To start with, it’s important to note that, in those days, it was incredibly cheap to go to college. Tuition and books were a couple hundred dollars a year, which the Veteran’s Administration paid (my father was killed in WW2). Counting undergrad and grad school, I went to college for 14 years and finished nearly debt-free – impossible in today’s world.
I came to UM in the fall of 1960 as a music education major from an all-boys catholic, college prep school and was clearly unprepared for the large university experience, although I had enrolled at UM the previous summer and had taken 15 credit hours in physical education. The bright spots of my fall semester were learning to play the guitar and being one of thousands of students on the steps of the Michigan Union when JFK gave his “Ask not what your country can do for you” speech. Majoring in violin was definitely not one of the bright spots (if you want to be good, you’re supposed to practice between 35 and 70 hours a week; I practiced about 70 minutes a week) and I switched to clarinet at the end of the first semester.
I pledged Delta Chi in the spring of 1961. Our pledge class became quite close, thanks to our pledge-master, Lane Kendig ’62, whose leadership style, I’m certain, was later used as inspiration for the TV series “American Horror Story.” He did mold us into the tight-knit group which, at one point, discussed tossing him into the 10-foot hole he had us dig (to repair a crack in the basement wall) and then filling it up, but came to the group decision that the action would be morally bankrupt. Things that we learned as pledges:
(1): Eight people smoking in a phone booth is worse than trying to breathe the air in Los Angeles or running behind a bus. And
(2): People working together and supporting each other can actually accomplish real goals. Who woulda thunk it?
During my first year in the house, Bob Todd, Dave Huggett ’64, and I were in the “fireplace room”, a room large enough for three humans, three desks, and, as we demonstrated in the spring, a large vat in which we made corn wine. The wine would have been a huge success but for the fact that none of us knew how to stop the fermentation process, resulting in hundreds of inebriated bees battering themselves to death on our walls. We finally poured it out of the window and the remaining bees followed it out into the yard where they partied in a drunken reverie for several weeks while we were inside listening to recordings of Ray Charles singing “Hit the Road, Jack.” Meanwhile I continued practicing guitar (ever try meeting girls at a party by playing a violin or a clarinet? Don’t bother).
My second year in the house I roomed with Mike Kennedy ’63, a senior, in a room in the basement. Michael was from Escanaba, a town in the Upper Peninsula, where, as he said, there was a bar every 100 feet. We tried to duplicate the feel of his hometown. Our room had a hinged bookshelf inset into a wall, hiding a liquor cabinet. Which we continually restocked. At some point I got mono and the UM Health Service gave me Benzedrine to pick up my energy level. After I recovered, I still had half a bottle of the pills. There was a ping pong table in the house basement and Mike and I would each pop one or two of the pills and play with reaction times you could only dream about.
Somewhere in there I was the “E” and the social director. I have no idea if I distinguished myself at either, but I can take a good guess.
I spent about one percent as much time studying as I spent playing bridge with Tim Curtin ’64, Jim Richhart ’64, Howie Gandelot ’64, Mike McGuire ’65, and various other ne’er-do-wells (including a grad student from the Cornell DX chapter who had a glass eye and would remove it for good luck when we were mired in a losing streak). I also spent as much time playing guitar, playing intramural sports, and skipping classes (sometimes entire courses). My second semester junior year I switched my major from music to English, cut almost all my classes, and dropped out right before finals, taking incompletes in everything. At the end of the summer I went off to California to become a famous folksinger, didn’t, but had many adventures, and starved.
The following year I came back and went to EMU as a Psych major. I lived in an apartment at 802 Oakland (the corner of Oakland and Hill) with Jim Richhart ’64, Jim House, and a friend of theirs. By this time I was putting myself through school by working a meal job and teaching guitar lessons (group lessons, 2 hrs each, 8 students per group @ $5 apiece, 3 groups a week, giving me $120 a week for 6 hours of work – not bad in 1964). I remember once, when I needed a haircut, Jim H told me he could do it. I said “Great”, and Jim, several sheets to the wind, proceeded. Halfway through, I heard him chuckle and say, “Hmmm”. I asked him if there was a problem and he said “No, It just needs to be evened up a little”. He had accidentally cut a bald spot in the back right and then evened it up by cutting another one on the back left. Always make sure your barber is sober but, hey, something can be said for symmetry.
I focused a little more on my studies but, for some reason that fall, I cut almost all my Abnormal Psych lectures including the midterm. Realizing, two weeks before finals, that I was about to fail the class, I outlined the entire course book in two spiral notebooks. I took the final and got a 100%. The prof told me that, if I audited the course the next semester, he’d give me an “A”; if not, an “F”. I opted for the “A”. And then switched into theater for the fall semester of 1965.
That fall of ‘65, I lived in a house on Division with Bob Todd, three other theater students, and the girl that I sang with. I got a small inheritance from my grandparents of $8,000, so I got a $1,000 bill (they existed then) and went to Herb David’s Guitar Studios on State St, slapped it down on the counter, and got a 6-string Martin D28 and a 12-string Guild F312 guitar and $5 change. Thinking the $8,000 would last forever, my housemates and I would get lots of wine several times a week and do improvs (think Saturday Night Live) into the wee hours. In November, while rehearsing the role of El Gallo in The Fantasticks, I met the love of my life, Linda. One week after meeting her, while we wolfed down a romantic dinner at the Big Boy, I asked, “You want to get married?” to which she replied, “Sure.” We waited until January 8 to tie the knot because we were mature.
I got a job teaching guitar and working the counter at Herb David’s Guitar Studio, and our daughter, Anya, was born in 1967. In the late fall of 1968, I was offered a job running The Ark, a local folk music club. The club was on the first floor of a three-story house and we lived on the second floor. Meanwhile, I graduated in 1967 and got my masters in Playwriting and Directing in 1974, maintaining a 3.9 grade point average for those last nine years. We expected to run The Ark until I finished my masters, but we fell in love with it and never left. And it was a great decision.
I ran The Ark for 40 years as it moved from 1421 Hill to 637 S. Main and then to 316 S. Main where it seats over 400. By the time I retired in 2008, it was annually presenting over 300 shows a year featuring folk, blues, bluegrass, country, jazz, pop, rock, world music, comedy, and storytelling from all over the world. It’s doing better than ever now, with my daughter booking it.
During my time at The Ark, I also coached youth baseball and an adult women’s softball team that won a slew of City Championships, one Class B State and two Class A State Championships. As soon as I retired from The Ark, I got a job coaching the Pioneer freshman baseball team for a year and then worked with the Michigan Sports Academy for several more.
With the pandemic shutting everything down, I’ve had plenty of time to write a book about baseball – Baseball’s Best: Comparing Over 1000 Players In Their Primes, 1893-2019, analyzing players’ defense, offense, and pitching in their primes (as the title says), regressing them based on when they played and the size of the available talent pool, and then comparing them. You can get it on Amazon if you’re interested baseball and want to know who might have been better than Babe Ruth and Willie Mays.
I have kept in touch and am good friends with several of the brothers these past 50+ years and will readily attest to the fact that being a member of the Delta Chi Fraternity was certainly one of the best and most important decisions of my entire life.
What can one take away from my experiences?
Well, first of all, Delta Chi clearly didn’t get me to study. Why? Because, no matter how much I admired those fields, I believe I knew deep down I couldn’t spend the rest of my life in any of them. When I switched into theater, I knew it was right. Or so I thought until after several years of running The Ark. As the old saying goes, “Life is what happens when you’re making other plans.”
Second, Delta Chi more than helped me develop the social and interpersonal skills to function in the real world. I truly believe that, without that, very little that happened later in my life would have happened. Had it not been for Delta Chi, that proposal at the Big Boy probably would have taken a different turn: “Linda, will you make me the happiest man on earth? Will you marry me?”
“Don’t talk with food in your mouth. In your dreams. God, are you a loser.”
–David Siglin ’64 [email protected]
