. I had seen it on TV during its original shows. Eventually others on the floor who didn’t have a TV or had never seen the show began to hang out in our room. From 10pm – 11pm, we had a dozen people crammed into the room staring up at the TV in my closet.
Sunburn
One weekend Erik went on a boat trip. For hours, he was on a river without his shirt on. He got heat stroke and had severe sun burn on his back. For the next week, he had me rub lotion on his back, which by the way, was covered with acne. As gross as it seemed at the time, I knew he was in need so helped him out without complaining.
Darts
Much to my disdain, Erik brought with him darts with steel tips. He put up a poster on our dorm door and threw darts at it. After awhile the door had hundreds of small holes in it. You knew someone was playing darts in our room because you could here one hit the door from down the hall! Even worse was that a number of times I came home from class and opened the door just as a dart came whizzing by and into the hall! Eventually Erik bought a cork dart board, but darts still found there way into the wood of the door. Our dormitory floor’s R. A. (resident assistant) looked the other way until the day we moved out. We took down the dart board and put up a nice new poster on the door covering the damage. When it came time for inspection, Erik and I figuratively twiddled our thumbs and whistles with the slighted of hope the R. A. would forget about the dart holes in the door. Of course, he did not. We had to split the cost of replacing the door. At the time it seemed like a lot, but it only cost me $7.50.
Are you related?
Years after I left Stout, my sister ran into my old roommate, Erik, at a religious retreat in Illinois. He happened to recognize our common name, “Konopacki” and asked her if we were related.
Letters From Paul To Mom
