A Graduate School Adventure

I played clarinet in the North St. Paul High School Band. But I was never very good at it.

I played clarinet for a year as a student at St. Cloud State College. I wasn’t any better, so I stopped after my freshman year. 

I was a good piano player, but pianos are not mobile. I wanted an instrument I could carry with me. 

As a camp counselor for four college summers, I loved sitting around a campfire after dinner singing camp songs, accompanied by excellent musicians playing guitars. 

“Maybe I could learn to play the guitar,” I mused.

After college, I came to Denver to go to graduate school. It was exhilarating to live that far from home. My parents weren’t as excited as I was. They worried about me being in a big city. They personally picked my first Denver home ~ St. Rose Residence, in Downtown Denver.

St. Rose Residence was a large, secure, brick building operated by nuns near downtown, on what is now the Auraria Campus. It was a Catholic home for young women who had come to the Denver to work and go to school. I don’t remember much, except that there was a chapel and a 10:00 p.m. curfew.

I had a tiny room, with a crucifix on one wall and a very small closet. Men were not allowed inside the building. My parents drove me to Denver and helped me settle in. My father insisted I bring my clarinet and, as a parting gift, he gave me a tear-gas canister hidden inside a small pen. 

“Be careful when you go outside,” Dad told me. “Especially if you are downtown. Always keep this with you in your pocket. You never know when you are going to need it.” 

My class was composed of 100 social work students from all over the U.S. This was in the mid ’60s, during the War on Poverty, and we all had full scholarships. My tuition was fully paid, plus I had a $200/month stipend for living expenses. In today’s dollars that is about $1700.00/month ~ more than enough for rent and food. 

There were ten young, single students in my class. Everyone else was older and married. They lived in married student housing. They were, by far, more serious than the rest of us. They didn’t have nearly as much fun.

We single students were young and carefree. We often didn’t go to class. Instead, we met for coffee and talked endlessly about skiing. If we needed extra money, we went to the local blood bank and sold our blood for $10.00. Lift tickets at Winter Park cost $8.00 for a whole day.

I don’t remember much about my classes, maybe because I missed so many of them. They were mainly lectures about Freudian theory taught by teachers who seemed awfully old.

I do remember parties every weekend, going to jazz concerts in Five Points, and getting home after curfew. The nuns were happy when I told them I was leaving and renting a basement apartment near D.U.

But before I moved out, I decided to find a teacher and take guitar lessons. I was in luck. The first violinist for the Denver Symphony was accepting students. He was a wonderful German man and a good teacher. He taught in a tiny studio at the top of one of the downtown buildings. I sold him my clarinet in exchange for a nice guitar. Alas, I wasn’t any better on guitar than I was on clarinet. The strings hurt my fingers and I wasn’t diligent about practicing.

My guitar classes came to an abrupt end one night in November. It was cold outside and I had my tear-gas pen in my coat pocket. I entered the room and took off my coat. Immediately my teacher started to tear up. Soon my eyes were burning and watering, too.

“What did you do?” My teacher demanded. “I can’t see! I am blind!!  I have a concert tonight.”

“I’m sorry. I think my tear gas pen just exploded.”

“Why did you shoot me with tear gas?”

What could I say? I apologized profusely and backed out of the room. I never returned. I took my coat to a dry cleaner and explained that the white powder in my pocket was tear gas. I told them to please be careful. I never carried tear gas, or tried to play a guitar, again.