Oh we had a small tv in our room - SMALL. We watched General Hospital on it.
We bought all our books at the SBX.
We had a tub! It was awesome! My freshman dorm was really a neat old building. The tub was a deep soaking tub in its own little room. We all wanted to use it…for bubble baths!
I should add…we had daily maid service at this college. They cleaned everything very well…and made our beds, and gave us fresh towels every day! No I’m not making that up!
We had sit down dinners every night. Guys were required to wear a tie and jacket. Women has to wear dresses or skirts. Meals were served to the students. No cafe line!
We used a coat hangar for the tv and Luke and Laura were must watch tv. Like 3pm I recall.
We had a phone in our dorm room but it was only for local calls. Long distance calls required the pay phone in the hallway on the next floor up. My roommate had a small dorm fridge she rented - I am pretty sure it cost more to rent each semester than we paid to buy our kids their much-fancier dorm fridges eons later.
Drinking age was 18 & there were happy hours with ridiculously low priced drinks. We drank free beer at fraternity parties & we left the cups wherever when we got asked to dance … then drank from the cups afterward without any thought about safety. Frankly, we were young, dumb & incredibly lucky.
I went to a very small engineering school where our course choices were very limited. We requested elective courses on paper one semester & then got our schedules after standing in line on the first day of the following semester. We were always happy if we actually got what we requested. If not, we just took what we were given. We also stood in line to pay on the first day of each semester, and tuition was low enough it was possible to do it without loans.
No personal computers back then. Computer programming was done with cards. I actually could program in FORTRAN & COBOL back then.
@thumper1 , I want to live at your college NOW! Must have been a small or fancy one!
No microwaves back then either. A hot pot. Can’t remember if we had/were allowed other small appliances. I feel like none of my friends drank coffee.
For fun and when we were really tired of cafeteria food we would buy a Jiffy mix from the store and make cake and frosting using the one stove in the lower level (basement) of the large dorm. And then proceed to eat it all.
Late night runs to the 7/11 type convenience store across the large parking lot for bags of cheese curls and chips.
3.2 beer.
@abasket my first college was tiny. 900 students total.
All four years, I lived in a private dorm called Scottish Rite Dormitory (SRD). The joke was that the acronym stood for “Spoiled Rotten Daughters.” Similar to Thumper, we had sit-down lunches and dinners. We had to wear dresses only on Sundays, though. The maids cleaned our rooms and changed our sheets. We had a beautiful swimming pool. College guys were our waiters. Men were allowed on the halls only a few Sunday afternoons a year.
Since tuition was only $4/credit hour, I guess my parents didn’t mind splurging on the dorm. It was the same one my mom lived in. I always assumed my daughter would, too, but she couldn’t get into UT as an OOS student.
We watched reruns of “The Prisoner” in the lounge downstairs. I had an electric typewriter I bought the first week of college, which was a definite step up from the manual I’d used in high school. When I took calculus I used to go to the Science Library and check out calculators with reverse Polish notation. I don’t even know what that is anymore!
I’m not so old that I remember punch cards. But my best friend in high school took a computer programming course that seemed to involve miles of tape. By the time I took an intro CS course we had monitors hooked up to a mainframe. The main problem was that they were always occupied and I really did not feel like doing my project at 2 am.
Thanks to a gap year I turned 18 the first week of college. My poor roommate though was 17 and as soon as she turned 18, Massachusetts raised the drinking age to 19.
The first time I saw the Wizard of Oz in color was in my dorm lounge. I was wowed when they went to the land of Oz and everything was in…color!
Boys in the dorms…not at my freshman college…not at all.
But I transferred to a public university in 1970 fall, and guys were allowed in the dorm rooms but had to leave at a certain time. Of course…they didn’t!
Anyone else hitch hike? We didn’t think twice about doing it at the time!
Yes I hitch hiked home many times. 2 and half hour ride and it included the mass pike. Often with a large pillowcase of clothes. I swear to my parents that this story is true. Standing for hours trying to get a ride at the toll booth before the pike entrance. Nobody stopped.
And not what you think happened. Until one guy who seemed normal. Where are you going and he was going all the way and past my exit off another highway. Godsend. Yes in a strange way. After a few minutes he asked if I believe in Jesus. I said yes I’m a Catholic. He said not that way. Had I been saved. I said no. He slowed into the breakdown lane. Said sorry he would have to let me out. Unless I would consider being saved. Thinking about my options to said sure. We went outside kneeled and he prayed and I followed along. He had tears of joy and all. I got back into the car and asked him if I could mediate on my conversion so I would avoid having to talk as much as possible. A couple of hours later he stopped me off nearly at home. I purposely had him drop me off a few miles away.
I got out and said no one will ever believe this story. I was broke and school was over and needed a ride. And it wasn’t like I was robbing a bank. But it stuck with me a long time as quite troubling despite his good intentions. Maybe he had a quota that day or something.
I went to a UC long before they were impossible to get into. I didn’t even pick the school. I did a gap year at a college in Spain because I graduated HS as a junior so my Mom just sent me a letter and told me where I was going when I got back. I don’t have any idea how she ‘applied’ and it never occurred to me to even ask.
Phones at the end of the hall, collect calls home once a week. Even though my parents lived 2 or 3 hrs away they did not visit. I do not even remember a moving in day. My Mom probably dropped me off. My roommate was the only child of a famous Hollywood Producer and brought a horse to school that was stabled across the street! We lived in the first dorms that were coed and that was a novelty. The boys were on the other side of the building.
My claim to fame was my fancy electric typewriter. I got up to 100 words a minute and made some cash typing final papers staying up all night. I think I did them for free for the cute boys.
In my dorm, we didn’t have phones in the rooms so we left messages for our dorm friends on a bulletin board in the lobby. Old school texting. We also had buzzers in our rooms which would buzz once or twice. If it buzzed once, Roommate “one” would go down to the lobby desk to find out why they were being summoned: a visitor, a delivery, etc.
We had phones in our rooms and called home every Sunday night after 9pm (cheaper rates) and talked for a max of 20 minutes. I had a hot pot, an air popcorn popper, and incense. Tons of posters and photos and Love is… cut outs taped on my walls.
My favorite thing about my dorm was the Shampoo Room on each floor. It had 3 large sinks with handheld shower heads so you could wash your hair. On the wall were three hair dryers, similar to the normal hand dryers, but attached on the walls at head level. They were so powerful! I could turn my head upside down and have dry hair pretty fast - and my hair was really long. It was the closest thing to straightening my hair that existed back then.
I had a typewriter and made a little extra money typing papers for guys who didn’t want to type. Our 17 story dorm buildings had the roofs open! We could go up there and lay out/hang out with friends on sunny days.
We had ride boards where you would post or tear off a phone number and call and get a ride home and back from a stranger.
Our lobby common areas had a baby grand piano and a pool table. I loved being able to play piano while away at school.
@showmom858 - lol. We somehow got those long-distance codes, too! Clearly not as bright as you and your peers, as we (basically the entire campus) eventually got caught. So, yes, we had phones in our dorm rooms. I remember my roommate and my having to sit down and go through the paper bill figuring out who had made each of the calls.
We had a TV in our dorm room and watched All My Children every day. We got dressed up for Greg and Jenny’s wedding. ?
Boys were allowed in our all-women’s dorm, but only during certain hours and they had to have an escort. So there was a lobby phone and they would call from the lobby and you’d have to go down and get them and bring them up to your room.
We also had “racks” in our rooms. These lofted the beds so you could at least sit underneath them. We had our TV under ours on one end and a little loveseat on the other. We climbed on the built-in desks to get into our beds. When I was in school, everyone built and assembled their own racks. I think a year or so after I graduated the school started “issuing” them and no one could have homemade racks anymore. I think they decided everyone doing their own was a huge liability issue.
In 1981 I showed up at school during freshman orientation with a backpack. Just a backpack. I had been traveling around England and Scotland for a month with a friend on a trip we paid for ourselves and it was too expensive to fly home to CA afterwards so I planned my trip to coincide with the start of school in PA. All I had was the clothes I had backpacked in until the boxes I packed from home arrived. I had no appliances except a typewriter. I had packed a mug from home and I bought myself a coffee maker of the style that is now referred to as “pour over” but in those days was just Melita filter (as opposed to automatic or percolated).
There was one TV in the whole dorm and it was in the common room. Each hall had a phone you could be called on but you couldn’t make calls out. If the hall phone rang and you were feeling charitable you’d answer it but then you’d need to walk down the hall and knock on the door of the student who was being called.
I wrote long letters to my parents over a weeks time or more. I always wrote on lined paper in my notebooks and sometimes forgot to rip them out to mail them so I still have a couple. We only spoke on the phone once a week so mail was essential. We had a massive wall of glass fronted mailboxes where student notices and personal mail was distributed. It was so exciting to see a real envelope when someone wrote you - and so sad to only have “circulars” from the school in your box.
I went to a California community college out of HS and hitchhiked back and forth every day. Easy and cheaper than the bus! Occasionally I’d walk, about an hour each way. I took a math or chemistry class, struggled with the slide rule and was so jealous of the “rich kids” who had the first calculators, $100 to $125 HP models. A month’s rent in a shared house was $35 or so, so a calculator was far beyond my means.
Much of my HS graduating class went to the local very good community college and transferred to the UCs or CSU. A friend from my California HS town who taught here at U of Wisconsin said she rarely admits she went to a community college as the perception these days, in this part of the country is quite different.
My sorority house had a phone booth on each floor. Every night someone had her turn on “hostess duty” and did her studying in the little foyer where the phone was. When it rang you put the caller on hold and ran upstairs and found the girl being called. She then went to the phone booth (closet with glass door) to talk. There were only two lines, so when both were busy you could get some chem problems done. There was also a board with cup hooks and a tag with each girls name on it. If you left the house you flipped your tag over to read OUT, so that the girl on hostess duty knew not to run all over trying to find you. If you went out without “flipping out” and got a call you would hear about it in the morning! And sometimes a girl would be “flipped out” but have a note stuck on her hook that read “but don’t tell my parents”… so the hostess would make up an excuse about how she couldn’t find their daughter!
Of course, what was often remembered about HP calculators was that they used post-fix / RPN.
OMG, the memories you all have reminded me of…the non-electric typewriter, the excitement of the electric typewriter (might not have been til grad school), onion skin paper, erasing the onion skin paper too many times and it ripping, white out, the first ATM my junior (?) year…
Freshman year I attended a school with 719 students. Sophomore year I transferred to a large UC and my first class held 800 and was standing room only.
Yes to hitchhiking (I shudder at some of the risks my friends and I took). Spoke with my family probably less than once a week. Had a long distance bf and remember being oh so careful about when to call and how long to talk. Oddly, my mother just told me that she’s on a similar plan with her landline. I had no idea those plans still existed where minutes late at night and weekends were less expensive.
So many had similar experiences as me.
As you know I love fashion. Well, remember Candie’s slipon high heels in all the colors? I wore those to class. Yep, clip clipped my way around campus the fall of my freshman year, along with my skinny jeans. . I swear that’s what intrigued my now husband, Haha!