After graduating from high school in June, 1969, I entered the University of Wisconsin, Madison that fall, in the school of Liberal Arts as a pre-med major. It was a tragic year to be on that campus, one of extreme unrest that would spill into the next year. We were set up to fail, if you consider the series of horrific world events that just seemed to keep coming, highlighted by the Tet offensive in Vietnam, the assassinations of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King, the 1968 Democratic Convention Riots in Chicago, and on and on and on...
College was inevitable for me, something I was always supposed to do, and it seemed that I had no choice but to follow this path. But I was miserable and very disillusioned with life, in general, and life in the US, in particular, and also totally unmotivated, not about school, but about everything, which is never a good way to enter college, especially when you consider that my supposed field of "interest," to become a physician, required total commitment and mastery of the "pre-med" curriculum, which meant getting a perfect 4.0 grade point average or don't even consider going to med school. My parents were living in Europe, my sister was a brand new unwed mother living near the campus...I had nowhere else to go, I guess.
The drinking age in Wisconsin was 18 back then, so my friends and I spent the majority of our time drunk and/or stoned. As a matter of fact, our dorm, Ogg East, and our floor, the seventh floor of Leath House, which had earned a reputation as a total "zoo," was equipped with a bar in the basement. All dorm residents had to do was hit "B" in the elevator (which stood for "beer" back then), buy a couple of pitchers of brew, and bring them back upstairs. It was awesome...It was either a dodge or a time of experimentation, but everyone seemed to be high on something: many students were experimenting with alcohol or other drugs, and even the gunners were high on college. My next door dorm mates tripped every day; in fact, they gave their pet cat so much acid it walked out of their seventh floor window one day--demonstrating that many hippies weren't that cool...often they/we were just a bunch of screwed up dopers. My own roommate smoked dope constantly and tripped frequently, and we only lived three feet away from each other--there was no escape...That was my life at the turn of the decade--the hippie movement was still moving, though it was on its last legs, as history would sho...
