THE UNIVERSITY OF CONNECTICUT'S main and only campus is at Willimantic. But this was not always so. At the end of WWII, and with the mass application of so many Veterans to be admitted to the Halls of Higher Learning, it proved impossible to accomodate them all at Willimantic. So the University managed to "acquire" by some artifice or another, the facility further south on Long Island Sound at New London, known simply as Fort Trumbull.
Fort Trumbull lies almost under the Groton Bridge - a high, other-worldly highway span that goes over the Thames River here. Fort Trumbull, no less, dates back, 'twas said, to the days of the American Revolution and all that sort of thing. It had most recently been a "school" for the Merchant Marine (I think) with modern barracks, etc. - but as the MM had recently decamped, the facility was up for grabs, and so UC grabbed it as an auxiliary campus. All well and good so far.
But the trouble was that it was really a military type outpost - barracks structures and all - mess hall, and so forth - and its clientele were recently discharged Veterans - seeking to a man to bury forever their memories of "The Service" and be "fuc*&^%$" civilians again...
Sigh.
Nor was that the least of the troubles...
Fort Trumbull is , how shall I put it, "on the wrong side of the tracks". Downtown New London is, and always has been, a "sailors' town." Saloons lined the main drag. Across the Thames from our Quad was the Electric Boat Company - building then the very first atomic subs of the postwar world - they stuck out of the sheds that had sufficed for the "Pigboats" of WWII but could not house these monsters: tarpaulins draped over protruding bows and sterns gave a sort of sinister air of intrigue and mystery to it all.
As students, we were a sorry lot. Grown men now and ready to rumble, we were an unlikely lot of for college "Freshmen." Riot and commotion and drunkeness became the norm. The mess-hall became the first target and its Operator, whose name I have mercifully forgotten, became the first victim: one night his entire grave appeared as if by magic on the upstairs entry platform to his domain: piled up dirt in a mound, nicely patted down, a real tombstone at its head and the legend "So-and-so lies here: He tried to eat his own cooking."
From there, things went downhill. Whiskey bottles (shades of Hymie Weiss!), firebombs (shades of lunacy!), insults, challenges, richocheted off walls and from barracks to barracks as they burst forth from the multi-storyed buildings of nights... Then the ultimate happened: one of the firebombs landed on the roof of the building in the center of the Quad. This was a boarded-up, locked, and shuttered affair called simply, the "Magazine." Folklore held that it dated to the time of Nathan Hale who had sojurned hereabouts, and had been "charged" at that time with kegs of "gunpowder" and no one had checked on it since that remote day!
Mother of God! The Fire Chief was beside himself: all of downtown New London and much of the countryside roundabout lay under this threat! Sparks were already rising in the damp marine air! We were all summarily turned out - and since "we" had caused this state of affairs - "we" were put to work in a human chain sort of thing, passing out boxes and kegs and no-one-knew-what, a parcel at a time from the now hacked-open Magazine....
All was well that ended well - and the "pass-ees" later regrouped when the fire engines left - and we marched off en masse to the Sailor bars on the other side of the tracks for a night of further rioting and fighting in the streets of New London town. (I remember it was around St. Paddy's day in March, and the bars were serving beer dyed green, and much hilarity attached to being able to "pee green" for days thereafter...).
I signed up for "World History - 101". My very first reading assignment (you had to go to the library and look up the reference! Wow!) was an item, I think by Martin Luther or some Medieval sage, who wrote something to the effect ..."that there is no more sorry person in this world than he who is smarter than most, but dumber than some..." for surely all his days he shall be a misfit and find not his place, and stuff like that.
I have never forgotten that treatise and got 100 on the test.
English (I was not yet perceived as having "writing skills" - that came later.) was a rather crude affair, "grab ass" as we used to say, conducted on the ground floor of one of the buildings facing on the Quad. Our instructor, roughly the same age as his pupils, kept a blowtorch on his desk. Rather than the Great Literature of the World, his favorite dissertation or whatever was to ask us for contributions of pocket change as we entered his classroom. These he soon heated to near glowing hot in his blowtorch and then tossed them out his classroom window! The howls of anguish that echoed thereafter through these Halls of Learning, as passersby in the Quad picked up redhot quarters, nickels and dimes strewn indiscriminantly about... well, I'm sure you can imagine.
We all got 100 on the test with him!
This was my first intro to formal Psychology as well. Classes were huge, there were so many of us. "Psych" was given in a lecture hall that was the oldtime "banked" seating arrangement around the Prof, who stood stage center down below us. "Prof" in this case being a young, lascivisous girl, about our own age. She did pretty well considering all - including catcalls and whistles at times from here and there in the throng. Until one day she was lecturing us on the role of Syphillis in mental disease. The problem was that this toothsome wench had a rather pronounced lisp. So, when she unconsciously came to the part in her lecture where she intoned, "Thi-phill-is cause-th a th-speech impediment," she was doing okay - but with that, a roar went up that rang the rafters! Dumbstruck, she stood a moment and then her face reddened and she fled the podium and could never again be induced to appear before such lost souls.
Sigh.
Weekends I used to hitchhike home to Fairfield County down state. Here, I could "double date" with my longtime buddies and get some of Mom's home cookin' into the bargain.
Many of them had erstwhile enrolled in NYU - New York University. Some at a campus over in White Plains, one or two direct to the downtown campus of same in Washington Square in NYC. They most of them were still living at home, in fact (Mom's cooking every day, you see, etc.) And NYU seemed to offer a sort of really upgraded "education" alongside what I was being exposed to, that I could sense even then.
I decided to try and change.
And I did. But not before NYU haughtily "wiped out" my entire Freshman year at UConn and made me start over! I was told my academic record was not the best (no new news there), but my IQ and other tests showed I had "merit" and they would provisionally take me, on good behavior. But I was to understand NYU was a world class university no less and no nonsense.
And such it proved! Wow!
I became, in short, a commuter to my distant classes every other day or so, in far off Washington Square and rode the train into and out of the city -as I was later to do for so many years as a wage earner. And the winds of change swept over me at last! "Learning" finally appeared in an attractive guise, and I began to eat books for breakfast, as it were. Science, philosophy, philosophy of science even creative writing, the world became my oyster!
And why not? Heart of bohemian Greenwich Village, street people, stomping grounds at one time or another of American writers from Henry James to Jack Kerouac, and tinkerers and scientists from the Samuel(s) Morse and Colt - among others - to Noebel prize winners who seeingly "...came in bunches, like bananas" - the Square was a Festschrift at all hours! I remember standing in the throng the day MacArthur, called home from Japan in "semi-disgrace" by Harry Truman, rode beneath the "Arch" like Ceasar Regnant... Moss rarely grew on WSC students and "...life was real, life was earnest."
Geology unlocked my science passion! You wanna' know how?
Every other page in Geology 101 was an "explanation" - a rational one, mind you! - of all the places I had seen and been all my younger life: orographic uplifts, the Cordilleria, cirques, plains, oxbow lakes, draws and breaks, rocks and fossils, oceans even - I had lived and seen and traveled in, on, and through them all - unlike my peers who mainly hailed from the reaches of the Bronx and Queens - and to whom (yet) the wonders of topography and "structural forms" were yet mysteries unplumbed! But at last I, who had "been there, done that," (almost went over Yellowstone Falls once, leaning out to pick berries on the very edge) and so on had found "explanations" at last, that my family could never provide for me, as to the how, and when, and where and what of the Natural World! Wheee!
And so it seemed that Geology would be my destiny. Paleontology followed naturally in its time. One day I went to consult with my instructor to declare myself (like a penitent for Christ) to Geology as my Life's calling - I would so-Major in the field! But Hard Rock Spock (as we all knew him) had had a bad night before or something, and he grumpily set about discouraging me from ever following his field at all! The "..dangers are double, and the pleasures are few..." as in Dolly Parton's "Dark As A Dungeon" folk song about work in the Mines.. and he temporarily at least dissuaded me from Geology as a life calling.