First Days

52 years ago, I moved away from home and into my dorm and met my roommates in Ann Arbor. I was 18.

Today my youngest, Julia, moves into her dorm at Goucher in Maryland and meets her roommate. So my thoughts and hopes are with her. I hope she likes her room and even more that she likes her roommate.

The world is so different than it was when I went away to college. I was a conservative Republican. My roommates were from Detroit -- Philip (white) and Timothy (black). I quickly became very close with Timothy, so much so that I was eventually invited to join one of the black fraternities on campus.

I also became friends with Timothy's friends -- including a guy who was Stevie Wonder's best childhood friend and a guy who dated Diana Ross in high school.

The latter guy, sadly, had some emotional problems and later tried to commit suicide.

The whole experience, for me, was surreal. Here I was, a pretty naive white boy who had grown up in small towns -- Royal Oak and Bay City -- unsophisticated to the point that I did not even know how to leave a tip in a restaurant.

I certainly did not know anything about girls, which Timothy urged me to rectify. When his Dad dropped him off he had left a bunch of condoms, and he offered to introduce me to any number of girls.

Wandering around campus one night I came upon a small circle of activists sitting and chanting anti-war and civil rights slogans and songs. Taunting them were a number of jocks.

Instantly, I knew which side I was on and I began an intensive self-eductional mission on the civil rights and anti-war movements.

I transformed myself into a left-wing activist and advocate. I knew most of the major black leaders on campus to the point where they trusted me with information about their future actions, which included chaining themselves to the front of buildings to prevent business as usual.

Within months, I changed again, turning myself into a journalist in order to cover these events. In those days we didn't draw a line between actively participating and writing about participating, but gradually, as I became educated, I realized I couldn't do both.

I chose to become an observer and to record what I witnessed.

Many years later, my perspective changed again, and I started becoming more conservative again, with libertarian tendencies. I fell in love with free markets and free trade.

Now, at age 70, I shun all labels. I hope, most of all, that I am a humanist, with sympathy for all others. And most of all today, I hope my 18-year-old daughter, as the wonderful, brilliant, beautiful person she is, starts on some sort of adventure like my life has brought me.

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