My wife and I had dinner the other night with some friends from New Orleans who were in Oxford helping their daughter move into a dormitory for her freshman year at Ole Miss.
Afterwards I couldn’t help but reflect on my own experience enrolling in college and also helping my now middle-aged children move into dormitories.
For me, starting college was more exciting and challenging than graduating.
I wasn’t a great student, but I did accumulate enough credit hours, including some courses one summer at the University of Southern Mississippi while residing with my parents, to enable me to graduate from Ole Miss at mid-term in January, 1957. I had a job waiting in Jackson and opted not to go back for the formal graduation exercises that spring. They mailed me my diploma.
A little more than 20 years later, I watched both my children “walk,” as they say, and maybe, if I had it to do over again, I’d go through the formal ceremonies and invite my parents.
My folks did visit me on campus at least once every year I was a student, always on a football weekend. They’d drive up from Hattiesburg with a lot of food, and we would tailgate in the Grove, just as my wife Virgie and I did with our own children, except more often.
In those days you could actually park in the Grove and literally, instead of figuratively, picnic from the tailgate of a vehicle.
No reflection on today’s generation, but unlike many of today’s college graduates, I got out of school debt free, except for a monthly note on a two-year old Ford automobile my father had made the down payment on a couple of months before I graduated.
Likewise, my two children graduated debt free with cars my wife and I had purchased for them, and they had no car notes. These days, most college kids have their own cars when they enroll or shortly after their freshman year — or at least it appears that way to me, judging from the traffic around Oxford and on campus. Few, if any, incoming freshmen now have the benefit of a mentor like my late Uncle Arthur who helped me move into my freshman dormitory.
Arthur, or Archie as he was called, was my father’s youngest brother. He was a Navy aviator during World War II, and after the war he took advantage of the GI Bill to further his education with several degrees, at least one or two from Ole Miss.
Since he was more familiar with the territory than either of my parents, my father recruited him to take me Oxford to enroll as a freshman.
Archie, who came of age during the Great Depression of the 1930s, was frugal to put it mildly.
The day before I was to inhabit an Ole Miss dorm, he drove me in his Chevrolet to spend the night with relatives in Calhoun City. He had piloted a PBY Catalina seaplane in the South Pacific during the war, and had some harrowing experiences. But he wasn’t one to take unnecessary risks. So he drove that Chevrolet at a moderate speed all the way to North Mississippi. Besides he liked to conserve gasoline.
Upon entering Oxford the next day, he told me something I already knew. In those days there was a sophomore club on campus that cut the hair of incoming freshmen as an initiation rite, requiring it to be shaved so it would grow back evenly. They charged two dollars to do it, the money allegedly going to some worthwhile fund.
Archie said we would drop by a friend’s house he wanted to visit, and they would cut my hair, so I could save the two bucks.
And this advice he gave me on cafeteria meals: They charge a nickel for a glass of iced tea. But ice water, sugar and lemons are all free for the taking. Just take those ingredients and drink lemonade instead of tea.
I never told him, but I ignored his advice on that one. After all, I saved enough on the haircut to buy 40 glasses of tea. It’s no wonder parents and students go into debt these days to finance a college education. It costs way more than it used to, and the costs are steadily increasing.
But lessons from my Uncle Archie, who I am told by some of his former students was a great teacher at Pearl River Community College, could probably help ameliorate some of the costs.
Charlie Dunagin is the former editor and publisher of the Enterprise-Journal in McComb. He may be reached at cdunagin@enterprise-journal.com.
