Hi'iaka's Healing Herb Garden

UCSB

1. Dos Pueblos Hall

Freshman year we lived at Dos Pueblos Hall in Isla Vista. This was a residence hall but off campus. It was rumored that it belonged to Cactus Jack Curtis, the football coach for UCSB. I didn’t attend Freshman Orientation so my first taste of UCSB was driving to Dos Pueblos from Pasadena. For some reason I thought that Santa Barbara was off highway 99 and I clung to that delusion until I was almost at Bakersfield. I was able to find a shorter route through the mountains to the coast so I didn’t have to go all the way back to LA but the trip took an ungodly amount of time. Those were the days when gas was still under a dollar a gallon. Once I got there I thought the dining hall was a wonderful place. The food was only so-so but you could eat as much as you wanted to of everything. We had some strange people in our hall, but also some nice folks. The girls dorm was next door and boys were supposed to stay out of there. There was a young man with very short arms who I knew by sight from high school football games in Pasadena. The RAs, or Residence Assistants, were mostly football players, or ex-football players who had been injured. I got along OK with them because I was large and enjoyed playing Hearts. Over the first several months I went through several roommates and finally ended up by myself. This was OK with me as it allowed me to keep the thermostat at 60 and sleep on top of the covers and never make my bed. At some point my friends and I started a contest to see who could subvert the door locks the best. The doors were cheap hollow core doors with cheap locks that could be bypassed with a playing card. We tried to figure out ways of improving their security and found that driving some finishing nails into the door jamb around the lock would stop the cards from working. This talent has come in handy from time to time so you can’t say that I wasted my 4 years at UCSB.

There was a strange young man from Australia who pedaled his bike around town and always brought sticky sheets to the linen exchange once a week. There was one pair of roommates who drank a lot of wine and spent most of their time in their dorm room. One of my roommates was Ron Konove from New York, a short round faced boy with bulging eyes and a bad accent who’s favorite expression was “defenestrated duck.” I have no idea why all my roommates asked to move after living with me for short periods. Perhaps my long time roommates can shed some light on that. I smoked a pipe and cigars at that time and had found an ad in a comic book for 20 cigars for $5, so I was always able to supply smokes for the all night Hearts games in my room.

I had the use of my brother’s 1954 Mercury Monterey, which I thought was pretty classy. For that reason I was elected president of the dorm. That meant I was required to purchase and transport kegs for our beer parties. I had never had alcohol prior to this and had to develop a taste for beer, which I thought tasted very nasty. I was aided in this endeavor by my frugality as we often were unable to drain the kegs at our parties and I would try to fill up odd bottles and pitchers with the leftovers and drink them before they became too flat. During this time one of the denizens, Simon Cintz by name, was kind enough to teach me how to drive stick shift, which came in handy when I purchased my 1953 MG TD the next year. At one point someone accused me of running into their car in the parking lot and claimed that a smudge of green paint on the side was proof. I was apprehensive but knew I was innocent. I told my mother, who called my Uncle Ed, a board member of the Auto Club, who sent an investigator out to check on this. He said the level of the paint was inconsistent with my hitting the other car and that the green paint was not car paint anyway.

During this year there was also a spectacular auto accident when someone came barreling down our street under the influence and smashed into several parked cars and ended up wrapping his car around a telephone pole. A couple who had been making love in their parked car were very frightened but there were no major injuries as the drunk was too inebriated to tense up and walked away from the crash.

I started my college career as a Physics major. I thought it might be fun to be a physicist but I hadn’t taken calculus and my first semester class was using it. I was taking it at the same time but that didn’t really help. I was not encouraged by the early class sessions where the instructor told us that all that Euclidian stuff we had learned in High School was not really correct. The explanation of the Laurentz transformation was a good indication of how lost I was. Under the Laurentz transformation, if a train passes an intersection and a light on a rail car gives off a flash of light, then the light should expand in a spherical pattern both from the rail cars POV and also from the POV of a spectator at the crossing. My other big problem with Physics was that I broke most of the sensitive equipment they had within the first few weeks and was asked not to return to the lab. So that’s how I became a Psychology major.

Unfortunately I also became a beer drinking major and my GPA for second semester was a thrilling 1.9. On the plus side I was having a lot of fun. The gang of 4 had moved from Dos Pueblos to an apartment second semester and this is when I cemented our friendship as they would allow me to come over for supper after I had already eaten at the residence hall. In addition we spent a lot of our free time together learning the tough life lessons, like how best to embrace the porcelain throne when the bed twirlys caught up to you. The important thing to remember was that everything could be considered free time because our teachers didn’t care if we missed class.

It is important to know that I was a virgin throughout our entire college experience and actually had very few dates or girl friends. I found it easy to make friends with girls but almost impossible to ask one out on a date. I was friends with Nancy Vajretti, who supplemented her college income with a job as a topless dancer in Santa Barbara. I was friends with Mary Keeley, whose boyfriend, Greg, was one of my roomates Junior year. I was friends with Meredith Jan Foyle, as were the other guys. I did date a quiet young girl who had a habit of always smoking a cigarette and taking a drag when I tried to kiss her. My closest encounter with SEX was with a girl named Pam who was very nice and actually allowed me to kiss and fondle her. I always thought she had very hard breasts until the night she took me to her room and removed her bra and corset for a kissing session. I think she may have had a desire to engage in coitus but when I ejaculated in my pants I was so embarrassed that I fled and didn’t see her again. In one of my early Psych classes I did become fixated on a lovely young girl from Altadena named Cynthia Lynn Oldfield. I would just sit and stare at her throughout the class until her girlfriends accosted me in the hall and informed me that she was engaged to be married and did not appreciate my attentions.

I thought that Isla Vista was a great place, with so many fast food places to choose from and a pool hall besides. Every Tuesday they would have Twofer Tuesday and you would get two items for the price of one. We got a lot of good eats from there. The guys persuaded me to join in a taco eating contest at one point and I diligently trained for a month by eating and drinking extra at Dos Pueblos. When the fateful day arrived, however, I was put off by the poor quality of the tacos and refused to finish. I hope that no one was betting on me.