With the UC
being torn down and hauled away like so much trash, I figure it’s a good time
to publish some of my memories of the place that was my home away from home for
so many years… the Avion office. Considering that I was the one who haunted the
office for a full decade… well, okay, it was just three terms… one for Carter
and two for Reagan… I guess I’m best qualified to tell the story.
Often people
attend Embry-Riddle and stay in the dorm for a term or two and then move off
campus to a series of apartments, rental houses or even fraternity houses. Your
classes and labs rotate and even your daily mean cycle can take you to many
differing locations. The Avion office, however, had the unique ability to
become an anchor point for us from our freshman year until graduation and
perhaps a little bit thereafter. You could join the staff as a freshman and
remain attached to the Avion through your entire tour at ERAU. There was no
need to pledge or take an oath or change yourself to fit in, as we are all
misfits. Dean Rockett has often said that no fraternity, organization, club or
even ROTC has the sort of bonding that takes place in the Avion. Both as a
student and as an alumnus, the Avion mafia remains strong.
I always
wondered what non-Avion people did to survive on campus. For me, the Avion
office was in effect- my office. I had people from back home come to campus and
walk around asking where I may be found and the answer that always worked was,
“Check up in the Avion office.” I had a phone number where I could be reached,
a place to sleep when I got back to school and hadn’t found a roommate yet,
free postal service and especially important; a family when I was away from
family. We all had that same benefit. The Avion office was the place where we
vented, goofed off, created, sang, scammed, mourned, laughed, argued, made fun
of one another, ate, drank, celebrated and just simply relaxed. We were all
equals with a common interest, differing goals and assorted points of view and
we all respected one another. Those are rare circumstances in the real world.
When Teresa
and I were first engaged, she told me one day that she was going to join the
Avion staff, “…because you’re up there all the damned time, so I may as well be
up there too.” For me the Avion office was just a part of my normal existence
at ERAU. I’d first ventured into the office on Friday, February 10, 1978. In
those days the Avion office was the narrow room that would later become the common
purpose room. It was packed with upper classmen and instead of simply going in
and taking some time to be the fly-on-the-wall, I was introduced by Dan-the-man
to the whole staff as “This is the guy with the cartoons I’ve been telling you
about!” as he slammed my portfolio of cartoons onto the layout table.
“Uncomfortable”
is a rectal exam, this was more a kin to being dragged grudgingly to a back
yard party at a complete stranger’s house and being immediately thrown into the
pool.
As the
entire staff began reading my cartoons and snickering, smiling and laughing, I
started to relax a bit. What struck me was that they all “got it” they
understood most of my twisted humor and understood jokes that my own family
back in Michigan didn’t understand. Then it came time for editor Ray Katz to
read… he never cracked a smile. He just stroked his beard pensively and then
said, “Here’s what we’ll do, (Yes “we’ll”) you draw your ant life size and
we’ll call it the adventures of Empty Ripple. I politely scooped up my
portfolio, quietly said “thank you” to everyone and made tracks for the door.
Jeanie Snyder and Keith Kollarik (the guy who was then assistant editor and
would soon be editor) apparently both saw this coming and were standing at the
door as I went out. Jeanie grabbed me by the sleeve and whispered to “forget
Katz” and do it my way. Keith pulled me over and said that he was the one who
took the paper to the printer and I should do my cartoon any way I want. He’d
put a junk story on the editorial page where my cartoon would go and after Katz
did his Monday read and went home, Keith would remove the story and insert my
cartoon. “Once it runs,” he whispered, “Katz can’t do a thing about it.” I’d
fallen in with authority-scoffing scamsters… I’d found a home!
By the end
of that first trimester I found myself spending more and more time in the Avion
office. The staff members there were nearly all upper classmen and being around
them allowed me to become more and more a part of the university. By the
following autumn term I’d gotten my roommate Jeff Barrow onto the staff and we
were spending all of our free time up in the Avion office. I’d been tipped off
to some nasty and underhanded events in the university and worked them into my
cartoons, so I was soon a target. But I had two advantages- first, no one
really knew who I was. The classroom instructors could never pronounce my last
name always asked if they could just call me by my first name, which was
registered as “Walter.” So when they called the roll and got to the “Os” I
simply answered to “Walter.” Second was the sanctuary of the Avion office. With
the prog. pilots, food services, housing administration, Delta Chi and WERU all
gunning for my scalp, the Avion staff got quite protective of me. I don’t know
how many times over the years that pissed off people came stomping into the
office with an Avion opened to my strip and demanding to see me. The staff
would just shrug and say that I only came in on weekends to drop off the
cartoon. Of course I’d be sitting right there.
To say that
we were friends on the Avion staff would be a short sale of what the relationship
really was in that office. In the Avion office we were a family. It didn’t
matter if you were rich or poor or what color your skin happened to be or what
part of the planet you came from.
It wasn’t
unusual at all to walk into the office in the morning and find someone still
sleeping on the couch, or find a few people actually having spent the night
mapping out a new computer game that they’d loaded. Rafts for the raft race
were built by staff who guzzled October Fest beer and the construction quality
showed it. ( in October 1978 the Avion raft was so poorly constructed that raft
race officials had to send a power boat out to tow it across the finish line so
the awards could be given out the same day as the race) Photographers worked
until all hours, sometimes printing off rolls of photos taken at the previous
nights staff party, the approach plate for which had been laid out on the light
table.
And, then
there were things like “The Boards.” Someone would scroll something on the
white erase board like “Tim meet me at the library at 10- Pat” and seeing that
someone else would scroll, “Pete, you and me- the cone of silence at 1:45” And
another staffer would write, “Holly, I really need you to meet me at the adult
detention center at 4, bring a file in your underwear- Brian” which would bait a response of, “Brian, I don’t wear
underwear- Holly” and so on until the whole frigging board was just filled with
hysterical nonsense. When nothing more could be fit in, a photographer would
take a picture of it and after enough time for everyone to tickled by it the
board would be erased. No one in any other office on campus ever did that sort
of shit.
The annual
“Avioff” spurred another office thingy- nicknames, many of which stick to this
day. As staffers wrote their National Lampoon worthy prank stories, they began
signing them with some prank names that evolved into their staff moniker.
Around the office we had “Uncle Pat” “Jabba” “T.A. Binzo” “Tim Van Militant”
“Larry Newguy” “Cheff Spagetti” “The Ferret” just to name a very few.
One of the
best kept secrets of the Avion office in my era was the back hallway. Campus
security almost never patrolled that hallway. In fact I’m quite sure that some
of the campus security officers didn’t even know it was there. At night, the
single guard who was on duty at the UC switchboard very rarely left his little
nook. Thus, aside from being a good place to study for a test or a prog. or
have a private conversation, it was also a freeway to monkey business. In the
spring of 1979 the staff of the food service had set up a fine luncheon for the
visiting board of trustees in the room next door to the Avion office… and
neglected to lock the back door. Discovering that, Dan-the-man got a tube of
super glue and went in and started gluing shit. He glued cups to saucers,
napkins to silverware, water glasses to tables, menus to the walls he even
glued the carrot sticks and celery sticks to one another so when you lifted one
the whole lot came out retaining the shape of the dish! Oddly, for the rest of
that afternoon, no one seemed to be in the Avion office… hummmm. Of course the
best one that I can recall took place about seven years or so later- just
before Christmas break. The trimester was over and the bookstore was doing
their end of the tri. book- buyback… where they buy your text books back at
about half price or less and then mark it back up to a buck under new and act
like buying it is a bargain. They conducted this term’s buyback in the room
next door to the Avion- and of course locked both doors at the end of each day.
Rob Watt, however, found that if you stood on the back of the light table in
the Avion office and slid some ceiling tiles aside you could drop down into the
buyback room, open the door to the back hallway and fleece the book store right
back. We went in and nabbed assorted high price books for three nights in a row
and sold them back to the book store for three days in a row. Rob had to make
it even more fun by selling them back the same text books for three days. You
see, the people doing the buyback had no idea what your major was and if you
watched and caught different clerks each day, you could sell the store back the
same book you’d sold them the previous day. Some of those engineering books
were expensive to. I made enough cash to buy my plane ticket home for Christmas
and had some left over to buy gifts.
Yet no
established society can exist without taxation. It was Brian Nicklas who
introduced the “fry tax” to the Avion office. Thus anyone who brought French fries
into the office was subject to the tax. It allowed everyone to reach in and
deduct one fry from their plate while uttering “fry tax.” It’s a lesson that
many of us passed on to our kids and grand kids.
For some
unknown cosmic reason the university never fully understood the Avion office
and the people who called it home when we were on campus. Solid proof of that
came when a hurricane was heading toward Daytona. As a part of the standard
preparedness plan the Avion office was issued huge black trash bags to cover
our equipment- in the event of a roof leak, or loss. Additionally, a large roll
of duck tape (yes folks, the original name for that magic gray tape was “duck”
and not “duct” because it was waterproof. You never stop learning from me do
you?). The tape was for taping up our office windows so that when the hurricane
force winds shattered them deadly shards of glass would not blow everywhere.
Big gray “X”s were to be placed over everything glass. Of course we had no
windows- so we taped everything else that had glass… Uncle Pat’s glasses, my
watch crystal, the computer CRTs and so on. It mattered little, because Pete
Merlin dressed up like witch doctor and with hands full of palm leafs and stuff
went out on the balcony, danced around and chanted “Booga, booga, booga,
hurricane go away…” and the damned storm actually turned and went out to sea.
The most
important thing for all of us, however, was to protect the sanctity of the
paper itself. Forever the SGA and the university administration have wanted to
gain control of the Avion. It is a struggle that continues to this day. More
than once I have seen SGA henchmen physically “removed”… okay… bodily thrown
from the Avion office. Our greatest protection from their low level tyranny has
always been the fact that advertizing made the Avion self-sustaining, so when
SGA threatened to pull the purse strings we simply told them to shove it… the
Avion would be better on its own. Recently, even that protection has come under
threat.
It was
always a given that the Avion would take first prize in college journalism conventions.
I’d always thought that the reason was that our staff were not journalism
majors- thus we were not trying to advance any points, we were just reporting
the news. Additionally, we learned hard lessons about layout and context and
were garnished with some of the most amazing photos.
On the first
day of March, 2019 I was again on campus… the university had actually put up a
temporary sign in front of the administration building reserving a parking spot
for “Klyde Morris” because my name wouldn’t fit. I was guided on a fantastic
tour of the campus which is far, far larger than anything I’d ever expected. The campus is fantastic, but the students are
the same- they’re all there for the same reasons that we were there. The
institute for the incurably professional remains itself; a bit over crowded, a
few hassles, a few delays. While other campuses are wasting time protesting,
our students are working hard with a goal in sight among the towering buildings
and newly paved walkways. Yet, in the middle of the new campus I saw large
equipment that was chewing away at what was once the UC. The final walls were
coming down as I was there. The Avion office that I once knew was nothing more
than a void. Of course the new Avion office is open on the second floor of the
death star… directly across from the SGA office. Tyranny seems to never be far
away.
Safely
stored in the new Avion office is “the door” from the old office of my era.
Avion alumni who visit are asked to autograph the door and it is covered with
tons of signatures. Interestingly… the SGA has no such door. That’s because
Dean Rockett was right- no group on campus has ever been as closely knit as
those who resided in the Avion office.
I just took my daughter to the orthodontist...
BUY MY FRIGGIN' BOOK! I need the money!
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