"12 DEAD FROGS"memoir; Here comes college days--U. of Arizona, 1962. Becoming a FRAT-RAT, sky-diver, and inadvertently an instrument-of-fate that ended my fraternity soon thereafter!

("12 FROGS" in paperback): https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0777FHXX2

(Excerpted from TWELVE DEAD FROGS AND OTHER STORIES, A Filmmaker’s Memoir, by Rick Schmidt ©2017).

SECRET SERVICE (1962)
I would never have made it to college if my mother hadn’t worked so hard, in secret, to get me admitted. That summer after high school graduation, I had told my friends that I would just screw around until I got drafted, or something. Or else I’d join the Marines. College hadn’t seemed to be an option, considering that my grades were decidedly sub-standard (somewhere in the C- zone). I admired an older friend who looked so physically fit after Marine boot camp – he carried on proudly about “being a man.” Little did I or any of us know then, what lay ahead in Vietnam.

At any rate, my mother had applied to college for me, in my name, without telling me anything about it. I never asked her how she did it, but I’ve wondered lately if she went so far as fabricating the written essay portions of the college applications she sent out on my behalf; “Why I (Rick) want to attend University of __________.”

One day in August, 1962, she announced that I was going to the University of Arizona in a month. (“What?” I asked. “How?”). She then accompanied me to a men’s store and outfitted me with a bunch of white shirts, dark slacks, suit coat, underwear and socks, new shoes, a belt and some hankies. In spite of myself, I was going to college.

PART 2

***** COLLEGE FREEFALL

FRAT RAT (1962)

As I disembarked from the airplane in Tucson, descending an open-air gangplank, I was immediately hit by a blast of ninety-plus degree air. Overdressed in my long-sleeved cotton shirt with undershirt beneath, I soon became drenched in sweat. After a quick taxi ride, I began to get assimilated to my new life, first getting my dorm room assignment, locating the building (an ugly cement bunker four stories high), and stowing my suitcase in the two-person, bunk-bed room. Then, following the exodus of a few other disoriented freshmen, I walked down the street with them to a nearby restaurant and ate a hamburger. That familiar meal brought me back to life, supplying not only nourishment, but a sense of emotional stability as well. I may be on Mars, I thought, but at least they have hamburgers! I can’t say that I made any real friends those first few days, just kept pretty much to myself. I still wasn’t sure yet whether I was in college as a punishment or as a reward.

The heat made the whole first week of college even more surreal than it would have been for me otherwise. People basically seemed to move in slow motion. Remember, I was coming in from coastal southern California, where there was always some water content in the air. In any case, my body tried to adjust.

Before my classes got underway, beyond the assigning of books – I was entering the College of Mines, majoring in Geology – I enrolled in the so-called fun of rush week, where the freshman would visit the various fraternity houses and be chosen or not. Over the course of a week this selection process began to, not surprisingly, take a toll on me. I certainly couldn’t handle the process of accepted/rejection, being judged like cattle. So, the stream of daily evaluations began to make me more than a little crazy.

Finally, on about the sixth day of rushes, at the Phi Psi House introduction, I noticed one of the senior members fraternity ID pins laying on a table and I just snatched it up. I pinned it on my jacket, just under the hankie pocket, and started interviewing the pledges (kids my age) myself, riddling them with the usual inane questions. “Where are you from? What’s your major? What are your future aspirations? Where do you see yourself in five years?” I repeated the same tired questions I’d memorized from all the other fraternities. I had the routine down cold. After about twenty minutes of this play-acting with several different pledges, I noticed a group of Phi Psi fraternity brothers out of the corner of my eye, just cracking up as they watched my activities. So we bonded in that way, my insanity proving well-aligned to the appreciative membership of that particular organization. When I got word of their invitation to become a frat brother I joined up.

Living in the Phi Psi house I quickly learned that I was rooming with a group of people even crazier than I was (think ANIMAL HOUSE!). One guy invited me to parachute jump, so one early Sunday morning I drove with him and a girl I knew to a small desert landing strip outside Tucson. We were each given extremely cursory instructions on how to jump and land – we basically hopped off a foot-high log and rolled over like in a tumbling class. That was the entire training session. That’s all!

On my first real jump out of a plane the chute opened up while I was on my back in the air, spinning around in a roll a couple thousand feet above the ground. I was shaken somewhat unconscious for a few seconds by the jolt of the static line opening (a static line remains connected to the airplane, for automatic dispatch without the pulling of a manual ripcord). Coming to, I untangled my right foot, which was by then snagged in the nylon lines above my head. Then came the fun part. I floated peacefully above the desert for a couple of minutes before crash landing on an asphalt runway. I didn’t break any bones because I followed orders of an instructor on the ground. He yelled up to me through a bullhorn to “Look straight out! Keep elbows in, legs bent slightly!” Most importantly he kept repeating, “DON’T LOOK DOWN!” That was critical information, because after floating awhile in the sky, the natural inclination of jumpers is to pull back their legs as the ground suddenly approaches. This results most often in one or two broken legs, from the equivalent of that two-story drop. Amazingly, I landed correctly although way off target––the girl I was with landed right on the small bulls-eye painted on the tarmac.

I jumped twice more, even packed my own chute with the help of a frathouse crazy, Brad, a multiple jumper with 50+ freefalls to his credit. He walked me through the complex wrapping and folding up of lines and parachute material, which, if done carelessly, could result in a deadly tangle. On the third try we were supposed to pull our own ripcord before the static line automatically did that for us. I remembered, while the girl didn’t. I was glad to learn that if I bailed out at some future date, I would activate my chute. After that, I called it quits. I figured that I could think of less painful ways to kill myself than free-falling thousands of feet if my parachute failed to open.

Another crazy fraternity brother down the hall was a collector of animal life from the surrounding desert. Once he invited me into his room, had me sit on the upper bunk while he released his pet rattlesnake collection – two five-foot diamond backs and a couple smaller species. I quickly pulled my feet up, wondering just how high those big snakes could jump. When I accompanied him out to the desert once he casually revealed a small ’bark scorpion’ sitting under an innocent-looking log, remarking that its bite was usually fatal. Later that day, he found a cute little coral snake – pretty orange and yellow stripes – which he presented to me curled up on his palm. He asked if I wanted to hold it, saying that if I kept my hand skin stretched tightly like he was doing, arching his fingers back, the little snake had no place to sink in its teeth. When I asked him if it was poisonous he replied that the venom could supposedly kill a person in about seven or eight seconds, corals being the deadliest snake in North America. So much for desert lore! To think that I had gone into the desert at night for frat parties, laid around in dry-washes drinking beer, oblivious to dangers such as that. (Ironically, I as given a wide-brimmed hat with “Coral snake” beadwork some 20 years later (1982), to remind the snakes that “I was their friend,” so the gifting Flathead Indian in Ronan, Montana, had told me.

And just like in the movies we had crazy, rowdy parties. Somehow, at the first big one I attended, I got hooked up with a blind date, a fairly plain-looking young blond girl whom I was told to pick up at her dorm. The party, insensitively called ’a pig party,’ was devoted to having sex with as many ’undesirable’ girls as could be lured to the fraternity house. It’s embarrassing enough to admit now that I was ever a part of such a thing. But I did end up the instrument of fate, my actions (or inactions) indirectly responsible for getting that frat house kicked off campus for all eternity.

The interior of Phi Psi had been redecorated for the big bash, floors covered with mattresses, parachutes hanging from the ceiling all the way to the floor, strategically placed refreshment centers that held huge cauldrons of fruit juice mixed with sloe-gin. You literally had to crawl to get around––with the colored lights so low you could barely see a foot in front of your face. The disorientation from such tight, dark enclosures, and the loud pounding music, made you feel drunk before a drop of the lethal beverage even touched your lips.

My date and I tried to kiss and get in the mood, but our hearts just weren’t in it. So, she proceeded to wander off and get completely shit-faced drunk. When it came time to find her and get her back to the dorm, I couldn’t locate her anywhere. Only the next day did I learn what had happened.

Somebody had brought the girl into the bathroom to sober her up, held her under the shower (to wash off the vomit, etc.), and had then proceeded to strip off her wet clothes, dried her, wrapped her up in her coat and returned her to the campus. At the front desk of the woman’s dorm she’d passed out, sinking to the floor, her coat flipping open to reveal a naked body. That incident (added to a long list of equally inane stunts by Phi Psi’s throughout the years), finally got the on-probation fraternity house expelled from campus for good, dispersing all its members, including myself, back to normal life.

————