Chapter 26: Thanksgiving Dinner

I slept late Sunday morning, not even waking when Buddy started drinking and smoking pot. After the mandatory shit, shave, and shower, I grabbed my books and headed out. I needed something for lunch, and then I had to study on campus. I ran across Bo almost immediately, when I was leaving the dorm and he was just coming in. “Good morning,” I said, eyeing him to see if he had any suspicions about me and his mother.

He must not have, because he simply greeted me in return.

“Next time you talk to your mom, tell her thank you for lunch yesterday.”

“No problem,” he replied.

“So, is your sister planning on applying to this place?” I asked.

He gave me a shrug. “I think so, but I’m not completely sure.”

I grinned at him. “You know, she’s awfully pretty. If she does come here, she’s going to need a friend, an older friend, maybe a sophomore that she already has met, to help ease her into things and be a mentor. I mean, she really is pretty.”

Bo’s eyes opened wide at this. “Oh, shit! No way, no way! I’m going to be responsible for her!”

I just laughed. “I’ll be happy to help share that burden.”

“No way! She’s going to be the only girl on campus who doesn’t have a boyfriend.”

I just laughed at Bo and continued on my way, leaving him to wonder how he was going to keep his sister from meeting 4,000 new men, all of whom would be happy to show her around.

I grabbed some fruit and juice at the dining hall and kept on going. Five minutes later I was walking into the basement of Amos Eaton Hall, also known as ‘Amos Eat-Me’, which was where the math department made its home. The basement was where their pride and joy lived, an IBM 360 mainframe, a state of the (then) art computer. This behemoth was treated better than the students who used it. It, for instance, lived-in air-conditioned luxury, surrounded by technicians wearing white coats. You could see it at work behind a massive glass wall. No students could even get close to it.

Just that year it had been massively upgraded. It now had an entire megabyte of memory! That 1 MB cost roughly $1.5 million. That megabyte was what they called core memory, but not because it was at the core of the machine. No, core memory was memory that stored the ones and zeroes on what looked like steel washers, or cores. One megabyte equaled eight megabits, which meant that they had bought gigantic boxes holding eight million washers tied together in racks by wiring. If you wanted one of the bits to be a 0 or 1, you energized the wires and flipped the magnetic direction of a washer. This was some serious high technology!

(Remember, in 1973 even handheld calculators were ridiculously expensive. While they had come out just a few years before, a decent scientific calculator might run $300-$400. That was over ten percent of tuition, so you had to be rich to be able to buy one. Most professors wouldn’t even allow you to use one during your tests because that would favor the rich students, at least until the price dropped a few years later.)

Most undergraduate computer programming was done on this beast. The language was a flavor of Fortran, and the programs were run batch style. You typed your program on a card punch machine, one line of code per card, and then fed the cards through a card reader which stored the program in memory until it was your turn in the batch. If you had a thousand lines of code, you would have a thousand punch cards. One of the standard jokes was that you could tell a computer science major because they walked like a gorilla; the boxes of punch cards were so massive they dragged your arms to the ground.

After feeding your punch cards to the machine, you went away. Later in the day, or maybe the next morning, you could pick up your printouts. Hopefully it worked. The odds were it wouldn’t. You would have a typo on one of the cards and the whole thing would be rejected. You would fix the problem and submit the cards again, which simply meant another card would have a typo. Screaming students bitching about typing were commonplace.

There were rumors that in the subbasement were computers which had keyboards and monitors, but these were just rumors. Nobody had ever seen them but some grad students.

The computer center was one of the few buildings that were open all night. Batch processing of programs went on 24/7. Also open until the wee hours was the library, which was actually in a converted Gothic cathedral on campus. A new modern library was under construction but wasn’t anywhere near ready yet. As I recall, it wouldn’t be in use until senior year. During finals week it and the Student Union would be open 24/7. I found myself an empty punch card machine and started typing code that I had already written out long hand on paper. The program was one that was normally only taught towards the end of the semester, so it was fairly long. I was burning through the programming course, and Professor Nichols had agreed to let me take the follow-on course independently when I finished this class’s assignments.

I spent the rest of the afternoon typing code and then going over to the library. I alternated between Amos Eat-Me and the library until the early evening, skipping the deliciousness of the dining hall. Later I grabbed something in the Rat. Back in my dorm room I found Buddy missing, but what the heck, it was a weekend, and he was off somewhere goofing off. Mind you, it didn’t matter that he also did this the other six days of the week as well. The man was a serious student of moral dissipation. If they offered classes in that, he’d be magna cum laude!

I must have passed my first audition at Kegs, since the next morning at ROTC muster, Ricky Holloway, a junior in the ROTC program and one of the Keggers, invited me back for dinner. I thanked him and agreed, although I did mention I wouldn’t be able to drink and get too stupid on a school night. He laughed at that. Ricky was one of the supreme partiers of the frat, and his room was practically a shrine to marijuana. About ten years ago a couple of upper classmen had spent almost two years painting the entire room flat black and then covered it with intricately linked paisley artwork in neon green, red, yellow, and orange patterns. The room had been wired for sound and UV lighting. Ever since then the ‘Black Light Room’ had been passed down from generation to generation, with the residents morally obligated to keep up the tradition and care for the room. Whenever parents were around, the room was kept closed off, lest they get the wrong idea (well, actually the right idea) about what went on in there.

And so things went for the next few weeks. I made it a habit to visit Kegs on Friday and Saturday, and maybe a short evening during the week, and I noticed several other freshmen doing the same thing. Fall Rush was doing its job, and a new slate of freshmen were being groomed for an invitation to pledge.

The one really, really serious task I was overseeing had nothing to do with school. I was about to become a millionaire. I had managed to finish high school with my brokerage account right about $125,000. On October 6, the Yom Kippur War would kick off, and within weeks, OPEC would raise prices and cut production. Currently the price of oil was about $3 a barrel. By early 1974 the price would be up to $12 a barrel.

And I knew it. Shortly before I left Towson and drove here, I sat down with Missy Talmadge and outlined my future plans. She had been highly skeptical of my move into oil, which she thought was just one more commodity. I knew better; it was the one single element which the economy of the world moved on. The only more important resource is water, without which we die. I knew the price of oil would quadruple, which would get me from $125,000 to $500,000. That wasn’t good enough. Missy and I worked out a series of derivatives and futures which was predicated on the rise in pricing. If the Arabs started shooting at the Israelis again, I was going to be a millionaire. If peace broke out, I would be bankrupt.

Peace didn’t break out. Yom Kippur was not a holiday the school closed for, and by Monday morning’s ROTC muster every military tongue was wagging over what was going on halfway around the world. We followed it closely in the Military Science classes. Ten days later OPEC started playing games, almost doubling the price of oil overnight. That was only the start. I had left instructions for Missy to keep her nerve until the price hit $12 a barrel, at which point I wanted to dump everything and diversify. 1974 was going to be a disastrous year for the stock market. We were going to invest in Toyota and Nissan, sell short the American car companies, and buy stocks in Exxon and a few other oil companies.

Missy also suggested buying stocks in building supplies, like companies that made insulation, since people would want to insulate their houses more, but I declined. What I knew but she didn’t was that most of those same companies were about to face massive tort exposure related to asbestos. Many would go out of business entirely. Unfortunately, I wasn’t sure when this would happen, but I didn’t want to go anywhere near asbestos, not even as an investor.

November 5 came and went quietly. I was now officially and legally an adult. It was a Monday, and after dinner I called home and said hello to my parents and Suzie. They had mailed presents to my new PO Box address. There was even one from Hamilton, but when I told Mom to thank him for me, she gave me a very hesitant response. It was obvious he hadn’t gotten me a birthday present. They asked if I was coming home for Thanksgiving, and I told them no; it was an eight-hour trip or more by train or bus and would leave me just a few days at home.

The only thing I did different that day was apply for an American Express card. Times were different then. The idea of unemployed college kids having credit cards was not even considered, but I had sufficient assets that I was sure I would get the card. Besides, American Express was not (at that time) strictly speaking a credit card. You paid off your balance every month - or else! - and couldn’t roll the balance over. Additionally, there were very few places that accepted American Express back in the early Seventies. It was almost entirely restricted to hotels and restaurants. On the plus side, no matter where I was in the world, I would always be able to get a meal and a bed, and that was sufficient for me.

By early November I was already well on my way to being a millionaire thanks to the oil crisis. Buddy was well on his way to a totally different type of crisis, this one involving his grades. Even though he started attending a few classes and no longer slept through the F-Tests, Buddy had uniformly flunked every single midterm. You could see a haunted look start coming to his eyes when he tried to get me to help him. I did try, but the boy was hopeless. He would buckle down for a day, but then go right back to drinking and doping. By the beginning of November his parents must have found out about his grades because he was suddenly getting long phone calls on the pay phone in the lounge. Buddy was frightened but didn’t have the discipline to do what was needed to catch up. He didn’t do better on the next round of F-Tests, and I knew time was getting short for my roommate.

The hammer fell Thanksgiving. I wasn’t going back to Baltimore, and Buddy’s parents showed up at our door bright and early Wednesday morning. They were not amused by their son’s antics. His father peremptorily ordered Buddy to pack up; his mother looked me over disdainfully and demanded to know why I hadn’t helped her son get the A’s he deserved. Buddy must have been throwing me under the bus all semester. There was nothing to say, so I kept my mouth shut and watched. It got really amusing when his father opened his closet to help pack and found Buddy’s bong. Buddy immediately claimed it was mine, at which point I just laughed. Buddy was gone fifteen minutes later. He left ‘my’ bong for me, but I noticed he managed to hide his stash and take that with him.

It was a perfectly serviceable bong. I cleaned it up and put it in my closet.

The school closed after all classes on Tuesday of Thanksgiving week and wouldn’t reopen until Monday morning afterwards. That left me with a major dilemma. The dining hall would close from Tuesday after dinner until Sunday after lunch. If I were already a Kegger, I could eat there, but we hadn’t been officially rushed yet. I was going to be eating out for several days. I had already mentioned the problem to Jim Easton and Mark Malloy. I couldn’t move in, of course, but I was invited to eat there for a few days. Two or three of the brothers lived far from home and wouldn’t travel until the Christmas break. The same sort of thing occurred even during the summer. There were always two or three guys living there and not moving back home. I would have to talk to them about that.

As it was, three guys were staying over, Jack Jones and Bill Swayzack, a pair of sophomores, and Marty Adrianopolis, a junior. I asked if I could come over for the day. They agreed, and I sweetened the deal. If they coughed up a few bucks, I would stuff and cook a turkey dinner. That got an enthusiastic agreement, although they were all very curious about whether I could cook or not. It was one more way to cement myself as a guy worthy of being a Kegger. I collected a fiver from each of the other three and went on my way.

Wednesday, I woke up and went jogging around the eerily deserted campus. It was chilly to start; the snow season in upstate New York is considered to start by Thanksgiving, or sometimes even sooner. In later years Marilyn and I had occasionally taken the kids trick-or-treating in the snow! We had already had several inches of snow, but it wasn’t snowing just then. I was almost warm by the time I got back to the dorm. By lunchtime I was showered and shaved. I drove the Galaxie down to the Price Chopper mall on Hoosick and went into the Italian place for a couple of slices of pizza and a (now legal) beer. Then I went shopping. The fifteen I had collected from the three brothers, plus another five from me didn’t really cover the dinner, but I had sufficient funds to cover the difference. The house was very quiet when I rolled into the parking lot. Marty heard me coming in through the back door by the kitchen and helped me carry the load in and put it in the fridge. Afterwards he invited me into the living room, and we had a couple of beers while watching television.

Afterwards, Marty and Jack Jones and I drove to a diner in Albany for dinner. I remembered it from way back, Jack’s Diner, an Albany landmark since the dawn of time. Many a night we’d get stoned and get the munchies and drive over there at two in the morning and demolish an entire cheesecake. We ate and then I drove the guys back to the house and I went back to the dorm.