Recently a friend confided that her 80-year-old mother is having trouble adjusting to life in a retirement community. It seems the poor women told her daughter tearfully at lunch that she’s dealing with “mean girls.” We’ve all had our share of that—enough to last a lifetime, and we learned to deal with it. Initially my friend wasn’t sympathetic, but her son put it in perspective. “Mom, go easy on Grandma. She never went to college and never lived in a dorm, a sorority house or a military barracks. This is the first time she’s lived in a group setting.”
That made me realize how lucky I was to have experienced dorm living, even though I didn’t always think so at the time. It provided lessons in patience and tolerance, something I desperately needed. (Still do!) Through the years, I had various roommates who turned out to be great friends, but we both still needed to compromise.
One was a night owl and studied late with the overhead light on. Luckily, I could sleep through anything, including light in my eyes. The problem came when I, ever the early riser, got up for my morning classes.
Another roommate was a slob, and I was not; another was a neatnik and I was not. But we always were able to work it out. We would partition the room, keeping each half to our personal tidiness standards.

Our rooms weren't the only place where we had to compromise. Our floor, holding approximately 40 girls, shared six coin-operated washers and dryers. So, finding a time when the machines were free was always a challenge. Since we needed quarters to operate them, we’d help each other out by cobbling together change when the front desk was closed. This picture from one of my yearbooks shows some of the girls at work in the laundry room. This MUST have been staged for the yearbook photo. If it were for real, the girls wouldn’t be smiling, and they’d be only partially dressed.
The dorm had communal bathrooms down the hall, so each girl owned a “johnny bucket,” filled with her toiletries, which she carried and protected like gold at Fort Knox. One girl sang off-key in the shower; another never cleaned the tub after she used it.
Each room had its own phone, but service stopped at 10 pm on weeknights and midnight on weekends. So, we learned to wait in line to use the pay phone down the hall after hours and played messenger for any girl who was lucky enough to get an after-hours phone call from her boyfriend.
But there was lots of fun in those dorms, too. Practical jokes abounded. I remember being loaded into an elevator headed to the first floor, wearing only a half-slip and no underwear. We also often met in the communal lounge to make popcorn and dish gossip late at night. We laughed a lot and barely paid attention to the small black and white TV.
Old School dorms weren’t the posh places many are today, with maid service and more private bathrooms, and because of it, we managed to get an education in more ways than one!
Fun