Courtesy of Drew Magazine. Article originally appeared in the Fall 1993 edition, by Ray Smith C'89
What struck me first is what always strikes me when I return to campus: the stillness. Even after an hour in a darkened bus, arriving at Drew from Manhattan feels like stepping off a plane in the Bahamas in January, when warm ocean breezes drift over a body that still thinks it's winter. No rumbling subways, no car alarms, no blaring radios.
During a daylight visit, even little details still seem familiar, like the cafe tables outside the University Center and the maroon brick window ledges in Hoyte-Bowne . But at night, places have a way of taking on a very different presence.
At minutes before midnight, as I walk across the lawn from the Main Gate to the University Center, I see the clock tower at Brothers College glowing with more of a purplish tint than I had remembered. At every turn, the campus, like a botanical garden, is ablaze with daffodils. Mead Hall, recently reopened after its three year restoration, still commands the campus with its magnificent portico, even in the darkness.
Of course, some things never change. Alas, the UC is among them, still that relic of a design era that also gave us bell-bottoms and lava lamps. Architecture not withstanding, though, many of my most vivid memories of college are connected to this building, and the UC is my first stop tonight.
Returning there to The Acorn office to meet up with Photo Editor Karl Langdon is jarring. It's the first time I've been in the office since my senior year, when The Acorn went hi-tech with Apple Macintoshes and scanners and laser printers. During my first three years on the staff, I spent so many hours editing news copy that one friend started calling me Raycorn.
Now, it's a far cry from that frantic disheveled work place. Most notably absent in the new office are the wheezing old phototypesetting machine and the mad-scientist cats cans of developer. Two really familiar sensations remain: the acrid smell of the melted wax used to stick type to the blue lined layout sheets and the strange mood, somewhere between frantic and comatose, that settles on a newsroom as a late-night final deadline approaches. This is as Thursday night, and the editors have only a few more hours to get everything done.
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Tonight, Kandil is running a vacuum around the pool tables. We knew he'd remember Karl, who had written a memorably surreal Acorn interview with the custodian and his co-worker Millie Locket (out sick tonight). I wasn't sure if Kandil would remember me, but indeed he does recall how we met. It was late one night during fall orientation week. Some friends and I had climbed into the U.C. through the window of The Acorn office. That was fairly standard procedure for us editors (not anymore, since the window now has bars), and I thought it was a perfectly normal thing to do. Kandil disagreed, and we soon found ourselves being interrogated by two security officers. In short order, everything was cleared up. I had a key to The Acorn office, and we all had Drew IDs, so they let us go unpunished (as did the dean of students a week later).
...
For Kandil, all that is ancient history on this quiet night. His job done, before parting for home he notes that he's glad to be working in the U.C. rather than in such old haunts as Great Hall and Mead Hall. There, he claims, ghost sightings are not uncommon. Even the severe painting of Roxana Mead Drew in the front lobby of Mead Hall can be spooky at night, he says: "When you're doing something, it always seems like she's watching you." Much better, he concedes, to be among the living in the U.C.
As Karl and I set out on campus, we pass Riker, where I reflexively check to see if the lights are on in my room from senior year. (They aren't, although there seemed to be a party happening nearby. But we skip that; we're looking for things happening in public, not private.) We climb the Aztec Steps, far more awash in fluorescent light than back in the campus "dark ages" and head down to the Tolley-Brown circle.
Once at the nether reaches of campus, we descend into the first floor of Tolley Hall, known semi-affectionately as "The Pit". That floor, my home as a first year student, had acquired its nickname when a quirk of landscaping left its northwest face almost underground but the southeast face looming high above the edge of the Zuck Arboretum.
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