Jack Sheehan on the year at college that changed his life forever

Sunday, Sept. 16, 2007 | 1:28 a.m.

UNLV has been holding classes for weeks now, and I'm fully engaged in the routine of dropping my kids at elementary school and going through the checklist of homework, binders, lunch sacks and gym clothes needed to get them through the day. It's September, and I still can't shake the idea that I should be going back to school myself.

After 18 years as a student, and five as a college English instructor, the siren song of the classroom still calls to me all these years later.

It was 40 years ago this month that I embarked on the most significant transition year of my life, leaving the sheltered confines of a Catholic boys' school in Washington state and landing smack dab on the ultra-liberal rolling green lawns of the University of Oregon.

For perspective, in 1967 the Vietnam War was raging and dividing the country; the Summer of Love had just embraced San Francisco; and Jesus freaks, flower children and dime-store radicals loitered on street corners in cities up and down the Pacific Coast.

I had never even seen marijuana until I arrived in Eugene, and couldn't have spelled the word if you spotted me the vowels. But the aroma of it through the student union building and on the short walks between classrooms was so strong that a naive kid like myself felt the sudden urge to scarf a plate of brownies.

Young women were burning bras, young men were burning draft cards, yet I was relatively oblivious to it all. Much of my attention in the past year had been on learning to diagram sentences in Latin and figuring out how to get a 4-foot putt in the hole.

Indeed, it was the latter ability that afforded me a scholarship to the U of O, which I gratefully accepted once the admissions committee at Stanford had determined that my college-board scores and bloodlines were not quite what they were looking for.

So I headed off to Eugene with my modified crew-cut, driving an old Ford packed to the windows with the junk I thought would best serve me as I ventured forth to face this strange new world outside the cocoon.

With no more Jesuit restrictions on hair length, by Christmas break I had grown out a sorry-looking white-man's Afro , which nearly put my mother into therapy on my first trip home. And I had found a new literary hero, Oregon native Ken Kesey, who in his 20s had written two brilliant novels, "One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest" and "Sometimes a Great Notion." By the end of that school year I could quote by memory long passages from both, and it was the inspiration of those books and Faulkner's "Sound and the Fury" that caused me to switch my major from business to English by the second semester.

Because my prep school screwed up and didn't send along my transcript to the university's registrar, I was assigned to what was called an "international" dormitory. I was one of the few Caucasians in the dorm (this was prior to coed living quarters, darn it), and one of the few to speak conventional English. I figured the positive take was that among this eclectic gathering of humankind I would be experiencing a university in the most literal sense.

I drew three suite-mates who were as disparate in their manners and behavior as the Marx Brothers. One was a Chinese-Canadian kid with the strangest accent you've ever heard, very soft and breathy and spiritual, yet he ended every phrase with "Eh?"; another was a cowboy in his early 20s who'd done time on a work farm for possession of heroin; and the third was a dude from India who wore turbans and kept bottles of his urine on the windowsill in some rite of purification.

As eclectic as my suite-mates were in the global sense, they weren't what you'd call party animals. The Chinese kid studied constantly or worked on j ujitsu moves; the convicted felon practiced various positions with his girlfriend that they'd discovered in the imported skin magazines he constantly left scattered around; and the Indian guy just stayed to himself, drank herbal tea by the gallon, and filled his bottles. Suffice it to say we didn't run in a pack.

Spread over other parts of the campus were anti-war militants and Black Power advocates and earth mamas and Olympic track stars. If marijuana was the incense of the day, then Oregon's acclaimed long-distance runners were the high priests. From that place and time would come the legendary Steve Prefontaine and Olympic coach Bill Bowerman, who was formulating a waffle-based shoe that would launch the biggest sporting goods company in the world: Nike. In sum, the folks inhabiting that campus were a vastly more diverse group than I'd been exposed to in the farm country of Eastern Washington.

I pledged a fraternity my first week on campus, but wasn't allowed to move in until my sophomore year. So that fall of '67 I resigned myself to sitting back and observing the patchwork quilt called a university. I began to devour literature, engage in debates about world issues that hadn't mattered a whit to me before, and formulate at least a general outline of what I wanted to do with my life.

I didn't make many new friends that first year. My idea of a good time was to sneak a six-pack into my dorm room on a Friday night and listen to the Doors' first album. Jim Morrison's poetry was an inspiration.

My heroin junkie suite-mate had installed a blue light in the common area, accented by psychedelic posters from Jefferson Airplane and Quicksilver Messenger Service, and I'd lie there slightly blitzed, pretending I was some sort of pseudo-hippie but knowing deep down I was just a conservative Catholic kid from up north who was there to play golf.

The notion that my school was the most liberal plot of dirt on the planet was shattered midway through the second semester when I was nearly expelled from campus for being caught with several half-full beer cans in my room. I actually had to attend a student court to explain my crime.

I couldn't understand how the malt liquor could be treated as a greater offense than the fields of grass that were being smoked all around the university, or the heroin that the ex-con kept stashed in his drawer, or the Indian dude's bottles of wee-wee on the windowsill, but school officials didn't see it that way.

Little did I know that within a few shorts months the world outside our insulated community would explode, with the killings of Bobby Kennedy and the Rev. Martin Luther King, increased American mobilization in the jungles of Southeast Asia and riots in the streets of Chicago.

I grew up a lot that year, and knew that once I had been exposed to all these new stimuli, there was no returning to the innocence of my youth.