A SMALL WORLD INDEED

One of my best friends at Juniata College in the1960’s was Mick Kalacia ’67 from New Jersey. He and I were history majors and had a lot of classes together. Mick was stoic, studious and strictly loyal to his girlfriend back home. I tried to change all that.

I felt Mick should loosen up a lot. He was as serious as paralysis. In fact, one of our classmates woke up one morning in the men’s dorm, raised his arms to stretch and somehow paralyzed himself. He left school immediately and never returned. To this day I never stretch awake.

Horror stories like that made me feel that life was way too serious to take seriously, so I doggedly tried to get Mick to study less and have more fun.

The thing I concentrated on the most was to try to make Mick doggie paddle in the deep pool of cute coeds on campus. I just couldn’t believe his devotion to one girl at a time in his life when he had a duty and an opportunity to date as many girls as possible.

He was young, good looking and I felt he should take a bite out of the girlish apples of their fathers’ eyes to see who was the sweetest on campus. Why stick stubbornly to a Granny Smith, when you could sample Fujis, Galas, Mcintoshes, Winesaps, yellow/red Delicious and Cortlands? OK, I love apples.

So many girls, so little time. If you’re not with the one you love, love the one you’re with. Those were the twin tenants I followed in those delirious days. I’d even broken up with my high school sweetheart my freshman year after being overwhelmed by the fullness of the coed student body prancing around campus giggling.

I tried to get Mick to go to the weekend dances and to, at least, talk to the girls who asked me about him. But he was like a boulder and wouldn’t budge. He was on the choke chain of love stretched tight to Jersey.
Our senior year some of us took the Air Force officer’s test because the Vietnam war was raging and our future after graduation was one of four things- the Army, the Navy, the Air Force or the Marines.

The Air Force wanted pilots, so the officer’s test was four long hours of mystery, fantasy, wild guessing and complete confusion for me because I’d never flown before, let alone as a fighter pilot. The only one I knew who passed was Mick. He was that smart.

Mick and I went our separate ways after graduation. I went into the Air Force and after two years stateside, I got orders for RAF Woodbridge in England. Almost everyone else in my barracks got sent to Vietnam.

In 1969 on my second weekend in England, I took the base bus north to RAF Lakenheath for an intramural football game. I really just wanted to cheaply see the countryside.

Once there, I stopped at the snack bar for a bite and amazingly spotted Mick sitting alone at a nearby table in the empty room. I couldn’t believe it! We caught up with our lives. Mick had married his sweetheart Sue after all and was one of only a handful of Navy personnel on this big Air Force base. We parted promising to keep in touch, but never did. I’m afraid after the history classes ended, we were history.

So if I hadn’t been stationed at a British air base at the height of the Vietnam War, boarded a bus for a football game I had no interest in and stepped into the base snack bar at precisely the same time Mick was eating there, I’d have never had this one person class reunion. ‘Tis a small world indeed, Sparky.

PREVIOUSLY PUBLISHED IN COMMON GROUND MAGAZINE