Riverland College is busting at the seams with the 4-5 percent increase in student enrollment, good news for the college – good news for Austin.

Tuesday, August 31, 1999

Riverland College is busting at the seams with the 4-5 percent increase in student enrollment, good news for the college – good news for Austin.

There was another time the college was "busting at the seams" – back in the early 1960s when it was known as Austin Junior College. It occupied three short hallways of the third floor of the Austin High School. Above one entrance read "Austin Junior College."

If you were a lifetime resident of Austin, there was good chance you spent most of your school days in this building from seventh grade on.

Seventh grade classes met on the third floor in other parts of the building, mostly the old part. As you advanced through the grades, you worked your way down from floor to floor until as a senior your locker was on the first floor.

Following graduation many students had plans for college, plans for places like Mankato State, Bemidji State, Iowa State, the University of Minnesota, a few ventured out-of-state. Two of our graduating class mates were off to Annapolis, leaving behind a good number of us who had plans to return once again to the third floor of the high school, back where most of us started six years earlier. A humbler choice, a cost-savings choice to go to a college in the same building we had been so relieved to leave just three months ago. A college where we later conspired to tear out the cement in front of the Maple Street /Kenwood entrance, and replace it with sod so we too could have a campus.

Mr. Ruppert taught political science, a class we suspected to be like civics – the science part through us and sociology, whatever that was, in one of the classrooms that paralleled Maple Street. We also had health and English along the same hall where we were required to read "Huckleberry Finn" making me wonder "what the heck! We’re in college now – why are needing to read this kid’s stuff?" This changed when the instructor introduced us to symbolism and he begin to ask us what Jim and Huck represented and what did the river stand for. I was clueless – still am.

Speech met on the other hallway that ran north and south. The hallway that ran along Kenwood, now 4th St. NW, was the home of what Mr. LaVine, the dean of students, referred to as the "den of iniquity." We thought that was a cool name not knowing for sure what ‘iniquity’ meant. This was the smoking room where many of the students gathered between classes to ‘light up.’ Some made this an all-day thing.

In the fall you could actually see out the windows, by the end of the year you couldn’t much like our lungs.

And like the new Riverland College mailboxes, we too had our mailboxes at the top of the stairwell, a good site for dastardly deeds.

They, whoever they were (there were so few there, the dean, his secretary and the registrar, that was it) failed to tell us, as incoming freshman, that you had to study. I thought they did things like we did in high school. Coming from high school where studying seemed optional and being back in the same building in a somewhat different setting I maintained my the same level of study that got me by with "C’s".

After two quarters I took a "sabbatical" of sorts and sat out third quarter with a GPA of 0.8. When I returned in the fall I told Mr. LaVine that I was going to maintain an "A" average. He said if I did he would let me carry a flaming torch around the halls and the teachers would have to bow down to me when they met me in the hall. I got one "A" that year. A one-credit PE class for going out for baseball. It was part of the deal. As the second string right fielder I didn’t see much action. My one time at bat produced a foul ball that went out of Marcusen Ball Park, bouncing first off the back roof – my season highlight. Later I was picked off first, a result of reading the score board as I walked slowly back to first base after the ball had been pitched and an alert catcher noticed my nonchalance in returning to the base.

There was the time we suspended a sign down the side of the building to Miss Mitchell’s class that read "Hi Clara"; the annual freeze-out when we kept the windows open on the coldest day of the year; and the spring Whitewater State Park outing that pushed the staff advisors right to the edge, especially on the bus ride back.

My final speech was on the need for a new college and three years later ground was broken and now low and behold that space is full. Perhaps Riverland could sublet from the high school. I wonder if the mailboxes are still there. I think the Austin Junior College sign must be around somewhere.

Bob Vilt’s column appears every other Tuesday