Chapter 5: College, and a Rude Awakening

The first year of college. An exciting time, right? Taking the final step that would propel you into your chosen career field, into the wide world at large that lay beyond your neighborhood.

Academically, I felt prepared. I had graduated from high school magna cum laude, a member of National Honor Society. My work on the newspaper had won awards. I maintained my keen interest in science, and as a high school junior, even wrote a paper on the effects of traveling at the speed of light that won an award in a local Engineering Society competition.

The school counselors at Poly had done a good job of making sure we took the right classes and obtained a sufficient number of credits for the college of our choice, which for me was the University of Texas at Arlington (see Chapter 4). While known as one of the finest Engineering schools in the state, it still offered a decent Liberal Arts program. In fact, one of the esteemed English teachers there was Emory Estes, husband to my high school journalism mentor, Dorothy Estes.

While I was firmly committed to the pursuit of journalism, I made the decision to go for a BA in English, with a minor in journalism. Two reasons: English was always one of my favorite subjects in school, and two, I had a longterm plan to transfer to UT-Austin and enroll in their excellent Journalism School.

Arranging my schedule was complicated by the ongoing necessity of having a job. By this time, I had moved on from working at grocery stores. Or it moved on from me. This was the Sixties, and The Beatles were all the rage. Throughout most of my life, i wore my hair close-cut, burr-style. But like my friends had already done, I was ready to grow it out. The store manager, Mr. Cozart, stopped me one day and said hair couldn't touch the ears -- it was store policy. So get a haircut. The next day, I turned in my nametag and quit. My next job was unloading trucks on a loading dock at a department store, where long hair didn't matter.

Along with the standard "must take" classes, I chose some electives that were of particular interest to me: Journalism, of course, and Philosophy, into whose various rabbit holes I was a frequent visitor through high school.

Let's get this party started. Except, it was anything but a party. It was more like a rude awakening.

Unlike high school, the professors didn't seem to care if you showed up for class or not. If you wanted to throw away your money, so be it. And some of the freshman classes were large -- not 20 or 30 students, but 75, 80, a 100 or more. And the UTA campus was huge. You might literally have to run to not be late, or get a bicycle.

And classes like Philosophy, which I eagerly looked forward to, was one of the most excruciating. My slovenly-dressed professor spoke in a continuous monotone, and by the end of that semester, effectively killed all my interest in the subject.

The Foreign Language requirement ,was also a problem. At Poly, I had two years of Latin, which, as the basis for the Romance languages like French, Italian, Spanish and Portugese, I figured would be valuable. So I enrolled in Portugese. That lasted a hot minute. After two weeks,  I quickly switched to French, where I didn't fare much better.

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Downtown Fort Worth Post Office

Historically, I had always earned good grades without having to devote every spare minute to studying, so I had this notion college would follow suit. But work cut down my study time. My biggest mistake that freshman year was taking the Civil Service exam so I could get a high-paying job at the Fort Worth Post Office, where my father worked. Every holiday season, they brought in extra help to handle all the parcels.
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It was more money than I had ever made, but it also meant working as many as 60 hours a week on top of going to school fulltime. As you might expect -- although I didn't -- it was a grades disaster. For the first time, I earned "D's" in several subjects, plus an "F" in French. It torpedoed my grade point average and left me thoroughly shocked.

I was offered a fulltime job at the Post office, but turned it down to get my act together and my career back on track.

The one bright spot was my journalism class, which afforded me the opportunity to work on UTA's school newspaper, The Shorthorn. With my experience covering sports at Poly, I was made the Sports Editor. While the "Mavericks" didn't have the powerhouse football team they fielded at UT-Austin, UTA had a well-rounded sports program to cover. (In one sense, it continued a trend. Poly had a world-class marching band but a bad football team.)

As previously mentioned in an earlier chapter, that year UTA held a creative writing competition and my poem earned first place. That was pretty cool, and helped to offset the funk of my poor grades.

In the next two years, I was able to repair the grade point damage from that first semester freshman fiasco, and set the stage for my goal of transferring to UT-Austin, where I planned to turbo-charge my journalism dreams. Little did I realize at the time something would enter my life on a January night that would change everything -- forever.
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