Sunday September 17, 1967, was my first day at Penn State. I finally got to meet my roommate Dave DeTullio and get settled into room 1008 Pinchot Hall.

The first week was orientation week, which meant I got to take some tests to see if I could opt out of certain courses, select my first term’s schedule, and just get familiar with the campus. 

And get to know the other inhabitants of the 10th floor of Pinchot Hall. Like Mike Carr, from Pittsburgh, or a town near there; he and I bonded pretty quickly and we explored a lot of the campus together and got to know some of the other guys on the floor.

As it happened, based on the testing, I did place out of the basic English course, and I also placed out of Latin I, II, and III, and I was told I could take Latin IV. As I had only had two years of Latin in high school and that had been two years previously, I said I’d really rather take Latin III, but that wasn’t being offered in the fall term. I was told that I had had a really high score on the Latin test and that I should take the Latin IV, so that’s what I did.

That week the September 22 issue of Time Magazine arrived in my mailbox along with the November issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.

I’ve previously written about the effect that issue of F&SF had on me, but the cover story in Time Magazine about The Beatles was just as influential.

And suddenly I knew I had to get the Sgt. Pepper album.

The only problem was, I didn’t have anything to play it on. I hadn’t brought a record player with me to Penn State.

Now my roommate Dave had a record player, but he mainly played his 45 rpm single soul records. And while I was gradually getting to appreciate that music, I had genuine misgivings about his record player. To wit, his stylus. I didn’t think he ever changed it. Or at least not often enough to suit me. So I didn’t trust playing any LP of mine on his machine.

Mike, however, did have a record player, and he was in the room next to me, and he seemed nearly as interested in the Beatles’ new album as I was. So he agreed to let me play it on his machine if I bought it.

One evening we set out for College Avenue, and for some reason that I cannot fathom we did not go to the logical place to buy LPs, The Record Room, but we ended up a couple blocks further up the street at a store that mostly sold musical instruments and was set back a bit from the street. I have no idea why we went there.

In any case, they did sell some records in addition to musical instruments and they had the new Beatles album. It seemed to be a mom and pop type of store, as there was a middle-aged couple tending the store and they seemed to be the proprietors.

Anyway, I remember Mike got into a conversation with the woman, who was very nice, but he got to talking about the girls back home, and I started to cringe and tried to fade into the background because of the way he was talking about the “uglies” so casually. The woman seemed to be used to hearing that kind of talk. And I have to say that in fairness to Mike, he was one of the better guys that I knew at Penn State, and I rarely heard him talk like that again.

Anyway, I got the record, and for the next few weeks I spent a lot of time in Mike and Bob’s room (Bob being Mike’s roommate) listening to it.

Thinking back, that first week at Penn State was probably the most optimistic time in my life. What with those great test scores, getting out of the small town of Richland, meeting new people of all kinds, those two wildly different magazine articles.

Everything was possible.