Animal House 30th Anniversary?

[Riverkilt]

What is frightening to me is that I lived like Animal House (well nearly) when I was at Oregon State 1962-5 when my blood alcohol level did exceed my GPA.

We did drive up to a small college in Dallas, Oregon looking for dates, but never with that dead coed scam. We did drink beer in the PeeDee, Oregon cemetary a lot. We were really really drunk a lot.

Lots of wild antics and amazingly lots of wild coeds who actually liked the fun and games. Our fraternity chapter room was converted into a small casino on weekends.

I do remember some of the fun. I also remember getting very very drunk chugging Thunderbird wine early on a Friday evening. Passing out and blacking out in the rain on the back lawn. Somehow, later that night, I climbed four flights of stairs to the sleeping porch and drug myself into a top bunk...or I must have because that's where I woke up late Sunday afternoon. I have no memory and apparently didn't move from my deep passout/alcohol coma/ or residual withdrawal seizure for about 46 hours.

When I woke up I thought it was Saturday and I actually believed my fraternity brothers had a phony Sunday paper made up to fool me into thinking it was Sunday like on Mission Impossible.

I managed to get mononucleosis from heavy dating and was laid up in the university hospital on the Marine Corps birthday. The guys in my Marine Option NROTC unit actually made a "raid" in camos to the upper floor of the hospital to hijack me and take me to the Marine kegger. By the grace of God an old Army nurse caught them carrying me down the fire stairs and only by shouting at them that if I drank my spleen would explode and I'd die did they agree to carry me back to my hospital bed. I woulda drunk for sure.

Excuse me....having both a little euphoric recall and gratitude at the same time.

As my grandfather Murdoch often said, "Them were the days." And, while I didn't live the Animal House story, my life in college was so very similar - in attitude anyway - that the movie brings back what memories weren't lost to blackout drinking.

Some of it was twisted. When Kennedy was assassinated we already had a dance scheduled for that night. We had a very solem fraternity meeting and in our logic we decided as a group that the President would have wanted us to party....so we did...big time.

But some of that insanity was fueled by the Cold War. During the Cuban Missile Crisis we were called back to our armories to put the firing pins back into our 1903 Springfield drill rifles. That made it real obvious that the mobilization was full scale. Big stuff to give the ROTC kids firing pins for their drill rifles.

Those were the days when as an engineering student I carried a slide rule...no calculators...jeez am I olde or what!!??

And now Animal House is 30??

Ron