Chapter 20: Catching Up, Branching Out

Monday, September 10, 1984

Neither The Batt, nor The Eagle (Bryan/College Station’s newspaper, which we also subscribed to), had any coverage of the Houstonians for Equality rally. We were probably still well under the radar up here.

I didn’t have any problem with Marco, or the GSS people in general, knowing, but it might be a mess if it became general knowledge. That is, if there was such a thing as ‘general knowledge’ in a campus of over thirty thousand students.

More or less on a whim, I called Kyle Branner’s office and got his secretary. I scheduled a meeting with him and Martin Connelly for late Friday afternoon. It’d been too long since I’d spoken with them. They needed to be updated on the P.C.’s Limited investment and I needed to make sure that the rent money was doing what it was supposed to do.

That, and figure out if there was any tax planning we needed to do for this year. I was actually in a position to have to deal with taxes in a bigger way. Technically speaking, MNM had one unpaid employee (Jas) and one paid employee (Cammie). It might be better to make everyone a paid employee, though. Paid employees could start retirement accounts, after all, and we might want those.

Oh, we would very likely be rich, which made retirement somewhat irrelevant, but any tax-deferred savings vehicle was a good idea. That, and neither Kyle nor Martin knew just how big we were thinking. To them — and to Dad! — it would look oddly irresponsible to not be planning for retirement.

Tuesday, September 11, 1984

We’d made it this far without cable for Paige’s TV (though she would be the first to say it was our TV). Angie decided to mess with all of us during dinner, though.

“You know...” she said, then switched to singing and finished with, “ ... I want my MTV!”

I tried not to react, and thought I was successful, but Cammie immediately seized on it and said, “Wait! That’s some sort of secret future-person code, right?”

Angie giggled and nodded, saying, “Mm hmm, yes, it most certainly is.”

“So,” Cammie said, “do we get to know?”

“You do not,” she said, sticking out her tongue.

“Rude!” Jas said.

“We can arrange that,” I said, “if by that you mean that we should get cable.”

“I do indeed!” Angie said. “Really, we don’t need it. We’re not all that much ‘TV people,’ and we don’t need to be, but a bit of MTV would be nice. I mean, there are videos showing right now that I haven’t seen in over twenty years!”

Paige took care of whapping her, thankfully. I think everyone wanted to. The others just groaned.

“Seriously?” Mel said, shaking her head. “Did you set things up just so you could say that?”

Angie grinned and nodded, then said, “It’s worse for big brother. It’s gotta be, what, forty...”

She didn’t get to finish. Paige put her hand over Angie’s mouth and muffled whatever else she was going to say.

Mel giggled after a few seconds.

“This!” she said, shaking her head. “This is why you had to tell me! The truth comes out!”

Angie nodded, still muffled.

“It would make conversations like this much more problematic,” I said.

“You think?!” Mel said, grinning.

“I’ll call Cablevision tomorrow and get things moving,” I said.

Paige said, “Hey!” and let go of Angie’s mouth. “You licked me!”

Angie grinned and said, “You love it when I lick you.”

Paige groaned, covered her face with her dry hand (while wiping the other one), and said, “Okay, you win!”

Wednesday, September 12, 1984

My State and Local Government professor started class by asking us if we’d ever been involved with government at the state and local level.

Several of the girls just rolled their eyes at that.

After some discussion about what ‘involved’ meant, few people really had an answer. Eventually, I put my hand up.

“Yes, Steve?” Dr. Blair said.

“I was involved in a school board election. I mean helping out, not running! Also, I was just a speaker at a rally related to the upcoming Houston election. And, if you want to get very local, I was on our student council for two years.”

He chuckled a bit at that.

“That might be a bit more local than we’re interested in. I’ll bite, though. What offices did you hold?”

“Vice President and then President.”

He nodded.

“And the school board race?”

I shrugged, then said, “I was hoping that a new face would displace someone on the school board that I didn’t like. Fortunately, it worked.”

That got laughter from the whole class and a raised eyebrow from Dr. Blair. I had a feeling we might discuss it more later. That was fine by me — I really didn’t want to go into the details in public. The odds were low that anyone in this class would care, but even now I figured it was better if my involvement wasn’t all that obvious.

“And the political rally?”

“It was in opposition to the ‘Straight Slate’ movement in Houston. I’m not much of a fan of them.”

“Us, either,” Angie said, with the others nodding.

“Interesting. How have you found the process so far?”

I shrugged a bit again.

“Student Council was great. So was the school board race. I guess ... ask me in November how I feel about the anti-Straight Slate movement.”

He chuckled, and said, “Fair enough! You would do it again, though?”

I nodded, then said, “I think it’s important for people to be aware of local government. For instance, it’s my understanding that students at A&M tend to be very unaware of the governments of Bryan and College Station, yet collectively they’re about one-third of the population of the area and would be a pretty significant voting bloc — if they voted. Those city governments have a big impact on students’ lives. Not directly, but through the police as well as regulation of local businesses, housing, restaurants, and so much more. Most students aren’t even registered to vote here. Now — I said ‘unaware.’ If they’re unaware, they shouldn’t be voting here. But, ideally, they’d be aware and want a say in their community.”

“Interesting! You hit on the point I was going to make, more or less. My point is that people everywhere tend to pay attention to the federal government much more than their state government, and their state government much more than local government, even though local government can sometimes have the most impact on day-to-day life.”

I nodded, but didn’t say anything.

“Thank you, Steve!”

“You’re welcome, Dr. Blair.”

He launched into a lecture on exactly that point. I had a feeling some of the kids in this class would be changing their voter registrations, but who knew? Maybe he’d inspired something and maybe he hadn’t. Time would tell.

As class was ending, Dr. Blair asked me to stay after. While people were leaving, I got a few looks, and one guy told me he was a supporter of Straight Slate and hoped I would be disappointed in November. I just said, ‘May the best candidates win.’ I think he was okay with that.

When they’d left, and the girls had moved to the back of the room, I headed up to the front. It turned out Dr. Blair wanted more information about the school board race.

When he found out that I’d actually recruited a successful candidate for school board while in high school, he just shook his head.

“That’s a new record for me!” he said, smiling. “As far as I know, I’ve never had a student who’s actually gotten someone elected in a public election. I’ve had plenty that worked on campaigns to some level, but you’re in a class all your own. I suppose it served the other guy right for attacking you.”

I shrugged and said, “Really, it was Lizzie that I was concerned with. If they’d go after her, how many people without the resources to defend themselves would be impacted?”

He nodded, then said, “Anything else I should know about you?”

“I have no idea, really. If this was US Government, being quoted by Ronald Reagan would probably fit.”

“Ronald Reagan quoted you?” he said.

I nodded, saying, “Not by name or anything. I don’t think he knew my name at all at the time. I made some comments about the prom after Lizzie and Janet went to it in 1983...”

“I remember reading about that!” he said.

“And one of Reagan’s speechwriters took a couple of phrases and worked them into his July 4th address in 1983.”

“Fascinating. I’ll have my eye on you,” he said, smiling. “That’s not a threat, mind you. Just ... curiosity.”

“Curiosity is good, if you’re not a cat,” I said.

He chuckled at that.

“Indeed!”

We talked about it for a bit before splitting up to go to our other classes. No one felt that I’d crossed the line into bragging, thankfully. I was trying not to, but it was hard not to answer the question.

I also had omitted that Angie, Paige, and Cammie had spoken at that rally, but that was for them to mention (or not).

The big question we all had was whether this would get us some contacts with others in the class. So far, none of us had made much in the way of friends. To some extent, our sharing classes likely made that harder, not easier. We already had friends in our classes, after all.

When I got home, my first call was to Cablevision, the local cable company. They promised to have someone out in a few days. We had all of the wiring in place, and there was a cable jack close by the TV, so everything should be really simple.

I pretty much got the whole package. The extra channels, such as they were, weren’t that much more expensive, and I suspected the girls would get a kick out of ‘Skinemax’. I would too, probably. Most of it was awful, but that was why it would be fun, most likely.

Thursday, September 13, 1984

After my math class, I headed to the Computer Services Center. We had a program due next week, and I wanted to get time on one of the card punches and get my assignment coded. In the end, I wound up hanging out there much longer than I expected to.

There were three reasons for that. The first one was simple: all of the card punch machines were in use when I got there, so I had to wait for one to free up.

That led to the second. It turned out that one could sign up for accounts for all sorts of interesting things at the Computer Services Center. One could get an account on BITNET, for instance, which opened up the (potentially sleep-destroying) possibility of online chat. One could also get an account that offered access to USENET newsgroups (another potentially sleep-destroying thing). And one could get an account to use the campus printers to print out nearly anything (as long as you wanted dot-matrix plain text, anyway).

The third was the most interesting. I got my program coded and running pretty quickly after I could get to a machine. Three other people from my class (Trey Fisher, Carl Jefferson, and Murray Peterson) all spotted that and wanted my help. I ended up teaching them more than the instructor had to date, most likely.

They might be friends, and they might not, but at least I’d done a good deed for the day.

At least I’d called home and told Angie that I’d miss dinner before acting as an unpaid teaching assistant!

As I was walking up the street leading to ours, I spotted someone who I thought looked familiar walking towards me. As we closed the distance, it turned out that I was right — it was Sarah Chen, my TA from Chem lab. She seemed absorbed in thought.

I waved a bit, and it must have broken her concentration enough for her to pay attention.

“Steve!” she said. “What are you doing up this way?”

I pointed towards the corner.

“I live up this way. I’m on the next street, over half a block.”

She looked back.

“Wait ... you live up here? You’re a freshman, right?”

I nodded.

“There aren’t many...” she said, then paused and gave me a look.

“Wait!” she said. “Are you one of the people that took over the house with the basement?”

I smiled, and said, “Yeah, that’s us.”

“My boyfriend told me about you! That’s really cool!”

“Wait,” I said. “You’re Peter Bradshaw’s girlfriend?”

“I am!” she said, grinning.

“Cool! He did mention that his girlfriend was a graduate student in Chemistry, but I had no idea it was you.”