Halloween at IDC

Last night’s trick or treating sparked some memories about a Halloween celebration at IDC. I am having a hard time figuring out if it was fall of 1974 or 1975. I think it was 1974.

Someone got the idea that we had enough people and enough creativity to dress up as the entire cast of the Wizard of Oz. And I do mean entire. Sure there was Dorothy and Toto and the Lion and the Scarecrow and the Tin Man, but being the IDC we went full bore to cover all of the bases. Someone dressed up as the Yellow Brick Road, someone dressed up as the Twister, down to someone who dressed up as the Horse of a Different Color. I remember my first inkling was running into some folks in the A side laundry room, where people were trying (ultimately successfully) to take a white union suit pair of long underwear and dye them yellow for the lion.

After the full cast was assembled, there a cross campus walk to what was then the Wilbur Cross Library. The old library with the beautiful twin reading rooms with the long brown tables and high ceilings. There was a rush past the security desk and dancing and prancing and singing through sleepy students spending Halloween studying in the Library.  At least they got a smile.

And the night did not finish there. The crew left campus and visited folks in the nearby Mansfield Training School complex. I do remember the crew and the party came back to the IDC, where much jocularity ensued….

I think that this memory has stuck with me because it encapsulates some of the best of IDC. A burst of youthful energy and creativity that exploded over the course of a few hours pulling people from different corners together and expanding the idea exponentially. It was pure fun. It was not to be destructive or mean, it was to laugh, with each other and then to share that hilarity with others on campus and beyond.

Dedicated to our late beloved friend, Jill H., because a horse is a horse, of course, of course.

There is a post in the IDC Facebook group with Norman Landerman and a few others recollations of this night....

Cheap Eats and the Lurpy Lad from Pittsbugh

It is important for us to define a few terms here because I will be calling out a few people out by name in this post. You may ask, what is "lurpy"? It is a bit of a vague term and it sometimes morphs a bit to fit the time or the situation. The best I can do to define a lurpy person, is to say he is male, tallish, perhaps better put as gangly, extremities extending beyond the ends of his clothes which are often mismatched and clearly out of style. He sports a perpetual crooked grin, and there is a dullness in his eyes to the point that makes you question if he is all there with you. An odd duck, close to fitting in, but a bit of a square peg in a round hole.

Douglas Hammerstrom, who coined the phrase, is lurpy. Well, to be fair, he is only near-lurpy. There is a glint, a twinkle, behind the grin and the fashion faux pas, that says there might be something more going on. He is from Pittsburgh, or so he says, but upon closer inspection, in true lurpy fashion he is only from near Pittsburgh, as if metro Pittsburgh and Pittsburgh were the same thing. He thinks that if you can buy Iron City at the corner store and the clerk calls the local football team, "the Stillers", it is close enough, but geography does not lie.

When he came to the IDC we learned that he was Norwegian, and had relatives there. And if that was not exotic enough, he had traveled to Europe. He told us about strange foods he had encountered like lutefisk and blarblarssoppa. He said he could make up a special dish he found in Europe, called bircher muesli and share it with us. For a long time after we believed that bircher muesli  was Norwegian for wall paper paste with dried fruit and nuts. Turns out in true lurpy fashion the dish is of Swiss origin, not Norwegian at all.

And Douglas is cheap, always looking to best leverage a situation to his economic advantage. You know the deal that Volvo sometimes runs for USA customers when the economic conditions are right? Where if you will buy a car through a USA dealer, they will fly you to Sweden where you can take possession of the car and drive it around for up to two weeks? And then they put your now "used" car on a container ship and send it across the pond to your local dealer, and you fly back to the USA, to await its arrival? Somehow the import duties on sending over a "used car" rather than a new car provide enough of an edge to make it make it worthwhile for Volvo, and if you are willing to play the game and wait a little for your car you get a two week vacation in northern Europe. Ever know anybody who did it? Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Douglas Hammerstrom.

But this not about Doug or Volvos or gooey Swiss breakfast food. It is about smelt. Smelt. You know, small north Atlantic fish, similar to sardines, maybe a little bigger. I need to take you back in the mists of IDC time to a Saturday. There was no weekend evening food and a small group gathered to figure out a Saturday night meal. We found ourselves traveling down to Four Corners, where at the time there was a full functioning A&P grocery.

Someone cruising the frozen food isle, I want to blame Mike Babinski, saw them. The smelts. I have a distinct memory of a 5 lb. bag of frozen fish in somebody's hands, and Babinski saying, "Hey look, they are only 19 cents a pound!"

Let's do some quick math. Five pounds at 19 cents a pound means dinner for less than a buck We splurged and went for TEN pounds. The crowning piece of economic leverage was finding that you could buy A&P beer, in short squat wide mouth bottles for 99 cents a six pack. Ten pounds of frozen smelt and 18 bottles of beer and we were out the door with a feast for a crowd for under $5.00.

Back at the IDC, up on the fourth floor,  a frying pan, some oil, flour and a hot plate were produced. Hammerstrom as I recall found a large bowl and began mixing s gigantic quantity of bircher muesli. You can't fry bait fish in a small dorm room without your neighbors noticing, and soon the crowd gathered.  The music was soft classical, the beer was cold, the smelt was, well, smelly, but the crowd gorged itself on mass quantities of fish and a mixture of yogurt, oats, raisins, nuts, sticks, and stones that literally would stick to your ribs until the dried fruit eventually loosened the mess around 6 AM the next morning and you flushed it all away.

Good times, such fond memories. Strange thing is that in my onrushing dotage, I now gaze into my daily breakfast bowl and find that strange combo of yogurt, oats, fruit and nuts. It has the low glycemic index and the quick travel time through the digestive system I crave. Memories of Hammerstrom, staring me in the face, every stinkin' day of my life. There is of course the added breakfast course of Rick Bombaci peanut butter and toast, but I will save trashing him for another post.

And of course on this morning, we honor and pray for all Pittsburghers near and far, strong, resilliant and proud, so that they may heal, and that our nation will take the necessary steps to end this type of hateful violence.

Steve Sokoloski (IDC 74-76)

Douglas Hammerstrom, aka "the eyesore of the wilderness", Rick "Andiamo" Bombaci and Steve "Soko" Sokoloski