Memory loss and letters from Minneapolis

There's a lot I don't remember about the transition from Buffalo to Minneapolis during the late spring of 1970.  When did I pack up my belongings and head back to Warren?  What did I do for the three weeks I lived at home?  How did I get to Cleveland, from where Mike and I flew to Minneapolis?  (Greyhound bus, I assume, as that was a common form of transportation for college students back then.  It would be another year before I took up hitchhiking.) 

I also have no memory of my brother Larry wearing a graduation gown, or his attending either of the above events.  A partial answer is found in the first letter, dated 6/13/1970, I wrote to my parents from my summer residence.

Well here I am in Minneapolis.  Mike and I left Tuesday instead of Wednesday.

In other words, I boarded a plane, my first time flying, on the morning of Larry's graduation day.  Not that I would have attended had I still been in Warren.  With 441 graduates, the Warren Area High School class of 1970 was the largest to date.  Distributing more than two tickets per student would likely have packed the gym well beyond fire code limits.  Besides, the memory of the oppressively sweltering atmosphere of my graduation two years earlier -- the school had no air-conditioning -- left me with no desire to revisit the experience.

The above page from the 1970 Dragon yearbook adds another lost memory to the list.   Larry's photo is found on a page of underachievers, for the most part.  He claims to have been involved in just one school activity during his 3 years at WAHS:  wrestling, during his sophomore year.   He would have been a member of the junior varsity squad, but his name and face are nowhere to be found on the two pages of the 1968 Dragon devoted to the sport.  He could have very well tried out for the team.  During my senior year, my focus was not on the family.  I spent most of my weekends and occasional weeknights in the company of friends, enjoying the moment but, at the same time, eagerly looking forward to college and getting out of Warren.  Getting out for good.

Larry's major high-school activity was his involvement with Upper Class Men (UCM), one of the fraternities that operated underground.  UCM was considered the most inspirational, the highest on the social pecking order.  If athletes or scholars dared to join -- not that the two groups were mutually exclusive -- they risked expulsion from a sports team or found themselves ineligible for National Honor Society membership.   During my high school years, fraternities and sororities were strictly social organizations.  I have no memory -- there's that phrase again -- of their doing any good works:  volunteering, fundraising, and the like. 

During my freshman year of college, I probably spent as much time writing letters to high school friends -- Mike, Mardi, Mark, Barb, Joan, Kathy, Gary, Cam, Jodee, Dody, Gail, Renee, Tina -- than I did attending classes and studying.  And what a faithful correspondent I was, dashing off a letter a day or two after I receiving one in the mail.  When it came to writing to my parents, however, I was much less constant, to Mom's frequent consternation.  She wrote to me on weekly basis, he chatty letters filled with a wealth of domestic about life in the Nelson household after I left for college.  (I very much regret waiting until 1978 to keep them.)

In a change of habit, I wrote weekly letters to my parents during the 2 1/2 months I spent in Minneapolis.  And to my delight, I discovered, while sorting through Mom's things after she died, that she had kept all 9 handwritten letters.  As a result, I am able to set the record straight on how I obtained a summer job at Dayton's.  It wasn't as effortless as I previously claimed.

Thursday afternoon Mike and I went downtown looking for jobs.  We made the mistake of going to employment agencies and we found nothing.  We were in this one guy's office for 15 minutes while he was talking to us.  He told us what 'nice-looking, All-American' kids we were but that we should get haircuts.  We got a big kick out of this man; he was really strange.  So anyway, yesterday afternoon we went back downtown and wound up going to all of the department stores.  So here's the good news.  I got a job at Dayton's.  It's janitorial work (night maintenance).  In other words, I clean the floors after closing.  I work five nights a week, four hours a night.  The starting pay rate is $2.70/hour.  And for part-time work, you can't beat that.  

As for Mike's lack of success, I provided my parents with a unusually harsh summary in the following week's letter.  

Mike went back to Cleveland.  He got a job at school through some woman he knows there.  I really don't know about that kid.  He could have easily found a job here, but I guess he just panicked about being this far away from home, without a job, and living off the money his father gave him.  And he wanted to go to California this summer!  That kid really has a lot to learn, and what happened to him here will set him back a few paces since he didn't even give himself a chance.  Oh, well.

As I would have signed off 50 years ago, I guess that's about all for now.