Tag Archives: Hippies

Professor Groovy

Turn On, Tune In, Write About It

It’s time to give a little love to my new audiobook, Professor Groovy and Other Stories, a collection of four short stories inspired by my college experience as, yes, you guessed it, a hippie girl. Previously, it was only available only in Kindle, but now you can hear me reading the stories aloud. Before I forget here’s the link.

You may read or heard me say this before, but I will do it again: I take what I know and have my way with it. That is certainly true of myIsabel Long Mystery Series and my other fiction. But in this case, I relied on my experience in college for these short stories.

When I arrived at Bridgewater State College — now a university — I was a shy girl who lived a sheltered life. I never dated, except for coercing a boy to take me to the prom. I so enjoyed my classes at Fairhaven High School and look forward to going to college. I was the first of my family to do so. They and I thought I would return home and teach school afterward.

Well, things didn’t go as planned. I found myself attracted to the college’s counter culture thanks to a woman in my dorm who introduced me to her circle of friends. And from there I enjoyed a great social life that included imbibing in all sorts of mind-altering substances. I was no longer shy or sheltered. And, yes, I did graduate with good grades and a teaching certificate. It was too important for me not to do that. But I moved onto another kind of life, which included raising a large family, moving about this country, and, yes, writing.

Here is the pitch for the short story collection: Lenora Dias, her college hippie friends, and a notorious professor try to make sense of life during the sixties. A prequel of sorts to the novel Peace, Love, and You Know What.

When I was in college, I encountered college professors who were figuring things out themselves. Was there a Professor Groovy? I recall one who liked to, uh, socialize with my group of friends. There were others. But what happens to Ned Burke in Professor Groovy did not take place in real life. When Bridgewater’s literary magazine, The Bridge, published the short story in an appeal to alum, one of the editors asked which prof. inspired the character. My lips were sealed.

In Ripple in the Jungle, Lenora Dias meets a friend for coffee at a locals coffee shop. Yes, there was one in the town’s center, Buddy’s, where I hung out with my friends, but this is a highly fictionalized meetup. Lenora is secretly corresponding with a guy she never met who is stationed in Vietnam. She sends him a bottle of Ripple as a gift, but there’s a bit of glass floating in the wine so he doesn’t dare drink it. Yes, I did mail a bottle of Ripple to a soldier and was amazed it even arrived intact except for that sliver.

In Smart Girls Like the Cool Guys, Lenora hooks up sort of with a local guy when she is back home for the summer. The guy has had a rough life along with a self-made tattoo of a dagger with the words “Born to Lose” on his arm. Let’s just say he was an inspiring character, but the story is pure fiction.

Fat Mark Writes It Down: I had a college friend who was indeed overweight and kept a journal in spiral notebooks. But, no, I never read any of them or did anything like Lenora does to one of her friends who has a similar habit. I wish I had.

There you have it. I recorded that audiobook in my son, Nate Livingston’s Mudroom Sound Studio. It’s a quick listen at 1 hour and 15 minutes. Recording this book was a learning process since it was our first. I thank Nate for taking on the project. We are talking about recording the Twin Jinn Series, complete with music he creates. Sounds like a great project to me.

Find Professor Groovy and Other Stories on Audible: here’s the link.

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Memoir, Uncategorized

Doing the Dishes — My College Job

Dennis Merritt shared a recent Substack post Showdown at the Pembroke Dish Room in which he wrote about a job he had in college unloading dishes in a school’s dining hall. It brought back a memory although my experience was different, especially since a dean tried to get me fired.

In my junior year at Bridgewater State College (now a university), I was hired to work in the dining hall at Tillinghast Dorm, know as Tillie. My job was in the dish room for the early morning shift, which meant I had to be there before 7 a.m. Sometimes that meant I came straight to work from a party, left a boyfriend behind in my off-campus apartment, or had pulled an all-nighter studying. My shift lasted until my first class.

But I had motivation. During the summer, I worked at a textile warehouse in New Bedford, MA, which covered most of my expenses. But I was hoping to travel to Europe. I thought I could swing it if I didn’t spend any money, except for food and rent.

As in Dennis’s experience, the dining hall had a large machine with a conveyer system. Unlike his, we used large racks to hold the contents while they were being washed. Students and faculty brought their plates, cups, and utensils to a metal counter in the dish room’s large opening. There were two of us on duty, my friend Betty and me. One of us scraped plates and loaded everything onto a rack, which then traveled through the machine. The person on the other end removed the rack and stacked it on a counter for lunch time.

The shift started slowly with the early risers, but it got very busy.

On the few days Betty couldn’t make it to work, I had the job of loading and unloading the dishwasher by myself. I had to be careful the racks didn’t back up on the end, so I was running around a lot. Frankly, the experience was rather Chaplinesque.

Then one of the college’s deans got wind that I was working in the dining hall. The woman, who shall remain nameless, wasn’t pleased about the emergence of the hippies on Bridgewater’s campus. Of course, I was one of them. So one day, she approached my boss at the dining hall. She wanted him to fire me because, get this, I was an immoral person.

I found out about it when my boss took me aside. He told the dean he wasn’t firing me because I was one of his best workers. I thanked him for backing me up.

Actually, the dean’s attempt was a big source of amusement for me. I was too immoral to scrape food off students’ plates and get them clean? Perhaps she had hoped I would fool around enough that I would get poor grades and drop out. But that didn’t happen either.

By the way, that’s a photo of me from that time. And, yes, I did save enough to travel to Europe.

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