The Roots Run Deep Chapter 3

Chapter 3 - College and Early Work Experience

My narrative continues with a look at life in college and beginning work in the grocery business.

Vimeo Link: The Roots Run Deep Chapter 3 - College and Early Work (vimeo.com)

College Years

In the fall of 1969, I moved into a dormitory on the campus of the University of Wisconsin. My roommate was another fellow Wayland classmate, Dana Julian. Dana spent most of the senior year experimenting with rats in the attic of the senior dorm. Scientific experiments with electrodes in their brains. When he got to campus, he took a number of exams for the basic courses and was already a sophomore by the end of the first semester.

Dana had a work ethic that let him study almost constantly for weeks at a time and then he would take a night off and let himself get drunk or go a little crazy. After this little respite he would once again dig into his studies. Dana went on to become a brain surgeon at Baylor University in Texas.

It was at Madison that I woke up to a much wider world than I had ever experienced. As I walked down State Street toward the capital those first few days I was struck by the total diversity of life and people that exist on this planet. The words that kept repeating in my brain were “why didn’t anybody ever tell me about this”.

It was at that moment I woke up to the fact that I really knew next to nothing about the real world and I was about to wake up to the beginning of the rest of my life.

The one goal I had told myself my whole life was that I wanted to be a doctor, so I signed up for the science and chemistry courses needed to fulfill that desire. The reality of that choice soon became obvious to me as I was completely buried by the formulas and body parts that my mind needed to store away.

It was clear to me after a couple courses that being a doctor was no longer a strong enough desire to keep me on course.

In addition to all that was happening to me, we were at the apex of the Vietnam War and the campus was alive with protest and agitation. By the spring of 1970 we were in the streets with all the other students protesting.

In the winter of 1968, the government held the draft lottery which gave you a draft number based on the birthdate you turned 18. My number was 117 which pretty much meant I could be drafted if I did not have a good reason to stay out, and staying in college was one of those reasons.

We had missed a lot of classes at that point and we were more interested in closing the school down so we would not fail and the war became a secondary priority for us. We were pepper gassed and hit with rubber bullets and were no longer thinking straight.

A couple of us even came up with the idea of burning down one of the garages on campus with a Molotov cocktail to help move things along. Lucky for us that we hadn’t paid close enough attention in chemistry class to succeed.

In the end, the school let us take any of our courses as pass/fail in the spring of that year.

As the year ended, I went to my first outdoor concert outside of Madison and was growing into my hippie persona. I was smoking pot and dropping acid and letting my hair grow out so I could show the world who I was.

A little later that summer I hitchhiked my way to another festival in Northern Wisconsin where I lived in a small pup tent for 3 days and avoided some bullets on the last day from the security team the festival had hired. They were the Hells Angels. I’m not sure who made that bright hiring decision.

It was in August 1970 that a small group of men loaded a truck with fertilizer and blew up the Army Math Research center on the Madison campus and killed a graduate research student. Karl and Dwight Armstrong were the main leaders and Dwight remained a fugitive until years later.

It was after this incident that my father suggested that I move home and finish out my college years at the campus in La Crosse.

In the following three years I would begin to come into my own.

When school started in the fall of 1970, I signed up for my first philosophy and anthropology courses at the University of Wisconsin, La Crosse. It was at that time that I was beginning to answer the deep questions in life. Who am I and why am I here?

I did life a little different from most people. I moved away and lived in a dormitory for 5 years in High school and one year of college and then moved home to complete my college education.

I was so taken by both philosophy and anthropology that I majored in the first and minored in the latter. I was particularly intrigued by the study of existentialism and Eastern Philosophy and was influenced greatly by Hermann Hesse and his book, “Siddhartha” as well as Friedrich Nietzsche’s book “Thus Spoke Zarathustra”, which I would read again a little later in life when I needed strength to move on with life.

Around this time my brother, Roger, told me about another writer named J. Krishnamurti. I bought the book “Think on These Things” and his writing spoke to me in a way I had not experienced before. I also discovered Alan Watts around the same time and began to immerse myself in the exploration of my soul.

I was an average student at Wayland but in college I was studying subjects that interested me and I excelled in all of them. My main anthropology professor allowed me to take several courses as self-study and I loved every minute of it.

At graduation she was somewhat surprised to see that I had graduate summa cum laude. She said “wow, I knew you did well in my classes but I did not realize you were so accomplished”.

During Christmas break in 1970 I went to Las Vegas with my friend, Rick Clement. His father worked for the Atomic Energy commission so he knew the town and area well. We were still under age but I bought a roll of nickels and played the slot machines. About half way through the roll I won 80 dollars and walked away with my winnings. Later that week we drove to LA where I used my winnings to score a pound of marijuana, which I packed in my suitcase and carried home on the plane. Another instance where God was watching out for me.

I can say that I hardly ever paid to smoke, as I used my entrepreneurial skills during college to sell enough to allow me to smoke for free. I don’t recommend this line of work to you, but it was just another one of my business endeavors that would not be a full-time job.

The summer after my sophomore year my brother Roger and I moved into the house in Brownsville, as it still had not sold. I spent my time reading, listening to music and spending time on the river. Karin and I were basically living together that summer as well. She was working at the Traine company in La Crosse and had rented an apartment that she used for storage and little else.

Things were going well until her little brother, Gary, went by the apartment to visit her and found out from the manager that she was never there. This resulted in her parents learning that she was living with me and that did not fit into their plans for their daughter.

Marc and Karin 1971

They drove out to Brownsville and made it clear, in no uncertain terms, that if she did not come home, she would be disowned. This was a very stressful time for all of us and she decided it best to move back home.

I’m not sure why this did not end our relationship but once again, God had other plans in store.

At the beginning of my Junior year, I signed up for a year in Copenhagen that would have been my senior year in college. I was quite prepared to go but ended up getting married in April of 1972 instead. This was one of those decisions that I will always bring up when the conversation turns to the topic of what might have been?

I have no regrets but I do wonder how my life might have turned out had I taken that year abroad. For sure I would not be writing this story as I now am.

As Karin and I prepared to get married we rented our first apartment in La Crosse within biking distance of the university. This was an old, small house with an apartment upstairs and one downstairs. We got the downstairs apartment which had the smallest bathroom I had ever seen, on par with those you find on a cruise ship. It was sufficient for us though and we had some good neighbors upstairs, John and Betty Jeremier. John was attending UW-La Crosse and Betty was a nursing student.

John and Betty Jeremier

Through John and Betty, we got to know several other relatives and friends who we hung out with often. We would party at their homes and go for outings in nature.

I April of 1972 Karin and I got married at her parent’s church in La Crosse. It was a small affair with my brother Stan as my best man and Karin’s childhood friend, Darlene Rhinehart, as her maid of honor.

My friend from Wayland, George, Doc Davis, came to the wedding and hung out with us at the church, at my parent’s home, and later at our apartment. My father gave us a bottle of champagne to take with us and after finishing that and several joints none of us were in any shape to go anywhere, so Doc spent our wedding night with us on the couch. We threatened to do the same thing for him when he got married a year later, but never followed through.

When we came out of the church, we found our car stuffed with newspapers and covered in shaving cream. That not being enough, when we got back to the apartment the toilet was full of Jell-O and the bed was short sheeted and full of crackers. Luckily, we were not in a mind set to care much at the time.

I had applied at several schools for graduate studies in Philosophy and was accepted at Columbia and UW-Madison. I thought it would be great to go to New York to study but that was a bridge too far for Karin. Moving that far away and living in a big city would have been a major culture shock, for both of us.

We opted for UW and packed up in the fall of 1973 and headed back to Madison. We rented an apartment; Karin got a job at the American Cancer Society and I began my studies in the philosophy department. I also began working as a night stock manager for a local grocery chain to bring in some extra money. I took several classes in the summer of 1974 to get some basic studies out of the way and I loved the fact that I could wipe out these boring courses in 8 weeks.

In the spring of 1975, I woke up one day to the realization that I had no idea what I would do with a degree in philosophy and decided to switch my major to an MBA. It made more sense to me to stick with business as my father had done well in that area. The MBA program was totally unsatisfying to me, however, and once again I needed to find something that would feed my soul a little more.

I Again, had one of those moments when I realized that I was stocking grocery shelves at night when I could be running the whole store, so I made the decision to move back to La Crosse and start the super market management program at the local vocational school.

In early 1975 Karin became pregnant and we had to prepare for another change in our lives. We were then living in a third-floor apartment in a 6-apartment building closer to campus. It was a hot summer and we did our best to get through it. On August 6^th we were getting ready for dinner when her water broke in the living room and we were off to the hospital. Our Daughter, Stacy was born on August 7, 1975 and our world would forever change.

Karin and Stacy day 1

We moved back to La Crosse that fall and lived with both sets of parents for the next year. Thankfully, my mom knew a lot about how to deal with a crying baby at night. She convinced us to let Stacy cry until she learned that we would not be coming and she finally started sleeping through the night.

The year after Stacy was born, I attended school at the Western Wisconsin Technical Institute in their super market management program. I was the oldest student in the class by about 5 years and had a much broader background and educational history than everyone else so I sort of became the class leader.

The program was a two-year degree but since I was already a college graduate, I was able to skip all the basic classes and just concentrate on super market management. It was easy and fun and I pretty much breezed through.

While we were living in La Crosse, we attended church with my parents at a local fundamental Christian church and given my educational training, I began to question the whole Christian Bible thing. In the process of this I attended a lecture on Bible prophecy and took it upon myself to do a deep dive into whether I could validate the prophecy in the Old Testament with the New Testament writings. After a few months work, I was convinced that I could accept the Bible as a legitimate work and Christ as a real man and the Son of God. I even went so far as to get baptized. I would spend the next few years reading the Bible and doing various Bible Studies in places where we lived. This was around the same time that the Jesus Revolution was happening on the West Coast, although I was unaware of that phenomenon at the time.