Hazy Days

By

John T. Lockwood

The image we hold of college campus life in the 1960’s is one of wild-eyed, long-haired students, crazed through the ingestion of LSD and marijuana, running amok in violent protests against this and that. As one who actually was in college bang in the middle of the 60’s, I can attest that this image is somewhat of an exaggeration – to put it mildly.

The particular college I attended, Niagara University, was a staid, almost monastic institution when I arrived on campus in the fall of 1964. A Roman Catholic university, NU was run by Vincentians – one of the orders in the Catholic clergy. Coming out of a preparatory school which was itself located on a college campus (Manhattan College), I felt that I had a good idea of the atmosphere of academia. My brother had attended Boston College, and I had visited there several times and was familiar with that campus’s ambiance, influenced as it was by the Jesuits. The Jesuits, however, and the Brothers of the Christian Schools which order ran Manhattan College, were not nearly such conservative orders as the Vincentians.

When my classmates and I arrived at Niagara, we were surprised, baffled, and more than a little irritated by the extensive rulebook we were given, laying down the laws by which our lives were to be governed for the next four years. Well, at least the next two. Niagara loosened up somewhat for upperclassmen, but only somewhat. As freshman, however, we were the victims of the full force of Vincentian Tyranny. Freshmen had to arrive on campus a week before the rest of the students -- a week inappropriately named “Orientation Week”, although we found it more disorienting than anything else. We were marched thither and yon to this meeting and that, where we repeatedly received the “look to the right, look to the left, the guy next to you won’t be here four years from now” lecture. What this little exercise was supposed to demonstrate to us, I do not know. To me, it seemed to imply that no one except me would be stupid enough to hang around there for very long. Sure enough, four years later I was still there, but most of the guys I sat next to at these meeting were long gone. I think I had taken this you-won’t-be-here-long stuff as a kind of challenge and therefor I stubbornly stood for all the nonsense, year after year, until I graduated.

At the last of these “orientation” meetings, we were introduced to the “indoctrinators”, a group of sophomores whose job it would be for the next two weeks to harass, bully and otherwise make life miserable for us. The descriptive brochure issued to prospective students by the University in those days contained, in the section titled “Campus Life”, the seemingly harmless phrase “a mild form of hazing still exists during Orientation”. I had seen some hazing of frat pledges on the Manhattan College campus. There, it consisted of a few guys running around with Greek letters inked on their foreheads and being made to sing some stupid songs to the amusement of their clownish frat brothers. This was all voluntary and those pledges were only getting what they richly deserved for aspiring to be frat clowns themselves.

Hazing at Niagara University was, in fact, an amazing institution that over the course of two weeks would put several freshman in the infirmary for chronic laryngitis, a few kids in for asthma attacks, and confined others whose nerves were shot all to hell. Every freshman, and probably a few of the sophomore “indocs” as they were called, suffered from exhaustion and lack of sleep from the daily and nightly grind of singing, cheering practice, push-ups, pull-ups, raw onion eating, marching, jumping, screaming, yelling, running around in circles, pants-dropping, cap-tipping, bowing, scraping, groveling and other humiliating practices to which the freshman had to be subjected for reasons known but to the confused collective mind of the administration, which, tolerating the practice, must take full blame for it. The effect of this choreographed immaturity was predictable. A few freshman simply packed their bags and went home. Others whimpered and cried into the dormitory pay phones at night trying to convince their parents to get them the hell out of there. Fights broke out among freshmen whose fuses were daily trimmed to a hair width by the constant stress. The indocs wouldn’t let us punch each other out while in their charge, so if the freshman next to you in line as you were being marched pointlessly about set you off for some reason, you arranged to meet him later so you could punch his lights out for him. Many of these “fights” never actually came off. The participants usually cooled off by the time of the assignation. This happened to me on one occasion. I got into it with a burly Italian kid. He was built solid but was short and carried a spare tire for a gut. I had fights with his type in high school -- they always punched themselves out quickly and I figured I could take him by keeping him away with my considerable reach advantage until he got sufficiently tired for me to poke him about at will. On the other hand, he might have killed me. By the time our arranged fight came around I couldn’t breathe properly for bronchitis and was unfit. I don’t think his heart was in it either. We shook hands and forgot about it.

I did have one real fight. I was rushing to class one afternoon (we did have classes during all this idiocy) when an indoc, who was also rushing to class, grabbed my freshman cap as we passed and flung it into a grassy area. This was a common enough practice and the problem was that you were expected to retrieve it without actually walking on the grass. The indoc, however, had not stopped as we were both late for class. I simply walked over and picked up the cap. At this point, some other indoc popped up out of the gutter or from wherever and started chewing me out for trodding upon the sacred grass of Niagara University. Well, I had had it.

I indicated, in a voice somewhat magnified, that I was late for class and didn’t have time to take any bovine excreta from the likes of him. I started to walk off. He ran after me gesticulating wildly and putting forth the opinion that I was an anatomical feature common to both sexes, known by a common Germanic derivative term too impolite to mention in mixed company. He also remarked something to the effect that I was not paying him the respect he thought his due. Reflecting upon his observations, I instructed him to engage in coitus with himself. At this, he attempted to persuade me of the rectitude of his position in the argument by shoving my books out of my hand, whereupon the books and my notepads dropped to sidewalk. Big mistake. I hit him in the midsection with a force sufficient to put his entire family in the hospital. He crumpled to the pavement, gasping for air, wincing out tears and clutching himself into fetal position. I picked up my books and walked off, telling him he knew where to find me. As I left, I saw a priest on the steps of the Alumni Chapel watching us. I continued to walk toward my class, expecting the priest to call out to me at any second. He didn’t. Maybe he thought the indoc got what he deserved. Maybe he just disapproved of hazing in principal and thought that this sort of thing was inevitable and therefore not his business. I cannot say.

Notwithstanding the indifference of the priest, I figured I was doomed as the indocs were always threatening us with expulsion for minor offenses and here I had just doubled over one of their own along the dotted line. Yet, nothing happened to me. The few times I saw that indoc afterwards, and subsequently throughout my freshman year, he avoided eye contact with me. Somewhat later, I found out something curious about him that may partly explain why he never tried to get even with me. He had the reputation of a tough guy among the sophomores and was always bragging about being an amateur boxer and how his Dad had taken him for boxing lessons and so forth. He certainly didn’t want it to become generally known that a skinny “frosh” had so easily put him down. For my part, I was happy to keep my mouth shut about the incident.

There were many hazing “events”. The most important of these was the “Walk to the Falls”. As one might assume, this entailed walking from Niagara U campus to the falls, a distance of four miles or so. During the walk, the indocs screamed and shouted at as, as usual, but otherwise it amounted to nothing more than a easy stroll through Niagara Falls, New York – a grimy industrial town famous for paint, chemicals and shredded wheat. Niagara Falls was famous as a newlywed getaway and the dinginess of the town engendered the joke that Niagara Falls, NY was the second biggest disappointment of many a bride’s honeymoon. After the march we were set free at the Falls, which is the downtown section of the town. Some frosh went to the nearest bar (the town was full of them and legal age was 18 in New York at the time). This was not good strategy as you could run into indocs there. Other frosh simply took the bus back to campus. Two friends and I decided to stroll about the town for a while. This was a bad idea, too, as we had not gone far when we ran into a pair of inevitable indocs who had been drinking. One of them was a guy named Grogan (Mr. Grogan, to us). I remember him as an unpleasant jerk even after hazing was over. He was a towering five-footer who, in my mind, will always be stupid, loud, bigoted, and drunk. He and his partner hassled us until they got bored and went off to the park to vomit. We went back to campus.

If hazing taught us violence, let it not be said that it did not also teach us sex. The most offensive of the hazing “events” was the “marriage” or the “wedding”. It was apparently a tradition going back some years designed to allow the freshman to blow off some steam amid high hilarity and even higher jinks. The “marriage” consisted in taking a coed and a male student and making them play act through a wedding ceremony, with the guy being cast as the reluctant groom. This was done in the auditorium in front of the entire freshman class, the indocs, and any sophomores and upperclassmen who wanted to show up This might have been done in some harmless way, but the creeps running this show picked as the groom an overtly homosexual freshman. I knew this guy. He was a very nice guy, very fey with a cherubic face and tendency toward globularity. They teamed him with an exceptionally beautiful freshlady named Karen. I never got to know Karen very well throughout my four years at Niagara, but I remember her for her dark Italianate complexion and deep brown hair, offset by brilliant blue eyes. As soon as my effeminate friend opened his mouth to recite his lines in a voice naturally pitched several octaves higher than his “fiancé”, the audience broke into uproarious laughter, which kept up until the very end. At first, I laughed too, but as the event progressed, the whole scene began to gnaw at me. It was one of those moments that I knew I would remember years later and I found myself wondering what I would think about it twenty years hence. I had the suspicion that I would not be proud of myself for laughing, so I sat on my hands for the remainder of the show, refusing to look at it. After allowing us this catharsis, the indocs reimposed order and spent the next twenty minutes telling us how horrible we were. I forget exactly in what specific morals they found us deficient, but it had nothing to do with laughing at homosexuals.

At times, while we were being marched and sung, some upperclassmen would come around and say they needed some freshman to polish their ROTC shoes or to clean their rooms for them. The indocs would fork over a few frosh out of the line for them. This was good duty. The upperclassmen would haul you off to their dorm and basically leave you alone or just bat the breeze with you for awhile. Often, the juniors and seniors did not even have you do the work for them for which you had been ostensibly recruited. They were always looking for guys from their home town or who had gone to their high school or whatever. “You went to Beecher High? Who’d you have for senior English? Egad! She’s still alive? She must be a hundred!” And so forth. Many time the conversation concerned hazing and how much worse it was in their day. Several seniors one time told me that in the old days the “marriage” ceremony was topped off by making the two freshman get down on the floor, one atop the other, and pretend to hump (they used a stronger word). I sat there stunned listening to this – couldn’t believe it. Still can’t.

The worst incident I recall in hazing and the most painful to me, specifically involved an indoc named Pasquerello (real name). I was standing in line with about fifty other freshman outside the refectory late one day waiting to get in for supper. We were being chewed out and harassed as usual by a number of indocs. This was routine stuff and I was bored, staring off at the Robert Moses power plant in the distance and dreaming of better days. At that moment, a dialogue going on next to me started to insinuate itself into my conscious. It was this Pasquerello creep working over a freshman. I allowed my eyes to drift over and saw that the freshman he was picking on was the smallest frosh I had ever seen. The kid could not have weighed 110 pounds. He was no more that five feet two. His face was blanched white with fear as Pasquerello, who was a powerfully built athlete with bulging arms and fully developed chest, bore down on him. With a flourish, Pasquerello removed his indoc armband, throwing it at the kid’s feet. This was challenging the kid to a fight. I did not know the kid and, up to this time, had no particular opinion of Pasquerello, but I was getting one – a low one -- quickly. I don’t know what precipitated this confrontation, but there is no excuse for pushing around a tyke. I felt my anger rising rapidly. My ears were reddening and my heart started pounding with the involuntary release of adrenalin into my system. I had an impulse to grab the indoc armband from the ground and challenge Pasquerello to pick on someone his own size, namely me. The problem was I was not his size. I knew I couldn’t stand up to him long in a fight. I stood there hesitating, caught between a shaking anger at Pasquerello for being a bully and fear of him for being a big one. Eventually, the tiny kid picked up the armband and tried to hand it over to Pasquerello. But the big boy wasn’t through with him and took the kid out of the line and dragged him off to grassy area with some other good-for-nothing sophomores. They humiliated the kid for a while, making him pick the indoc band up repeatedly with his teeth to the giggling delight of that bunch of pathetic wastrels. I stood there a useless coward.

Hazing ended in “Hell Night” – not exactly original, I know. Hell Night took place in the old gymnasium on the top floor of a hundred-year-old building. It was a Friday night and the last night of hazing. The next night was a dance (the “Liberation Ball”) to which the indocs had forced you to buy tickets. They would also fix you up with a date if you didn’t have one. I did. I had met a blonde named Kathy from Rochester, NY before hazing got underway, and knowing about the mandatory dance, I asked her to it. I must have looked like a loser, though. I was asked if I needed to be fixed up about fifty times, it seemed, by various indocs. The first time, a female indoc came up to me and asked “Do you want a date for Lib?” I was so dense I thought she was asking me to go with her (the indocs did go to the dance). “I already have one”, I replied gently, mindful of her feelings. She said “OK” and wheeled away smartly. “She took that rather well”, I thought to myself as she walked off.

On Hell Night we waited in our dorm for the indocs to come and get us. We were required to wear old clothes and to have a blindfold with us. At one point, some natural-born leader among us decided that all of us on the third floor should hide in one room. This we did. About forty of us crammed into one of the smaller rooms on the north wing of the building. It was amusing listening to the indocs charge up the stairs to our floor and then stop dead when confronted with an empty floor. They clamored about opening doors until finally arriving at our door. We charged out yelling and hollering, giving the indocs quite a fright. They lined us up at our doors, made us put our blindfolds on, and marched us to the old gymnasium. The girls all lived off campus and had to be bussed in. A couple of the girls refused to get off the bus. Good for them.

Arriving at the gym, we were made to lay on the floor. You could smell limburger cheese and vinegar. They were going to force us to eat and drink this stuff while on our backs and blindfolded (a dangerous practice, by the way). They were also going to squirt mustard and ketchup on us and so forth (also a dangerous practice). That is why we had been told to wear our crappiest clothes. I didn’t have any suitable (or unsuitable) pants to wear so I borrowed a pair from my friend, the chubby kid from the “marriage”. They didn’t fit well, to say the least, but they got the job done.

I hated the thought of anything to be put in my mouth against my will and was determined to get up and leave if anyone tried to force it. I figured, correctly, I now know, that nothing would come of it if I simply got up and left. I didn’t have to. A voice said, “Anyone in this section got hay fever or allergies?” That sounded good to me, so I raised my hand. I was led away and made to sit against a wall in another part of the room. After a few minutes of silence somebody started jumping around and then the indocs started yelling as if they were being tortured. We were supposed to think that this was our fellow freshman crying out in agony at the awful things that were being done to them, but I recognized the sophomore’s voices. The smell of cheese and vinegar did become very pronounced. As I sat there, several more freshman were led over to where I was sitting. They were woozy. A window opened and I could feel fresh, cool air waft through the section I was in. After twenty minutes or so of all this, someone tapped me on the shoulder and said, “OK, you can take off your blindfold and go”. I removed my blindfold and discovered that I was on the landing at the top of the stairs. I walked towards the stairwell and an indoc thrust out his hand for me to shake. I did and left, somewhat dazed that I had escaped with no problem at all. I was literally the first one out of there.

Others were not so crafty as me. I returned to the dorm and watched as my classmates started to stream in. They were covered with mustard and so forth, most heading straight for the bathroom. Many puked. What a great tradition.

Hazing started to die out after my freshman year. Just my luck to be in the last class to go through it all, Hell Night included. The following year, the “walk to the falls” event took place on one of the hottest September days on record in the Niagara frontier. Several freshman fainted and two were hospitalized as a result. After that, the administration stepped in and passed guidelines curtailing the activities of the indocs. I heard that the school’s Risk Management department was squawking and wanted the whole practice stopped. Hell Night was transformed into a psychological exercise that year. The freshman were marched upstairs blindfolded and made to lay on the floor in the dark for a few minutes, dreading what was to come. Then suddenly, the lights were turned on and it was all over. The year after that, Hell Night was forgone altogether.

So was the rest of hazing after a few years. Looking back on it, it amazes me that it lasted as long as it did. All of the hazing events and incidents were thoroughly illegal under the laws of the State of New York. Everyone associated with hazing, freshman, indocs, staff and faculty, knew this. Some freshman were injured physically during hazing, others dropped out of the school. How on Earth could it have continued without tort suits forcing the school into bankruptcy? Well, the 60’s were not nearly as progressive a time as we now believe.

For example, while I was attending a summer session at Niagara University in 1970 finishing up my degree requirements, I met a student enrolled at the University of Vermont who was taking a summer class at NU. He told me about “Kake Walk” – an appalling tradition that was still ongoing at UVM when he had originally enrolled there. It took place during that University’s Winter Festival. Fraternity brothers would dress in fancy clothes, wear blackface and “walk fo’ de kake”. This entailed dancing ridiculously to old minstrel tunes and singing in insulting Negro dialect to win prizes.The frat boys doing this were all white and many of their frats in fact restricted membership to whites, this codicil being actually written into their national bylaws [note: Niagara University had no fraternities – jtl]. The few black students at the UVM protested, as did some whites who were not frat members, but the University administration idiotically insisted that the practice was not racist in any way. The “Kake Walk” persisted until 1969.

Oh well, at least NU didn’t have any tradition like that.

FIN

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20 April 2002