IC stopped issuing penalties for untidy dorm rooms in the late 1960s. Beginning in 1969, female students wanting to stay out past midnight no longer had to request permission cards. A year later, the college designated Tallcott Hall as its first all-freshman dorm for men.

In the fall of 1970, as Doug Hunt ’74 and his fellow freshmen first crossed the threshold of Tallcott Hall, two other firsts were on the table: freshmen no longer had to wear beanies, and alcohol could be served at campus events.

“The campus went wet,” wrote Professor Emeritus John Harcourt in The Ithaca College Story.

So did Tallcott Hall.

“We’d only been on campus a couple days,” Hunt said. “Most of us were away from home for the first time, not all that sure of what we were getting into, and out of the blue, some upperclassmen showed up and started spraying water everywhere. Our rooms were getting soaked. But of the 114 guys in the dorm, 60 or 70 went down to the lobby and got organized.”

“We not only put up a healthy defense,” added Ken Melech ’74. “We sent a group down to their dorm on the lower quad. The attackers became the attacked. We made sure they suffered the same watery fate as the one they’d inflicted on us.”

“We learned how to organize and manage our lives according to the level of success we were willing to work for, but when I go back to campus for reunions, my predominant thought is how much fun I had my freshman year.”
 

“I’d assumed that was just the way upperclassmen welcomed rookies,” Hunt said. “But as it turned out, they wanted to make us pay for not having to wear beanies.”

Photos of students wearing beanies show up in college yearbooks as recently as the 1970s. According to some sources, identifying first-year students in that way built class unity, but other accounts cite beanies as a form of hazing. At some campuses, for example, any upperclassman could single out any beanie wearer and demand a set of pushups.

“Eliminating the beanie didn’t eliminate the desire of some upperclassmen to continue hazing freshmen,” Melech said.

“But by standing up to them like that, we bonded. Everybody got to know everybody, and nobody outside Tallcott Hall ever bothered us again.”

Despite their don’t-tread-on-me reputation, Tallcott’s newest residents were still some of the youngest students on campus.

“Somebody called us the Toddlers, and out of that came the Tods,” said Hunt. “All freshman year, that’s what we were called.”

For Jim Walter ’74, that freshman year had a lot of ups and downs.

“My first weeks and months at school weren’t the greatest,” said the New Jersey native. “Living with guys from different parts of the country, from different social and economic backgrounds, I was way out of my comfort zone. But during semester break, I realized how much I missed my new friends and the life that was unfolding for me at IC. That was a huge turning point.”

WAR AND GAMES

New worlds were opening to the Tods in classrooms, sound studios, main stages, sub shops, bars, intramural sports fields, and even the lounge in Tallcott Hall. Sometimes there wasn’t much difference between those last two venues.

“Doing homework in the lounge was sometimes a challenge because that was the site of Tallcott’s version of the National Hockey League. We had a table hockey game with a full schedule culminating in a playoff series and a championship.”
 

The lounge was also where the Tods gathered to watch the news, especially events in Southeast Asia, where the Vietnam War was raging. Most of the Tods were born in 1952. The draft lottery for men born that year took place in the summer of 1971. Hunt and Melech came up with high numbers and very likely wouldn’t be called up. Walter’s number was 149—borderline. Kirck’s number was very low: 34.

“When we started our freshman year, the country was still in the middle of the Vietnam War,” Melech said. “Many of us had family and friends who were in military service and some had been casualties. We were subject to the draft, and we didn’t know for sure we’d even be able to finish college. Vietnam was on our minds. We’d sit around talking about politics and the war for hours.” One of those discussions brought the war a little closer for Walter. 

“Half a dozen of us were sitting in the lounge, expressing what we thought were worldly opinions about life and war. Most of us were just months out of high school, but one guy, John, had served in Vietnam. He’d been shot out of a helicopter and was lucky to have survived. Others in his platoon hadn’t. After listening to the conversation for a while, he said, in essence, that we were just a bunch of lucky kids who had no idea what the world was like beyond our sheltered, comfortable lives. Then he quietly left the room. Everybody knew John was absolutely right, and right then I grew up a bit.”

FUTURES TO CONSIDER

Though the Tods were well aware of the events occurring in Vietnam and the possibility that they would have to put their college plans on hold due to the draft, campus life kept them busy as they considered their futures.

“The Saturday night of orientation week, I wandered down to the communications school,” said Hunt, who majored in communications management. “A sophomore DJ was on the air, saw me through the studio window, and waved me in. Two hours later, he went off the air and asked me if I’d be interested in being his engineer. I hadn’t even been to a class yet. I accepted and handled those duties for two years.”

For drama major Charles Kirck ’74, a milestone moment was getting a part in a play. “Since IC’s theatre program was the best around, it was like getting a gig on Broadway,” he said.

Melech, a TV-R major, recalls working as a lab assistant for department chair James Treble.

“He said he was going to teach me the most valuable thing I’d learn at IC: the over/under technique of rolling audio cables. It turned out, that was one of the best things I learned at school. Over the years, I’ve rolled and unrolled thousands of cables.”

“We learned how to organize and manage our lives according to the level of success we were willing to work for,” said Hunt, who graduated cum laude. “But when I go back to campus for reunions, my predominant thought is how much fun I had my freshman year.”

“The hockey league, intramurals, and having a legal drinking age of 18 were all part of the fun of being a freshman,” added Melech. “But the political turmoil and the war were constantly on our minds.”

TODS MOVE ON

As the Tods started their sophomore years, they still had their student deferments. And, being sophomores, it was time for them to move out of Tallcott Hall. Some of the Tods became roommates and migrated to dorms for upperclassmen. Others migrated singly. Still others moved off campus. In 1973, the draft was abolished and the last American troops in Vietnam came home. A year later, the Tods graduated.

“We came to IC with the country at war and left with the country entering peacetime,” Walter said. “By the time graduation rolled around, getting drafted wasn’t on anybody’s mind.”

After Commencement, the Tods went their separate ways, Melech to a career in the television industry and photojournalism. Kirck is an audio-visual systems specialist and videoconference administrator. Hunt is a retired IT business and marketing communications consultant. Walter recently retired from the University of Connecticut as associate vice president of communications.

“At every point in my career, I was able to apply what I learned on South Hill,” Walter said. “I took an elective, Public Opinion and Propaganda, and over the years I’ve routinely referred to one of the textbooks. It’s quite tattered, but I still have it on my shelf.”

Melech was the best man at Hunt’s wedding, and the two remain fast friends. Some of the Tods have kept in touch. Others haven’t seen each other since graduation. But last October, at their class’s 40th reunion, 11 Tods responded to Hunt’s invitation to come back to South Hill, what Kirck called “a magical place, like the Emerald City in the Land of Oz.”

One of those returning Tods, Steve Leder ’74—a professor in the Department of Surgery, Section of Otolaryngology, at the Yale School of Medicine—wore the same hand-tooled belt he bought at a head shop on State Street when traffic, notpedestrians, flowed over what is now the Commons.

“The people who worked there—the Tree Frog it was called—were late twenties, [and they] led a counterculture life. Shopping there was an embrace of independence completely different from anything I’d ever known. The leather belt was designed for me in the back room, with a rising sun hand tooled and centered at the midpoint. I wore it every day at IC, and I still put it on—with only one hole added. I’ll always remember the Tree Frog and a time that’s a lifetime away but also very close.”

Though their experiences at Ithaca took them in different directions to adulthood, the Tods seem to agree: “Lifelong friendships were formed. And the campus became our home,” Hunt said. “No matter where we are now, IC is where we started to grow into men.”