Questions About This Mornings Post

One of my young friends from back in my Grove Avenue youth group days asked me a couple of questions earlier today about this morning’s blog. The first question was about my trip out west after high school which caused me to miss my first Fall semester at U of R. He wanted details! The second question concerned how I managed to pay for the rest of my college experience after my dad forced me to pay my first semesters tuition with my own money. Since he asked, I will attempt an answer to both questions in what promises to be perhaps the most boring blog post in the nearly nine year history of The Tempest. 

After I graduated from Patrick Henry high school in June of 1976, I was not ready for college. I wasn’t ready for anything that looked or felt like being a grown up. So, along with my best friend, Al Thomason, I hatched a plan that would buy me some time. The two of us got jobs working in the warehouse of Lowe’s Hardware on Broad Street. We signed up for every shift they would give us. Our plan was to save every dime we made and blow it all on a cross country back-packing odyssey out west. While the rest of our friends would be moving into freshman dorms, we would be on the mother of all road trips cross country, heading for the Rocky Mountains. We both left Richmond on August 12th with $1,000 of cash each. Seven weeks later we wound up totally broke and almost out of gas near Bluefield, West Virginia. Luckily for us, we knew a freshman at Bluefield College who allowed us to crash in his room. His dorm took up a collection for us so we could make it home. Those seven weeks are mostly a blur now, but some of the highlights involved the Bad Lands in South Dakota, Mt. Rushmore, a rodeo in Gillette, Wyoming, Glacier Park, Montana and a motorcycle mechanic and his very hot gypsy girlfriend, Yellowstone, and a series of cowboy bars in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. The hiking was incredible, the life experiences even more so. Needless to say, my parents didn’t think much of my plan, thinking it dangerous and foolhearty. They were right.

Here we were, ten minutes before leaving on our trip. My dad probably was looking at us while Mom took this picture and thinking...What could possibly go wrong??

Now, as far as the second question goes...its a bit harder to piece together. Basically, I was only able to afford to go to U of R if I commuted, and even then, I couldn’t really afford it. My dad was a Baptist preacher and I was the last of his four college attending kids, so A. Dad didn’t make much money and B. By the time I came along he was tapped out. So that meant I had to find a job. Lucky for me, I did...building pallets and assembling shelving in an un-air conditioned, and unheated warehouse in the Hanover Industrial Air Park for a company called Trefz & Steenburgh. In the four and a half years it took me to graduate from college, I worked every single week, 25 hours, from 12:30 to 5:30 every day, Monday thru Friday. During the summers I worked full time there and built decks with my buddy Al on weekends. The money I was able to make over the summers helped keep the amount I would have to borrow in the fall more manageable. The money I made from that job...about $175 a week after taxes paid for about a third of the costs. Everything else was financed through loans that my dad co-signed for me and educational loans from an outfit called the Charles B. Keesee Fund. I graduated with roughly $18,000 in Keesee loans in 1981. It took me ten years to pay them all off.

So, there you have it.