“Hi Josh, where are you off to?” my Mom asked.  “Just going to water plants, I’m getting paid this year, remember?”  I was making rounds to water plants and feed the small pets belonging to students away for Christmas break.  As I walked the long, eerily quiet hallways of Shorey House, the large master key ring jingled in my pocket.  It’s 1972, I am ten, my Parents Pat and Barbara; Sister Leah age five; Irish Setter “Rusty;” and Leah’s pet white rat “Ruffles” have been living for the past two years in a small apartment on the ninth floor of Pierce Tower.  Shorey House was the undergraduate dormitory “house” for 55 students occupying the ninth and tenth floors of Pierce Tower, on the University of Chicago campus, where my Parents were Resident Heads from 1970-1976.

 

Saying it was unusual to move into a college dormitory in 1970, at the age of eight is an understatement.  Fifty-five older “Brothers and Sisters” from all over the country lived together from mid-September to early June.  Leah and I would freely roam the hallways stopping to talk, listen, and observe the daily activities of college life.  Our family apartment was L-shaped, Leah and my bedrooms were at the end of the small side of the L.  Next to my bedroom, was the back door, leading to the hallway lined with student rooms.  Our Parent’s bedroom was at the opposite end of the apartment; for me the back door served as a magical portal.  I would slip out quietly, into an exciting new world of adventure - sex, drugs and Rock ‘n Roll.  I knew the skunky odor of marijuana which frequently wafted through the halls mixing with music of the Rolling Stones and The Doors.  

 

In 1972, Shorey House became the first co-ed house on campus, controversial at the time, in fact adding women greatly improved life in Shorey.  The women were smart, and added a whole new dynamic, plus - Leah and I now had great babysitter options.  More than once, I opened a student’s door without knocking, or waiting for an answer, to find two naked bodies intertwined.  Why are they wrestling with no clothes on I wondered?  Sex was not a taboo subject in my family, but for me Shorey House became a human laboratory that accompanied family discussions.

 

It’s late October, and the flyer posted near the elevators, announced the student lounge would be closed for a few days due to “construction.”  Halloween was especially fun, and the building of the annual Shorey Halloween maze was under construction.  The maze, like a Pentagon secret Skunkworks program, was designed and built by students in the two-story lounge that was at the center of the student rooms and daily social life.  The lounge, like an inviting racket ball court, was the main common area in the house; it had couches, chairs, and a small kitchen.  Next to the open metal spiral staircase connecting the ninth and tenth floors, was a carpeted platform built by the students, an antique leather barber’s chair my Dad found, and a cast iron lamp post in the style of the World’s Columbian Exposition, found abandoned near the Museum of Science and Industry.

 

The maze was constructed of cardboard boxes, taped so tightly together that no light could enter.  The two-story maze was a highly complex web of passageways, rooms, trap doors, dead ends, and secret sliding panels, that could take hours to navigate in the pitch-black darkness.  The maze was so diabolically complex, that people had to occasionally be cut out after hitting a dead end, having missed a secret sliding panel which often led to different level and the way out.  Complete with dry ice “smoke” loud Halloween music and sound effects, the maze became so popular that student’s from around campus began to hear about it, and a decision was made to charge non-Shorey House guests to enter the maze.  After all, Milton Friedman, the famous U of C economist had been over earlier in the Fall for a “Sherry Hour” talk with students in our family apartment.  When Friedman was asked whether he would autograph the worn Shorey House Monopoly Board, forever the free market economist, Friedman signed his name and wrote “Down With” next to the “Monopoly” board logo.

 

Finishing the end of my rounds watering plants, feeding reptiles and rodents, Mom found me filling a watering can outside a student’s room.  Mom followed me into the room and quietly watched as I watered the dark green plants with their telltale jagged leaves, basking under ultraviolet lights in the small closet.  I re-locked the door, we walked back to our apartment together, and I put the master key ring back into the desk drawer in the study.  Mom never asked me about the kind of plants I was watering, nor do I have a memory of any mention by the student whose marijuana plants Mom had seen.  Like so many aspects of our family life at the time, there was a lot going on, and compared to young kids today, I operated freely around the dorm, neighborhood and even downtown Chicago by myself, often with very little or no supervision, it was a very different time.

 

Forty-eight years later, I often think about the six years we lived in Shorey House.  I remember our time there very fondly to this day.