Chapter 36 (cont.)

 

Darin H, UD '94, Adam G, UD '95, and Chris, UD '96 all moved into the house in the Fall of 1992. All stayed until their respective graduation years…

 

Darin: There were six of us living there, four were members of the lacrosse team. Half of us had lived together over in Towne Court. To be honest, I knew nothing about East Cleveland before we moved there. Freshman year was all dorms and the various off-campus parties, sophomore year was mostly Towne Court and Park Place. So by the time we moved there, it was new to me.

 

Chris: We were the first to live in 65 after the new landlords bought it. I heard a family had lived on the 67 side, it was much nicer than 65. I also heard at one point the sheriff of Newark lived there. One time I was working the door at one of our parties, when two older guys in their late 20’s or early 30’s came up to the door. My first thought was that they were undercover cops, but one of the guys had dated a girl who used to live there years before. They just wanted to party in the old house again. They had their own beer so I let them in, but I never got to talk to them.

 

Darin: One of the guys we lived with had some carpentry skills, and another friend of the house was a plumber. The two of them built the downstairs bathroom from scratch. They installed the room and did all the plumbing and electric. That was necessary, as we had six guys and one bathroom. That shit was pimp, before pimp was pimp.

 

Chris: It used to be just an empty kind of storage area, but our housemate came down a week before school started and built it.

 

Grover: I felt our parties there were better than any frat. We would get hundreds of people that would come through and normally four to five kegs would not last any night. I think East Cleveland was bigger than Main Street because most people throughout campus were looking for a cheap alternative to the bars. When we first moved there, sometimes I would get a bit drunk and invite a bunch of random ladies to our parties. One time I invited every group of women we saw…let’s say at the time I couldn’t hold my liquor very well.

 

Darin: Delaware was pretty much a party all over...especially if you knew the right people. I will say that East Cleveland had a lot going on, especially at our house, which at the time was more or less deemed the “Lacrosse House.” Fairly often you would be in class (or more likely out somewhere) and would hear people talking about what they were doing that night. Someone else would say there was a party at the Lacrosse House. I would get home and ask some of the guys if we were having a party, and up until that point, none of us knew we were…but we did.

 

Chris: Honestly, it was only the Lacrosse House from the Fall of 1992 to the Spring of 1994.

 

Grover: Everyone on East Cleveland was great. We had our neighbors in 67 who I still keep in contact with (six ladies). We had people we were friends with all over. The people on East Cleveland were pretty diverse; one-third Hippies, one-third Frat / Athletes, one-third Regular Joes.

 

Chris: East Cleveland really came alive on Friday and Saturday nights. It had a lot of great houses, and the Horseshoe.

 

We had a party one night where one of our friends -- who later moved into the house -- was hooking up with an assistant coach from the girls lacrosse team on a car in our driveway. I grabbed a pitcher and filled it up with water. I ran upstairs and climbed out the side window of the attic, onto a ledge no wider than a foot. I shuffled over and dumped the pitcher on the two of them. It wasn't really that funny, but you need to remember I was wasted, standing on a ledge three stories up.

 

Grover: For some reason, living there and being drunk always involved nudity. I remember we'd had a party one night and I decided to visit my friend’s party for a bit. I came back and there were like twenty people running around naked. It was unbelievable. In fact, any time we threw a party, a chant, “Let’s get naked!” would come out, and we are not just talking guys here, we are talking many women participated.

 

Another time, I'm walking home with my girlfriend, and we had thrown a small party. On my way back I see someone come out of the house walking down the street toward us. He was this hairy guy we knew…and was completely naked and slathered in butter. We had about a thirty-minute conversation with him on the street, as I try to keep from cracking up, and then he leaves. I don't even know if he noticed that he was naked.

 

Chris: We didn't let the parties down in our basement. The living room was the main dance floor. We used to put a beam up under one of the joists, because the floor would bend so much. It was scary to be down there when people were dancing upstairs. It looked like the floor could give way at any second.

 

Darin: We buried a few bodies in the basement. Wait, did I say that?

 

Chris: I almost forgot “Duff Memorial Park.” I built a whiffle-ball stadium in our backyard, in the Summer of 1995. I spent over $100 on plywood and paint and built it over the course of a weekend. The funny thing is, that people who didn't even live in the house used it more than I did. We had guys coming down from Kershaw all the time to play. They wouldn't even come inside and say hi, they would go right to the backyard and start playing.

 

Darin: We had parties all of the time, but never got busted. Halloween parties were always good. I do remember that for some reason at least one person would fall through a window, or a fight would break out, or someone would shit on a chair.

 

Chris: By the last year, we only had two parties or so the entire year. Everyone was sick of cleaning up the house, shit getting broken and stolen. I became an expert at replacing broken window panes. The crazy thing is in all that time, we never had a party get busted.  The cops may have come, but we never got charged. The only time we got a noise violation was a on a weeknight during the last year we lived there. We had music playing downstairs, and a few of the roommates were playing Sega hockey and someone called the cops on us. We got our first noise violation. It wasn't a party, everyone in the house at the time lived there, there were no kegs, and I'm not even sure if we were drinking. Just a CD player by an open window. Hilarious.

 

After we all graduated, we dropped by the house on more than one Homecoming. Outside the attic window, there were two circle stickers about the same size; an STX lacrosse sticker and the FireTribe frog sticker…which I now have tattooed on my arm. My brother might have put the lacrosse one out there, but more than likely it was me.