911 ½ 9th Street. After 48 years I can still remember the address of the apartment my friends and I shared in Boulder during the fall semester of 1961. It was located within walking distance of CU, near the top of a hill and just past the old Columbia Cemetery, and a few blocks from Chautaqua. There were big oak trees along the street and they dropped huge piles of leaves. It was a two-bedroom in the basement of a bungalow owned by two elderly sisters who lived upstairs and sometimes brought us cake and pies. All the furniture seemed to be as old as the house, which was built in 1913. It was probably worth $10,000. Today it is assessed at $900,000. We paid rent of $25 per month each and agreed to shovel the sidewalks when it snowed, and it seemed like it snowed every week from late September to Christmas. We had a kitchen, living room, and bathroom. It was a dark little bunker but we decorated it with some of our own stuff and it suited us. Pardun (nicknamed Pardos) had brought a record player but we only had a few records, and we played Bruebeck’s Time Out and the soundtrack from West Side Story. To this day if I hear one of those songs I can sing all the lyrics. We didn’t have TV. We played many games of Hearts in that apartment, and I was reminded of it when I read Stephen King’s book, Hearts in Atlantis.
Mike “Dude” McNair and I shared a bedroom and Pardun and Perko had the other. It was communal living, with rotating duties; vacuuming, washing dishes, and cleaning the bathroom. We grocery shopped together at Safeway and divided the cost. I resented the grapefruit juice Pardun liked and he probably didn’t like it that I drank more than my share of the milk, but all of us got along pretty well. We designated Saturday as housecleaning day, and that lasted for a good two weeks. Dude did most of the cooking as he was the only one who knew how, and he was a good cook. Pardun did the snow shoveling because he liked it.
We had our own entrance in the back. Once all of us except Dude went home for the weekend, and on Saturday night he got back late and (guess why) couldn’t get his key to work, and he kicked open the door. He claimed he could hear the old ladies rolling out of bed when he did.
Dude had a night job at a restaurant downtown on Pearl Street. I don’t know how they used them, but they went through a lot of maraschino cherries at this restaurant. The cherries came in wide-mouth two-gallon jars. There was a lot of cherry juice left in the jars and Dude mentioned to the rest of us that he thought we could make wine out of it. Perko and Pardos were enthusiastic about it, but I had doubts as to whether these novices could brew up anything worth drinking. One night Dude brought home two jars of cherry juice and they put in yeast, I think, and covered the tops with cloth. After a certain length of time, I forget how long, they decided it was wine. Somehow Bob Naylor became involved and he was invited to join us in sampling it on a Saturday night. Naylor had been my friend since 7th grade, and all of us knew him.
My exposure to wine up to that time consisted of Shake Em Up, sort of a wine cooler, and Vino Fino, a dark table wine that we bought for under a buck a gallon and drank during poker games in my parents’ basement in Pueblo. Price was the only consideration when you selected Vino Fino. For a long time after I wouldn’t drink wine because I thought it would taste like Vino Fino. Of course, at that time I had just turned 20 years old and was not legally old enough to drink anything except beer.
The homemade cherry wine was hideous, sweet and cloudy, and it tasted like cough medicine, and I drank half a glass and went into the kitchen to make popcorn. That was back when you popped it in a frying pan. We had a gas stove that had previously cost me my eyelashes and a little hair but that’s another story. The other four congratulated each other on the manufacture of such a fine vintage, drank several glasses, and ate a hell of a lot of popcorn.
Lordo (Naylor’s nickname from his days in a Central gang) was living in a dorm and decided that rather than stagger back to campus he would spend the night on our couch, which was fine with us. We gave him a blanket and pillow. In the morning Lordo was gone but on the carpet by the couch he had left a puddle of puke consisting entirely of cherry wine and popcorn. A fine reward for our hospitality. Needless to say, we were quite pissed off and got into an argument about who was going to clean it up. All of us refused, and so nobody did. After about a week it had completely dried and I vacuumed it, sucking up most but not all of the popcorn which had by then partially adhered to the carpet.
A couple of weeks later Perko and I were drinking beer at The Sink. It was a weeknight and pretty quiet. I think some of you recall The Sink. That’s the only time I remember Perko drinking enough to semi-lose control. Close to midnight he said we should go to Lordo’s dorm and chastise him about his decision to barf and run.
“You don’t do that. You don’t drink your friends’ wine and eat their popcorn and then heave on the floor and take off. You make a mess, you clean it up. This wasn’t right, what he did.”
All right, I admit that quote is bogus. I don’t remember what Perko said. But he could have said something like that.
Perko’s idea sounded OK to me although I figured we had very little chance of actually seeing Lordo, first of all because I doubted whether Perko really knew which dorm Lordo lived in, and even if he did, whether we could find him. We left The Sink, walked a half block, crossed Broadway and we were on the university campus. It had snowed, of course. We entered the dorm Perko said was the right one and it was very quiet inside. There was a long hall and nobody around and we didn’t know which room Naylor had. Perko started walking down the hall and loudly calling, “Lordoooo. Lordoooo.” We got no response at first, but then a guy came out of a room and told us he was the student manager of the dorm and we needed to get the hell out of there now or he was going to call the campus police. Now the campus police at CU were not just security, they had authority to arrest, so this was no small deal if they showed up. Perko asked the student manager (they had another title, I forget it) if he knew Lordo, and the guy repeated his earlier request quite forcefully. He did not inquire as to Lordo’s unusual name. We left.
Walking back we passed a women’s dorm and there was a light in a second floor window. In those days (I love that term!) girls could stay out until midnight on the weekend, but had to be in their rooms by 10:00, I think it was, on weeknights. Every dorm and boarding house had a “house mother” who made sure they were in on time. Boys, (men) however, were free to prowl anywhere they pleased for all hours. It would have made more sense to let the girls out and lock the guys up.
Perko made a snowball and threw it at the lighted window. He missed, but he was close enough that some of the girls heard the sound, saw us down below, and opened their windows. They were in their jammies and they looked really cute. They taunted us regarding our snowball-throwing ability, and we lobbed a few more at them but then we saw a campus police car heading our way. When we started to leave the girls yelled for us to stay but we thought it best that we depart, and so we did.
Our living arrangement came apart just before Christmas when a couple of us who were actually concerned about their GPAs realized that they were having too much fun time and too little study time, and their semester grades might contain a B or two instead of all As, and we sort of self destructed. The next semester three of us lived in the same rooming house, but it wasn’t the same as before. Dude’s brothers, John and Doyle also lived in the rooming house, along with two other guys. One, a student, got on our nerves and as a bad joke we told him we were going to shoot him. Doyle worked in the university drama department and had access to props, including guns and blanks. One day the guy came home and Doyle and I met him with revolvers, then opened fire with the guns loaded with blanks. He turned and ran a few steps before he realized that he would be dead if we were shooting bullets. Doyle and I thought it was pretty funny. All of us had grown up with guns but were still careless with them.
By the time fall came again Dude was married and the other three all lived in different places. Just before graduation I got kicked out of my apartment and slept on Pardos’s couch for a few nights. All of us stayed friends and we still correspond and gather occasionally. A lot was going on all the time back then, some of it pretty crazy stuff to us, but it was nothing to what happened on campuses just a few years later.
All these years later, though, I think the four of us, and maybe some other people too, are still asking the same question.
Where is Lordo?
Jerry Miller
April 9, 2009 at 1:51 pm |
Jer,
I find it fascinating that we remember the same events but completely different parts of them. The maraschino cherry juice wine was quite likely a step above the quality of “Paisano” which cost a dollar a gallon. Today the ingredients are available for making homebrew as good as anything on the market but making your own wine or beer was harder in those days when the only yeast you could buy was bread yeast. I remember the four of us playing poker at Perko’s house and drinking home brew that had distinct bread overtones. It was a step below Walters but Perko’s dog liked it and would tip up the empty bottles to lick out the yeasty beer at the bottom. I remember the dog finally crawling into its box and just passing out.
April 10, 2009 at 3:36 pm |
Jerry,
Thanks to your Lordo story, I’m flooded with memories of my rather long time in Boulder. There are too many stories to tell at one sitting.
I was there three years before I should have graduated and then I dropped out of CU to work half time at the brickyard and ride a horse I got the summer of 1963. I was living alone in a room rented from a very sweet lady named Mrs. Draper. It was $25 a month with no kitchen privileges, but almost every Sunday Mrs. Draper invited me to have dinner with her. Otherwise I ate at the UMC (student union) or a little cafe on on University just east of 13th.
I rode my bicycle the several miles out to the Valmont brickyard, and passed the Columbia Cemetery going and coming everyday. I kept my horse on a ten acre pasture, also quite a ways east of 28th Street, which was then sort of the eastern limits of town.
I often rode my mare Rocket, certainly the calmest horse I’ve ever known, west on South Boulder Road past Broadway and on up to the Mesa Trail. The Table Mesa subdivision didn’t exist then. The road up to NCAR, National Center for Atmospheric Research, was sort of the southern limit of southwestern Boulder. When I see the development now, I feel like my memories must really be dreams, or that I inadvertently was a pioneer.
In a relatively few minutes I could get to open space, riding not very far I now know, but away from town. Once riding back on the trail to Eldorado Springs, I came up on a wild turkey, which flew up right under Rocket’s nose. She spooked, but not badly enough to dump me.
I think those rides were part of my search for freedom, but freedom from what? I still am searching, but though I don’t quite quite know the answers, I’m drawn back to that time, and a place that no longer exists. Now I wonder who I was then.
Jeff Arnold
April 11, 2009 at 4:10 pm |
When I went to CU in 1961, I lived at Hubble’s on the corner of Pleasant and 10th right across the street from the Sigma Nu house. There were 10 of us girls living there and 20+boys came for meals. The room I shared with Evelyn Ruby was not supposed to house 2, but there were girls living at hotels so being a little crowded was supposed to be ok. The room was about 70 sq ft. and sort of triangular shape. The closet was so small the the hangers overlapped. I hardly every wore most of my clothes, because they were trapped in the back of the closet. I slept on the top bunk. The room was not wide enough for the beds to be side by side. The fire escape was off that little room, but in order to get the door open so people could get out, the beds had to be moved. I only sat my desk a few times as both of us could not set at the desks at the same time-no room. Ten of us shared the bathroom. It was a room that had two sinks, one stool that was open , and a tub. If someone flushed the toilet when you were in the shower, you were scalded. As soon as my contract was up, I moved.
I will forever wonder how that place ever passed the health codes or the fire codes.
April 14, 2009 at 3:17 pm |
We have an answer to the question, “where is Lordo?” but it is not the answer we wanted. One of our classmates who subscribes to Ancestry.com found the following information: Robert L. Naylor, born in Pueblo March 7, 1942, died in Colorado August 26, 1991. If anyone has additional information please inform the reunion committee. If any of you have stories about Bob that you want to share, please click on submit comment at the bottom of this post.
April 16, 2009 at 5:52 pm |
Miller:
I, too, remember the 911 1/2 address!
I remember one time Naylor came over to the 911 1/2 space, and , as was usual for that time, had been drinking. Maybe it was the same night as the couch incident you reported. In any case, he decided he was going to sleep over and was going to get in bed with me.
As he climbed into my bed, he noticed the quilt my mother had sent, a polyester covered very warm blanket. He screamed, “A Pussy Blanket!” and jumped out of bed as if he had been shot.
At the time it was fine that he didn’t like my blanket, and yet, to this day, I still call any similar quilt by Lordo’s name.
September 27, 2009 at 2:16 am |
You guys can share your memories of Robert Naylor “Lordo” and speak of his drinking and his spewing out juices on your rugs, but your stories do not ruin my memory of this charming young man. I will ever be thankful for his taking the time to interact with me. Mary Jane