The TV Room

Rice Hall Dormitory like the other two freshman dorms had a large common room on the first floor.  The main entrance to the dorm opened up to this room and the first floor's central corridor branched off to each side.   There were vending machines on the wall just inside the entrance.  The common room had a television on one end and a phone booth (with a pay phone) on the other.   Around the television was an assortment of chairs and couches.  

This was standard practice in those days,  I enjoyed a similar setup in Sage Hall at Cornell and one summer in West Residence Hall at Greensboro College.   Probably amazing to a student these days nobody had their own television set and everyone in the dorm relied on that single phone.  Of course with long distance charges for calls there was an incentive to keep things brief and instead write detailed letters home.    

This was the social center of the dorm,  with capacity crowds for shows like Laugh-In, The Smothers Brothers, The Avengers,  It Takes A Thief,  Johnny Carson,  NFL football on Sundays (Monday Night Football would not start until 1970),  and NCAA football on Saturdays.  It was the first season of The Mod Squad,  Land of the Giants,  and Here Comes The Brides.   Wild Wild West was in its last season.   Another huge contrast with today was NBC,  ABC, and CBS were the only stations.  

I got my first television set in June 1969,  a tiny B&W portable.  By 1974 I would upgrade to a tiny color portable.

"That Girl" was midway through its five year run and ran immediately after (and in the winter immediately before) "Bewitched" on Thursday nights.   Somewhat surprisingly it had a good following in the dorm.   It was not a special favorite of mine but in retrospect it was original enough to be well worth watching and even significant.    The "Pop" bottle in the image reminds me of another language adjustment for those of us coming from the Midwest.  We had to get used to soft drinks being referred to as "soda" and not "pop".