Whenever I read that a Mac alum is living in Austin, I give a little cheer!  I blundered into Austin for college at UT in 1971.  Back then, and today, Austin is one of the best little spots in the world to live (even though it’s not so little anymore ….).  I lived in Austin part time from 1971-76 and full-time from 1976-82.  It was like a summer vacation that lasted six years.  It was wrenching to finally leave, but more about that below.

 In 1971, Austin was NOTHING like it is at present.  If you can believe it, it was known then as one of the cheapest places to live in the United States.  I certainly lived cheaply there.  My freshman year was spent at the infamous Jester Center, along with Debby Large, Pam Simmroth, Mark Beaulieu, Layne Summers, and Scarlett Boykin.  One day before classes even began, I was walking down Speedway, and Keith Valone drives by, sees me and stops, and asks me if I want to ride out with him to Diana Shisk’s apartment?  Sure thing!!  Diana was living just north of the campus on Speedway, and I was beyond impressed that at the age of 18, she was already set up in independent apartment living and had even started in summer school!   So why was Keith Valone in Austin?  He was supposed to be at USC, but had been drawn into Austin’s orbit for at least the day.  Perhaps it was later that same day that we all piled into Layne’s car and drove out to Shiner, Texas, for barbecue.  On the way back, there was a spectacular view of the milky way and we just had to stop and gawk at the side of the road.  Sadly, after that we hardly saw each other.  I do remember going up to Pam Simmroth’s room and visiting with Mark Beaulieu and Dan Sicking, her future husband.  They had snuck onto the girls’ floor and Mark was busy sketching Dan and Pam, a cute couple.   Simone Childs and I met up several weeks into the semester and had a swim together at the Women’s Gym.  She was living over in Blanton, I believe.  At one point, Loyce Bates and I ran into each other on campus and visited for a little. 

One of the things I really enjoyed about Austin was how everyone was open to new friendships.  There were no established groups where you had to break in.  I had great roommates at Jester even though we started out as complete strangers.  Most everyone was happy to have a conversation with you most anywhere, in the dorm or in class, and even strike up a relationship.  I met one of my future roommates in the food line at Kinsolving during summer orientation.  I was completely alone in the cafeteria dinner line, and Linda turned around and struck up a conversation.  We started a friendship that moment that lasted for the next ten years until she married and moved to California.  I met loads of new people.

 Jester Center was history after one year and from then on, I was a resident of Hyde Park, which was the area directly north of the University.  Many students lived there because we had no cars and the University sent its shuttle bus system straight up Speedway, making  transportation pretty convenient.  It was really a liability to own a car and try to drive it in to campus.  The rumor was that the University sold ten student parking permits for each available campus parking space.  Parking permits were dubbed “hunting licenses.”   Hyde Park was also cheap rent.  Cheap rent, of course, meant not so nice accommodations, but what did we care?  I moved from apartment to apartment in the “avenues”, all of them smelling like cats and furniture so old it was slick.  Many of the apartments looked like they had not been painted since World War II.  Countless residents had left the walls cratered with nail holes.  Rent was less than $100 a month.  I didn’t use the AC at all.  That was not budgeted.  There were roaches everywhere.  Serious roaches.  They should have helped out with the rent.  They had a bad habit of running across the ceiling.  We would have to grab a chair to stand on it to dispatch the little beasts.  The houses in Hyde Park were absolute dumps, many of them having been built in the 30s and 40s.  In the mid 70s they were selling for less than $20K.  Even at that price, no one was much interested in living in them.  “THE PLACE” to live in that era was Riverside Drive, with its rows and rows of new apartment buildings. 

Two words always come to mind with Austin:  poor and happy.  It is hard to believe that I lived for so many years on so little, but I never thought a thing about it.  After a December 1976 graduation from UT, I needed a job fast and landed a secretarial/clerical position with the University of Texas, and even with a full time job, I remained poor but happy.  Salaries back then with UT were a joke, even for Austin.  Not that everyone else had such a good job, but they still made fun of us UT employees:  we only could afford meat once a week.  I could not afford it at all.  But did we love our jobs?  You bet!  Of all the jobs I ever had, UT jobs were my favorite.  We were treated with respect and felt valued, even if we earned dirt.  They even let us walk across campus in the middle of our work day and take a class on “company time.”  Tuition was not free, but it should have been.  We were on first name basis with the professors and regularly socialized with them.  They had no problem having fun with the help.  I first worked for the Physics Department, then the Office of Graduate Studies, and ended in Speech Communications.

For around $5, we could have a very satisfactory evening of entertainment on the UT campus.  We would take in a movie at the Union for 75 cents, and maybe even blow a dollar if it was a better movie.  With the remaining $3.50 we could get a beer and bowl a couple of games in the Union bowling alley.  We were perfectly content with that.  While working in the Communications Building, I quickly learned that if any type of line was forming outside the building, to get in it.  They were giving out something free.  None of us would have any idea what the goodie was, but we were going to get our hands on it.  I got regular passes to the tapings of Austin City Limits (What fun!  A world class concert:  Chet Atkins, Tammy Wynette, Gatlin Brothers …. and all the free beer we could drink! ) and feature movies being shown one time on campus.

When one has little money, one usually owns a pretty sorry car.  We were no exception with our huge ford: the green bomb.  It broke down everywhere, especially when we drove it more than 10-12 miles out of town.  Many of you probably drove by us broken down on the side of IH35.  Fortunately husband Ramon was adept at getting the bomb back on its feet and had a full set of tools in the trunk, and he was adept with them.  Wreckers and professional repairs were totally out of the question.  He would lie on the side of the road under the car and I would pass him the tools.  That man could take a pencil lead and fix the distributor cap with it.  He always got us up and running again.  Our worst experience in the green bomb was descending from Independence Pass in Colorado with no brakes.  He used the hand brake to get us down.  How that thing even made it up to Colorado is beyond me.  I was still nursing my old camaro along, which had seen much better days.  My little beauty was now candy apple red instead of silver.  It was in such bad shape by 1976 that I was driving all over Austin, blissfully unaware that the flywheel was resting on top of the drive train. 

We churned along until May of 1982.   We had stretched Austin as far as we could.  We had a dismal apartment, earnings below the federal poverty limit, and had finally graduated with our final degrees.  It was time to grow up and move on.  Drat!!  The six year summer vacation had ended.  Our car was about to blow a piston so we took the milk run Greyhound bus to Houston and landed jobs one week.  On the way back to Austin, the Houston police were working the bus station with a big picture of a woman wanted for capital murder, and showing it around to everyone.  Our mouths were going dry.  The woman sitting behind us on the bus had a crying infant and slapped it silly about every 20 miles.  Naturally, it kept on crying allllll….. the way back.  That was a long bus ride.  Back in Austin, we rented a truck and packed our meager belongings which consisted of little more than a bed we had managed to find on clearance, our clothes, a few dishes and our books.

My first six months in Houston were one of the worst of my life.  The withdrawal symptoms were horrendous.  In Austin, I could step on a shuttle bus and be at work in ten minutes.  A tank of gas had once lasted me the entire summer in Austin.  In Houston, it took me an hour and a half in heavy traffic to reach my first disastrous slummy public library job where I was detested by my immediate supervisor.  HER managers had hired me (they gave me 30 minutes to accept or decline the job … I should have run for it ….) without even letting her know … not a good scenario.  Once I arrived at my new job I understood why.  She was bipolar and mean with a long history of losing staff, the first in a long line of many mentally ill supervisors I encountered through those years.  It was in those first few months we had our car stolen one afternoon (we were one of the lucky ones and got it back in one piece ….).  In Austin, we knew all our fellow apartment dwellers.  We barbecued together.  In Houston, our apartment neighbors would not even look at us. 

In time we made adjustments, got some money, bought a house with super neighbors, etc. and were fine.  But one thought is never far from the back of my mind – what if we had stayed in good old Austin?  What would it have been like?  I think we would have been just fine and could be happily still living in Austin today.  I like Houston just fine, and my life here is good, but still, what if … we still fantasize about moving back.   Hmmmm...

S,

I am just getting around to reading some of these posts again. -  A good story you weave.... yet again.   You truly have a gift for remembering details Shirley.  

I remember being so cash strapped in college, also. It was a real treat to get to go out to eat somewhere other than at the SWTSU cafeteria. My parents gave me $5 for my car gas, and that was to last for weeks. (This was to ensure that I didn't drive the car to other college campuses...like UT.)

I could feel the homesickness you described that you had in Houston. - Good story Shirley.  

Pretty soon you will have to gather all these stories up and publish your book. 

Keep writing,

Jenice

Shirley, what great stories!  I visited Austin many times while at Lamar, but mostly in the spring time.  My time at Lamar is now fondly remembered, but sometimes it was not that great, at the time.  I went to Lamar of a sports scholarship, and I'm sure eveyone knows who my offensive line coach was,  but the only reason I went to Lamar was because, they were willing to pay my way through school.  I had never even heard of Lamar until I was recruited there.  Hu Rhodes, John Snider & I all went to visit one time, and I was not that impressed.  The school seemed small (compared to UT and TAMU),  it was HOT, it was HUMID, and there was a chemical plant within 1/2 mile of the football stadium that made everything smell.

Football, was football...... I showed up in early August, when the morning temps for our early practice during two-a-days was 87 degrees or higher, with about 95% humidity.  Two-a-days lasted between 10 days and 2 weeks before school started.  I hated it.  Wake up, eat a small breakfast, go to practice, eat lunch, go back to the dorm to catch a couple hours of sleep.  Go to afternoon practice, eat dinner, than back to the dorm to get hazed by all the upperclassmen.  After about a week, I had just about had my fill of all of it.  I called my mom, and told her that I was missing her and that I hated it at Lamar and wanted to come home!  My mother in her infiite wisdom would have no part of it.  She flat out told me that if I showed up at the house, ALL  of my clothes would be at the front door.  She said "ride it out, it will get better".  And she was right of course, once two-a-days ended and school started up, life became tolerable again.  However the hazing continued until the end of the football season.

The president of Lamar back then was Dr. Gray, he was a former football player also, but he did not believe that the players were any different than other students, so the scholarship athletes had no benefits that you hear about at the major schoolss.  We had no "Training Table" for athletes.  We just ate right along with everyone else at the cafateria, trying to figure out the "mistery meat" of the day! No easy classes (look at my GPA)  Ha ha!  no tutors.

Money was always tight, I recieved $10 a month for Laundry money from the athletic department.  Anything else was a gift from the parents or older siblings.  I learned pretty quickly that Pizza Hut would alternate their weekly ads between the Beaumont and Lamar school papers.  With the ad you buy one pizza no matter what size, you get an additional pizza the next smaller size for free.  So I ordered a lot of "GIANT" pizza's and enjoyed the Large pizza right along with it.  Needless to say,  I ate a lot of pizza!

Lamar was a  commuters school, we had about 11,000 students that attended and during the week it was always a busy place.  But once the weekend hit,  it was a ghost town!  Most of the dorms were even empty on weekends.  San Antonio was a 4 hour drive for me, so I did not get to go back that often at all.  Once the season was over I was bored out of my mind.  I ran into an odd fellow one day that kind of reminded me of Grocho Marx,  His name was John Gentry, but he said everyone calls him "Frito", so I met him we talked and he was an interesting funny guy.  He told me about a group of guys who were trying to form up a local Fraternity, he asked me to just come meet them and see if I might be interested.  The fraternity was named Alpha Upsilon MU  or "AYM",  I did not know why but the joke between the guys was that it stood for "ASK YOUR MOTHER".  We had numerous Lamar golfers in the group, a couple of engineering students, and a small assortment of other students, but they all seemed like nice guys.  Their friendship got me out of the dorms on weekends, so I was happy.  Shortly after joining..  A  "Kappa Sigma" alum from another school was in town and was looking to see if any local fraternities were interested in going "National". After some discussions we decided to join Kappa Sigma. Since the fraternity was not established on campus we really had no pledge week to go thru, no Upperclassmen and their pranks to deal with.  All we had to do was basically learn the history of the fraternity, & go through initiation!  That was it.  Once we were recognized by the school we received a floor or two of a dorrm builing that wasn't being used and that became our Frat house!  Many a party was held there, and many good memories took place there with my fraternity brothers.  Of course a lot of great friendships were made there also and almost all of them still exist to this day.

Lamar has gotten moderetly bigger now with about 16,000 students.  Most of the dorm buildings that existed during my  time there are all gone.  Replaced by nicer, newer dorms, more centrally located and not spread all around the campus.  They even tail-gate the football games now.  That was unheard of duing my time there.  They have made many improvments to the stadium and it looks completely different.  HOWEVER,  The chemical plant is still there!  It is still HOT, still HUMID, and the smell is still there!  Wouldn't trade it now for a million dollars.  :-)