This Old Scan II… with Bonus “Remember When” List!

Kathryn and I graduated college in 1994. I found a “remember when” list online for the Class of ’97 Reunion last year, and while they don’t ALL apply to me and Kat, most of them are close enough. It was interesting spending four of the most important years of our lives in a tiny town. Sherman has grown exponentially since we left.

YOU KNOW YOU GRADUATED FROM AUSTIN COLLEGE IN 1997 IF:

• You lived in Caruth and couldn’t move your furniture (We lived in Clyce and could rearrange at will)
• You vividly remember the damp and dingy smell in Luckett Hall because there was a Luckett Hall (Oh god yes! Coincidentally, I walked into the bathroom at work one day early this week and immediately thought, “Jesus, it smells like the basement of Luckett in here!” That damp moldy smell is permanently burned into my brain and nose.)
• You knew the real SUB and Pub (Sadly, they are only a memory now. Their unique character has been replaced by a big bright shiny new building. I guess it had to happen some day.)
• You attended at least one party at Old Settler’s (I’m sure I did)
• You remember getting drunk on $0.37 at Calhoun’s on “Coin Night” (I am proud to say I never once set foot inside Calhoun’s during my entire four-year college career.)
• You typed your papers on a Word Processor (I got one for high school graduation. It was a typewriter with a tiny little readout screen. Practically useless, unfortunately. I typed most of my papers on my friend Peter Nevius’s Mac Classic, or in the Mac Lab in the basement of the science building.)
• You know where the Loggia was and snuck food out of the cafeteria and ate it there at least once (Many, times, actually. Apparently the cool kids hung out in the Loggia, a little glass-walled hallway between the Pub and Slater’s.)
• You remember the only places to eat in Sherman were City Limits, MGs, Vittina’s, Garcia’s, La Mesa, South Austin Grill and Slater’s (What are MG’s and Vittina’s? La Mesa? Besides a handful of fast food places, we only had City Limits, Denny’s, Garcia’s, Slater’s, the Pub, CiCi’s pizza, which we were THRILLED to get our junior year, and Tracks, that tiny little cheap hamburger place on the other side of 75, across from Dude’s Music and Pawn. We were poor, so South Austin Grill was only for very fancy occasions; see photo and caption below.)
• You had to drive past the cemetery to get alcohol in Denison (or Denison was just a liquor store) (If you were going to “the store,” that meant Kroger. If you were going to “THE STORE” pronounced in capital letters, that meant the liquor store on the edge of town.)
• You were excited when Super K-Mart, Chili’s and El Chico came to town (All these came to town after we’d left.)
• You saw the Steak Country Cow in at least one parade and remember all the stories associated with it (Loved that cow. Rumor had it that once, many years ago, it somehow ended up on the roof of Abell Library.)
• Hickory, Crockett, Purgatory, Luckett, Coffin and Old Settler’s were still standing (Yes to all.)
• You had at least one class with either Hugh Garnett, Ken Street, Jane Ellington, Roy Melugin, Jim Ware or Shelley Williams (Jane was one of my favorite professors. So were Peter Lucchesi and Mark Monroe. I think Mark’s still there but Peter retired years ago.)
• You remember Harry Smith as President and David Jordan as Dean (Yes and yes. And Tim Millerick was Dean of Student Life.)
• You had to go off campus to Nautilus to go to a decent gym (We weren’t really into working out the way people are today. That was for athletes. We’d walk the track sometimes or play tennis or racquetball, but we never really missed not having a “decent gym.”)
• You remember the 1st season of The Real World (No, I do not. We did not have a TV until our senior year when we moved into an apartment, anyway, and we didn’t really miss it.)
• You risked your life living in a campus-owned house (Three years in the dorm, and one year in a campus apartment)
• You thought Ice Milk was a real treat when they added it to Slater’s (Slater’s got ice milk?! Damn.)
• You remember a fraternity named Rho Lambda Theta (I guess?)
• You watched at least one demonstration in the SUB by John White, the pool shark (Hahaha. As VP of the Campus Activities Board, I probably booked the guy at least once.)
• You remember the Trust Games at the Lake Campus (We didn’t do trust games as freshman, but Kat and I and our boyfriends and other friends (Peter Nevius, Chris Werner, Elston whose last name I can’t remember) camped at the lake a few times. The cafeteria would prepare a meal for you to grill over your campfire if you told them in advance you were going camping at Texoma… Nice food too, better than you’d get in the cafeteria. Once it was potatoes to bury in the sand and bake, and steak and veggie shish-ka-bobs. And it was part of our meal plan! No extra cost!)
• You got injured at some point sliding down the levee (What levee? At the Red River Dam?)
• You went to a party at The Hill or Pumpjack (Yes, and yes. Fallout and Tequilafest were other parties I always enjoyed going to. I think the Phi Betas and/or Tri Gams hosted Fallout in the old VA building, complete with cargo nets and nuclear radiation signage everywhere. I don’t think fraternities at AC were like fraternities at many other colleges. They were mostly all sweet guys. No Animal House antics.)
• You were allowed to smoke in the Pub (True enough, although I didn’t smoke. I tried to go at times when there weren’t a lot of people there, to avoid it.)

After Kat and I graduated, our families took us and our friends to the South Austin Grill, which was pretty much the only “fancy” restaurant in town at that time. This is the only decent photograph I have of that.

Here’s what Kat and I did in the classes we had together. Really, we were both very good students, but sometimes the lectures bored us out of our minds.

When I bought my first computer, in 1996, I believe, I was pretty sure I was going to get a Mac since I’d typed all my papers on Mac Classics in college and been able to use a Color LCII in my office on campus for doing flyers and other layouts for publicity-related items for the Campus Activities Board, of which I was vice president. Actually, learning Pagemaker on that computer was what got me my foot in the door at my current job. Anyway, I asked my new boyfriend Doc to help me do a comparison of a few Mac models that I thought I could afford. I bought the Performa 6205CD and an extra 8MB of RAM, and I think that I paid a total of something like $2700 for the whole shebang. Check out those sexy specs!

Shortly after college graduation, I went with my boyfriend to the Stonewall 25 Anniversary celebration in New York, marching in support of LGBTQ rights. It’s a very long and complicated story, but I mostly had a fantastic time. I saw Laura Branigan in a street concert, visited the Statue of Liberty, participated in the parade, visited Fallingwater and the Hershey’s Chocolate Factory, and saw more of the Midwest and East Cost than I had ever seen before or since.

I visited Russia, Poland, Lithuania, Finland, and a few other Eastern European countries as part of a month-abroad course I was lucky enough to be able to take in 1993. On paper, we were supposed to be studying these countries’ new economies after the fall of the Soviet Union, but in reality it was just a fun cultural experience (I’ll post my journal here later, I think). We had to turn in a ten page paper at the end of the class, which wasn’t a whole lot of work for one month. A few nights ago I found a small stack of currency from some of these countries. Being a poor college student, I think if it had been worth more than about $10 I would have exchanged it on my way back into the States, but I decided to keep it as a souvenir. So when I found it the other night, I wondered how much it was worth these days. A quick calculation on exchange-rate sites told me that my 11,650 Polish zlotys were worth more than $5,000.00 US. WHAT?!! That can’t be right. Can it?? Has the value really gone absolutely nuts like that in the past 15 years??! Maybe it has!! Where can I take this money to be exchanged?! Is this too good to be true? It has to be too good to be true. Right? Hmm, maybe I should do a little more digging… and… DAMN. Turns out in 1995 Poland revaluated their currency, to where 10,000 old zlotys were worth one new one. And one new zloty is worth… drum roll please…. 44 cents US. Oh well. I guess I’ll keep the bills. They are really beautiful, although I think that’s Copernicus on the 1,000 bill, and did he get hit with the ugly stick, or what? Talk about your baaaaaaaaad haircuts.