Going dorm part 2: ‘Some really dreadful stuff’
Editor’s note: This is the second in a three-part series.
Dorm life isn’t all new for Ted Pease, one of 15 staff, faculty, visiting scholars and graduate students at Utah State University currently living on campus – and the only one to live in a freshman dorm.
As a freshman at the University of Washington, Pease lived in a high-rise dorm called Lander Hall. Later, as a Ph.D. student at Ohio University, he was a “dorm mother” for the freshman dorms.
Some of the students he lives among now weren’t even born when he was in Ohio. Some of their parents might not have been born when he was in Washington.
“The symmetry of doing it in 1986 and then again in 2012 is a little beyond ironic,” said Pease’s wife, Brenda Cooper, who took an early retirement last year and moved to the small town of Trinidad on California’s northern coast.
“That one was way worse than this one,” Pease said of his dorm experience in Ohio. “There was a kid upstairs, his name was Jordan. He had a basketball. I had to confiscate that basketball once a week. For some reason, bouncing a basketball was something important to do at two in the morning.”
These days, Pease said, the students who live above him in Davis Hall are either very quiet or very frightened of the “old guy” down below.
By comparison, Pease said, his current dorm life is a breeze.
“This place is like Pleasantville compared to every other college campus I’ve ever been on,” he said. “It’s safe and reasonably quiet and it’s not too out of control.”
When he was a “dorm mother” at Ohio University, there was much more partying.
“In theory it was a dry campus, but there was a lot of boozing,” he said. “There was a guy who fell out of a fourth story window during a party. There was some really dreadful stuff.”
He’ll never forget the young woman who gave birth in an OU dorm bathroom.
Like any other college campus, Utah State has its share of problems and parties, but Davis Hall area coordinator Shannon Jolley said USU’s campus – stacked heavily with teetotaling members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints – has fewer alcohol incidences than other schools.
“I would say the vast majority would be roommate conflicts, just people learning how to live with other people and not always doing that maturely,” Jolley said.
The old guy downstairs
Pease’s apartment can be reached by an outside door, so he doesn’t have to go inside the main building. However, despite his efforts to slip in and out unnoticed, he’s caught the attention of many of the residents.
“My favorite was back in the fall when it was too hot – there’s no air conditioning, so I had to keep the window open,” Pease said. “I could hear everybody. I could hear them walking around and talking outside. This one young woman said, ‘Who’s that weird old guy?'”
One of Pease’s neighboring residents is a student named Chandler Kingsbury. At the beginning of the fall semester, Kingsbury and his friends came over one day and peered curiously into the open window.
“Hi Ted,” Kingsbury said. “Hey, this is kind of nice in here.”
Pease pulled back the embroidered Martha Stewart curtains he’d purchased from Kmart.
“Chandler, get out of here, you perv,” he said.
Paige Myers, another Davis Hall resident, said many of the students interact with Pease in person as well as on the Davis Hall Facebook page.
“He’s always really nice and he talks to us,” she laughed. “But it’s more like ‘Oh, hey Ted, sorry about the fire alarm going off.'”
The students don’t seem to mind that a professor is living as their next-door neighbor. They even try to be sensitive to quiet-hour regulations when they’re around his door, though it is sometimes hard to muffle their Call of Duty Xbox tournaments.
“For the past three-plus hours, what sounds like a zombie or exploding sense of sound warfare game party has been on the big screen TV that backs up to my living room,” Pease wrote on the dorm’s Facebook page a few weeks back when he was under the weather. “Can’t freshman zombies die a little quieter?”
He signed it, “The Dorm Mother,” which has become Pease’s name among Davis Hall dwellers.
Davis Hall’s resident assistant, Jordan Ames, quickly replied with an apology – and an offer to put an end to their game.
Pease wrote back “it ain’t bedtime… even for an old fart,” and insisted he just wanted to figure out what game they were playing. “It sounds like exploding-racecar-zombie-warfare-my-little-pony-extravaganza,” he wrote.
Myers said she appreciates Pease’s sense of humor, but she still told her friends to turn the volume down.
“It was right up against his living room so I was like, ‘Guys we should turn it down. Ted has pneumonia.'”
Shortly after moving in, Pease was laying in his bed one night by the open window. He could hear a girl’s voice coming from outside as she talked to someone on her cell phone. With a glance at the alarm clock on his bed stand, he saw it was 3 a.m.
“Her voice was just in the background like dee-dee-lee-dee-dee, and I’m thinking, ‘Oh please. It’s three in the morning,'” Pease said.
He wasn’t fully awake until he heard the girl say, “And you know, I think I might be pregnant.”
“I was like bing: Whoa, I’m awake now,” Pease laughed. “But fortunately, I’m not ‘in loco parentis’ so I could just put the pillow over my head.”
At least one student, though, has adopted Pease as a parental figure.
“I don’t know,” Amanda Tuft said. “Like a grandpa, I think.”
When Tuft first learned her neighbor in the basement would be a 57-year-old man, she thought it was a little weird.
“Because, you know – he’s like an old guy,” she said.
But once she met him, she realized he’s “pretty cool,” and potentially useful.
One weekend, Pease received a call from an unknown number. He picked it up and heard a young woman’s voice on the othe
r end.
“Ted, this is Amanda from your building,” Tuft said. “My friend and I can’t get her truck to start. Can you help me?”
Ted replied to her request: “Well, I’m not a mechanic. Call the cops.”
Fires, zombies and laundry
The inside door to Pease’s apartment opens up to the stairway where the laundry room is.
“It’s convenient, but also not,” he said.
Pease wakes up at five or six every morning, so he gets his laundry done before seven.
“I don’t know if that bothers anybody – I sort of hope so, because the kids are doing their laundry late at night when they get back from the weekend,” he said.
“It vibrates my bed,” Pease said. “I woke up the other night, it was like midnight, and I’m going mrrr-mrrr-mrrr.”
He compared the noise of the laundry and chattering students to living in a large city.
“The middle of the night stuff is really annoying, but I’m getting really good at blocking it out,” he said. “I mean, if I were in Chicago living by the ‘L,’ I guess I wouldn’t hear the train after a while.”
Some things, though, are tougher to ignore than others.
Since Pease moved into Davis Hall, there have been four occasions where the screeching of a fire alarm woke him up in the middle of the night.
“It’s usually someone’s cooking that sets them off,” he said.
The last two alarms have gone off when the temperature was sub-zero and the students had to stand outside shivering while the matter was investigated.
One night around 11:30, the alarm went off and the students filed outside into the frigid air. Upon investigation, the culprit was identified as a young woman who had used so much hairspray, it had triggered the fire alarm.
“That’s a lot of hairspray, and I’m thinking, 11 at night?” Pease said. “What’s the story? It’s got to be, ‘Let’s cement it in place before I go to bed.’ I don’t understand.”
On another occasion, Pease was sitting on his living-room sofa next to the Rubbermaid tote that doubles as his coffee table. Suddenly the fire alarm went off and he jumped to his feet to open the door.
Water was pouring down the stairway like a waterfall.
One of the residents, involved in the semi-annual game of tag called “Humans vs. Zombies,” had shot a Nerf gun inside the building. The plastic projectile hit the sprinkler on the ceiling and suddenly the fourth-floor apartment was drenched.
The students were ordered to evacuate and all stood around on the grass as water flowed down the outside of the building. Pease watched as the kid holding the Nerf gun ran out the heavy front doors.
“This kid came out, he was all hyped up,” Pease said. “He said, ‘Oh, my dad’s gonna kill me.’ Then I heard him say, ‘I guess I won’t be getting my new car.'”
As the designated RA for the area, Ames was running around in the chaos, attempting to salvage residents’ soggy belongings and calm students down.
“Ted kind of helped students to be calm while I ran around helping other people,” she said. “Obviously he was a little worried about it, but he saw the insane scrambling while everyone was trying to get the sprinklers turned off and his attitude helped the students to remain calm. That helped a lot, actually. He’s awesome.”
The damage cost tens of thousands of dollars. The fourth floor was the only area with major damage, but it took months before all the repairs were completed.
There are some perks to living on campus.
The location is convenient and the price – roughly $500 a month – is affordable.
“I’ll tell you what’s a good thing,” Pease said. “We live in Logan, so there’s snow right? At five in the morning, I hear this guy going along with his snowplow. And guess who’s not doing it? Me.”
He doesn’t have to mow the grass, trim the hedges or clean the gutters.
“I’m using their utilities and I get to watch campus cable,” he said. “There are some perks.”
Editor’s note: Sarah Menlove is a student in the JCOM department.