Fond memories of 'going away to school' in the ‘60s

Before escaping to college in New Mexico in 1966, I had never had a real boyfriend in high school. The era had the warm golden tones and the coming-of-age aura of those late-1960s movies like "The Graduate," "Love Story" and "Goodbye Columbus."

My parents dropped me off after a cross-country drive heading west on Route 66, passing under the St. Louis Arch, aka The Gateway to the West. Our car broke down in Tulsa, Okla.; the trunk and roof were weighted down with footlockers, and among the baggage were 25 starched white blouses that my grandmother had put herself in the hospital ironing. She had a water-filled Coke bottle with a hole punched into the bottle cap which she used to sprinkle the blouses before putting the hot iron on them, soliciting the "hiss" from the iron accompanied by a cloud of steam on the late-summer afternoons before my leave-taking.

Actually, I had no intention of wearing these and planned to ditch them as soon as possible. My favorite piece of clothing was a funky gray denim shirt that I bought in a T-shirt shop on the Rehoboth Beach Boardwalk that had "Wanted – State Prison" printed on its back. More about this later.

Finally, my parents dropped me off at the curb of the dorm and headed east, fearing that I would be homesick. I wasn't! My mother had already alienated my dorm mates by bragging about the 25 white blouses and my extensive wardrobe that looked like it was meant for a city college in the 1930s, as hers had been.

I wanted a fresh start, and fortunately my father, looking like a rancher with his twinkly eyes and weather-beaten face, had charmed everyone, including the dean of women, whose office he had visited to ask her to take good care of me. This was in the time when dorm checks were carried out at 10 p.m. by the dorm mother. Gentlemen callers had to visit the front desk and court you on the lobby sofas.

My parents, believing that I had been a homebody who spent Friday and Saturday nights watching films about the anthologies of Guy de Maupassant on PBS, or wistfully turning the globe of the world while dreaming of adventure, thought I would never be a "wild child." They signed a document stating that I was free to leave campus on weekends. I immediately took a Greyhound bus to Albuquerque with three other students, carrying my overnight clothes in my roller skate trunk as a suitcase.

An initiation ritual at New Mexico Highlands University, nestled in the heart of the northern Sangre de Cristo (Blood of Christ) mountain range, was called Whitewashing the H on Hermit's Peak. I had no intention of participating in this activity! The first Saturday, school buses pulled up in front of my dorm, Melody Hall. Football players rushed in to herd us out. I hid in the stall of the bathroom I shared with three other dorm mates. Of course, they captured me with no problem, sending me to the waiting buses.

Wearing the denim work shirt that said "Wanted – State Prison," I was about to climb a mountain in the Rockies. On the bus, I sat next to a boy from The Bronx. I looked back and saw another boy and girl, him from Chicago, her from West Texas. These were to become my freshman friends. Yes, I saw him and he saw me! I didn't think much of it at first, but he, the tall, lanky midwesterner, pulled me up the mountain called Hermit's Peak.

The football players had fortunately forgotten us and were wielding buckets of whitewash way up the slope. Being natural-born slackers, my group sat and roasted hot dogs and marshmallows over a bonfire. The seductive smell of roasting piñon wood permeated the air. When we returned to town we parted, and the other girl, Nona, latched onto the boy like a barnacle, so I sort of forgot about him except for seeing him in the cafeteria or playing Simon and Garfunkel's "The Sound of Silence" on the record player in the student center.

However, he (his name was Gene King) would throw pebbles at my window at night, standing below in his sheepskin coat, and I would lean out, my then-long hair flowing down Rapunzel-like. The girl from the Lone Star State flunked out and didn't return for sophomore year. She apparently couldn't handle romance and passing classes at the same time.

As the leaves fell that autumn of 1969, I heard the sound of pebbles hitting my window once again, and there he was! We went to watercolor class and purchased blocks of exotic pink watercolor paper from France, and strolled through the town painting on street corners for the next six years.

He finally dropped out and had to sell paintings to get by. Somehow I could manage to paint and pass! I stayed and got a master's degree in painting despite devoting much of my time to painting local scenes and walking around town with Gene. At freshman orientation, they had told us to look left and right, and one of the people sitting there would probably not graduate. If you do happen to graduate from college, you have proven that you can at least bring something to completion.

My graduation finally came and there were no more classes to take. I remember feeling sad because I would have to leave Las Vegas, New Mexico, and the people and town I had come to love. My father had passed away, and my mother remarried before I graduated. I now had a new stepfather to drive me home. I felt sad as I saw Hermit's Peak fading in the back window of the car carrying me east. The love of art and painting came home with me, and I eventually found another, more lasting love to replace Gene King. I started painting the area where I grew up, and I began to see old, familiar buildings and scenes with a fresh eye as I fell in love with coastal Sussex all over again!