This is a transcript of my remarks at the 50-year Reunion of the Arkansas State University Class of 1967, delivered on Oct. 13, 2017. This is the original version. The delivered version was trimmed slightly to save time.
By Roy Ockert Jr.
Over the years I’ve written quite a bit about the big story of our senior year — university status. Today I’d like to talk more about what life was like during our years at Arkansas State.
Many members of our class started as freshmen in the fall of 1963. If so, you received a copy of “The A Book,” the guide to life at A-State.
Among other things the A Book gave prices for going to college here. I came here from a poor family in Hot Springs, but Ray Hall Sr. gave me a 1-year $500 scholarship. My main costs per semester included:
• Tuition of $90;
• Room and board for Danner Hall, $275 on the installment plan; and
• Yearbook publication fee, $7.
If you could afford luxury, you requested a room in Arkansas Hall or University Hall — $330 in advance. The real bargain was the basement of Danner — $230.
The A Book included a calendar, which began that year with 2 1/2 days of registration and classes starting Sept. 18. Thanksgiving vacation was a 4-day weekend, and Christmas vacation was two weeks. We came back for two more weeks of class after New Year’s, and final exams began Jan. 20.
The spring semester started the next week and ran through all of May. We did have a week for Easter vacation.
Student conduct was so important that eight pages were devoted to it. About half of that was a listing of organizations you could join. But there were some strict rules:
• “Drinking, serving and-or possession of alcoholic beverages, including beer, is prohibited in all student housing, on or off campus, on the premises of said housing, and at any student-sponsored activity on or off campus.”
• “The appearance of being under the influence of alcohol is unbecoming conduct and subject to disciplinary action.”
• “Proper dress for students. All students, men and women, are expected to be dressed appropriately at all times. Bermuda shorts may be worn on the following occasions:
—On picnics, fishing, etc.
—To intramural activities.
—Traveling to and from home in a private automobile.
—To the tennis court.
—When decorating for dances.
“They are not to be worn in any academic building or in the college dining hall.” Pat reminded me that if girls wore shorts to gym class, they had to wear a raincoat over them. Note that the rules also did not include an exemption for going downtown or to local restaurants.
Another important rule was the timing of events.
“All social affairs on weeknights must end at 10 p.m., on Friday ... and Saturday nights at 12. No affairs may be continued after the midnight hour on Saturday nights. Organizations who violate this rule will be denied further social privileges.”
Of course, the women’s dorms were locked up at 10 on weeknights and 12 on Friday and Saturday nights so socializing possibilities were severely limited after that anyway. And freshman women had to be in at 8:30. One Saturday night I almost got a girlfriend in hot water after taking her to Memphis to see “Doctor Zhivago” and missing the Jonesboro exit on the way back.
The A Book included a map of the campus, which was at the edge of Jonesboro; there was little to the east or north. Aggie Road and Caraway Road ran through the campus, intersecting in the middle, and Cooley Circle was a connecting street that ran in front of the academic buildings.
The women’s dorms faced Dean Street, and the men’s dorms along Caraway and Aggie.
The football field (Kays Stadium), Indian Field House and Kell Field (baseball) were near (or in the case of the field house attached to) the academic buildings.
You could walk from any point on campus to any other point in 10 minutes, which is how much time we had between classes. Or you could drive, and it wasn’t unusual to find a parking place beside your classroom building.
In our freshman year the Dean B. Ellis Library, a modern structure by comparison to other buildings, opened. So did the Journalism & Printing Building, where I met my future bride. But the biggest change on campus occurred in our sophomore year — the opening of the Reng Center, A-State’s first student union.
Previously, Wilson Hall had been the central gathering place — for classes, for assemblies, plays and lectures and for students to socialize (Wigwam in the basement).
The Reng Center became sort of a college town within itself. The cafeteria moved there from State Hall. So did the Wigwam. We had a bookstore, pool room and bowling lanes, barber shop, a lounge upstairs where you could get in little last-minute studying, and the elegant Ballroom, which became the site for dances, concerts, conventions, lectures and banquets. Almost every Jonesboro civic club met in the Reng Center so there was a mixing of town and gown, thanks to Ma Nedrow’s low prices and good food. The cafeteria food was also cheap, but not as good.
I lived in Danner Hall for three years. My first roommate went home after a couple months, and I had a solo for a year and a half. The top two floors had a communal bathroom, with all open facilities — and I do mean open. You’d better remember to take your room key if you locked the door to go take a shower. The ballroom on the first floor had the only TV available to residents. Two floors had a pay phone. Our dorm mother was a lovely lady, Mrs. Paxton, who lived in an apartment off the ballroom. Her husband was a campus cop, and students who went out drinking had to dodge him when they got back.
As I said, Arkansas Hall was more luxurious. Each two rooms shared a bathroom. In the fall of my senior year I moved up in status to Arkansas, then to an off-campus apartment for my last semester.
I can’t say what the women’s dorms were like because men were strictly forbidden from going past a certain line in the lobby.
There were no fraternity or sorority houses. Each of the five men’s fraternities and four women’s sororities had a dormitory suite. Four of the men’s were in Delta Hall, and my fraternity, Lambda Chi Alpha, was in the bargain basement of Danner. The sororities were in University Hall.
We had deferred rush, meaning no one could join a Greek organization until completing a semester of his or her freshman year, thereby proving (to some extent) you could handle college.
The Greeks were even more competitive than today. My own, having been started in 1959 by veterans coming home from Korea, competed especially hard, first in scholarship, then in everything else. All groups took pride in getting their people in key positions. Mine, for example, had the yearbook editor for about 14 years in a row. SGA elections pitted one coalition of Greeks against another, and one year that meant Ray Hall against Jim Goad.
However, that competition benefitted the campus. Among other things, we showed up at football and basketball games to sit in mass under our flag — to show our group’s strength and school spirit.
A-State had a reputation of being a “suitcase college,” and I was a suitcaser for a while. My first year I had a girlfriend in Hot Springs so I went home every weekend possible. That was difficult because I was working at The Jonesboro Sun, then an afternoon paper, six mornings a week. On Saturday I would take off at 9:30 or so and make what was then a 4-hour drive home. Sometimes I’d take my girlfriend home about 10 Sunday night, go home for 2-3 hours of sleep and then head back to Jonesboro at 2 a.m. If all went well, I could get to Charlie Johnson’s liittle cafe near the old Sun building, in time for bacon, eggs, toast and coffee. If not, he had doughnuts to go.
That relationship, along with my Ford Falcon, expired after the freshman year, and I became more of a traditional college student. That usually meant, among other things, trying to find a date for the weekend. The new Wigwam became the best place to take your “significant other,” or to look for one. Students congregated there between classes, and flirting was expected. The next best place was the library. If you didn’t have a date by Thursday, you could go to the library and look for someone who might be in the same boat. I don’t recall that working too often.
Being in a Greek group helped because we did things together, like having “smokers” at the pavilion and working together on various projects such as Homecoming displays, which tended to be all-night affairs. And we had some magnificent mechanical displays that usually required stuffing thousands of paper napkins in chicken wire, which was something I could do.
Access to wheels and phones was critical to almost everything we did. Wheels were not often a problem for me; I had started working after my junior year in high school so I could afford my own car. Keeping it running was, especially on those long trips home and back.
Making phone calls was more troublesome. I hated those pay phones in the dorm. You usually had to wait for one. You needed the right change to make a long-distance call, paid in advance for three minutes. And you had some clown standing behind you waiting for his turn, maybe even joining in the conversation. If you were calling someone in a women’s dorm, you had to count on someone answering the pay phone there, then going to get the person you wanted to talk with. If she wasn’t in, you’d have to try again later.
However, getting a key student position on campus often came with a perk — access to an office phone. By the time I was a junior I had a master key to the Reng Center, where the yearbook office was, and I also worked for the bowling center so I had a desk in the bookstore manager’s office. As a senior, I got keys to the Journalism Building, where we had an office with a phone for the co-editors and advertising manager.
Along with that came access to A-State’s toll-free WATS line. You couldn’t make regular long-distance calls on office phones, but you could get the WATS line, especially at night, if a call was related to college business — like “Mom, I can’t come home this weekend — I have to work on the yearbook.”
My fraternity brother, Phil Pickle, had the most ingenious setup. Most people didn’t know it, but there was a system of tunnels under much of the campus — maybe some are still there. Pickle got to know them like the rest of us learned the streets above ground. And he managed to wire a walkie-talkie hookup from his room in State Hall to his girlfriend’s room in one of the women’s dorms — a direct line of sorts.
Students have always looked off campus for food and entertainment, especially because closing hours on campus came early. We didn’t have as many choices then, but we had some. Just to mention a few:
• The “slop shop” — awful food but it was right next to Danner.
• Pete's and Jack’s — where the mother of a future governor worked for a time.
• Berry’s Truck Stop — after everything else was closed.
• The Kingsway Supper Club at Paragould, where you could get a great steak for two and didn’t have to worry much about getting “carded.”
• Craighead Park — a good place to spark.
• Walcott, for picnicking, swimming and an annual leadership retreat, where each year Dean Moore got thrown into the pond — which may be why they called him "Frog," though never to his face.
• The Senath Light, where you could go on a summer night with your best girl or a group of guys to drink, tell scary stories and wait for that elusive light to come down the road.
Dean of Students Robert Moore especially was a force of life on campus during our years. He and Dean of Women Peggy Stroud could be scary because they could kick you out of school for almost any infraction. One night after a trip to Kingsway, a group of brothers who lived in the annex off the Danner ballroom, came back. Three of us knew that the best way to get to our rooms was through the basement and up the back stairs near our rooms in the ballroom annex. My little brother (a yearbook photographer) had to visit the communal bathroom on the second floor, where he was caught by Mr. Paxton with alcohol on his breath.
The next day I went to Dean Moore’s office with him. For his punishment, Dean Moore offered a deal. My little brother would provide him with free pictures for his alumni files for the rest of the year — Lindsay may still have some of them in her files — and he could stay in school. We eagerly accepted.
At A-State we learned about life, and we learned about death, too.
Our freshman year had barely started when President Kennedy, an idol to many of our generation, was assassinated. One day, while I was in my dorm room after returning from work at The Sun, I heard the shocking news of the shooting on the radio. I went to class anyway — Fine Arts Musical — where Evan Lindquist played somber classical music until ducking in to tell us that President Kennedy had died. After class I returned to the Sun; the presses had been stopped and a new edition was just being printed.
Going to college was a privilege. All able-bodied men were subject to the military draft, but you could get a college deferment, postponing what seemed like the inevitable. Men were required to take two years of ROTC, and many of my friends took the 4-year route that led to enlistment. All of us had friends who had been drafted, and some had friends who didn’t make it back. We also knew that leaving college because of finances, bad grades or social misbehavior could change your status to 1-A in a hurry.
The first time death really hit me personally was in January of my junior year. One of my two roommates, Mark Crow, a fraternity brother and chief photographer of the yearbook, was killed in an auto accident at Stuttgart, where he had gone to take pictures at another brother’s wedding. I had lost relatives, including my grandmother and grandfather, when I was too young to understand the finality of death. Losing Mark hit me so hard I couldn’t go back to our room for quite some time.
We graduated in 1967 on the high of university status, and Pat and I got married the day after Commencement. Our time at A-State prepared us for some dark years ahead, starting in 1968. We had grown up in a hurry for good reason.