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by Judy Reckart
It's just another parking lot now, but the three-story wooden tenement I shared with two roommates at the corner of University Avenue and Carson Street had a lot to recommend it in 1972.
In retrospect, I can't believe my solidly suburbanite parents let me live there. The third-floor apartment's rear windows offered emergency access to a raw pine fire escape (of sorts), also the perfect venue for idiot undergrads to grill hot dogs on precariously-perched hibachis. The bedrooms were heated with open-flame gas space heaters, which cast a very romantic (and really dangerous) flickering glow. My cat Buckwheat spent his adolescence attempting to charm pigeons and bats from the rickety railing of the apartment's third-level balcony overlooking Carson.
The guy who lived immediately downstairs was an aspiring banjo player with an affinity for pre-dawn practice sessions. He was a few years older than us and a little intimidating to a 20-year old. During the two years he was our neighbor, I never heard him say a word and he never had visitors. We eventually learned to pile pillows on our heads as he trudged up the bluegrass learning curve at 3 a.m. Apparently, he stuck with his instrument of choice: I heard him perform with near virtuosity on West Virginia Public Radio a few years ago.
Our place was "semi-furnished," equipped with vintage appliances and cast-off furniture too bulky for previous tenants to hump down three flights of stairs when they moved on. When we left Carson Street in '75, one roommate (who became my first - now ex - husband) offered our landlord $25 for a massive Hoosier cabinet in the apartment's dining room. I don't remember how we got the damned thing down those stairs, but I'm still honked off that he got it when we divorced - and probably still has it.
These charms aside, our apartment's location was its primary attraction - a block from both Sunnyside Superette and the old Mountaineer Stadium and just a short trek across the stadium bridge to main campus classes. But its real draw? Our digs were almost next door to the College Inn, probably Sunnyside's premier -and hands-down noisiest - bar in the early-70's. I still suspect all the buildings on that block of University leaned on each other for support, with no firewalls between them and darned little insulation: some were actually connected with interior corridors. Regardless, sound rolled through those buildings nearly unimpeded, especially music played full-tilt on the Inn's bass-heavy juke box.
Musical components we couldn't actually hear, we felt pulsating along the old buildings' beams and through their walls. I'm still clueless about the lyrics to Inna Gadda da Vida - then again, who isn't?
But thanks to three well-spent years in Sunnyside, I can pound out the Butterfly's famous drum bridge without missing a lick, 30-plus years later.
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