I started out working the kitchen in the dorm at U Albany … gathering food, setting tables, serving, clearing, etc. If one ever needs a lesson in humility, that would be it. Having to wear a nylon blue uniform with pad and pencil in apron pocket … made to stand perfectly still and silent … to run and fetch … all for your dormmates as they enjoy their breakfast and dinner. It was the perfect job to teach one to keep the eye on the prize. By the third year, RA (resident assistant) jobs were there, if one was lucky. I was lucky. We had a floor to work … to keep somewhat orderly in terms of helping students where help was needed … and making sure none got themselves in untenable situations. After five years there, I was ready for the next job … mind you, these jobs paid for room & board & tuition (or parts thereof) so each was critical to being able to get the degree necessary for not falling back to waiting tables. So, with that foundation, I was able to secure the job of Dorm Director while working on the next step … the degree allowing the recent table mistress to wander around in the heads of the unsuspecting.
So … being a dorm director in the mid-1960s was a real treat. We were still harbouring ideas of in loco parentis while the outside world was in the midst of all sorts of “revolutions” … the sexual revolution … the civil rights movement … weed abundant and relevant to the times … Viet Nam protests. Timothy Leary came to the Buffalo campus as did the Black Panthers and Dick Gregory. It was moderately amusing to watch White students rallying around a “Get Whitey” speech but equally disturbing as well … to see the former prof, Leary, stoned out of his mind and making virtually no sense while getting a contact high oneself … to live for two years in a dorm apartment located above the U’s recruitment office … where Dow Chemical, supplier of “stuff” for the war a world away was being picketed and threatened with being blown sky high … indeed, it was an education in and of itself! During these years, I felt very responsible for the 125+ girls in my charge … I was far too young to fully understand that I had as much control over their well-being as the mouse does the hawk. But I did my very best. Over and over, I tried to impress upon them the dangers lurking all around them.
One evening, there was quite a commotion at the end of the first floor corridor leading to my apartment. Five girls from two different rooms had barricaded themselves in one of their rooms. The RA had come running for me. We were both puzzled. Once I was able to get the girls out and in the apt., I asked what could possibly have created the need for their bizarre behavior. They said they were being harassed by the other girls. Although I like to imagine that I have a certain colour blindness where people are concerned, it was pretty easy to notice five Black girls in one dorm on a campus of twenty thousand dormies and townees. These were tough kids from NYC but wildly outnumbered and quite possibly very sensitive to being a severe minority for the first time in their young lives. There was no proof, no one was being pointed to as a perpetrator … it was a stand off. The one thing that I clearly recall was asking why they didn’t tell the RA. The answer: “She was like the pO-lice.” Well, why not tell me? says I. The answer: “You is like the Chief of pO-lice.” I was a bit insulted but somehow we all reached detente. We so often think of Blacks as in the minority … and, indeed, they are when overall US stats are considered. But these girls came from a place where they were always a majority … think Harlem … where homes, schools, stores, theaters, etc. are all contained in a circumscribed area. That dorm, that university, took them as far from their comfort zone as a trip to Zimbabwe might have been to their very Caucasian peers.
The girls were just tasting freedom for the first time … so unlike our college students fifty years later … boys, drugs, booze, late hours … FREEDOM … from home, parents, siblings, teachers, clergy, and any all who might draw the chain close to the jugular. From my first monthly meeting in September to the last in June, I begged them to not walk the campus alone at night. Sadly, over and over, I had to deal with a drunk girl who had been grabbed or nearly grabbed as she struggled on the route from a main Street bar back to Schoellkopf at some late hour. Hysterics were always abundant and the campus security force not quite up to the task.