The city of Boston was so vibrant, its pulse seemed to beckon me every time I stepped outside. That was a problem.

I prioritized exploring the city more than exploring my studies. I went to my classes, yes, but rather than going to the library afterwards, I went to concerts, ball games, protest rallies, walked the Freedom Trail multiple times and was diligent in my search for the city’s best pizza.

I loved the city but by sophomore year, I began to realize that I was learning more on the street than I was in the classroom. Stuck in a tenement in the fall and the suburbs in the spring, I found I didn’t love the city as much as I had. Plus, I wasn’t getting the education I was paying for.

That summer, while lugging that sheetrock, I had a lot of time to think about my life’s path. I kept hearing Irving Kravsow question my career choice as I carefully maneuvered the sheetrock around the corners of the stairwells. Bethani’s and her friend’s comment back in high school that I was “shallow” was on replay as I raced backed down the stairs to lift another load. And while I ate my lunch, my mind didn’t go silent. Former teachers and my parents appeared on that soundtrack, repeatedly telling me I wasn’t living up to my potential.

By the middle of the summer, all that thinking had turned my educational path 180 degrees. I decided I had to get out of Boston. Go somewhere quieter. Smaller. Where I could start over, concentrate on my studies for the first time ever and reestablish my identity and confidence.

But the Sivells weren’t a family that easily changed course.

I was sure Mom and Doom would tell me to stay where I was and finish. I would need a convincing argument to sway them. I spent the next few weeks of lugging that sheetrock arguing the case in my head as if I were a lawyer defending a prisoner on death row.

Once I had the strategy set, I had to wait for the right moment to put the plan in motion. It came at dinner, a week later.

We were talking about the upcoming football season when I asked Doom what it was like playing football in college. He had played and was a captain at Hampden-Sydney College, the small, all-male school in the middle of nowhere Virginia that he had attended. He had graduated in 1943, just before he went off to war. It was something he loved to talk about. The more he talked about his time at the school, the more the softer side of his personality came out.

I listened and then reminded him that I had originally wanted to go to a small school before choosing Northeastern. And I realized now, after sitting through large lecture classes where the profs and TAs didn’t care if you showed up or not, that maybe I needed to go to a school where I would be held accountable on an almost daily basis.

I said I wonder if a small school with small classes could do that for me. As I was clearing the dishes, I knew it was time to sink my hook. I said, as casually as I could, that maybe Hampden-Sydney could.

If there was a moment of hesitation, I don’t recall it. Doom had been after me to apply to Hampden-Sydney when I was in high school, but he knew my grades would put me on the admission bubble. This time, however, he realized getting me into that school could put me on the right track toward responsible adulthood.

Instantly, Doom was on a mission to make it happen. He didn’t want me changing my mind. A good friend and football teammate of his had become the school’s registrar. He said he’d make a call to his pal in the morning.

I really didn’t know anything about the college at that point other than its fight song that Doom had sung, over and over, throughout my childhood. “Here’s to old Hampden-Sydney, a glass of the finest, red ruby rheinest filled up to the brim …” And that he had loved his time at the school and still was in contact with several classmates more than 25 years later. The only thing I knew was that I needed to make a change in my life.

So Doom made his call and I sent my transcripts to the school. It was July. We didn’t have much time. I say we, because now Doom was 100 percent invested.

While waiting, I kept working. Since I had not re-enrolled at Northeastern, my future depended on being accepted at Hampden-Sydney. Otherwise, lugging sheetrock and hanging ceiling tile appeared to be my future.

With two weeks to go before classes started at Hampden-Sydney, I was on a scaffold in a crumbling school, chiseling old gobs of ceiling tile glue off the unlit corridor’s ceiling. As I worked, I could see this rather large figure approaching down the long hall. Usually, just the principal, the janitor and I were the only ones in the building. Considering the neighborhood, I was nervous.

Then I realized it was Doom. He had brought a letter from Hampden-Sydney. He was so excited when the letter came that he couldn’t wait until the end of the day to see what it said. Although, he had a pretty good idea that I’d be accepted because of his connections. I was. Doom was thrilled. Later Mom told me he’d been checking the mail everyday, as if he were the student, waiting to get into Harvard.

“Well,” he said, “it is the Harvard of the South.”

So I transferred from the largest private university in the country, with more than 12,000 students, in the diverse and cultural hub of Boston to one of the oldest and smallest private colleges, with 670 students, all of them men. It was seven miles outside of the sleepy town of Farmville, Virginia. Population 4,131. As for diversity, it was located in a county that had closed its public schools rather than comply with Brown v. Board of Education. A book was written about that.

 I wouldn’t have been ready as a freshman to drive 520 miles to Virginia. But two years later, in the fall of 1971, I packed my Volkswagen and drove there having never seen the place. I had no idea what I was getting into.

I didn’t know that the school had mandatory chapel until the year before. Or Saturday classes until the year before. Or that freshman had to wear beanies until the year before. Again, I was clueless as to what my future was and it was again because I hadn’t done any planning, just a lot of leaping. But it turned out that my timing was good, especially concerning chapel, Saturday classes and beanies.

HSC is located on a beautiful campus, about 60 miles south of Charlottesville and 60 miles west of Richmond. So, in the middle of nowhere. The nearest town, the aptly named Farmville, is 7 miles down the road.

One of the exciting things to do during the week was, after dinner, drive to town to get an ice cream cone and cruise Longwood Teachers’ College to look at the women. There were 7,000 of them. Then it was time to drive back to campus and do homework. That was a big night. Oh, the weekends were a bit more lively, with the frat houses booking bands from Richmond and Charlottesville, but it still wasn’t Boston.

My first room at the school was in the old gym. It didn’t look like a gym as we know them today – it was a long narrow building – because it was built before basketball was a game. Actually, at that time, many of the buildings on campus had been built in the early 1800s, some built by craftsmen who had learned their skills working on Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello.

When I called home that night to report in and told Doom where my room was, he was excited to tell me that he had lived in the same building when he was at the school. Doom lived in the basement and his work-study job was to clean the gym and set up the equipment for the next day.

I was assigned a room with two other transfers and there were several rooms around us full of transfers. The rest of the dorm was filled with freshman and that made it a really noisy place. Our room was right off the front porch so on the weekends you could hear everyone coming and going and getting sick.

Just like freshman year, I was stuck in another three-man room. Harvey was pure country, having grown up on a farm that was connected to his small town by dirt roads. He had brought a rebel flag to hang over his bed and I had shown up with a portrait of Abraham Lincoln to hang over mine. Neither was meant to be a political statement. Harv just like the colors of the flag and I was a presidential nerd and Lincoln happened to be my favorite.

Despite our differences in wall art, Harv and I hit it off right away. His dream had been to go to North Carolina State, but when he got there, he felt out of place and came back to Virginia. We both had the same dreams of athletics but, alas, had the same level of no talent.

Our other roommate was a real drag. All he did was stare at the picture of his girl friend and scratch his rear end. And study. Nothing wrong with the latter, but Harv and I were not that focused. Maybe that’s why that roommate became a doctor and made a sack of money and Harv and I eventually wound up with a sack of debt.

Within a couple of weeks, there was the natural shake out that colleges experience every fall with students leaving, realizing that they had made a mistake in coming to school there. Some rooms opened up in an upperclassmen dorm and Harv and I were able to escape roomie #3 and moved. Our “new” dorm had been built in 1835, before central heating and electricity. And the rooms had had fireplaces, although by the fall of 1971, they were boarded up. And the rooms were huge. Maybe the first Hampden-Sydney men brought their horses into their rooms.             

The wing we moved into had a lot of sophomores and, like us, a couple of juniors, Pops and Rich, with whom we became friends. They introduced us to Chris and Bert and some of others and pretty soon we had our own social circle, friendships that would span decades and include cross country visits, multiple weddings, godparenting and eventually, funerals.

Next time: Chapter 33: Socializing Before Studying … Again