Higher education

When I went to college in San Francisco, (Healds Engineering College.) I lived at a residence club at 220 Gough street, San Francisco 2, California. Yep, before the five digit zip code!

People at the residence club would spend a great amount of time trying to guess what country I was from. The most common guess was England. I had never lived anywhere out of the Eel River Valley, and had been to very few places. So when I moved to San Francisco, I was trying desperately to hide my “Hickyness”. I talked even slower than I normally would, and was careful to pronounce every word. The “pigeon jabbering” San Franciscans were very difficult for me to understand. It was like a foreign language to me.

I went straight from being a choker setter one Friday, to being a student the next Monday. There was not enough food in the world to fill my stomach. It was fortunate that there was a Chinese Restaurant right next door, "Bucky's Cuisine", and they had pork fried noodles to go, for fifty cents a bowl. The residence club served breakfast and dinner and that was all. You were handed a plate with your serving already on it, and it was rare that they would allow seconds, and that was only if they were trying to get rid of something. Every evening after dinner at the residence club, I would go down the street an get three orders of noodles to go. They must have felt sorry for me because my room-mate said that they never gave him such large portions. Or maybe they were honored that I seemed to like their food so much. I would eat the noodles through-out the next day, I know, it's a wonder that I didn't get food poisonings, but at the time there was no such thing as poison food! The people at Bucky's didn’t know that I would have eaten the stuff in their slop bucket, had I known where it was. The rest of the people at the club would have left-overs that they would sometimes give me with great amusement, to see such a small guy eat so much. (150lbs at the time) After about a month of relatively little physical activity. My voracious appetite calmed down and the food that the club served was more than enough.

San Francisco in the early sixties… But that’s another story!