I’m talking Riverside.

UCR.

What I’ve referred to as “my formative years.”

I know I know there were those eighteen earlier years when Monterey Park first formed me.

And, after 1970, where Altadena continued the process, almost completed it.

But from 1959 to 1970, it was Riverside.

That’s when and where I got to really know Shirley, married her, fathered our child, began and finished my college degree (UCR, English), and started teaching for real and a regular salary.

Those were happy days.

The nice thing about being happy is that once you learn it you can always be happy.

And young. You can always be young.

Riverside, UCR, in 1959 opened a whole new world for me.

I was young, eager, naïve (even more than now), inexperienced (more than now), ready (still am). The world was my oyster and Shirley was my pearl.

In no particular order, things happened, and I’ve talked about them. I won’t tell everything, but I’m sharing memories I’m reliving. Bear with me.

Shirley and I were on foot that first year. Neither one of us had a car.

I had earned my license a year later than my peers, and I seem to remember teaching Shirley to drive because her father was too impatient and I took over the lessons.

So we both could drive but didn’t have a car. The bus was our means of transportation to bring us home on the weekends. Riverside was sixty miles away, the trip took over an hour, with local stops along the way, and dropped us off at the El Monte station where our parents picked us up and brought us home the rest of the way.

I knew but was not fully aware that the reason we never rode that bus together was because our parents had different work schedules for when they could drive over to get us.

So in Riverside we were on our own on foot.

We lived in the dorms, the only ones extant. The ground floor of the girls’ dorm had an open window where the girls could sneak out, meet boys, go into town and do whatever girls do.

I was in the boys’ dorm, upper floor, separated by the common cafeteria where we all ate cafeteria style, pushing our trays along the rail while our plates were heaped with curated food. I’m surprised that I don’t seem to remember the food clearly, just that there was always enough. I was still that hungry little kid so it was like heaven on earth, you could re-fill your milk glass and, if I remember correctly, you could always go back for seconds. I think that began my love of smorgasbords, sadly now almost non-existent as the former present is swallowed up (yes, an appropriate metaphor) by the past.

Shirley and I would meet during the day or in the evening after hours and roam about. This was even before we were “together.”

I always thought we were together, but Shirley was more cautious about admitting it.

She was the more worldly one, had gone on actual dates with boys in cars, knew how to dress in appropriate fashion, how to behave in public, was just way ahead of me in the ways of the world.

She taught me much, and I was an eager learner. Then I taught her things and we learned together.

Life was enchantment at every time of day.

We would roam the Riverside streets when there were orange groves everywhere in town. At blossom time, the whole valley filled with perfume, and breathing was magic.

Nowadays the orange groves are nearly gone. The groves were bulldozed for housing and strip malls, as the population rose from 60,000 to over 200,000. The extant groves now are up near the UCR campus which operates them as part of the Citrus Experiment Station which began the Riverside enterprise early in the last century.

Riverside was the Orange Capitol of the World. The Parent Naval Orange Tree is tended like a shrine. In the early 1900s Riverside, with the big houses of the Gentleman Farmer Orange Barons, had the distinction of having the “highest per capita income in the nation.” The landed gentry were the moneyed elite, the local society’s upper crust.

In the 1960s, those were the days when UCR went from the edges of rumor, “Heard about you up there at the end of the valley, at the base of the Box Springs Mountains,” to students more than a thousand coming in to town to look around. I think our inaugural class was about 1500 and I didn’t know all of them.

Those were the days when Riverside’s highest education was RCC, Riverside’s two year City College. That was enough for the town which was becoming a bigger city, and “those uppity university types should just stay up there, not come into town to sneer at us ignorant locals.”

I didn’t know any of this. I was just a kid away from home on my own for the first time, and everything was new to me.

I caught on, sometimes pretty quick.

On campus, our freshman class was openly hated by the upperclassmen. “You flooded in and destroyed our beautiful small intimate Humanities based university college where everybody knew everybody and the Professors ate lunch with us and sometimes held class at their houses.”

We said, “We’re sorry. We didn’t know. Don’t blame us. We mean you no harm.”

Things settled down during our first year as some of us took upper division classes and mingled, and the older students had their own floor in the same dorms and ate in the same cafeteria.

There was grudging acceptance. We all sat together on the floor in Watkins House where the Poetry Group read everyone’s poetry and put out the latest issue of Poetry UCR, including some of us.

We joined the marches and student sit-ins during the unrest and upheavals of the early ‘60s, and the older students realized we were allies, swelled the numbers, and took us on as a project to train us and show us the way, as upperclassmen should always do with the new incoming freshman class of near peers. Adolescence leads to adulthood.

We were a unified campus. All freshmen took Freshman English and read the same books. Everyone on campus saw the school play.

All freshmen took Humanities, the history course that gave us plenty to discuss after hours in those late night bull sessions in the dorms where we hammered out a common understanding, augmented the hours spent in class and learned more, extending our education, wrestling intellectually with upper classmen and gaining eventual respect.

So we joined the upperclassmen, the old guard, in their resistance to the next influx of even more freshmen next year.

“You’re ruining our beautiful small intense Humanities based Liberal Arts University where upperclassmen sit with us in the cafeteria, share food and music at our local on-campus pub, The Barn, and we don’t want to be watered down and diluted by the way-too-many of you.”

We had become the Old Guard.

Not totally, because when the upperclassmen planned a revolt, staging a demonstration to turn away the new hordes, we were not trusted enough to be included.

The night before busses of high school seniors were scheduled to arrive for a campus orientation, showing the attractions of UCR to convince them to apply and choose this wonderful campus, the upperclassmen, under cover of darkness, climbed to the Big C on the Box Springs Mountains, with brushes and buckets of white paint, and transformed the image.

As the busses arrived and the students disembarked, they saw, resplendent, on the mountain in the early morning light, the Big C was now a Hammer and Sickle.

Some of the students wanted to get back on the bus. Some withdrew their application.

We, the current freshman class, felt left out, but did what we could, turning around the signs on campus so the new prospective students would get lost and think twice about going to UCR.

So we were rebels too.

Which is why, when the Administration, hungry for growth and campus offerings commensurate with the larger campuses like UCLA and Berkeley, proposed the introduction of Fraternities and Sororities to UCR, we voted it down unanimously. We didn’t want our beautiful small intimate Humanities based Liberal Arts University polluted by a flood of newcomers who would cheapen and dilute our intensity and probably lead to Big Time Sports and an emphasis on employment for job security rather than the true deep comprehensive education we loved.

These days, UCR has Fraternities and Sororities and Competitive Sports in the name of change as “progress.”

UCR is becoming more and more a presence in the larger world, and has gained universal recognition and acclaim.

Yet it retains its Humanities focus. In the face of progress, a fully developed Medical School, competitive tech, the English Major is still major, and students are prepared for this century, and publicity highlights the real human values, the commitment to altruism.

And the new Chancellor, whom I’ve been reading about, is so securely intelligent and supportively student-oriented, speaks so masterfully and I want to meet him, shake his hand, add my voice to the choir singing the praises.

UCR, those early days last century, when Shirley and I would roam the campus, side by side, then holding hands, would stay out late because she could always sneak back into the dorms through that ground-floor window, while I had to wait by the door to the boys’ dorm for someone to come out so I could get back in without waking the RA who might write me up for breaking curfew.

We went everywhere. We tried Picnic Hill where couples met to kiss, but chose those darker vacant paths of the Citrus Experiment Station at night, the secret garden, and our beloved rosebush on the other side of the path nearer the main building, where we sheltered from the rain and the same night made love four times, still a record.

After all these years, I want to go back to visit the campus and see if our rosebush is still there.