Coming from Germany where I spent my last two years of high school, the first day at college in the US turned my world upside down.

My plane landed in Dayton, Ohio; it was the last week of September, 1966. As the passengers filed into the airport, I looked around with a sense of anticipation, having been notified that someone from the college would be holding a sign with my name on it.

When the crowd thinned, I finally saw a small cardboard placard with the words “Erica Merriam” written in whimsical rainbow lettering, held by a tall guy, barefoot, with long, wildly disheveled hair and curly beard. I glanced up into his face; his eyes looked back at me with a squinty twinkle, as though laughing. With fascination and a faint tinge of fear, I looked him over, trying to size up the situation. Is he safe? He reached out to shake my hand. As I stepped closer to him, an unfamiliar but pleasant scent wafted up my nose.

“Hey, man. What’s happening. You Erica Merriam?”

“Yes, I am. Who are you?”

“I’m your ride. Let’s get your bags and split. We gotta boogie to Yellow Springs so you can register before the office closes.”

“What’s your name?” I asked, trying to find some ground to stand on.

“Wolf Man.”

“Wolf Man? What kind of name is that? American Indian? Is that your first or last name?”

“Just call me Wolf. That’s good enough.”

We bounced along in the bright-orange, spray-painted VW van on the long ride from Dayton to Yellow Springs. Through the window, cornfields stretched into the distance with their yellow harvested stalks, row after endless row. This was my first time in the Midwest, except for a few months in Kansas as a newborn.

The driver was friendly and talkative which helped allay the anxiety of being in the hands of a stranger. Although he spoke English, many of the words and phrases he used were foreign to me. He asked if I smoked weed.

“I’ve actually never smoked weeds before. I’ve only smoked cigarettes behind my parents’ house in the orchard.”

Wolf took his eyes off the road and stared at me for a few seconds with a half smile. Then he asked if I had dropped acid.

Why is he asking me these questions? I wondered.

“I don’t remember having spilled any. Well, maybe once in chemistry class.” He told me when he first took acid it blew his mind. What does that mean?

He continued on in this strange dialect and told me he was “bummed out about the shit that’s going down with the pigs that are offing people, like man, it isn’t cool. Like, where are you at with that?” he asked. I shrugged my shoulders. I didn’t have a clue what he was talking about.

How is it possible that the English language changed so much in the two years I was in Europe? Maybe this dialect is only spoken at Antioch College.

“Are you a student at Antioch College?” I asked, trying to change the subject and talk about something I could understand.

“Naw. I dropped out after my second year. I just hang around the campus and do odd jobs. I don’t need much to live on.” We were almost having a normal conversation for a few minutes.

We drove into the leafy, green campus, a reassuring sight with its historic brick buildings interspersed with modern classrooms and apartment complexes. We stopped in front of the student union where Wolf dropped me off with my luggage. He flashed a peace sign, and told me to “keep your cool, baby,” and said that he would see me around.

As I grabbed my bags, ready to walk up the stairs to register, I saw a cluster of disheveled people gathered off to one side of the building, intently watching something hidden from view. Curious, I put my bags down on the sidewalk and walked over. In my stylish Florentine shoes with stacked heels, matching purse and mini skirt, I stood next to the motley group of men and women and peered into the center until I saw the object of all the attention. Air sucked into my chest as my hand went reflexively to cover my mouth. There was a naked man preaching to the group. I tapped the shoulder of the tall, longhaired young man standing next to me.

“Excuse me, sir. Can you please tell me what is happening here?”

“The dude’s flipped out on acid,” he said matter-of-factly.

“Oh, I see,” I said, feigning comprehension.

Oh my God. This is a crazy place. I think I made a big mistake coming here. 

I headed back to the student union to officially register. The friendly, older woman who helped me with the paper work spoke the same kind of English I did and wore a skirt and a blouse and had shoes on her feet, something I could identify with.

“Welcome to Yellow Springs, Ohio and Antioch College. My name is Lynnette Johnston. Coming from Germany I imagine this will be an adjustment for you. But we’re here to help you in any way we can. Just come on in when you have any questions or problems or you need someone to talk to over a cup of coffee.”

What a relief. Maybe everything will be all right in the end, even if I just have one person I can talk to.

How did I get so out of synch with American culture? I was only gone for two years. 

The registrar lady interrupted my reverie by asking if I had any more questions before I got settled in. Feeling a sense of kinship with Mrs. Johnston, I brought up the naked man I had seen.

“Please, Erica, call me Lynette. Around here, we call each other by our first names, even the professors. But back to your question about the naked man.”

Lynette explained that, unlike most colleges of that era, there was no dress code, including no rules against being naked. She went on to say that Antioch was known to be progressively liberal and sometimes even radical. She confessed she had a difficult adjustment herself when she first came on board as staff, being from a conservative midwestern family.

Lynette assured me I would get a good education. She said Antioch regularly turned out graduates who went on to become stellar public figures like paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould, Martin Luther King’s wife Coretta Scott King, Eleanor Holmes Norton, and The Twilight Zone creator Rod Serling.

I’m in The Twilight Zone right here, right now.

Lynette said I would eventually get used to this unusual college. She even predicted I would come to love this place the way she had.

“I’m curious to know how you picked Antioch College,” she asked, showing genuine interest.

During my junior year of high school, I started thinking about which college would be right for me. I went to the office of the college counselor and picked up the thick catalogue of colleges in the U.S. I looked at the pictures, read the information, but was unable to get a sense of any of the schools. They all sounded the same. As American students abroad, we received almost no guidance on how to go about making an appropriate selection. Many of my classmates simply chose colleges or universities where friends or relatives had gone before them. I felt like doing the same, but a twist of fate intervened the following summer.

In those days hitchhiking offered a cheap and mostly safe means of getting around in Europe, even for girls. On a tight budget, I stayed in youth hostels during my summer travel adventures. At two different youth hostels in France, I bumped into Antioch College students. They stood out from the other travelers by their colorful, gypsy-like garb, their guitars and harmonicas, and free-spirited ways, juxtaposed with their worldly knowledge about politics and social issues. They seemed to have a fervent idealism and belief that they could change the world, the likes of which I had never seen.

Listening to them talk was mesmerizing. But what really grabbed my attention was hearing that they received college credit for traveling and learning about other cultures. This news convinced me that Antioch was the place for me.

In the fall, I announced to my college counselor, Miss Brill, that I had made up my mind on where I intended to go to college. Upon hearing my choice, she frowned with disapproval and tried to persuade me to reconsider.

“Antioch is not a place for a nice, intelligent girl like you,” she said emphatically.

“Why not?”

“There are liberals and radicals at that school. They go on marches and do a lot of protesting against our government. They’re disruptive. And they have a new policy where boys and girls are housed in the same dorm. Nothing good can come of that.”

I didn’t look too concerned. I’ve shared my living space with my two brothers my whole life. What’s the problem?

She added, “And I’ve been told that the students smoke a drug called maryjoowana.”

I didn’t know what that was, but it sounded intriguing.

My parents read the catalogue about Antioch and learned it was founded in 1852, based on egalitarian, liberal arts principles. It admitted black students during the time of slavery, and was the first school to appoint a woman as a full professor in the mid-1800s.

Antioch had a reputation for producing socially engaged citizens, with classroom learning balanced by jobs off campus in the “real” world. The college motto came from Horace Mann, the college’s first president: “Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity.”

Based on what my parents read—and what I failed to disclose—they had no objections.

Lynette sat for a moment in silence with a smile on her face, as though digesting the story. She said she loved hearing about how students end up choosing Antioch.

Lynette asked one of the students who had wandered into the building to give me a quick orientation of the campus. The designated young woman, appropriately named Sunny, cheerfully took on the role of tour guide. She was slender with bushy black hair, some of which lay in rows of tiny braids in the front half of her head. Her café au lait skin emanated an attractive glow. She had on jeans that looked like the legs had been cut off—or torn off—to make them into shorts with no hem, just unanchored threads. When she bent over to pick an apple off the ground, I could see the edge of her bottom. No underwear. She had on a tee shirt that revealed her nipples through the thin fabric. No bra. On her feet were leather sandals that looked handmade. She saw me looking at them and said the sandals were called huaraches and came from Mexico. She bought them when she spent time studying Spanish in San Miguel de Allende.

As we walked around, I asked Sunny why she had chosen Antioch when she could have attended top-notch schools where she had been offered generous scholarships. She said she was attracted to the fact that the students at Antioch had a voice in how the school was governed; she loved the idea of the work-study program; the college’s history of being one of the first schools in the country to accept black students and later to offer coeducation thoroughly impressed her. She said her ideas and politics were too radical for her to consider going to a conventional school. She felt like she was among kindred spirits at Antioch. “We’re all eccentrics here, people who know how to think for themselves.”

I wonder if I’m eccentric.

The tour ended up at Birch Hall, a modern looking building which would be my dorm for the next year. After Sunny left, I found a pay phone and called my parents to let them know I had arrived safely. I described to them the beautiful campus, but kept the conversation short, leaving out most of my turbulent and troubling impressions. 

Did I make a mistake choosing Antioch College? I asked myself. I had adjusted to several different cultures in my short lifetime. Surely I could adjust to college life in the 1960s. I decided the best place to begin was to adopt some of the customs of the host country—in this case, the host college.

Of course I ditched my mini skirts, heels and purse the day after I arrived, exchanging them for jeans with handmade embroidery around the pockets, an embroidered blouse from Mexico, huarache sandals, and a cloth bag from Africa, all purchased from the second hand store in the artsy-craftsy town of Yellow Springs. The store had a strange odor to it, like leaves burning on a fall day after raking. I had smelled the same odor for the first time when I walked into my dorm. The smell hung in the air like a cloud. It turned out this smell would become very familiar throughout my years in college.

Next on the agenda was learning the dialect and customs. Maybe in the end, I’ll fall in love with this place, like Lynette said. I just have to make sure my parents don’t come for a visit while I’m here.