This week we continue my nostalgic look back at my college days specifically my third semester at IUPUI in which most of my classes were at the downtown campus which had notably better wheelchair accessibility and girl-watching opportunities.

Hi, this is Chris Young. Welcome to episode 47 of Contemplating Life.

This week we continue my nostalgic look back at my college days especially my third semester at IUPUI spent primarily at the downtown campus.

Before we get into this week’s episode I need to do some housekeeping. I planned to do one or two more episodes and then take a few weeks off for the holidays. I also have some assistive technology projects I want to work on and I just need to put my head down and pour myself into those projects for several days at a time. That doesn’t leave me time to write, research, proofread, rewrite, polish, record, edit, rerecord, re-edit, and upload a new episode every week. So I really need to take a break to work on other things.

When I finished this episode, it was almost twice my normal length. I went back and forth several times trying to decide if I should do it all at once or split it. Ultimately, I decided to split it and I added an extra couple of anecdotes to the first half to flesh it out.

By having two episodes already written, that will give me a further break. This episode is a bit of back story for next week’s episode which is a really good one. But I think you will also find a laugh or two this week. After next week, I will be taking a break until the first of the year. I will also be doing my annual Oscar movie reviews sometime in February or early March.

So… Let’s move along with today’s episode

For my third semester, I was stuck yet again without a computer programming course I could take so I decided to primarily focus on the downtown campus where I could pick up several liberal arts requirements and get them out of the way. I still took a calculus class in the evening at the 38th St. campus but everything else was downtown during the day.

The girl-watching at the downtown campus was far superior to that at the 38th Street campus. There was a joke that IU students told about Purdue. I think it was equally applicable between the two campuses in which downtown was mostly IU and 38th St. was mostly Purdue.

Question: “What do you call a good-looking woman at Purdue?”

Answer: “A visitor.”

Sadly the stereotype was based on reality. Purdue is an engineering and science school and its 38th St. campus was occupied by few women and the majority more closely resembled Amy Farrah Fowler than they did Penny Hofstadter. And the opposite was true of the downtown campus. Trivia question… What was Penny’s maiden name in “The Big Bang Theory” TV show? Answer at the end of the episode.

There was one particularly strange and unattractive gal in my physics class named Kat with a “K”. She always dressed quite bizarrely in lots of scarves and ponchos with dangling fringe. One day she sashayed by me as she entered the class and the fringe on her poncho got tangled up in the joystick on my wheelchair. The chair took off across the room and I crashed into a table at the front of the classroom.

I’m quite embarrassed to admit we said some very nasty things about her looks. Someone suggested she was so ugly… How ugly was she… That she shouldn’t have been named Kat – she should have been named dog. From that day forward she was referred to as Kat the Dog.

Even in those days at the horny young age of 19, I wasn’t so shallow that I felt that looks were everything. There were simply more women downtown in the liberal arts programs and especially nursing programs than there were in computers, science, and engineering programs at 38th St.

That’s not to say that there were no attractive women at 38th St. I had a lab partner in physics who was pretty easy on the eyes even though she was a little bit of a nerd. There was a guy who was a teaching assistant who came up to her and asked her out for coffee right in the middle of physics lab. She politely turned him down. One of the other girls in the class witnessed it and asked us, “Who was that guy?” We explained he was a teaching assistant. The other girl asked, “What does he do?” My lab partner who was the target of his advances replied, “Apparently anyone he can get his hands on.”Him

As for me, after chasing my first true love Rosie through junior high and high school as well as taking a freshman girl named Cheryl to the senior prom, I had sworn off dating any more women in wheelchairs. I concluded that the combination of 2 disabilities would make a long-term, happily ever after, relationship prohibitively difficult.

There were several smart, attractive women in wheelchairs at IUPUI and although I was friendly with them I never pursued a relationship with any of them. My friend Mike whom I spoke of last week dated a gal for several months who was the most attractive disabled gal I ever met.

I held out hope that once someone got to know me, I might have a chance at romance with an able woman. I knew that such a person would be very rare so I wouldn’t have the opportunity to… I guess you would say… shop around. A nursing student theoretically might offer a better chance at success. I think I was buying into that cliché that one of my Northwest High School classmates had proposed about wounded veterans falling in love with their nurses.

I had the attitude that if anyone showed any interest in me at all, I had to try to make the very best of the friendship in hopes that it might grow into something more. I had learned from my experience with Rosie not to discount the value of being “just friends”. So in the worst-case scenario, I would have good friendships with women and under the best-case scenario, one of those friendships would grow into something more.

The combination of my inexperience with the fairer sex and my desire to find a significant relationship tended to make me sense clues or signals that were not particularly real. I had to fight the urge to fall in love way too easily. Looking back on the situation years later I joked, “If I went into McDonald’s and a good-looking girl behind the counter said, ‘Do you want fries with that?’ I had to resist the temptation not to fall in love saying, ‘She must love me. She’s worried I’m not getting enough fries in my diet.’” Okay, it wasn’t quite that bad… But it’s closer than I’d like to admit.

Let’s talk about the downtown campus facilities. I previously described how difficult it was to get around the 38th St. campus but it was much easier at the downtown campus. In those days it consisted of just three buildings all of which were completed in 1971 when I was in high school. I’ve included various photos of these buildings in the YouTube version of the podcast and there is a campus map linked in the description.

First, we have Cavanaugh Hall, located just south of W. Michigan St. on University Boulevard, a five-story building that is the heart of the campus. It was the first academic building on the official IUPUI campus. It is named for Robert E. Cavanaugh, the former dean of IUPUI’s Indianapolis predecessor, the IU Extension Campus. It housed classrooms, department offices, and the campus bookstore.

Although there were four steps at the main entrance, off to each side there were standard code-compliant wheelchair ramps. Two publicly available elevators connected the five floors and the basement so there was no problem with getting around the building in a wheelchair. You didn’t need keys to use the elevators and there were plenty of people who could push buttons for you.

A few hundred feet southeast of Cavanaugh across a courtyard was a building known as the Blake Street Library. In the basement of the building was a cafeteria known as “The Hideaway.” The building is now known as Taylor Hall named after Joseph T. Taylor first Dean of the School of Arts but I don’t know when the name was changed. Blake Street no longer runs south of Michigan Street since the construction of the Business/SPEA building in 1981.

In 1994, a new University Library building was constructed east of that location. The Hideaway Cafeteria was closed in 2008 when the Campus Center was opened just west of Cavanaugh. The campus center is connected to Cavanaugh by a second-story enclosed bridge over University Boulevard. It houses food service, a bookstore, recreational facilities, and other student services.

The third and final building available when I was there was the Lecture Hall located across a courtyard due south of Cavanaugh. It contains four or five amphitheater-style classrooms of varying sizes positioned together in the center of the building like wedges of a pie. An outer concourse surrounds the entire cluster. Several ground-level entrances are completely accessible. No need for a ramp.

I would sit at the top row of the seating area with the stadium seating extending below me. The swivel seats were fastened to the floor in front of a small rail table that extended the length of the row. On the aisle, I could get up close enough to set a notebook on the table. I rarely if ever took notes but I needed something to write on during written tests. Photos of the facility today I found online have more modern theater seating with an armrest table that folds up. So I don’t have anything to show you how it looked in the early 70s.

A fourth building was constructed downtown while I was there but I never had any classes in it. It was originally called the “Science, Engineering, and Technology Building“ with the idea that all of the 38th Street programs would move into that building. By the time it was completed in 1975, the name was shortened to “Engineering and Technology.” The final move from 38th St. to downtown wasn’t completed until the early 90s.

My transcript reveals I took “Integral Calculus & Analytical Geometry 2 MATH 164” which I’m certain was at the 38th St. campus in the evenings. Downtown, in the morning I had “Sociology S163 Social Problems” in the Lecture Hall. I then went to lunch every day in the Hideaway Cafeteria. We already discussed my third-semester French class a few episodes ago. I also had “Psychology as a Social Science PSY B104”.

There was a companion course I took in my fourth semester “Psychology as a Biological Science PSY B105.” I didn’t care for the biology class much. We had to memorize lots of brain anatomy and physiology and I’m just not big on memorization. The only interesting thing that happened in that psych biology class was the instructor discovered he could create his handout materials printed on computer paper cheaper than he could with a copy machine. He would go to a computer terminal, and type his handouts using a primitive text editor called TECO. That was an acronym for Text Editor and Corrector. It was designed more for computer programming than general word processing. Remember this is the early 70s and there are no desktop computers or word-processing software. Anyway, he could print out as many copies as he wanted and the University only charged his account one penny per page. In contrast, he could type on a typewriter, use whiteout to correct mistakes, and take it to the copy room where they would charge him 10 cents per page. The end result was, that all of our class notes were in all uppercase printed on green bar computer paper. I got a “B” in the course.

I enjoyed the psychology as a social science class more. On the first day, the teacher wanted us to get acquainted with one another and had everyone introduce themselves to the people next to them. She said, “Try to remember them and don’t go by what they’re wearing because tomorrow they will be wearing something different.” I chimed in, “Yeah I’m sure if I came in tomorrow in a blue wheelchair instead of a red one people wouldn’t recognize me.” They didn’t know whether to laugh or not so when I laughed then they did.

The teacher told one of my favorite stories I heard in college. When she was an undergrad studying psychology, there were various research programs you could sign up for extra credit or to earn a few dollars. Normally they were boring things like watching for the light to turn from red to blue and pushing the button as quickly as you can. Then she saw one posted on the bulletin board that said “Psychology Majors Only.” She thought that might be more interesting so she signed up.

In the experiment, they showed her a series of drawings and you are supposed to describe what was going on. For example, a young boy was sitting on a park bench with his head down feeling sad. A man sat next to him patting him on the back.

She knew if she said that none of the other boys would play with him and his dad was consoling him, it meant that she had trouble relating to others and feared rejection. If she said the boy struck out playing baseball it meant she had a fear of failure. Other possible descriptions would reveal something about her relationship with her father. No matter what description she came up with for the scene, she knew what the psychological conclusion was going to be and she didn’t want to reveal anything about her personality. She finally picked what she thought was the least troublesome description of each scene.

When the experiment was over, they revealed to her its true purpose. They didn’t care what she wrote. They were videotaping her to study facial expressions during stress. They knew that if they gave the test to a psychology major they would do just what she did which is to second-guess and psychoanalyze every possible answer. The test was merely an instrument to induce stress. They showed her the videotape of herself and she made her sorts of weird facial expressions. She chewed on the pencil. She tapped on the table. She flipped her hair back repeatedly. They got plenty of stress-induced reactions out of her.

As I said, I enjoyed the class and was awarded an “A”. I didn’t realize at the time that years later I would be studying personality and psychology through a series of self-help seminars on the Enneagram Personality Typology. I’ll probably do a whole series on that in future episodes.

It was during the third semester that I befriended a psychology major but I didn’t meet her in psychology class. We were both in the sociology class I had before lunch but I didn’t meet her there either. We met Perhaps one fateful day in the Hideaway Cafeteria.

She was the first woman I ever dated who was not disabled. It resulted in a friendship that lasted for decades. The details of that story will have to wait for next week.

Oh… What about the trivia question? No one knows Penny’s maiden name. In 279 episodes from 2007 through 2019 they never revealed her name. See the link in the description for more details.

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