Memories

As you might expect from my prior two posts, I've been thinking a lot about my college days since yesterday afternoon. I thought I'd share some of my memories of NIU and campus with you all. I know you may be getting tired of me going on about it and might be thinking, "get over it, you weren't there, your friends are safe, move on." I apologize. But I'm not done working through it yet. If you want you can skip this post. But I promise, it should be happier than my other two. I have a lot of happy memories of DeKalb.

Mystery Train

Have you ever seen the movie Mystery Train? It is a great flick. I saw it one night in the Cole Hall auditorium where yesterday's shooting took place. The Cine Club used to show independent and artsy films there each week. One night my roommate asked me if I wanted to go with her to see Mystery Train. She was a music major and had a lot of artsy friends (although she herself wasn't really "artsy fartsy" as she put it). I said sure, it beat staying in the dorm studying. We walked there together and watch the film and walked home. It was one of the best films ever. You gotta see it sometime. It isn't for the kiddos though.

Hot Dog Stand

You could always mark the beginning of spring when PJ Red Hots rolled out the red and yellow umbrella and brought the hot dog cart to the Commons. We'd get hot dogs, chips and sodas and sit in the Commons in the grass eating them. That was a favorite lunch of ours when I worked for the programming office in grad school. Quick, cheap, filling. I'd always get mine with ketchup and sweet pickle relish. The hot dog guy would always give me dirty looks. (Note: Chicago hot dogs are ALWAYS served with mustard and a kosher dill spear. Absolutely never do you get ketchup on one. Some places won't even serve it with ketchup. I hate mustard. I love ketchup. Hence the evil looks.)

The Crows

When Mr. Incredible and I were first married we lived in a tiny one bedroom apartment just off campus. We were there 6 years. It had a balcony, off street parking, an inside entrance, and a laundry room on the grounds. We thought we were living like royalty.

Anyway, to get from our apartment to campus we'd walk through the apartment complex, through the stadium parking lot and the campus TV station lot, then cut through a small grove of trees. The small wooded area was really out of place with all the paved lots and buildings, but they had built around the trees and there was a small house on that patch of land that no one ever knew what it was used for. It was owned by the University though and the path through the trees was widely used. Except by people who were afraid of birds.

For in those trees lived several hundred HUGE black crows. Every night towards dusk they would take to the sky and fly around, one big black cloud, cawing very loudly. Sometimes they would fly low towards your head. Mr. Incredible and I loved walking through there and seeing the crows. We thought they were really cool.

Then one day we were back on campus driving Violet around on yet ANOTHER of our BORING tours of campus (and why can't we just go get frozen custard at Ollie's NOW) and we saw that the trees had been cut down. We never found out what happened to the crows.

The Carpeting

The library on campus, second and fourth floors in particular, had the most ugly carpeting ever seen by human eyes. Bright yellow, red and orange in a plaid pattern. The joke was it was there to keep students from falling asleep.

It was clearly the ugliest thing on campus, at least until they reupholstered the furniture in the Student Center in that lovely color "80's teal", in the early 90's.


Lagoon

On the East side of campus is a wonderful lagoon. In the summer everyone hangs out there studying, napping, eating lunch, or just visiting. But beware the geese. They are mean. They bite. The ducks don't bite, but they do get aggressive if you have bread or food. In the winter we would ice skate on it. I don't have many photos of my undergrad years, but I have a bunch I took one day ice skating with good friends from my Freshman dorm floor.

The Gargoyles

No discussion of NIU would be complete without mentioning the gargoyles. A brief history. In the late 1800s NIU first opened as a teacher's college. Everything was in one building, Altgeld. Altgeld is still very much the center of campus, even though its functions are now mostly filled by other buildings. It is the heart and soul of the campus. It has a very old, castle style (I so wish right now I knew anything about architecture so I could give it its due). On the top, guarding the campus, are stone gargoyles. One dark and stormy night, so the story goes, one gargoyle was struck by lightning and fell off the building. They put it back, but it was struck by lightning two more times. It was eventually determined that the gargoyle didn't want to stay on top of the building. So they mounted it on the ground and built a garden around it.

The gargoyle has a goofy smile on his face (or had, as you'll see when I finish this sad tale). The story further goes on that the gargoyle only frowns when a virgin graduates. This is the part of the story you don't want told in front of your parents when you are a 16 year old touring campus!

For generations we have loved our gargoyle. Photos would be taken with him, much to the chagrin of the groundskeepers. He'd be dressed up for homecoming and other holidays. Signs would be left in his hands. One day Mr. Incredible and I were back in town to go out to dinner and walk around the lagoon. We went to show Violet the gargoyle. To our horror we discovered his head had been broken off. We left dismayed and later Mr. Incredible looked up back issues of the Northern Star (the award winning student newspapers - was I in for a shock when I discovered that not all campus papers are as great as it is). Hooligans broke the gargoyle's head off and it is missing. Students reportedly now replace the head with various objects, like pumpkins at Halloween.


The People

It is a large campus. If you've read any of the articles you've seen enrollment figures over 25,000. That was the size of it all my years too. But it never felt that big. You'd see the same people every day or week or even semester. Sure some faces would change, but you recognized lots of people. Majors would be smaller and you'd know your classmates and professors. You'd know people through dorms or clubs or student government or favorite activities. You typically caught the same bus at the same time each day and the same people would always be on it.

Even now we go back and visit campus a few times a year and see staff and faculty we know. The more the campus changes the more it stays the same. Even with this tragedy it will be the same.