Technically I went school with Jeffrey Dahmer. My first two quarters in Ohio State were also attended by one of the world’s most infamous serial killers. It’s hard to explain how strange a period of time autumn quarter 1978 was to new students and what a fertile breeding ground for mental illness it was. I was recently reminded of my brush with crazy when yet another series on serial killers launched on cable. At least this series dealt more with details from the police side and what advances have been made in the past 40+ years in tracking and capturing these monsters.
OSU at the time was still exhausted from the student protests, the changes happening in American culture post-Nixon and Vietnam, and a slew of other issues. Frankly the place was a mess. It was crusty in the way neglected public facilities get when there is no continuous improvement funding and no enthusiasm to improve things. We talk about how trauma is passed down in families but isn’t history full of examples of shared trauma in a mass scale? The place reeked of exhaustion and minor neglect. Heck the toilet paper rolls in the women’t restrooms were set so that you could only get one sheet of paper at a time so the University did not to have to spend too much money on supplies. Sigh…
Anyway, autumn, 1978 was a mess. The University over accepted freshmen well beyond its capacity to house, feed and even offer classes to all of them. Apparently it had been a standard practice to admit beyond capacity but in autumn 78, the number of students who actually showed up and enrolled was unusually high and unexpected. I’m not sure what the options were, but the University responded by adding beds to various nooks and crannies and used the survival of the fittest method of management to deal with the fall out. Ahh…the good old days…
I didn’t even get a dorm assignment. I got notice that there was no housing left and good luck to you. A fine welcome…maybe that’s why when I came to work for OSU, I tried to change the experience for other students. My motto was “I will always try to err on the side of the student.” That said, I didn’t make exceptions but I did try to fix things to work correctly. But I digress.
There were still dozens of campus bars and the drinking age was between the ages of 18-21, you could buy 3.2% alcoholic beer and 6% once you turned 21. That just meant that people looking to get drunk under 21 had to drink twice as much, not a hard achievement for many and the training ground for adult alcoholism in action. It also lead to an excessive amount of barfing. Ahh the good old days…
Anyway, I have no idea if I ever encountered Jeffrey Dahmer, OSU is and was and will likely always be an extremely large campus. It’s one of the things I liked best about it but certainly not everyone’s cup of tea…or beer. When the Dahmer case became public and dominated news cycles, I was working at Ohio State and had access to student records on line. Our office oversaw certain tests and had to look up results regularly. My student workers who assisted with the process looked up Dahmer’s records much to my surprise and told me that he had basically flunked every course for two quarters…except riflery. He managed a C+ in that course. Still makes my blood run cold…
As a side note, I am a late boomer and thus am lumped in with people born almost 15 years before me and with whom I have very little in common. A lot of us late boomers are saddled with that bit flotsam so I’ve been inventing other monikers for us:
The Punk Rock Generation (maybe a little too early for late boomers and certainly not accepted generally by the late boomers)
The Sex, Drugs, and Rock and Roll Generation (several middle period boomers told me they have laid claim to this)
So that leaves:
The Serial Killer Generation. So many of these blood thirsty, mostly white dudes are close to my age and even more disturbing was how close I was to their active killing arenas. We lived in Niles, IL (adjacent to Des Plaines) when John Wayne Gacy was murdering young men and boys, I was in northern New Jersey (Passaic/Clifton) when Son of Sam, David Berkowitz was killing dark-haired women because a dog told him to, and then there’s Jeffrey Dahmer, my school mate…
Khatzkel Did It 