A photo in last week’s Optic shows an old house on the Highlands campus dwarfed by a most imposing, new building, the new residence hall designed to accommodate 262 students, as part of the university’s burgeoning enrollment.
As I drove two friends — one a student I’m hoping to recruit — around campus, I led an impromptu tour, which included memories of the area.
An aerial photo in the registrar’s office shows the university circa 1950.
Things have changed: Wilson Complex, now a staple for almost anything athletic, isn’t in that photo. Nor is the paved running track or even Tyrone Music Building. Instead, the old women’s gym (the gym was old, not necessarily the women), which also contained the bookstore, appears on the spot of the Kennedy parking lot.
It was inevitable that the few blocks north of National, along Ninth, 10th and 11th streets, would lose their residential flavor as the campus grew north. I remember Agnes and Mary Lou, classmates from Immaculate Conception school, who lived in that area.
There was a barely functional power plant, whose skeleton remains in the San Francisco- Sulzbacher area. On Saturdays, two Freds, one Leroy, one Billy and I would enter the ancient building to nose around. Like most kids, we had a theory about the assorted switches and buttons, which we touched with no hesitation but feared to move.
For example, in any strange structure we entered, we puzzled over various buttons and switches. All of us theorized that several of the buttons would activate some kind of mammoth cement mixer which would swallow us whole. And the red button — if you pressed that — the building would explode.
Where did we get those notions? Were they a result of the convergence of hyperactive imaginations and an overdose of horror movies? I wonder whether anyone ever deliberately erected a building whose sole function was to vaporize when some imp from Railroad Avenue pressed a button or pulled a switch.
The first time we entered the almost-abandoned power plant north of the HU campus, we five fanned out in different directions to enjoy our conception of Frankenstein’s workshop. Seeing an array of buttons, I dared the others to press the one button guaranteed to level the entire campus.
But before we got the chance to wreak havoc, a watchman, who never said a word, flung his arm with a motion for all of us to get out. Standing closest to him, I’d noticed all his digits intact. He reached for a hook — the kind farmers use to pick up a bale of hay — to punctuate his request that we leave. We left, as he made a lazy swing with the hook.
Outside, I spookified the adventure, telling my buddies the man had a hook in place of a hand, and I may have convinced them, given that F,F,L and B were farther away at the time, and suddenly a block away upon hearing my report.
We’d often wait until the watchman left the building before entering through the porous doors and windows, expecting that bravado would overtake one of us, causing a San Francisco-type explosion.
• • •
Billy’s father worked for the highway department and had access to discarded tires from heavy equipment. One such tire had been brought to a house on Railroad Avenue, possibly to serve as a giant planter or even a bench where people could sit in the circle while roasting wieners.
The tire was gigantic, with a circumference of possibly 25 feet. We “proved” this by having all five of us lie on it, head to toe, in a circle. Standing up, the tire was easily 9 feet tall and took five kids to lift.
Several of us uprighted the tire and rolled it from Railroad Avenue up Columbia Avenue, all the way to the Mora Avenue area, where the hill goes back down. It was the closest hill not heavily traveled by car.
It must have been quite a sight, a handful of boys rolling a huge ‘Dozer tire. We got stares as we went past the Silk Stocking Districts on Sixth, Seventh and Eighth.
Approaching the slope where the road goes downhill, two of us got into the tire, the same way someone might insert an inner tube, our backs to the tread, facing toward the middle. Soon there was no need to push the tire anymore; it took on a life of its own as it sped down the hill toward the residences in the area that now includes a dormitory. Superman himself couldn’t have slowed it down.
One of the Freds and I, the two occupants of the tire, clocked our speed at 56 mph — or at least that’s what we told our friends later on.
Actually, 10 mph would have been more realistic. We felt the impact as the tire leveled an outbuilding, but we were shielded from excessive pain when the tire later stopped dead against a solid wall.
The real pain was in colliding with Fred when one of us got ejected from the tire and landed against the other. The dust we stirred up and inhaled didn’t help either.
We hadn’t intended any vandalism and hoped that anyone living in that area would inquire first about our condition, and then ask why we did it.
We left the tire as a donation and spent the walk home agreeing on the most plausible and convincing version of the tale we’d unfold to our parents, who’d likely heard about our antics only minutes after they occurred.
We agreed on this version: “Mom, in case you heard about some kids crashing a big tire into a wall, well, it wasn’t us. It was probably some kids from the other side of town.”
A few years later, a shiny building named Melody Hall went up on the site of our tire shenanigans. And for a while we believed our tireless efforts helped pave the way to clear the area for the residence hall.
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