Arnett's Capital University Years, 1968-70

Bexley, Ohio’s Capital University, in the late sixties, was a campus about to make a major transition, coinciding with the final year of Dr. Harold Yochum’s presidency. I became a freshman in the fall of 1968 and one of the campus traditions of this small Lutheran college, founded in 1876, included mandatory chapel attendance early on Monday and Wednesday mornings.
As I look back on those days, nearly forty years ago, I can see the blessing of mandatory chapel services; it brought the entire student and faculty body together in a place where you could meet regularly and become friends with your fellow students. Very soon in the year, a group of us identified our common interests; sex, drugs, rock and roll, as well as protest against the rapidly unpopular war in Southeast Asia.
Our coed fraternity became known as The Freaks. We had free thinking faculty members to whom we were drawn to help cultivate our countercultural interests. The soundtrack to our social experiments including groups like Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention, Joe Cocker, Blind Faith, John Mayall’s Blues Band, Jimi Hendrix, Janice Joplin, Canned Heat and of course, The Beatles during their final days.
The university seemed to embrace our student activism by bringing in controversial speakers like Madelyn Murray O’Hair, the famed atheist, freeing classes on the days of the national antiwar moratoriums, allowing the first campus parties with alcoholic beverages and coed dorm visitations. One of the biggest surprises in official university blessings was when our Freak fraternity was given a university house to serve as a coffee house, complete with an upright piano, a refrigerator and four bedrooms.
I remember visiting the coffee house one Friday evening and seeing a blazing guitarist that I had never notice on campus before. Don Chakeres was an Upper Arlington native, majoring in chemistry and he had a guitar style that was later to be popularized by jazz guitarist Al Dimeola. We found common ground playing the blues and Beatles hits and when the new school year started in 1969, we became inseparable.
I remember Don’s brother, Dave, was a bassist, his pal, Frank Pierce was an excellent drummer and we worked up an act with David Papke, who was abandoning his Simon and Garfunkel repertoire for original songs. We played constantly in rotating ensembles of different sizes, personnel and soon jammin’ became more important to me than maintaining my track in the conservatory. By the end of my fourth semester at Capital, my grades were in such a spiral that I was called before Dean Roland Sedgewich’s academic review board, where I offered my resignation, rather than being dismissed as a student.
It broke my father’s confidence in me when I admitted that I had quit as a student and I got a job working as a nurses aide at Columbus State Institute, a state mental institution. I worked the overnight shift, would come back to the Capital campus, sleep in Dave Papke’s room, audit some classes and get together with the gang to make more rockin' music.
Don Chakeres married Linda Miller in June, 1970 and I played Bye, Bye Blackbird at their wedding ceremony at First Community Church. Their wedding reception at the OSU Faculty Club was one of the most memorable parties of my first twenty years; the Greeks, the Italians and the Hippies letting it all hang out in celebration.