A Change of Majors

I had determined that since my folks had moved to Nebraska and I was not that attached to Simpson, I should transfer to the University of Nebraska in Lincoln. A foreign language was required for admittance, so I decided to go to summer school to pick up enough credits. The other reason for transferring was that I intended to change majors.

When I went to Simpson I wanted to get as far away from the newspaper business as possible (like many children, I heard the complaints, at the dinner table, of the parents about their occupation). After a year of school, I realized chemistry (my Simpson major) was not for me and I went back to a field I knew something about - journalism.

Another student (who also needed some summer credits) and I got the dictionary out for addresses and wrote about 20 different colleges in resort areas with summer schools.

We decided on Bay View Summer School, in Petosky, Michigan (a division of Alma College in Alma, Michigan).

I found three different jobs to help pay my way. Two were on campus, cleaning out class rooms and other chores. The other was at a local restaurant called the Russet Inn. The cook stoves were fired by wood and my job was to be sure the wood pile was well stocked and the bin by the stove full. As it happened, the student on the shift preceding mine loved chopping wood so all I had to do was bring in a few pieces from the pile and that earned me all my meals.

A major regret from Bay View plagued me for more than 30 years. My roommate, who came with me from Simpson, smoked heavily. While studying at night, I would pick up one of his cigarettes and take a puff. To that point I had never smoked because my dad, who had a two-pack-a-day habit, had asked me to wait until I was out of school and age 18 to make that decision. Of course he later died of lung cancer caused by smoking but when you are young you don’t think anything like that could happen to you. At any rate I began to feel guilty about smoking my roommate’s cigarettes and bought a pack of my own. I was 50 years old before I kicked the habit.