College Years

It would be a mistake to call us a garage band when we began. We were more a living room group. We didn’t really sing for anyone but ourselves. Like the doo-wop bands on Philadelphia street corners, we just looked for the best acoustics and honed those songs from the great vocal rock’ n roll east coast vocal bands of the late fifties, like the Del-Vikings and the Diamonds. Our junior year passed into history and our senior year continued with very little attempt to sing at parties or dances. But as we approached graduation, real life intruded and it looked like our singing group would be left behind as a childhood hobby as Dave and I, seniors, graduated into college. Hasty and Pat, maybe more relieved then anything, decided they had better things to do with their upper class high school years and Hasty knew that he was headed for Purdue and eventually bigger things.

Dave and I had become good friends and neither of our families were rolling in money and our grades were not the best, though Dave’s were much better than mine. So we decided to go to Butler University. It was near home so we could go to school and save money by living at home rather than getting dorm rooms. Of course that was before the Delta Tau Delta house rushed us and we came to learn the real lesson of going to college; how much beer can you drink. In the end one of the reasons they took Dave and I into the fraternity house was because we could sing. They wanted Jocks and Brains and Social type people; we fit into the later group as entertainers I guess. Cutting to the chase, we had joined Animal House, the first fraternity to ever have a house off the Butler campus, and it was a newly built house built on a ravine over the White River, that passed by the University Campus. While Dave and I didn’t make our grades to get pinned as Actives, we did pass all the beer drinking tests, the generally rowdy rushee tests and learned the Delta Tau Delta handbook. Also, we had begun singing with another talented singer in our rush class, Mickey (?) as an in-house trio for the entertainment of the general population of the house. So we began our second semester in the Delt house. To make matters worse, we actually moved into the house instead of just being townies. Our families were disgusted with our grades and I still don’t know why they thought we would get better grades if we were in that house of decadent and wily Delta Tau Delta degenerates, home of the Midnight Thwacker, most of whom we idolized.

During the second semester, things turned decidedly worse. The study room Dave and I shared was on the first floor and we had taken to sneaking out of the house during study hours and haunting our old favorite spots like the TeePee and the Rondevu and others around town. When Dave realized how bad his grades were going to be, he dropped out of school to avoid getting so many bad marks on his record. I soldiered on alone for a month or so until life gave me one of the strange wake-up calls I know tend to expect. My high school sweetheart and first love were still a steady item even after I went off to school but it had become harder and harder for us to see each other. I was on the west side at college and her family had moved to the east side where she transferred to Warren Central HS. Also, there was a cultural difference between college and high school that was getting hard to bridge. It’s hard to say what would have eventually happened to us if the typical fifties love story hadn’t caught up with us. In the euphemism of the time, we were both invited to a shotgun wedding with all four of our parents taking turns at the trigger.

It was decided for us, that we would attend a school in Murray, Kentucky, as much because to get us out of town to hide this terrible event from disapproving eyes as to send us to a school that Pat’s sister was attending. Clearly now our music days were over and the seriousness of adult responsibility was settling in. Because she wasn’t finishing her senior year, Pat passed an entrance exam at Murray and we immediately set off for Kentucky to attend the summer session. Poor Pat. Miss Totally Cool

and the sweetest person alive, cheerleader, prom queen and straight A student. Larry, the immature, un-disciplined, moody, dreamer, authority challenging young man had almost nothing positive to add to this doomed marriage. Still, in 1959, this is the way things were done and we were sent off to work it out as best we could away from friends and family.

Then, amazingly enough, Dave decided to join us at Murray State. Another one of his friends from Broad Ripple HS was going to go to Murray as well so almost as independent choices we ended up together again at this strangely named school on the north side of the Blue Ridge mountains for the next phase of our college career. Up until now, despite our close relationship Pat and her beautiful singing voice, we had never sung together. She was in choir, of course, and performed in almost all the school musical productions. With another male and female voice and Dave, we formed a quintet that sang songs like This I Swear, Pennies From Heaven, Zing Went the Strings, and Since I don’t have you. I loved singing these Skyliner tunes with this group but Dave began to lose interest in his school work and struggle with his grades and returned to Indiana. after our friend Jim was killed in an automobile accident returning to Indy over Thanksgiving. Pat and I were about to add a little brother for our son Dave, little Daniel. Our singing days were definitely over, once again.

COLLEGE YEARS