1967-1969 Part 3A: Events at Allen Rumsey House

The middle years in Allen Rumsey House. Continue reading

I remember reading somewhere that James Earl Jones lived in Allen Rumsey House when he was at U-M. I don’t know whether he enjoyed it, but it really suited me. I never considered moving out.

Mimeo

The House Council: I was asked to serve as secretary for the House Council fairly early in my freshman year. I let my creative juices flow when I composed my minutes for the weekly council meetings, which were held on Wednesday evenings (I think). I mimeograaphed fifty copies and put one under everyone’s door on Thursdays. Quite a few guys told me that they enjoyed reading the minutes.

Elections of officers at AR were held in the spring. Only guys who planned to return to the house in September were allowed to vote. Since I anticipated that debating at the varsity level in my sophomore year would take up a lot of my time, I decided not to run for secretary or any major office at the end of freshman year (1967).

However, I did volunteer for the position of editor of the house newsletter, Rumsey Roomers, which was published intermittently using the same mimeograph machine as the minutes. It had not been uncommon for years to go by between publications. I published at least three issues during sophomore year. I didn’t really “edit” the newsletter; I wrote every word, including both the questions and answers of the interview section, which was modeled after the Playboy interviews. I interviewed God in the last issue that year.

At the end of my sophomore year I decided that I had enough control over classes and debate that I could run for president, a role that I referred to as the Big Banana, or EBM (El Banano Magno, the Spanishish version). I ran against Ken Gluski, who resided on the fourth floor.

We actually held a “debate”. That is, I gave a little speech in the lounge, and then Ken did the same. I introduced a number of ideas that were pretty good, but, I must admit, most were not within the purview of the president. Ken’s remarks were vague.

De gustibus non disputandum est.
De gustibus non disputandum est.

I campaigned pretty hard. My slogan was “Bananas and noodles don’t mix.” Someone told me that gluski was the Polish word for noodles. I just checked on translate.google.com. The real Polish word is kluski. Close enough for rock and roll.

I mimeographed a one-page letter about the election and slipped copies under doors. John Dalby, the fourth-floor RA, complained that this was unfair. There was no rule against it, but Ken did not have a mimeograph machine in his office. I replied that Ken could use the mimeograph machine. I even volunteered to type up whatever he wrote. This mollified John, but Ken never responded to my offer.

Where are the other three girls?
Where are the other three girls?

I won the election, but not by as many votes as I had projected. I do not remember who the vice-president or secretary were. During junior year I worked a lot with the treasurer, Keith Hartwell, the social chairman, Roger Warren, and the athletic chairman, Mike Murphy.

Roger immediately went to work lining up a “sister house” for the next year. Traditionally the two houses together sponsor a few parties. He somehow persuaded the largest girl’s dorm, Stockwell House, which boasted over four hundred residents, to match up with us. This was better than “Surf City”.

It is now called Stockwell Hall, and it is co-ed.
It is now called Stockwell Hall, and it is co-ed.

In the fall of 1968 Roger scheduled a mixer with Stockwell. I didn’t go, but it was evidently a fiasco. Girls showed up and then quickly left. Fortunately, Roger had another function scheduled with them a day or two later—a beach party at a nearby lake. Very early the morning after the mixer I printed up flyers and taped them above the urinals in each bathroom. They said something like “Pissed? So am I! But come to the beach party. Nobody will be able to walk away early.”

The beach party was a big success. Even I attended, and I played a rubber or two of bridge with Celia Phelan, the president of Stockwell House.

The university was pressed that year to loosen its restrictions on visits by students of the opposite sex (there were only two in those days) in the dorms. A U-M administrator issued a notice that each house could design its own rules, but a process had to be established through which complaints by residents were processed. I worked on amendments to the house’s bylaws to put in place a rigorous process for handling complaints about our regulations. It was unanimously passed by the council. I then wrote a letter to the university administrator explaining our approach. The response came back rather quickly. Our application was approved by the administration, the first one that had ever been accepted even though we had implemented absolutely no restrictions on the presence of women in the house. I was astounded and very pleased. In those days I considered myself an anarchist.

At the same time the council made a few changes to the bylaws. One allowed people to run for the same office more than once. This was not my idea, but I took advantage of it.

We didn't ask for these.
We didn’t ask for these.

For years AR had subscribed to Playboy magazine. The president retrieved the magazine from the house’s mail box and placed it in the lounge. One day the corporation sent “Allen Rumsey House” an invitation to join the Playboy Club in Detroit. We had to certify that we were at least 21 years of age. I wrote back that Allen Rumsey House was much older than 21, but few of the residents were. I asked for an honorary membership. They turned us down. I mean, come on. I was only asking for a lousy piece of paper.

In the spring semester a fair amount of money remained in the AR bank account. Someone (I don’t remember who) proposed that the House Council donate part of it to charity. He did a good job of describing the good works that the charity did. I voted to give it some money, but the motion was voted down.

Thinking that we must do something with our surplus, I met with Keith to determine as precisely as possible how much of the money would be available. I also asked Dave Zuk how much would be required to buy a good color television for the game room. We found a way to pay for the TV over three years, and that left us with about $500. I then proposed to the council that we buy the TV and pay a refund to all residents of $5 of their $20 dues. It passed unanimously.

This was a very popular move. People could not believe it when I handed them a $5 bill. Nobody ran against me in the presidential election in the spring of 1969.

The main issues in my senior year had to do with attempts by the university to turn the AR House Council officers into an unfunded police department. Some guys on one of the upper floors had done some mischief that led to damaged property. They may have thrown a water balloon that broke a window. The university sent a bill to West Quad. The West Quad Council wanted to send the bill to AR. I vigorously argued against this, which surprised everyone at the council meeting. If they had decided to do it, I would have ordered all of the money withdrawn from the bank and paid our bills in cash for the rest of the year.

By the way the new always-open visitation policy worked fine, as well as I could tell. Life was different, but the earth stayed in orbit. It turned out that surprisingly few members of the fair sex were all that eager to set foo in U-M’s oldest dorm. It probably did not help that the only ladies’ room in AR was in the lounge, which was nearly always occupied by nerds, a few of whom were capable of rude remarks.

Not for me.
Not for me.

I resigned as president early in the second semester of my senior year so that someone else could get some experience in the job. I do not recall who succeeded me.

The staff presented an award at the end of each year. It was named after a former resident who had donated the funds for a monetary award, which, as I recall, was $50 or $100. Roger won the award my junior year. They gave it to me in my senior year. Because I was a senior, I got no cash, but I did get to hear Jim (Gritty) Krogsrud refer to me as Mr. Allen Rumsey. That was nice.

Intramural sports: In my day the university conducted two sets of year-long intramural contests, one for the fraternity houses and one for the dorms. In the major sports they ran two leagues, A and B. The better players usually—but not always—played in A.

They may have also had competitions for women1 that I was unaware of, presumably pat-a-cake and hopscotch.

AR had never won the overall championship of the dormitory division before 1969-1970. The house’s athletic chairman that year was Mike Murphy. He was good at practically every imaginable sport, and he both played and encouraged others to play for the house. We ended up winning the overall title with the highest point total ever recorded.

I don’t think that the house’s A volleyball team lost a match in the four years that I resided there. We had a lot of good players who were 6’2″ or taller, and they started practicing together every September. In my senior year I was captain of the B volleyball team. We got to the finals, but we lost to Chicago House, a WQ rival, in a very close match. However, we were awarded the championship because the opponents used an ineligible player. Mike Murphy, who played on our A team, watched our match, recognized the ringer, and filed a successful appeal.

I actually dunked a basketball here. Scout's honor.
I actually dunked a basketball here. Scouts honor.

I was also a member of the team that won the B basketball championship, but I contributed little. I don’t think that we won the A championship, but we came close.

On one glorious day at the IM Building I dunked a basketball in warmups on a regulation 10′ basket. A number of people witnessed it. I had dunked volleyballs a few times, but this was the only time I managed to perform a real dunk.

I played significant roles in three team sports. A new event, slow-pitch softball, was held very early in the school year. We did not even understand that it was an official event until we reached the finals of the tournament. I had been pitching every game. I was not a great pitcher, if there is such a thing, but I could consistently throw strikes. Unfortunately, in the final game I lost that ability in the fourth or fifth inning. John Dalby replaced me, and we ended up losing the game.

My contribution to the B (touch) football team’s success was also substantial. As had happened when I played in the eighth grade (documented here), opponents almost never covered me. I remember that on one occasion I had been so open in the end zone so often that when Jim Burton finally threw it to me, I felt like making a fair catch.

Pick

My real specialty, however, was the pick play. The diagram at right is fundamentally flawed. There is a very good chance that the blocker, if he stands and waits for the defender as it indicates, will often be flagged by the ref. This is clearly illegal.

The intended receiver should NOT slant across the middle; instead, he should take one or two steps downfield and then cut sharply across the middle. Meanwhile, the blocker should make a shoulder fake toward the sideline, and then cut toward the middle (actually toward the other defender) and quickly look back toward the quarterback and wave for the ball. Then, when he collides with the defender, it will not look like he intended to block him.

I was expert at both techniques. As a blocker, I never missed the block, and I never was flagged for picking. As a receiver, the ball was once a thrown a foot or so behind me. I reached back and batted the ball up. I then abruptly turned up field, snatched the ball, and ran for a touchdown. I swear that this actually happened.

The pick plays nearly always worked. I remember that on one occasion, however, we could not even try it. We were scheduled to play on wet artificial turf. The footing was worse than on glare ice. Every time that anyone tried to plant his foot, he ended up on his butt.

I remember our final game pretty well. I think that we played Adams House. I scored a touchdown early while the opponents were not covering me yet. We scored a couple more, and so did they. I think that we were ahead by four or five points in the closing seconds. The opponents had the ball; I was standing on the sidelines. One of their players broke free and scored a touchdown. They then lined up for the extra point and tried to run it in. Our defense stopped them, but so what?

I was surprised to see the guys on our team, exhausted as they were, celebrating in the end zone and on the sidelines. It turned out that the opposing team had NOT scored a touchdown. One of our guys had tagged the runner just short of the goal line. The defensive stop on the last play actually had secured the championship for us. I felt foolish for a second, and then I was more excited than anyone, especially for the guys who made that heroic defensive stand.

Yowsah! I had a slight crush on Jane Fonda.
Yowsah! I had a slight crush on Jane Fonda.

These team sports did not win the overall title for us. Mike Murphy tirelessly organized participation in every event in every sport. We won few events in either of the two track meets, but we came close to winning the overalls both indoors and out. We had participants in every weight category in wrestling. The only one we won was when two of our wrestlers met in the heavyweight final.

Towards the end of the year Mike reported that the university was interested in ideas for new IM sports. I suggested soccer and marathon dancing. I had just seen They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?.

U-M’s current IM web page is here. It appears to me that they no longer have a league for the residence halls. I wonder if any house ever broke our record for total points. It still stood in the late seventies.

Road Trip: In the sixties the drinking age in Michigan was 21. Most residents of AR were younger. In Ohio, however, one only had to be 18 to purchase 3.2 percent beer. In my freshman or sophomore year the House Council organized a bus trip to Toledo, which is only 54 miles south on US 23, on a Friday or Saturday evening. I was not interested in the beer, but I decided to go when I heard that the last stop would be at the Town Hall, a burlesque house. John “Raz” LaPrelle and Ken Nelson for sure attended. I don’t remember who else was among the twenty or thirty guys on the bus.

I went into one or two bars, mainly to listen to the music. I remember that one band had several horn players, which allowed them to play a few songs that I did not expect to hear.

Ineda

I remember walking on the streets with guys who were bigger than I was and thinking “Gee, I bet we look really tough to people.”

Burlesque

In the end, however, I got bored and went to the Town Hall by myself while the other guys were still cruising bars. When I got there an X-rated film was being shown. All I remember is that the heroine was a natural redhead. Then a few live “dancers” did their stuff. Let’s just say that their best years were behind them. The star of the show, Ineda Mann, was much better.

It was a good experience, but it was never repeated. The Town Hall was razed in 1968. Even if the trip had been repeated, I would not have gone. Once was enough.

Presentations: A few times people from the outside offered to make a presentation to the residents. I have vivid recollections of two of them. The first occurred on a September evening just before the first football game. One of the assistant coaches came to the house with some game films from the previous year. He showed the films in the game room, and he supplied the play-by-play commentary. It was just the right combination of humor and insider information. It really got everyone psyched up about the upcoming season.

King

I did not enjoy the second one, which occurred a year or two later, at all. In fact, I got quite angry at the presenters, and I let them have it with both barrels. The two of them represented the John Birch Society. They made many outrageous claims. The one that really set me off was the accusation that Martin Luther King supported Communism. Their evidence was a photograph of him shaking hands with Fidel Castro. This was stupidest reasoning that I had ever heard, and I heard (and made) a lot of dumb arguments in my four years of debate.

JP II

I tried to locate on the Internet the photograph of MLK with Castro. There are a lot of photographs of Fidel with international figures and a lot of King with international figures, but I could not locate even one with the two of them together. I did find photographs of the Cuban leader with at three different popes. Nobody has ever been more strongly anti-Communist than Pope John Paul II, the man who was more responsible for the dissolution of the Soviet Bloc than anyone.

The guys were shocked at my reaction to this demagoguery. None of them had ever seen me angry. It only happens about once every ten years or so.

Not that kind of shower party.
Not that kind of shower party.

Other Pastimes: Perhaps the most emblematic of all of the events at AR was the shower party. The concept is simple. One member would suggest that another guy had done something so outrageous (not necessarily bad) that he deserved to be thrown into the nearest shower fully clothed. A voice vote would be taken, and democracy prevailed.

I was part of a few shower parties. Once a set of guys tried to throw me in the shower, and they finally gave up. It was not that I was strong—far from it. I simply pumped my knees. Some guys grabbed my arms and torso, but they never got me horizontal, and my very bony knees did some damage to a few faces.

I was a member of many shower party crews, mostly because my roommate, John Cruickshank, was the most frequent recipient. He was addicted to terrible puns. I guarantee that I never gave up on getting a guy in the shower. My specialty was ankles.

Once I had their ankles together, I would not let go. It was only a matter of time.
Once I had their ankles together, I would not let go. It was only a matter of time.

One day one of the guys sitting in the game room in the basement announced that no one could throw him in the challenge. Handing my glasses to someone, I replied that three of us could do it. I pointed to Ken Nelson and John “Raz” LaPrelle, who took up the challenge. I dove at his feet and pinned both of his ankles together. I held on for dear life. Ken and Raz got grips on his torso. It took a long time, maybe thirty minutes, but we got him out the game room door, up the stairs to the first floor, all the way down the hallway to the bathroom, through two doorways to the shower that someone else had turned on. We shoved him in.

The wet person was Peter Petty, who was 6’10” tall and weighed 350 pound. This was one of the four or five greatest accomplishments of my life.

In my era AR was famous for its water balloons. A few guys threw balloons out on the courtyard side, but the best hurling was towards the sidewalks on East Madison and South Quad. The primary advantage was the target-rich environment. Also, there were no doors on that side of our building, and it was not a bit obvious how to gain access to the house from the south side.

Blue_Front

The two most distinguished practitioners of this art were Frank Bell and Ken Nelson. Their styles could not have been more different. Frank dealt in volume, careful targeting, and deadly accuracy. He bought balloons by the gross at the Blue Front2 party store on the corner of Packard and State Streets.

WB

Frank’s favorite launching site was the first floor bathroom. He told me that his favorite target was a group of two or three females walking on the sidewalk who were engaged in conversation. His objective was to provoke the target into verbal outrage that did not spill over into a confrontation. He did not have a major-league arm, but he (with an unbelievable amount of practice) was able to loft the balloon considerably and make it land with uncanny accuracy at the targets feet. Immediately after launching he shut the window and listened for his payoff in screams and screeches. Facing a bank of 120 windows, no one caught unawares could possibly suspect that the source was at street level.

Targets

Ken was the guy whose arm was so strong that he beat out a major league pitcher (Jim Burton) for quarterback of the house’s A football team. His style was entirely different from Frank’s. He did not buy balloons in bulk as Frank did, but if he felt like flinging a few, someone would gladly supply the balloons just to be part of the event. He threw from the third or fourth floor. His heaves, which splattered in front of the door to South Quad were so epic that no one could possibly have guessed that they came from Allen Rumsey House. Unless they saw the balloon in flight—which almost never happened—the victims always looked up at the windows overhanging them in South Quad.

I never threw anything, but I considered the water balloons fun and, as the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy says, “mostly harmless”. No one suffered anything worse than wet shoes and stockings. However, a couple of freshmen who lived on the third floor when I was a senior indulged in something that was a lot more dangerous.

Wirst_Rocket

They had a Wrist-Rocket, which is a slingshot that is affixed to the wrist in order to improve accuracy even when the elastic part is pulled back past one’s ear. These two guys occasionally used it to shoot beebees in the direction of South Quad.

One evening two guys from South Quad had their window open and were being unduly boisterous. One of the guys with the slingshot fired at their window. The beebee went through the window of the South Quad residents and reportedly broke a lamp in their room.

Killian

The two SQ guys were not run-of-the-mill students. They were two of the most famous people on campus, and both were big and powerful. Tim Killian was a lineman on the football team who was more famous for kicking field goals.3 His roomy, Dan Dierdorf, was the best offensive lineman in the country. He became a five-time all-pro for the St. Louis Cardinals. He stood 6’3″ and weighed 285 pounds. If you asked everyone on campus to name one person whom they would never want to anger, nearly everyone would select Dan Dierdorf. I know I would have, even before I saw him at close range.

The shot from the Wrist-Rocket set Dierdorf off. He charged across East Madison and stormed through the door to AR. The first thing that he saw was the lounge, where I and a bunch of other nerds were seated. I was probably playing bridge. We all recognized him immediately.

Dierdorf

“Who here has a gun?” he demanded

I told him that no one in this house had a gun. This was true, but I was pretty sure of what might make a person think that someone did. He responded, “Someone shot a lamp out in my room, and they are going to pay for it.”

Someone else said, “There are no guns here.”

Dierdorf picked up a broom that was leaning against a corner. He nonchalantly snapped the broom’s handle in two in his hands. He had no need for a fulcrum. Our eyes got wider, and our hearts beat faster in anticipation of “flight or fight” mode. Believe me; no one was considering “fight”.

To our great relief he marched resolutely up the stairs with the broomstick piece in his hand. His bellowing continued, but he never actually did anything. Although the guys with the slingshot would not have won a popularity contest in AR, no one ratted them out. As usual in a group of guys, omertà prevailed, and there were no further incidents with the Wrist-Rocket.

Arnold

There were lots of other diversions in the dorm: sockey (played in the corridor with a rolled up pair of socks), cans (also in the corridor with a frisbee and four coke canstwo stacked at each end), epic water wars between two floors that created waterfalls on the staircases, and Arnold Palmer’s Indoor golf Game in the lounge. The course was called Sunny Beach.

The golf game was really enjoyable until a guy whose name I don’t remember (and who was not even on any of the university’s athletic teams) decided to play with us one day. You could make the little Arnold figure swing by pulling on a circular ring located on the handle of a golf club that was attached to Arnold’s back. This guy had so much power in his trigger finger that he actually drove the green on a par five! Other guys could come close on a par four, but the par five hole was the entire length of the lounge. Reaching the green in two required two monstrous strokes for everyone else.

Diplomacy

Someone brought the Diplomacy board game into the house. We spent a few days digesting the rules. Finally, we got together the requisite seven guys and set aside a weekend day to play.

There are no dice or anything else designed to bring randomness into the game. This game is all about making deals. The rules set a time limit on the bargaining sessions, but they are totally unrealistic. We agreed to ignore the time limits. After several hours someone violated a bargain that he made with another player and stabbed him in the back. The second or third time that it happened, the victim got extremely angry and quit.

We tried playing one more time, and essentially the same thing happened. We never managed to finish a game. I was fascinated with the game, and I bought it for myself. I was never able to gind seven people willing to commit a day to playing it. It survived several moves and has been sitting in the basement of our house for decades.

Of course, we also played cards. We played rubber bridge whenever we could find four willing players. Some games would go on for hours with players finding substitutes when they need to go somewhere. Usually the games were in the lounge, but occasionally we would play in my “suite”, which was right next door.

Dylan_Albums

I have a pretty clear recollection of one monumental session in Room 109 that went on from about ten in the morning until well after supper. We only broke for meals. The stereo was playing one Bob Dylan record after another. When the stack was done, the dummy would flip it over.

Yarborough

My recollection is that throughout that entire session I only had one opening hand. I have subsequently played enough bridge to deduce that this claim is probably apocryphal, but I am quite sure that at some point I opened the window, stuck my head through it, and screamed to the heavens that I was sick of never getting any cards.

A few of us also played at least once in the sanctioned duplicate pairs game at the Michigan Union. By then we were playing Howard Schenken’s Big Club. We did pretty well, but we did not finish first.

KJBB

Grub: For burgers there was only one choice, Krazy Jim’s Blimpy Burger with Krazy Ray on the grill and Krazy Jim taking orders. It was very close; we took a shortcut through a fence. It closed in 2013. A store with a very similar name opened downtown the next year.

Omega pizza, which was on the northeast side of central campus, had the best pizza when I was an undergraduate. It was a long walk, but we felt that it was worth it. If the weather was bad, which happened often, we ordered delivery from somewhere. There are references to Omega Pizza on the Internet, but I think that they have moved or gone out of business.

In the sixties there was a small shop on State Street that made outstanding hot submarine sandwiches. It was gone by the time that I returned in 1974.

NW

Miscellaneous: I was naughty at least once. Newsweek magazine somehow got addresses for everyone in the dorms at U-M. They sent postcards offering discounted subscriptions. To get one, all you had to do was put a checkmark in a and mail the postcard back to them. There might have been a place for a signature.

The postcards must have arrived at West Quad in one big stack with a rubber band around it. Instead of distributing them to the individual boxes of the addressees, the mail person just put them out on a table with a sheet of paper telling people to take them if interested.

One evening when no one was around I picked up the stack of cards and dropped them in a mailbox. I then did the same with the ones at East Quad and South Quad.

Newsweek evidently did not check to see if the boxes were checked, and no one there was surprised that so many were returned at once from one location. Everybody in the dorms got a few free issues of the magazine and then an unwanted bill. A few people were upset for a little while, but it soon blew over. Nobody knew that I did this until decades later.

Franke

I went to mass every Sunday at St. Mary’s, the parish associated with the Newman Center. I liked the music that they sang, especially the pieces written and led by Bob Franke. Eventually he moved over to the Episcopal church.

Jack

I attended at least two performances at The Ark, a “coffee house” associated with the Episcopal Church. One was to hear Franke. The other was when Ramblin’ Jack Elliott came to town. His concert was fantastic. He sang “Me and Bobby McGee” twice because he was dissatisfied with his first rendition. This was before Janis Joplin released her version. I bought one of Jack’s albums, but I was disappointed with it. He was much better in person.

Both Bob and Jack are still alive in 2020, and they both still perform regularly.

One of the local bands really impressed me. They changed their name from The Long Island Sound to Fox and then to something else. I loved their song “I Want to be a Cowboy.” Dave Nemerovski, a resident of AR, was related to one of the members.

Willie

I did not watch a lot of television. One show that filled the TV room every week was Mission Impossible. A group of us would count the words uttered by Willie Armitage, the strong man. I think that the record was thirteen. I liked Mr. Riggs better than Mr. Phelps.

Bill_K

Bill Kennedy at the Movies was on every day. I would pop down if Bill was showing a Bogey movie or one with Gary Cooper, the Marx Brothers, or W.C. Fields. One day I was astounded to watch The Story of Mankind, the strangest movie (with the most amazing cast) ever made. On another occasion I watched The Pad and How to Use It4, a bittersweet movie that sparked my interest in opera.

Walter

Several of us were big fans of Walter Brennan, who won three of the first five Oscars for Best Supporting Actor. He had a fairly popular Western called The Guns of Will Sonnett. Walter and his grandson rode around looking for the kid’s father, a famous gunfighter named Jim Sonnett. When people asked how fast he was, Walter would say, “He’s fast, but the boy here is faster, and I’m faster than the both of them. No brag, just fact.”

I wrote to Walter Brennan to wish him luck in finding his son and to ask for an autographed picture. He sent it, and I put it in the AR trophy case. It was still there in the middle seventies.

Saturday morning was often devoted to watching cartoons. I know that we watched “George of the Jungle” and “Rocky and Bullwinkle” in reruns.

One of our favorite shows was a live-action kids show called “The Banana Splits Adventure Hour”. It featured four performers in bizarre animal costumes. Bingo was a gorilla, Fleegle a dog, Drooper a lion, and Snorky an elephant. They were also a rock-and-roll band that spent a lot of time in amusement parks.

From left: Drooper, Bingo, Fleegle, and Snorky.

Each Split had a very distinct personality. All of them could talk except Snorky, who only honked. My favorite was Drooper, who was played by Anne W. Withrow. Drooper had a long tail, which apparently got in the way sometimes. When she wasn’t pretending to play the bass guitar, Anne usually carried the tail in her left hand. All the rest of the performers were guys. Of course, the costumes meant that you could not tell.

Occasionally they would do some jokes that were very unusual for a kid’s show. I remember that once they asked how to get a miniature poodle to pull a dog sled faster. The answer was “Get a bigger whip.”

We all sang along to the Banana Splits song. I still can recite the lyrics, which you can read here. The third verse (“Two banana, four banana, …”) was not sung on the show. It was added for the non-hit single.

The late sixties was not a good era for cinema. There were no multiplexes within walking distance, but two very large theaters bordered the campus. A few smaller theaters showed foreign films. I saw three movies that I really liked: Antonioni’s Blow-Up, Midnight Cowboy, and (my favorite) Z. At the end of Z everyone in the theater loudly applauded. I had never heard a single person applaud at the end of any other flick that I had seen. You know that they can’t hear you, right?

Fred is now more famous as Too Slim, the bass player for Riders in the Sky.
Fred is now more famous as Too Slim, the bass player for Riders in the Sky.

Fred LaBour was one year behind me at U-M. He worked at the Michigan Daily. On October 14, 1969. the Daily, which was (and presumably still is) read by nearly all students, published an article written by Fred and John Gray that confirmed the conspiracy theory that Paul McCartney was dead. Their evidence was mostly in songs recorded by the Beatles, but it could only be heard if you played them backwards. Many students did, including some in AR. Adding to the mindless speculation was a lot of fun, but nobody whom I knew took it seriously.

LMC did not debate; I never heard of it. Now it has two additional campuses.
LMC did not debate; I never heard of it. Now it has two additional campuses.

The Daily also published a gigantic crossword puzzle, and offered a prize to the best solution submitted. AR’s team, which included me, finished second or third. I think that we missed the three-letter word for a college in Benton Harbor. We got to go to a party full of journalism nerds. It was the only party that I attended other than the AR-Stockwell beach party in my four undergraduate years. That is also where I drank the only beer that I consumed as an undergraduate.

Some alcohol was consumed in AR and, especially in the last year or so, some marijuana. I never smoked any, but occasionally you could smell it in the hallway. However, it was in no way comparable to what was around me every day when I was in the army in Albuquerque. I wrote about those amazing days here.


1. Women were not allowed to be cheerleaders (!) or band members when I came to Michigan in 1966. The cheerleaders were male gymnasts and members of the trampoline team. In my four undergraduate years I never heard any mention of sports for women. Title IX was not passed until 1972. There may well have been no varsity sports for women when I was at U-M. Prior to 1956 women could only enter the Michigan Union, where President Kennedy gave a speech in1960, if they were escorted by a man. Even so, they had to use the side door. The Billiards Room in the Union was closed to women until 1968. People at the time considered U-M a very liberal university.

2. Inside and out, it seemed like a relic in 1966, but it did not go out of business until fifty-three years later. They even sold magazines for nudist colonists! New owners reopened it as a craft beer and wine store a few months later in 2019.

3. Tim Killian’s most valuable contribution to the university might have been the fact that he removed more than half of the entries in the U-M football record book. On October 26, 1968, I watched him kick three field goals in the 33-20 victory over Minnesota in Michigan Stadium. This broke the previous record of one, shared by everyone who had ever kicked a field goal in Michigan’s storied football history.

4. The Pad appears to have disappeared. You can’t buy a copy in any format, and it is never on television. I would really like to see it again.

1967-1969 Part 2: U-M Debate

Debate in the middle years. Continue reading

A primer explaining the format and other details of intercollegiate debate can be found here.

Fall 1967: When I returned to school after the summer of 1967, I discovered some very important changes in the debate program at U-M. Dr. Colburn was still the Director of Forensics, and Jeff Sampson was still coaching. Juddi (pronounced “Judy”) Tappan, a high school coach from Belleville, had been added to the staff. My recollection is that in her last year at Belleville two girls from her team had won the state championship.

Juddi

Juddi’s assignment at U-M that year was to coach the novices. She had a very good crop. I think that both of those girls from Belleville came to U-M. One might have participated in debate for a short while, but by the time that the tournament season started, neither was involved. The four principal players were Bill Davey, an exceptionally smart guy1 from Albion, MI, Ann Stueve from Kentucky, Jim Fellows, whom I never got to know very well, and Alexa Canady from Lansing. All four of them were almost certainly better debaters than I was when I first set foot in the Frieze Building a year earlier. They all definitely had more experience than I did.

I think that there was one other coach, but he spent little time with any debaters and none with me.

Expo67

For me the debate season began bizarrely. Jeff Sampson escorted me and either Bob Hirshon or Lee Hess to Expo ’67 in Montreal to debate against two guys from Duquesne University in Pittsburgh about abortion. The whole debate only lasted for a little over thirty minutes and was attended by the coach/escorts of both teams and three ladies who had years earlier passed the age for which family planning is much of an issue. The guys from Duquesne had done quite a bit of research and presented a lot of serious arguments. We mostly told jokes.

Surely this was an appropriate metaphor for the age: four young guys debating about the circumstances in which women should be allowed to have abortions. Moreover, two of us were not even taking it seriously.

I don’t remember that we took an airplane to Montreal, but neither do I recall a long car trip with a border crossing. I retain a rather vivid memory of a rude cab driver who pretended that he did not understand English. If we had a car, why would we take a cab? Maybe parking was an issue.

This trip was undeniably a waste of time and money; perhaps some other organization paid for it. The plus side was that we did have time to wander around the Expo for a day or so. My strongest memory of the fair itself is eating a reindeer sandwich at one of the Scandinavian pavilions. It tasted a little funny, but it was not awful.

Magika

I also remember that we attended a performance of Laterna Magika, a multi-media theater troop from Prague, which at the time was on the other side of the Iron Curtain. Jeff chided me for trying to figure out what message was being conveyed.

Years later my wife Sue told me that she was also in Montreal during that period, had heard about the debate in which we participated, and almost went to it. This was five years before I even met her. So, this was almost a great story.

I considered the national debate resolution for that year, “that the federal government should guarantee a minimum annual cash income to all citizens”, uninspired. I cannot remember much about the individual arguments. Of course, debaters argued whether the states were “closer to the people” or whether in-kind payments were better than cash, but I cannot imagine that there would be enough meat there for a year’s worth of debates.

I think that I had three partners during the year:

Right_Guard
  • I remember debating with Larry Rogers, a junior, at the tournament at the University of Illinois Chicago Circle (UICC). I remember that he performed brilliantly in one debate, but overall we did not do well together, and I did not enjoy the experience at all. I also remember that one morning he took what he called “a Polish shower” with Right Guard before he dressed for the debates that day. By the way, all the male debaters wore suits Larry quit the team before the end of the year.
  • I am sure that I debated in at least one tournament with Lee Hess, another junior, who was my partner during the whirlwind spring 1967 season. I have a vague recollection that we debated together at Ohio State, but details have escaped from my memory. Lee had a motorcycle. I think that he might have had an accident with it that semester.
  • My third partner was Gary Black, a senior. I think that we did well together at one tournament, but I don’t remember the details. The main thing that sticks out in my mind is that I did “outsides” on the affirmative, which meant that I delivered the first affirmative constructive and the second affirmative rebuttal. Usually, this is only done when one debater is much better than the other, but my speaker ratings were generally equal to or better than Gary’s. He designed the affirmative case; I could not have defended it with much enthusiasm.

I might have debated with Bob Hirshon at one unmemorable tournament.

Spring 1988: Just before finals for the fall semester Jeff took me, Lee, and Gary aside, and had us write down on a sheet of paper the name of the other member of the trio that we would prefer to debate with. They both chose me. Although I chose Lee, Jeff decided to pair me with Gary for the important tournaments in the second semester (January-March 1968).

Here is what I remember of that time.

  • Both Lee and Bob quit debating before the semester began.
  • Gary and I had a practice debate against Bill and Ann in which we performed badly. Juddi remarked that it was a classic case of the novices showing up the varsity. I was too arrogant to get upset by this.
  • Gary and I made the elimination rounds at a few tournaments, but we did not have any exceptionally good performances.
  • We went 2-6 at Northwestern, which was an improvement over what I had done as a freshman.
  • Gary and I flew unaccompanied to a tournament at Loyola of Baltimore. The field was weak. I think that we qualified for the elim rounds, but then we lost. I lost my overcoat on this trip. Another passenger evidently took mine from the overhead rack by mistake when the plane stopped in Pittsburgh.
Keep_It_Down
  • Throughout the year ballots from several judges remarked that I should tone it down. I would start out at a reasonable volume, but after a while I got excited and started shouting. I worked on this.
  • Jeff did not work with Gary and me as much as he had helped Lee and me the previous year.
  • At the District 5 qualifying tournament for the NDT Gary and I were 4-4 with twelve ballots out of twenty-four, exactly average and exactly the same as Lee and I did the previous year.
  • Both freshman teams did quite well throughout the year. I don’t remember the details.
I think that this is a recent picture of Gary Black.
I think that this is a recent picture of Gary Black.

Jim Fellows decided that he did not want to debate any more.

  • My roommate in Allen Rumsey House, Charlie Delos, remarked that if he looked like Gary, he would kill himself.

  • Riot

    The summer of 1968 was definitely unique. Assassinations led to destructive and bloody riots. The suburbs of KC, where I was, were not affected, but Detroit, one of the centers of the protest, is less than an hour from Ann Arbor. The police also rioted outside of the Democratic Party’s national convention in Chicago. Then Nixon disclosed the existence of his secret plan to end the War in Vietnam.

    I had my first real job in the actuarial department of the insurance company that my dad worked for. My summer adventures are described here.

    Fall 1968: Jeff Sampson moved on. Juddi made all the decisions about partnerships. She also did whatever coaching was done.

    The team had one very talented freshman, Mike Hartmann. He had a pretty good partner, Dean Mellor.

    After the election the "executive" was this guy.
    After the election the “executive” was this guy.

    The resolution was “that executive control of United States foreign policy should be significantly curtailed.”

    I was paired with Alexa. We ran a case that banned deployment of troops to fight without a congressional declaration of war. I was first negative and second affirmative. Bill and Ann were the other varsity team.

    Here is what I remember of the first semester.

    • I enjoyed debating with Alexa. I had never had a female partner before. She was a talented debater and a good partner, but the thing that really impressed me was that she carried her own evidence boxes.
    • A small percentage of varsity debaters were female. Black debaters were very rare. Alexa was the only Black female debater whom I ever saw at a varsity tournament in my four years as an undergraduate debater. This could not have been easy for her.
    Feed
    • In one round we faced a good team that presented a a plan to use American food to feed starving people around the world. I had heard of this and done a little research, but I had never discussed it with Alexa. I decided to argue topicality and to present a counterplan that included all aspects of the affirmative plan, but no reduction in executive control. Alexa did not know what to argue in the second negative, but she soldiered on and did not complain, even when we ended up losing the round.
    • Our best tournament was Ohio State. We made it to the semifinals, which qualified us for the Tournament of Champions. We might have been the first U-M team ever to accomplish this.
    • For some reason Juddi drove us to Oshkosh, WI, to a second-rate six-round tournament at the state university there. In the first round we debated a really obnoxious team from Ripon College on our affirmative. The second round was allegedly power-matched, but we were scheduled to meet the same team on the same side! I immediately complained to the staff. I was told that we should just switch sides. I really did not want to debate that team again, but we had no choice. The teams that we faced after that were a little better, but I was depressed after the last round. Then they announced the results. I was astounded when they announced that Alexa was the second-place speaker. I never had lower points than she did, and, sure enough, I won the award for top speaker, which, as I recall was a hearty handclasp. Alexa and I had won all six debates and qualified for the quarterfinals, where we were quickly eliminated on a 2-1 decision that no one in the audience could believe.
    • Juddi smoked. She expected one of the males to light her cigarettes for her.
    • We stopped for gas once when Juddi was driving her own car. She purchased $.50 worth of regular.
    • Juddi wore a LOT of makeup. Alexa, who roomed with her on trips, said that it was frightening to see her when she first got out of bed. One of the other grad students said that Juddi always looked like a million dollars, but you had to suspect that at least half of it was counterfeit.
    • Before final exams both Ann and Alexa quit the team. So, Bill and I were the only varsity debaters left.
    We could not take the shortcut through Ontario because of the stop in Oberlin.
    We could not take the shortcut through Ontario because of the stop in Oberlin.

    Spring 1969: The first tournaments that Bill and I attended together were at Harvard and Dartmouth in January. Juddi made the arrangements. We drove to Oberlin College in Ohio to pick up their team, Roger Conner2 and Mark Arnold, and their coach, Dan Rohrer. We then proceeded to Buffalo to pick up a team from Canisius College. I never heard of teams car-pooling to debate tournaments, and this was uncomfortable, at least for me. Mark Arnold disliked me intensely. Also, the Oberlin and Canisius teams had much better records than we did.

    We definitely attended the tournament at Northwestern. I think that we were 4-4, which continued my trend of improvement over the previous year with three different partners.

    The only other tournament that semester that I clearly recall was the very long drive to Minneapolis to attend a tournament at St. Thomas College, now known as St. Thomas University. I think that this was the first time that Jimmie Trent, a famous debate coach and a professor in the speech department at Wayne State, accompanied us. We attended a peculiar set of tournaments for the next year and a half. It was not until considerably later that I began to suspect that Juddi tried to schedule tournaments that she was reasonably certain that she and Jimmie would not run into anyone from Wayne State.

    Jimmie definitely was very knowledgeable about debate, and he was also great fun to be with on tournaments. He specialized in my favorite kind of humor, the shaggy dog story, which was ideal for a long drive. His presence almost counterbalanced having to deal with Juddi. At some point they got married, but, as far as I could tell, that did not change the political implications of a Wayne State speech professor helping U-M debaters.

    The tournament at St. Tom’s was at best second-rate. It did not even supply standard ballots for the judges. They had to fill in these yellow cards that rated speakers on a twenty-point scale instead of the thirty point version. There was also very little space for the judge to express the reasoning, if any, behind the decision.

    When we were on the St. Tom's campus, all this was covered with several feet of snow.
    When we were on the St. Tom’s campus, all this was covered with several feet of snow.

    The three feet of snow on the ground made traipsing between buildings carrying our evidence a real pain and led everyone to question the motivation for the trip.

    Bill and I went 7-1 in the prelims. That made us the top seed in the elimination rounds, which, as I recall, began with quarterfinals. Almost all tournaments used seeded brackets for the elimination rounds, but not this one. Instead, for some reason, they drew the pairings at random. In the quarterfinals we ended up debating against a team from Augustana College in Illinois that we had already defeated on our negative. We were “locked in” on the affirmative because tournaments generally guarantee that no team will debate another team twice on the same side.

    This was the worst possible draw for us. I had a much better record on the negative throughout my career, especially with Bill. It was a tough round. I will always think that I won this round with a joke. I started my last affirmative rebuttal with this remark: “I have been wondering why Mr. ______ (the second negative) wore galoshes to the debate. Now that I see all the snow that they tried to bury the plan under, I understand. Let’s start digging.”

    Everybody in the audience laughed. We won the room and two of the three judges.

    In the semifinals we faced the team that gave us our only loss in the prelims. However, this time we were locked in on the negative and won easily.

    In the finals we faced two guys from Iowa whom I had debated several times over the years. We were locked in on the affirmative. As it turned out, in the elimination rounds we faced the second, third, and fourth seeds, in that order. All were teams that we had already debated.

    At this point in the year we had a pretty strong non-intervention case, but we also had a food case that we had pulled out (successfully) a few times that year. The northern plains was a very conservative part of the debate world, and so we decided to stick with the non-intervention case.

    Just before the debate started, they introduced the five judges. Two were debate coaches with whom both teams knew pretty well. Three of them were local luminaries. Of course, we did not get to interview them, and so we had no way of know how familiar they were with debates at this level.

    Debate coaches have a lot of practice at following arguments. The best tactics for dealing with inexperienced judges are not at all as clear as they are for dealing with debate coaches. The thought occurred to me that we should perhaps run the food case. Any yokel can relate to starving millions. However, it was only a flickering thought; we went with our original plan.

    The trip back to Ann Arbor seemed longer.
    The trip back to Ann Arbor seemed longer.

    We won both debate coaches, but lost the three civilians. I will always think that if we had used the food case, we would have won the outsiders and maybe lost the coaches. I had plenty of time to think about this on the long drive home. Winning this (or any) tournament would have been a feather in our cap. Finishing second in such a sorry gathering made us just an “also ran”.

    Bill and I went 4-4 at the district qualifier in March. We only won eleven ballots. So, I appeared to be regressing a little.


    Moon

    During the summer I worked in a the actuarial department of Kansas City Life, not my dad’s employer. Two other guys, Todd and Tom worked there. One day someone asked if they had gone to lunch, and I was able to use a line I had been saving for weeks: “Tom and Todd wait for no man.”

    Man also landed on the moon.

    Fall 1969: I learned that two strong additions had been made to the debate staff, Roger Conner1, who had an exemplary record debating at Oberlin, and Cheryn Heinen, a very good debater from another strong debate school, Butler. Roger and Cheryn could probably have been a big help, but they were seldom allowed to go to big tournaments, and neither planned a career as a debate coach. Because the program had very few debaters, we hardly ever had practice rounds, and when we did, Juddi ran them.

    Since Bill and I were the only debaters on the team with experience at the varsity level, I had assumed that we would be paired up from day 1. Partner-switching is uncommon at most schools.

    I was therefore unpleasantly surprised and disgruntled to find myself paired with Dean Mellor at the beginning of the year. Bill and Mike must have also been debating together.

    Cheryn did not work with us much. Still, the most memorable event of the semester occurred when she was driving us in a car from the university’s motor pool westbound on I-94. There were three other debaters in the car. One was certainly Bill. The other two must have been Dean and Mike.

    The car was proceeding at the speed limit when all of a sudden the front hood came unlatched and was flung backwards by air pressure into the windshield. It also made a dent of at least six inches in the roof of the passenger compartment, but it remained attached to the hinges. The glass on the windshield shattered, but it stayed together. This video is what it felt like from the inside. However, we were going much faster, and both the windshield and hood were obviously beyond repair.

    Cheryn screamed in terror, but she quickly regained composure. We were very fortunate to be quite close to an exit. Bill and I rolled down windows and gave Cheryn driving instructions to get the car onto the exit ramp and then into a service station.

    Cheryn called the university and reported the problem. The people at the motor pool insisted that one of us had opened the hood for some reason and failed to latch it. We all insisted that no such event had occurred. After a few hours someone brought us a different car to use, and we continued on to the tournament without further incident.

    MIC

    The resolution for 1969-70 was that the federal government should grant annually a specific percentage of its income tax revenue to the state governments. I think that we ran the same case all year. It called for granting 50 percent of the income tax revenue to the states through existing grant-in-aid programs. We claimed that Congress would never finance the programs to that extent because of the power of the Military-Industrial Complex.

    I do not remember details from too many tournament. I remember attending the Ohio State with Dean. We had been doing pretty well for the first seven rounds. In the eighth round, however, Dean got all flustered in the 1AR, and totally made a mess of things. His speech was so bad that there was no chance of winning after that. It was too bad, because we would have qualified for the elimination rounds if we had won.

    DJT likes his steaks the same way.
    DJT likes his steaks the same way.

    I am not sure where we were, but at one tournament Juddi arranged for us to eat supper with the debaters from Emory University in Atlanta. She liked their southern charm. At dinner she ordered a steak well done. The waiter brought it. Juddi cut it and sent it back for more cooking. She judged that the substitute was sufficiently dead. She smothered it in red sauce. Before she could take a bite one of the Emory debaters asked her very politely why she didn’t just order a piece of bread and cover it with ketchup.

    By the middle of November Juddi had changed the pairings so that I was again with Bill. On Thursday November 22 we drove to Chicago for a tournament at UICC. It was a fairly important tournament for us, but it meant that we would miss the last game of the football season.

    Students at U-M were allotted one reduced-price season ticket on the south and west sides of Michigan stadium. I had a superb ticket on the 50-yard line. How I managed to get such a good seat is described here. On this occasion I gave my seat away to someone. I don’t remember who received it.

    We only got to read about it.
    We only got to read about it.

    We missed the best game in the storied history of Michigan football. Ohio State was rated #1 in both polls. Michigan was 7-2. OSU had never been behind at any point in any of their previous games. Nevertheless, Michigan prevailed 24-12 that Saturday and won a ticket to the Rose Bowl for the only time in my undergraduate career.

    Meanwhile, Bill and I had our worst tournament ever. For me the worst aspect was our loss to my old friend and high school debate partner, John Williams, who represented UMKC. I was more depressed about this than about any previous result. Still, I only had one semester left, and I resolved to make the most of it.


    Where are my U-M debate partners in 2020?

    On Twitter I follow Bill Black, who is rather famous for finding fraudulent activity in corporate and political America. He currently teaches law and economics at UMKC. His Wikipedia page is here.

    I have not been in touch with Gary Black. I was quite surprised to find this web page on the Internet. I am not positive that this is the Gary Black that I knew, but the age and colleges match. I wonder what Charlie Delos would think of Gary’s new career.

    Alexa Canady is a famous neurosurgeon who is now retired and living in Pensacola, FL. I emailed her because I noticed that she was a member of the American Contract Bridge League (ACBL). She responded to the email, but we have not had any further correspondence. Her Wikipedia page is here.

    I have seen Bill Davey twice since I graduated in 1970. When I came to Ann Arbor after being discharged from the army, he let me crash in his apartment for a week or so. I also saw him at a debate tournament at Georgetown in the mid-seventies. He was then clerking for Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart. Later Bill was a big player in the development of the World Trade Organization. He is now retired from his teaching position at the University of Illinois. His biographical information is here.

    Mike Hartmann is an attorney at the international law firm, Miller-Canfield. He was the CEO from 2007 to 2013. His bio page is here. I have been in touch with him by email.

    Lee Hess is the Chairman of Cairngorm Capital and lives in Columbus, OH. I have communicated with him by email a few times. His bio page at his company is here.

    Bob Hirshon is a professor at the U-M Law School.

    I have not been in touch with Dean Mellor. Apparently he is doing something in sales in the L.A. area. His LinkedIn profile is here.

    I have not been in touch with Larry Rogers.


    Roger
    Roger Conner.

    1. Bill was a Presidential Scholar in his senior year of high school (1967), which indicates that he had one of the two highest scores in the state of Michigan on the National Merit exams.

    2. I asked Roger why Mark Arnold hated me. He told me that I was right about that, but he did not know why. Roger was an interesting guy. He sold bibles in his youth. He tried to teach us to yodel, which he insisted was the best way to prepare for debates. He spent thirty years as lobbyist, mostly on immigration issues. I almost went to see him when he was leading a seminar in Hartford. In 2020 he is an adjunct professor at Vanderbilt.

    1966-1970 U-M: Lingo and Abbreviations

    Abbreviations & idiomatic terms. Continue reading

    1A: First affirmative speaker. Add C for constructive or R for rebuttal.

    2A: Second affirmative speaker. Add C for constructive or R for rebuttal.

    1N: First negative speaker. Add C for constructive or R for rebuttal.

    2N: Second negative speaker. Add C for constructive or R for rebuttal.

    AR: Allen Rumsey House.

    Chihote (hee HO tay): A device consisting of surgical tubing and a kneepad for propelling water balloons great distances.

    Co-ed: 1) n. female student. 2) adj. containing both male and female students. In this period no house was co-ed, but some dorms (e.g., South Quad) were.

    Constructive: Ten-minute speech.

    Drop: In debate, to miss or neglect an argument made by the other team.

    Flowing: Taking notes (including planned responses to an opponent’s arguments) in a debate. The sheet(s) of paper is called a flow or flow sheet.

    House: Smallest unit of dorms at Michigan. Quads had 6-10 houses.

    IM: Intramural sports. At Michigan the competition was separated between frat houses and dorms.

    MISL: Michigan Intercollegiate Speech League—all colleges in Michigan

    NDT: National Debate Tournament held in March every year.

    RA: Resident Adviser: one per floor in a dorm.

    RD: Resident Director: one per house in a dorm.

    Rebuttal: Five-minute speech for advancing, refuting, and summarizing arguments. No new arguments are allowed in the rebuttals.

    Resolution: The topic being debated. The same resolution is debated all year. The ones for 1966-1970 were:
    1966-1967 RESOLVED: “That the United States should substantially reduce its foreign policy commitments.”
    1967-1968 RESOLVED: “That the federal government should guarantee a minimum annual cash income to all citizens.”
    1968-1969 RESOLVED: “That executive control of United States foreign policy should be significantly curtailed.”
    1969-1970 RESOLVED: “That the federal government should grant annually a specific percentage of its income tax revenue to the state governments.”

    Spread: To present an inordinately large number of arguments, sometimes with the intention of dropping some later. If the opponent does not mention an argument, it can be claimed as valid by the team that made it. Spreading can be done by talking fast or using economy of language. The best debaters do both.

    SQ: South Quad.

    Topicality: The issue in a debate as to whether the affirmative’s plan is a legitimate interpretation of the debate resolution.

    U-M: University of Michigan

    WQ: West Quad.

    1967-1969 Part 1: U-M Classes

    Classes in the middle years. Continue reading

    To the best of my recollection this was my undergraduate academic schedule at Michigan:

    FreshmanFall 1966Math 195Russian 101Chem 103Latin 350
     Spring 1967Math 196Russian 102Chem 106Greek 101
    SophomoreFall 1967Math 295Comp ProgEcon 101Greek 102
     Spring 1968Math 296Comm SciSp PersuasionGreek 201
    JuniorFall 1968Math 395Econ IntlSp DebateGreek 202
     Spring 1969Math 396TopologyHomerThucydides
    SeniorFall 1969ProbabilityStatisticsPsychologyEuripides
     Spring 1970Sp StudyLinguisticsRuss LitAnthropology

    The classes for the first semester of freshman year (fall 1966) are discussed here.

    The classes for the second semester of freshman year (spring 1967) are discussed here.

    The classes for the second semester of senior year (spring 1970) are discussed here.

    Here is what I remember from the middle years by subject:

    Math: The three-year basic sequence (195-6, 295-6, 395-6) started with a review of calculus. The last semester covered, I think, the calculus of several—more than three—variables. It was during this last class that I realized that I had absolutely no interest in being a mathematician. I could no longer visualize what was being talked about. I am sure that it is valuable for things like string theory, but it was not for me.

    In fact, I was lucky to last that long. These six classes were all taught by professors, as opposed to graduate students.1 We were expected (but not required) to do the problems at the end of each chapter of the text. I looked at them, but I never did them. Our tests asked for proofs rather than solutions to problems. The material became more and more difficult as the course numbers got higher. I familiarized myself with the concepts, but I did not actually learn them. That was not my goal; my goal was to pass the tests.

    HH

    I developed several techniques for pretending to prove that formula A is equivalent to formula B, which is the format for most, but not all, mathematical proofs. It would be best to come up with an actual proof, but this is not like horseshoes or hand grenades. Coming close can count for a lot. I thrived on partial credit.

    The first technique is known as proof by induction, a legitimate and powerful method absolutely essential for proving some mathematical concepts. It even has its own Wikipedia page. Any time than something countable—an integer or even a rational number—was mentioned in either formula A or formula B, I would used proof by induction. It was always good for a half-page of paper, and I never got less that seven out of ten points. Occasionally, it actually produced the required proof.

    The technique that I invented and perfected was the Wavada Squeeze. You will not find it on Wikipedia yet. Here is how you do it: Start with formula A, and in a column beneath it make as many manipulations of it as you can think of. For example, you could multiply and divide by something: A=((x+3) x A)/(x+3). After ten or so manipulations, you end up with something quite different from what you started with. On a separate sheet of paper perform a different set of manipulations on formula B. Once in a while one of the two will actually show the way to a proof, and that’s great. However, even if neither does, you can maximize your partial credit by writing the the manipulations of B in reverse order beneath the manipulations of A. This will give you a “proof” that A=B with twenty or so legitimate manipulations, and one horrible leap somewhere in the middle. This was usually good for at least five out of ten, which was much better than nothing.

    I made the mistake of taking one graduate-level class, Topology. I ended up with a C, which is a terrible grade in a graduate class. I remember entering the classroom on one Monday after a debate tournament. Everyone was busy writing their names on “Blue Books”, which meant that an exam was about to take place. This was news to me. Evidently, it was announced in a class that I had not attended. Usually I tried to make sure that I had a friend in classes to warn me about such events. This class, however, was composed of graduate students in math. None seemed approachable. I got one right out of nine. Showing up clueless in a classroom full of people with Blue Books appeared frequently in nightmares over the decades.

    I am embarrassed to say that not only have I forgotten the names of these teachers, but I also have only vague recollections of any of the concepts, never mind the details, of what I supposedly learned. I never considered graduate school in math.

    Nesbitt

    Actuarial Science: I passed part 1 of the actuarial exams in May of 1969. I took two classes from Cecil Nesbitt2, a very famous actuary, in the fall semester of 1969 with the half-hearted purpose of passing part 2—probability and statistics. I was not a bit impressed with the quality of the other students, when compared with the guys (and girl) in my math sequence.

    My attendance in both classes was extremely spotty. I did not do any of the assigned problems. Nevertheless, I thought that I had passed part 2 in November, but i was wrong. The exam was offered again in May, but I was not upset enough about this failure to study more in the spring session. The result is described here.

    Cecil Nesbitt’s Wikipedia page is here.

    Cameron

    Greek: For the first two Greek3 classes the teacher was H.D. Cameron.4 I can clearly visualize the professor who taught the 200-level classes as well, but I am embarrassed to report that I cannot remember his name. He also taught the Thucydides class.

    My clearest recollection of those last two classes in the sequence involved the final exam. With less than one hour remaining before the Greek final, I realized that I had misread the exam schedule and studied for a different subject. The exam for that subject was a day of two later. So, I ended up taking the Greek test with practically no cramming.

    Thank goodness it a Greek course was the one to which I gave insufficient attention; I got an A anyway. If I had neglected the other subject (I forget what it was), I would have been in a world of hurt. This kind of thing was also a subject of many future nightmares.

    In all honesty the university should not have allowed me to take these four classes. My high school Greek class was good enough that I could almost certainly have placed out of Greek. However, there was no placement test for Greek at U-M. I am thankful for the lack; I received four easy A’s.

    The Homer and Thucydides classes were more difficult. All of the other students in both classes were graduate students who took nothing but Greek classes and spent all of their daylight hours in the classics department. I was lucky to survive.

    I enrolled in a course that translated the plays of Euripides. I had to get special permission from the professor to join. However, after a week or two I dropped the class. It was just too demanding for my schedule.

    If I had applied to graduate school in 1970, I would have tried for a masters in the classics. These were the only classes that I enjoyed the most.

    Gronbeck

    Speech: I took only one real speech class, persuasion. It was taught by Bruce Gronbeck.5 The other two speech classes were gift A’s to compensate for the time that my participation in debate consumed.

    I went to the persuasion class every time that I was in town. I gave all the speeches and turned in the assigned paper. I found the material presented boring, but the speeches were quite interesting.

    I have several vivid recollections. We talked about some of the speeches as a class. In one situation I remarked that I thought that the speaker had seemed sincere. Prof. Gronbeck asked me why I thought that, and I was stumped. Nobody else really had a better answer. As Jean Giraudoux famously noted, “The secret of success is sincerity. Once you fake that you’ve got it made.”

    Jim Pitts is #20 in the middle row.
    Jim Pitts is #20 in the middle row.

    Jim Pitts, the captain of the basketball team, was on the roster for the class, but he never attended, not even for the assigned speeches. Prof. Gronbeck told Dr. Colburn about this, and a few days later Jim appeared, and he was prepared to give a speech. No speeches were scheduled for that day, but he was allowed to deliver his speech, which was about abortion.

    Jim took the floor with about twenty 3″x5″ cards held in very large hands. The use of a deck of cards in a speech is always a bad idea unless you plan to demonstrate how to throw them. Jim’s first line was “The chances of getting an abortion in this country are 1. Slim and 2. None.” On the fourth card he could not read the handwriting of whoever wrote the speech. A few cards later the cards were in the wrong order, which always seems to happen. When he finished the speech, Prof. Gronbeck thanked him, and no one else said anything. The class then continued as usual.

    That was Jim’s last speech, but he never missed any basketball games that year.

    Prof. Gronbeck wanted to hold a one-on-one debate, and I volunteered. My opponent, who was from Germany, chose as the topic the reunification of her country. She was against it. It wasn’t much of a debate. I had to go first, and we only got one speech each. She made no attempt to refute anything that I had said.

    Communication Science: For some reason in those days the academic department at U-M that dealt with computers was called “Communication Science”. I took two courses. The first was the introductory programming class. My instructor was Господин Muchnik, whom I already knew as a student in my first-semester Russian class. We learned to program in MAD, which stood for Michigan Algorithm Decoder, a programming language used nowhere else in the world.

    Card

    There were no terminals. We had to record our programs and our data on eighty-column IBM cards. This required use of a machine to punch the cards. Each card corresponded to a line of code or a row of data. There was no backspace or delete key. If you made a mistake when you punched the, you had to eject the card and throw it away. The university had a dozen or more of these machines for students, and they were located on the other side of campus. If they were all in use, you just had to wait or come back later.

    When you finally had your program and data punched, you inserted the deck of cards into the pre-compiler, a small machine that found syntax errors in MAD programs. When you fixed all of the errors that it found, you were ready put a rubber band around your deck of cards to submit a job to the computer. The operator would accept the job, assign it a number, and give you a card with your job’s number and a phone number for a recording that announced the number of the job that the computer was currently on. It might be hours or even days befor the announced number was greater than the number of your job. When it finally happened, you walked back to the computing center to retrieve your output and your deck.

    Card_Punch

    The first few times that you did this, the output consisted of a list of errors. If there were only a few errors, you would wait for a keypunch machine to be available, fix the errors, and resubmit the deck. This process went on until you either despaired or were euphoric when you finally got some results.

    For our final project we could do any program that we wanted. The only requirement was that it be at least one hundred lines of code. My project read in a bridge hand of thirteen cards and output the opening bid using the standard American system taught by Charles Goren. I did it over the Thanksgiving holiday when there were no lines for the keypunch machines, and shorter waits for the jobs. I got it to work well pretty quickly.

    Needless to say, I really liked programming, and I was good at it.

    The other Comm Sci class that I took was a strange amalgam of language theory and the history of computer languages back to the Turing machine. I did not get a lot out of it.

    Economics: You cannot debate as much as I did without doing quite a bit of research into economics. By the time (sophomore year) that I enrolled for the introductory class at U-M I had already read hundreds of articles and several books on economics. The format for the class was lecture plus recitations. I enjoyed the lectures, although my memory of who gave them cannot be correct. I found the recitations tiresome and overly simplistic.

    I studied for the final with my debate partner, Gary Black, a senior. I helped him more than he helped me. I was more than a little peeved when he got a low A, and I got a high B.

    I took one more economics class. I did not like anything about the way the course in international economics was taught. I put in as little effort as possible. I think that I got a C.

    Daniel Kahneman.
    Daniel Kahneman.

    My enduring impression about the field of economics was that it was 99 percent unproven theories. I was right. The next fifty years proved conclusively that most of what I was taught was just wrong. In fact, Daniel Kahneman, a psychologist, won a Nobel Prize in Economics in 2002 for demonstrating that the basic behavioral assumption underlying all economic analysis is nonsense.

    Psychology: As a senior I signed up for the introduction to psychology in the honors program. I was allowed to take one class pass-fail, and this was the one that I selected. Grades lower than C were unheard of in honors classes. So, I correctly determined that I could pass this class with virtually no effort.

    The teacher was a female graduate student, and she insisted that we understand the principles of feminism. Most of us had never heard of the word. I remember very little else about the class, except that it was full of freshmen with first names like Hill or Twink. Twink told us that in the home in which he grew up no one ever questioned Freud’s teachings. I found that astounding, but I suppose that it is no more astounding than believing in the Book of Mormon or, for that matter, the Bible.

    I could take this guy, too.
    I could take this guy, too.

    Twink was a fairly big guy, maybe 6’3″. Once I was walking somewhere with my friend, Tom Rigles, who had already heard me tell stories about him. Tom said that he did not imagine him being so big. I casually remarked that I could take him. Rigles scoffed at me. As God is my witness, I could take Twink then, and if he is still alive, I could take him now.

    I don’t think that the psych class had a final exam, but we were required to write a paper. I had picked up a book called Games People Play by Eric Berne. The night before the papers were due, I skimmed the book and wrote and typed the paper. It was the third and last paper of my entire undergraduate career

    I disliked all the “social science” courses that I took. If you had predicted in 1970 that I would voluntarily take almost nothing but social science courses for six years in graduate school, I would have told you that you did not know what you were talking about.


    Ted

    1. Ted Kaczynski, the notorious Unabomber, was a graduate assistant in the math department at U-M during the sixties. The offer of the teaching position was the main reason that Ted chose Michigan over Cal Berkeley and the University of Chicago.

    2. My best friend since 1972, Tom Corcoran, worked as an actuary. One year I was shopping for a birthday card for him. I looked through about twenty humorous cards until I found one that actually mentioned Cecil Nesbitt! I was absolutely astounded.

    3. I learned classical Greek in high school and college. Decades later I tried to teach myself modern Greek in preparation for a Hellenic vacation. The alphabet was the same, and the grammar was similar. However, the vocabulary and pronunciation were drastically different.

    4. Professor Cameron in 2020 is emeritus in the classics department and curator of the university’s Museum of Zoology.

    5. Professor Gronbeck died in 2014. A very lengthy obituary can be read here.

    1967 U-M Spring Semester

    A lot of debate. A little class time. Continue reading

    Debate: If you need a primer about intercollegiate debate in this era, you can find it here.

    I learned that my partner, Lee Hess, was in ZBT, the Jewish fraternity. He had attended New Trier High in the Chicago area. He claimed that his father was a “cowboy”, by which he meant that he traded futures on livestock prices. Lee had contacts all over the country. He was the complete opposite of me, a stranger in every town save one.

    Space_Race2

    One tournament that I remember rather vividly was at Northwestern. I am pretty sure that we unveiled the moon case there. We ended up with a 1-7 record. My recollection of that “1” is not clear. Maybe we won one affirmative, but I suspect that the moon case exploded on the launch pad.

    Jeff chased down the judges of a few of our affirmative rounds to ask them whether we lost the debate on topicality or on one of the substantive issues. I don’t remember what the answer was. It was inconceivable that we would run such a squirrelly case at the district tournament in March. So, I think that we decided to put our effort into patching up the holes in the case1 that Lee and his partner had run in the first semester. I don’t recall the specifics, but I know that I learned a lot.

    The process of debating at the varsity level was a more striking change for me than the actual debates. In high school and in the first semester at U-M we rode to tournaments in cars and/or buses. We always ate at places that emphasized quantity per dollar rather than quality or exotic tastes. We stayed in roadside ma and pa motels or at second- or third-rate hotels.

    Early in 1967 Lee and I flew to Boston with Jeff Sampson for the annual debate tournament at Harvard. I had only flown on planes a very few times. I cannot remember previous flights except the ones to and from KC for the holiday break between semesters, and those were both using the program prevalent in that era by which students could fly standby for half-price.

    Jimmy's

    Our first supper on this trip was at the legendary Jimmy’s Harborside in Boston. The three of us took a taxi from Cambridge. I suspect that this was the first time that I had ridden in a taxi.

    I know for sure that this was the first time that I had ever eaten lobster. Jeff and Lee pressured me to try it. It seemed to me at the time (and ever since) that it was pretty much a tasteless vehicle for delivering melted butter to one’s mouth. Also, an excessive amount of effort was required to extract the meat. I did get to wear a bib for the first time since I learned to walk.

    I am not sure where Jeff stayed, but Lee and I stayed in the dorm at Harvard. It in no way reminded me of Allen Rumsey House. It was a suite; each student had his own bedroom. One or two of the residents were present; the others were still on some sort of break. Lee and I stayed in an empty suite that featured—get this!—a loft with an extra bed. I vaguely recall that one of the missing suite-mates was the son of a U.S. Senator.

    Fugs

    On the second night Lee arranged for a young lady whom he already knew from somewhere to visit us in the dorm. Lee produced a couple of bottles of wine and fed Frank Zappa and Fugs albums to the record player. I made myself as scarce as I could without leaving the room—where would I go? Pretty soon Lee and she went up to the loft, where they stayed until morning.

    At that point we had debated seven rounds, four on the negative and three on the affirmative. I had no way to judge how well we were doing, but we had faced some pretty good teams. Since the last six rounds were power-matched, that is usually a good sign. Our opponent was the University of Texas, a pretty good team.

    The girl was gone when I woke up. Lee was a mess. If we had been on the negative, we probably would have just forfeited. As 1A, Lee just had to read the constructive speech. The rebuttal would definitely be difficult, but Lee was determined to give it a try. We removed a sentence or two from the 1AC, but he still could not quite finish what was left in ten minutes. Nevertheless, we were still in contention until Lee’s rebuttal, which was unspeakably bad. I tried to pull it out in the last rebuttal, but it was hopeless. For the first time in my life I mentally blamed my partner for losing a debate. I only did it one other time.

    I am uncertain how important that debate was. Both teams were either 4-3 or 5-2 going into the debate. If we were 5-2, it probably cost us qualifying for the octafinals. If we were 4-3, it only kept us from having a winning record.

    Jeff did not yell at Lee, at least not in my presence.

    Mike Denger became an anti-trust lawyer.
    Mike Denger became a prominent anti-trust lawyer.

    I don’t remember when it happened, but at some point I got to watch Northwestern’s team of David Zarefsky and Mike Denger debate in an elimination round against Georgetown, another national power. I was very impressed with all four debaters, but especially Denger, who had won the NDT the year before. It gave me something to aspire to.

    Yard

    At least once Dr. Colburn drove us on a debate trip. He liked to stop at Win Schuler’s restaurant, an institution in Michigan. Their specialty was prime rib. It was pretty late, and the place was almost empty by the time that we were finishing supper. Dr. Colburn had ordered a yard of beer, in which he had made little progress. A guy at the next table was giving him a good-natured hard time about it. Somehow a wager was made as to whether Dr. Colburn could finish the whole yard. Dr. Colburn promised that if he couldn’t, he would stand on his chair and sing “The Sweetheart of Sigma Chi.” The other guy offered to stand on his chair and sing “God Bless America” if Dr. Colburn finished it. Dr. C., not that far removed from his fraternity days at Sigma Chi at the University of Indiana, had little difficulty, and the other fellow paid off. We all applauded his performance.

    Dr. Colburn never considered asking Lee or me to drive us back to Ann Arbor, but we made it in one piece.

    Lee and I went 4-4 at districts with twelve ballots out of twenty-four. We had ascended to mediocrity.

    Classes: My recollection is that I attended nine or ten debate tournaments during the semester. We ordinarily left Wednesday afternoon or early on Thursday and returned late on Sunday. So, I missed a lot of classes.

    I remember almost nothing about Math 196. I attended less than half the classes. I don’t remember the teacher at all. I kept up with the textbook by studying for a couple of hours per week early in the morning. I ended up with a B, which was something of a triumph considering how little effort I expended.

    No time for this.
    No time for this.

    Russian was a big problem. I had no time to go to the Language Lab to improve my listening skills, which were negligible. Furthermore, I had missed so many classes that I had lost my ear for the language.

    After acing the class in the first semester, I did very poorly on the midterm in the second. We were required to listen to a paragraph read by one of the teachers and then answer questions about it. The fact that I could not understand the reading and therefore could not answer the questions contributed to my panic on the grammar section of the test as well. I knew enough to do pretty well, but I choked.

    I went to see the teacher. His desk was in the Frieze Building, right next to the desk of Mrs. Rado, my teacher from the fall semester. I explained to him about my attendance at the debate tournaments. He knew that I had done well in the first semester, but he was not too sympathetic about the way that I set my priorities. I did pretty well on the final. I was hoping for a B, but I only got a C.

    My other big problem was Chemistry 106. I had taken 103 in the first semester; the continuation course was 105. My faculty adviser insisted that this was beneath me, and he signed me up for 106, the continuation class for 104. I never really got on track in this class. I scored an abysmal 38% on the midterm. Believe it or not, my score was only a little below average.

    The worst part was that my labs were on Thursdays. After one of the few recitation session that I had attended, I approached my teacher, Ms. Koljenin, and told her that I had missed six chem labs. She denied that I had done so.

    I patiently explained that because I represented the university at intercollegiate debate tournaments, I had indeed missed six labs. She asked me my name and looked it up in her grade book.

    “You’ve missed six labs!” she exclaimed.

    I asked her if I could make them up over the Easter break. She said that would be impossible. I then asked if the lab would be open. She affirmed that it would. Before she could say anything more, I asked if she would allow me to try to make up as many as I could over the break. She relented.

    I need help!
    I need help!

    Most of the experiments involved identifying an unknown sample by performing various tests on it. I got my samples and made every effort to do all the experiments. However, I am really bad at this sort of thing. My samples would not cooperate. For example, if I was supposed to judge the color as yellow or green, it would appear brown. I did all six experiments, but if I got half of them right, I would be surprised.

    I studied diligently for the final. I did much better than on the midterm. I got a C in the class. I was just happy that I would not need to take any more science classes.

    Thank heavens for Greek.
    Thank heavens for Greek.

    Fortunately, my fourth class was Greek 101. No one else in the class had ever taken Greek. I had four semesters in high school with a very good teacher. In a class in the third week I was called on to read—in Greek—a few sentences that we had never seen. I did, with good pronunciation and very few pauses. I then translated them without any difficulty. The next day fully half of the students were missing from the class. In any case, I cruised to an A.

    In sum, I got an A, a B, and two C’s. Not good, but not a catastrophe. I certainly did not want to explain a D to my parents, who were, after all, footing the bill.

    I learned that semester that I needed to be more careful about selecting my classes. If my chem labs had been on Monday or Tuesday, I probably would have gotten a B in chemistry. If I had also insisted on taking 105 instead of 106, I might have gotten an A.

    Although I enjoyed Russian a lot, I realized that I needed to avoid languages that required listening skills. They just required more time than I could afford to devote.

    I also realized that I needed to avoid taking classes that required papers. I may have dodged a bullet by missing out on Great Books.

    My phys ed class, which was held in Waterman Gymnasium, was in badminton. I learned very little from the instructor. He explained the rules and then basically let us play. One guy, who was an accomplished tennis player, was much better than anyone else. My recollection is that I was a distant second, but that might just be arrogance.

    We had two tournaments. In the singles tournament I drew the tennis player in the first round, and he crushed me. However, in the doubles my partner and I did not face him until the finals. By picking on his hapless partner we actually gave them a pretty good game, but we lost.

    Allen Rumsey House: Charlie Delos2 and I shared room 315 for the second semester. We got along well enough that we planned to share a room for sophomore year as well.

    By the second semester I knew everyone on the floor pretty well and most people in the house. The people who had pledged fraternities in the first semester were seldom seen in the second. They mostly hung around at their frat house.

    At some point I learned how to juggle. So did quite a few other people, including Dave Zuk. I remember him practicing throwing three balls against the eastern wall in 314.

    When we could not get four for bridge, we played hearts or spades. Paul Stoner was the worst hearts player ever. He was fascinated with “shooting the moon”—taking tricks containing all thirteen hearts and the queen of spades. Sometimes he would try for it even after one of the other players had taken a heart. This became known as a “Stoner run”.

    THE_Cat

    On Friday nights the television set in the separate TV room was set to NBC to watch the back-to-back acronym shows, “The Man from U.N.C.L.E.” and “T.H.E. Cat”. I wasn’t much invested in the latter, but a bunch of adventurous guys, including Dave Zuk, actively emulated the show’s hero, played by Robert Loggia. They got into various locked university buildings either through the network of tunnels that hey had mapped or by climbing the drain pipes to gain access through unlocked windows on higher floors. Unfortunately, one of these guys was seriously injured when a drain pipe came loose and he fell a few stories to the ground.

    Orr

    Incidentally, on these Friday nights the guys in the game room were usually watching an NHL game. I had no interest whatever in hockey. I was a big fan in general of many sports—I had religiously watched ABC’s Wide World of Sports as a kid. However, I could not follow the puck very well on the black & white television.

    This changed after the first time that I saw Bobby Orr on the ice. Over the next three years I watched him as often as I could. If the Bruins were not on, I still had no interest in the sport.

    AR held elections for all officers in the spring. Only students who were planning on returning to the dorm the next year were allowed to vote. I decided not to run for secretary. Instead I ran unopposed for the office of the editor of the house’s newsletter, Rumsey Rumors. I think that there had only been one issue all year, but I planned to take the job at least a little more seriously.

    I am a little confused about who ran for president. If Ken Nelson was not the president during my freshman year, then he ran unopposed and won. At the time there was a rule that one could be president only for one year.


    1. In his basement Lee recently found a typed copy of the constructive speech that he used when debating with me in the spring of 1967. It must have been the very speech that he read in that infamous eighth round at Harvard. It called for the U.S. to abandon the commitment to Taiwan (specifically to Chiang Kai-Shek), to recognize Communist China, and to terminate the trade embargo. I have no recollection of running this case. I must not have done much research.

    2. I found this webpage devoted to Charlie Delos.