On December 1, 1969, the first draft lottery was held. #154 was assigned to my birth date, August 17. In 1970 they started drafting with #1. No one predicted that 154 was a safe number. As it turned out, the lowest safe number was 196. Bill Clinton got 311, and George W. Bush got 327.

I thoroughly enjoyed my first four years at the University of Michigan. I lived in the dorm all four years. It suited me perfectly. No worries about rent or food, clean linen, and a floating bridge game in the lobby, which was right next door to my room. As much as I appreciated this arrangement, by New Year’s Day of 1970 I was very tired of anything to do with actual classes.

Instead, in my last semester I planned to spend a LOT of time on debate. This was my last chance to qualify for the National Debate Tournament. This adventure is described in 1970 Part 2. Compared to debate and research for debate, sitting in the classroom and preparing for classes seemed excruciatingly boring.

To give myself more time for debate, I resigned as president of Allen Rumsey House (a dorm of just over 100 guys in West Quad) so that someone who was returning the next year could get some experience. I resumed editing (which meant writing, mimeographing, and distributing) Rumsey Rumors, the newsletter published occasionally for residents.

I had thoroughly researched the school’s catalog for the second semester to construct the easiest schedule that would allow me to graduate in May. I was only three credits short of the required total, and I had met all the requirements except for one, which I planned to fill with an introductory course in social anthropology. I don’t remember exactly why I selected this course, but it met my own main requirement (no papers). Moreover, a sophomore who was a friend of mine was also taking it, and he was a skilled note-taker.

I was pretty sure that ten of my credits would not count for graduation. The catalog said that one could only have forty credits in one’s major. I had fifty in math. So, I calculated that I needed thirteen non-math credits in the last semester. As a four-year debater, I was allowed to take a three-credit individual study in speech communication. That would require little or no work. So, I needed two more classes.

My first choice was a 400-level Russian literature in English. I had read a few Russian novels, and I really liked them. I was worried that papers might be required, but someone who had taken the class assured me that there were no papers.

For my last class I picked introductory linguistics. How hard could it be? I had taken twelve semesters of Latin and Greek in high school and nine semesters of Latin, Greek, and Russian at U-M. I also took a language theory class in the Communication Sciences department, but it was mostly computer-oriented.

At the first linguistics lecture the makeup of the class startled me. It was about 70 percent females, most of whom were packed tightly in the first few rows of the auditorium. Furthermore, most of the guys were in small groups spread around the rest of the room, and they all seemed pretty big. What really struck me was the prominence of their jawbones.

Almost everyone fell into these two categories. No one looked like me. I was probably the oldest and certainly the skinniest (perhaps 140 pounds) of all the male students.

When the lecturer appeared, I understood the female part. He was good-looking and very personable. He began his presentation by explaining how the class would work: students would be allowed to assign their own grades! There would be no tests, and the only homework would be a workbook that we would be required to fill out and submit. That explained all the athletes; I knew for certain that the athletes had a formidable underground network for locating “gut” classes. This one must have been close to the top of the list.

That was the last linguistics lecture that I attended. I could hardly believe how lucky I had been to find this class.

The lecturer at the first Russian lit class distributed the reading list, which consisted of at least six heavyweight tomes, none of which I had already read. I also learned that there would be both lectures and discussion groups led by graduate students. I never attended any of the latter.

I attended the lectures in the anthro and Russian classes for the first five or six weeks whenever I was in town. After that I took the midterm exams, but I never even picked up my results.

Meanwhile I had been attending debate tournaments, which took up a LOT of time. I also spent a lot of time in the library researching for debate. I also played bridge in the dorm, but I was not serious about it. A few of us played in the club game at the Union once or twice. I was quite serious about intramural basketball. I played on our team in the “B” division. I did not contribute much, but we did win the tournament. We also won in B volleyball. I was the captain of that team. Allen Rumsey House, the oldest and smallest of all the dorms, won the overall intramural dorm championship with the highest total score ever recorded.

At some point in February I quit going to classes altogether. I judged that I could pass my two real classes by cramming for the finals. This was undoubtedly hubris. I had no plan B.

1970 was, of course, a very tumultuous year at every college. Young people were fed up with a stupid war in Asia in which they were supposed to do the heavy lifting. At U-M this discontent was joined by a separate issue called the Black Action Movement, which challenged the university to come up with a solution to the extremely low percentage of black people enrolled at U-M. This movement was championed by my debate partner during the first semester of my junior year, Alexa Canady, who quit debate and focused her attention on pre-med studies and editorials for the Michigan Daily. BAM called for everyone to go on strike, which fit in perfectly with my plan.

I participated in one of the marches that BAM called for. I marched with them, mostly as a lark. I was accompanied by my outside agitator friend, Dave Bartlebaugh, better known as “The Ball”. He didn’t even go to U-M, and he didn’t care at all about the Black Action Movement, but he was a great agitator. He kept shouting “Free Huey! Free Bobby! Free all political prisoners!” He banged on trashcans as we passed them. I had trouble suppressing my giggles. I did join in the “Open it up or SHUT IT DOWN!” chants. It was a great time.

The Ball was a real character. During my junior year (1968-1969) he started hanging around in the lounge of Allen Rumsey House. He lived in an apartment off-campus, he already knew some of the guys in our dorm, and he liked the fact that some kind of nonsense was always going on. A the end of the 1970 spring semester he had successfully avoided the draft by failing the physical due to high blood pressure. I guess that he had somewhat high blood pressure anyway, but he augmented it during the week leading up to each physical exam through a regimen that included, among other things, a lot of coffee. According to this website he has been in the music business for the last five decades.

The BAM strike actually did some good. The university subsequently worked hard to help students from Detroit public schools to meet the school’s entrance requirements, which even for in-state students were pretty rigorous. When I returned to Ann Arbor in 1974 there were obviously more minority students.

A point system for admission to the college of Literature, Science and the Arts that aided minorities was also implemented. In 2003 it was declared unconstitutional by a 6-3 vote of the U.S. Supreme Court.

I spent the weeks before finals speed-reading difficult Russian novels and memorizing my friend’s notes. I liked most of the novels, but I had zero experience in how to prepare for a test in a college-level literature class. I had not taken even one class in the English department. I was supposed to take the Great Books class in my freshman year, but by the time that I got to Ann Arbor the class was closed. Because I had passed the Advanced Placement test in high school I was excused from the university’s English requirement.

The anthro test went about as expected. I thought that I did OK. The Russian lit class was another story. As I approached the room in which the test was held I was greatly concerned to see a large number of students handing in what appeared to be papers. I never did discover whether these were assigned in contravention of the information at the first class. They might have been extra-credit assignments from the leaders of recitation groups.

The test itself seemed to go pretty well. It required several short essays. I was able to write something reasonably sensible for each one. Keep in mind that my goal was just to pass, and at Michigan a D would suffice.

After the tests I started doing the exercises in my linguistics workbook. It took a couple of days. I went to my teacher’s office in the evening and slid it under his door the day before grades were due. I lacked the audacity to assign myself a grade.

As always, I did not pick up my exams. I could only guess how well I actually did. My grades were mailed to my parents’ house in Kansas City a few weeks later.

Exams were over by the end of April. I stayed in Ann Arbor for a few weeks. Bill Davey and his roommate let me stay in their apartment. I think that I slept on the floor.

I was busy with two things—the actuarial exams and the Junior College National Forensics Tournament, which U-M hosted in 1970. I took part 2 of the former and judged an astounding twenty-four rounds in the latter. I supplemented my income from judging with the proceeds from the sale of all my remaining textbooks to one of the bookstores. This is what I lived on.

I was in Ann Arbor for the graduation ceremony. Even thought the speaker was U Thant, Secretary General of the United Nations, I did not go. I was too afraid that they might not read my name.

I had passed part 1 (calculus) of the actuarial exams in my junior year. Part 2 covered probability and statistics. In both of these areas U-M offered courses tailored to the exams. I took both classes in the first semester and received a B in each. I also sat for the part 2 exam in November, but I did not pass, which surprised me a little. I had not studied much, and I was distracted by debate, but I was reasonably familiar with all the material. The grading for these exams was designed to penalize guessing, and I did my share.

In May I devoted not a single minute to studying for the exam. At some point it occurred to me that I should avoid guessing. My strategy was to work carefully on the probability questions and to answer only those statistics question that I was certain of. In the end I skipped 100 percent of the statistics questions. This meant that my best possible score was probably around 50 percent. For one of the few times in my life I was pretty certain that I had failed a test.

I had already decided that I would just go home and wait to get drafted. That’s what I did.