Cal Poly dorms circa 1972

My father first told me this story while we were visiting California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo during my junior year of high school. I think secretly he rigged things so that I would have to choose Cal Poly for my place of higher education. He told me I could only go to a public California school and since the Universities of California did not offer journalism specifically as a major, I felt I was left with little choice. But he had good reason to want me in SLO, a place he loved so much in his own college years, as you will soon see.

It was the spring of 1972 and my 19-year-old father in his blond afro was finishing up his freshman year at Cal Poly. The warm spring air brought promises of summer, which made studying for engineering classes as hard as staying awake in a stuffy room.

One of the other guys on the second floor of Yosemite dorm, tower six, was blasting music out the window again. It was a habit of his to point his speakers at another tower and crank up the volume. Feeling a bit fed up and a bit restless, the other tower retaliated with water balloons.

Pirate-like shouts of conquest issued from the dorm windows along with the water bombs. It didn’t take long for the exchange of ammunition and banter to attract the attention of nearly everyone on the men’s side of the dorm. The resourceful engineers employed surgical tubing as catapults until all the balloons in tower six were used up. Then they turned to emptying their trashcans and refilling them with water. From the second floor windows unsuspecting students below were completely drenched.

In the midst of the watery pandemonium someone’s eyes were opened to the exciting prospect of an indoor hot tub. Somehow my father got involved in the process of duct taping the gap around the door at the bottom of one of the concrete stairwells and tying a hose to the hot water faucet in the bathroom. To my father’s recollection there were about 20 guys swimming around in four feet of water inside Yosemite Hall.

Meanwhile, the raucous water balloon fight had drawn the resident advisors out of their rooms. They had been trying to get the mayhem under control, but with little success. Finally they had to call in the big guns: the resident manager. Today at Cal Poly she would be called the coordinator of student development, or CSD. She was an older lady who mostly kept to her self until emergencies like this one. She had called campus police and demanded that the students “cease and desist.” But right after she issued that order, some rogue youth hit her in the face with a water balloon. It took a while for everything to settle down after that.

As people headed back to their dorm rooms, they saw water seeping from one of the doors to tower six. The resident manager commanded the indoor bathers to open the door immediately. Obligingly they did, to the result of several hundred gallons of water rushing downhill and into the towers below, flooding their bottom floors. Threats of criminal charges and of payment for damages flew, but no one ever faced those consequences.