Sunday, September 14, 2003 5:07:29 PM Joe Coluccio

It was many and many a year ago in a kingdom mid-PA called State College. I and three of my closest high school friends had been accepted as freshman at the wonder filled Universal State of Knowledge. All motivation to be any level of student stopped in the middle of my senior year when I was told that I was accepted to the Pennsylvania State University. What idiot of pedagog thought early admission would prove a good idea. Or was it perhaps financial? I was insufferable around the guidance counselor’s office. Smug. Try as they would to scare me, I had made it! At last I could truly devote my weekends and even school nights to drinking beer and carousing. We had all become masters of shirking school assignments and looking aged in bond enough to get served at local bars and the occasional State Store. A plague was loosed upon the old town.

I barely survived the declining months of spring into graduation. The day after the high and mighty ending ceremony held, on account of new construction at the new High School (Across the valley from me as I sit here writing, I hear the drums of band practicing), in the declining football field of Seneca Junior High. I stepped on a snake in the empty stone dirt and brush lot at Verona and Frankstown. My terribly shaken hung over mind convinced me it was an apparition worthy some biblical intent. A shade of alcoholic exhalation. It was not. Had a more objective reality. I continued on, shaken and reformed, somewhat. And sick. Perhaps snake bitten.

The campus at State College was truly beautiful. Autumn, dead deciduous leaves swirl and tumble through sunlit regions of light defined by shade of tall timber to a luscious green lawn that slopes a long angle to the streets of the small and commercial lit town. Blacktop paths that lead in wide and sensuous curves from building to building are everywhere ignored for the softer blanket of grass and a growing covering of brown red yellow leaves. Students lay mid clover reading, sleeping, and dreaming. The buildings, fantastic copulas and caps, bell tower and Grecian sound columns, here and there a spattering of modern unrelieved concrete and tinted glass. Even seeming an atomic explosion could not upset these aged august and venerable buildings which would in a few scant years be invaded by political unrest and the explosion of youth that would unsettle the whole country. Power to the people!

Somehow I started to college with the right attitude. I was chaste and studious. Didn't last the year. None of us did.

I enrolled in the Aerospace Engineering Program. It was a matter of no small irony that some years later, 1969 to be exact I worked for a Cleaning and Tailor Supply firm on 12th Street two scant blocks south of Broadway in Oakland California and employed via manpower laid off aerospace engineers to help me unload fifty pound sacks of diatomaceous earth off a large flat bed truck out of Lodi, CA. The head of the aerospace department had an appropriate German accent. I don't recall his name, but he may have been part of the Rocket Team that rained Vergeltungswaffe Ein (V1) Vergeltungswaffe Zwei (V2) on Great Britain.

I was Space happy as a kid. And misdirected. I translated my love for astronomy more importantly cosmology into the practical solution that Aerospace Engineering offered. It has taken me years to realize that the "Inner Reaches of Outer Space" as old Joe Campbell called them were always available to me. ...we grow old. we grow old...do we dare to eat a peach?

Anyway

The guy with the gut German akksent, not afraid of cliche, we were told, same as the day before at orientation, to look to the person to the right of us, then to look to the person to left of us. Dramatic pause in the frozen silence of our pensive gaze, "Zey will be gone by zee end of za year!" I took him serious. I was gone and looking for a job by summer vacation. And the guy next to me who stayed was out of a job about six or seven years later, save for helping me hump Dynaflo into the basement of the Rosenburg Brothers.

What, you may ask, did I do for that year. Tried to get laid. College girls are hip and the sexual revolution had not yet reared its sensual head. Tried to get served. College bars are hip and card with the diligence of a prison guard. Tried to party on weekends, fraternities were uninteresting to me and we, none of us, had any money for night life. Tried to study, what a bore. Tried to... well mostly I just visited my friends, read new and dangerous ideas, listened to Ornette Coleman, got new friends and entered into the soap opera world of trysts and affairs, and got into a lot of trouble.

Watched the Beatles on TV. Ed Sullivan for the first time. We all wore Beatles wigs and made fun of them. An ignominious start for the icons of our generation. Heard about Kennedy being assassinated while I was uselessly studying from a Chemistry book that would turn to a Calculus book. Looking out over the West Hall quadrangle from my desk.

Next week I'll turn my futile brow to a weekend in Chicago, the zoo, South Bend and a nation in deep mourning.
Ciao Bambini!