First Fall

The semester where it all begins

By Bill Fields

When I arrived at the University of North Carolina for freshman year in 1977, the idea that fall semester was sweater season turned out to be the Moby Dick of lies. It stayed hot deep into the football schedule. We would have been much better off drinking water instead of the contraband we brought into Kenan Stadium — Southern Comfort hasn’t touched my lips since — but I had a lot to learn.

My dormitory, close to classes (good) and Franklin Street (good, as long as you remembered with enough regularity the point of being in Chapel Hill), was three-storied and three-towered Old West, where my hometown doctor and multiple generations of students before him had lodged. After all, the residence hall was built in 1823. 

I settled into room 27 — first floor, north tower, a straight shot down the sidewalk to the main drag — with Keith, a senior studio art major from Greensboro in his mid-20s. He turned out to be a great roommate, good company when he was there, the kind of fellow whose teasing never crossed the line, and considerate when he returned after a late night creating one of his abstract works. Skinny as a paintbrush, he ate a lot of toast, usually while sitting cross-legged on his bed.

It didn’t take long to understand what a long straw I had grabbed when it came to who was sharing my room. A fellow who became one of my best first-year friends not only was placed in an Old West triple in quarters meant for two, but one of his roommates once took the keys to his car and drove it to Rocky Mount and back without asking first. Handing over the keys, he called my buddy’s Chevette “the worst car made.” He was, I’m afraid, as right as he was rude.

Those first few months in my new world, I encountered moonshine offered by a suitemate from eastern Tennessee, a guitar-playing redhead from Pennsylvania who believed with all his heart he was Neil Young and, in the TV room one evening, a pet tarantula owned by a guy whose roots I never cared to know.

Unlike some of the newcomers to Old West, I arrived with no visions of med school, did not have to cram for an introductory chemistry mid-term, and, therefore did not have to return to my room after flunking that test and realizing, quickly, I was not cut out to be a doctor. That was not the fate of a number of my dorm mates from elite prep schools in the Northeast, some of whom arrived on campus with a semester or more of college credits, an eye-popping revelation for a public high school graduate who was starting from zero and naïvely believed that everyone did.

I tended to my studies well enough that I made the Dean’s List for my only time, doing well in an intensive Spanish course that did wonders for my G.P.A. that would dip in subsequent semesters as I put in more hours at The Daily Tar Heel. When we put in an all-nighter, three of us usually spent it in a classroom at nearby unlocked Smith Building, our studying fueled by what came to be known by us as a “One Thirty Four,” the cheapest offering at Subway, a foot-long bologna sandwich that cost $1.29 plus five cents tax.

My Smith Building preparation worked well enough until I stayed up until 5 a.m. cramming for an Astronomy 31 final and slept through my alarm. I woke up mid-morning to guys talking outside my room having finished their various finals, a sound that shocked me into a pair of sweatpants and a windbreaker, and out the door to Phillips Hall, a short distance down Cameron Avenue. My professor took pity and let me take the exam, and I returned by noon to friends who never let me forget that day.

It’s tempting to say that was my biggest embarrassment of fall semester, but the nadir likely occurred at the Daniel Boone Ice Rink in Hillsborough, site of a mixer with one of the north campus’ women’s dorms. Since I had never ice skated, the prudent move would have been to skip it. But I loaded on the bus and went forth to the ice where I fell over and over to the point that I was soaked from failure, while the experienced skaters from up north went round and round, wowing the southern girls.

I picked up no phone numbers that night, only a cold.

Southern Pines native Bill Fields, who writes about golf and other things, moved north in 1986 but hasn’t lost his accent.