Dean Wesley Anschultz

    Dean Anschultz was the first of my "comrades," the very closest of my friends (the others are George Wagner, Gene Norris, and Ed Harrington). I can remember the first time I saw Dean. It was my first day at Caltech and my roommate, D. Clark Gibbs, was playing pingpong in the game room with an upper classman who seemed to have no chin. "How could anyone be friends with someone so homely?" I thought.
    When I got back to the campus after playing football on the beach the very first day I came to California and Caltech, D. Clark Gibbs was drinking beer (Miller's) in our room with the homely chinless upperclassman, Dean Anschultz, and his horsefaced friend, John Price. By the time it came time to choose which house would be my permanent house, I was close friends with Dean and John and their sophomore cohort, Norm Velinty. (John and Dean were juniors.)
    Dean was from Lakewood, John from Van Nuys, and Norm was an LA "hood." Norm used to complain about people complaining that he was loud. (We invented a noise measurement in microvelintys.) "No one in high school ever complained about me being loud," Norm said. Dean then replied, "Of course not. On a windy day, we could hear your high school down in Long Beach."
    Dean had a chin so receding it was nearly absent and his forehead sloped to his blond hair. He also had a "hole in his heart," but I learned that later. In those days, they waited until he finished his growth before operating. A year or two after I met him, he had the operation, with a fifty-fifty chance of surviving it, which he did. Both Dean and John dropped out of Tech for a while but eventually got their degrees from Caltech in 1960, the year I was supposed to get mine, while Norm got his degree from UCLA or USC. All of us became computer programmers.
    Dean's room was in Alley Two, the corridor of rooms over the lounge and the dining room. He had several Erlenmayer flasks filled with various types of alcohol. His hifi system, which included a Heathkit amplifier, was the first I had ever seen (but, of course, not the only one in Fleming House and probably not the best). He had a sign over his bed that said, "Slide Gently Do Not Force". He had stolen it from a gate. (The rule at Caltech was that any government signs were fair game. For others, it depended on the size of the business. Stealing a sign from a store or company or person who could ill afford the loss was frowned upon. Everybody at Caltech had their eye on a sign on Pasadena's main street, Colorado Boulevard. It said "Hottest Spot in Pasadena." It was also two stories tall, on a construction site. For all their vaunted genius, no one ever figured out a way to steal it.) He also had another sign, "Radium Drive," which he gave to me at the end of the school year. There was one sign we talked about stealing but never did. It was at an expensive hotel near San Marino and read, "$25 fine for stealing this sign." (It referred to the much larger sign above it.) We also talked about stealing a couple of road signs: Superior Court and Supreme Court. He also had a couple of records that I heard for the first time: The Songs of Tom Lehrer (the very first one, a 10-inch LP) and Oscar Brand's Bawdy Songs and Backroom Ballads (again, the very first one).
    One of the other inhabitants of Alley Two had a record of road race auto sounds and every once in a while there would be a road race down Alley Two, which Dean almost always won. The rules stated that you had to go the length of the alley straddling the walls and not touching the floor. Dean was exceptionally good at this, hence his nickname: "Cricket."
    The year before I arrived at Caltech, people were stealing lights from the Bullock's Department Store parking lot when they weren't crossing the l's. Dean decided he wanted one and took one down. He was driving back to the campus when he thought a car was following him. "I wonder if that's the police," he thought. So, instead of turning into the Caltech parking lot, he turned down the nearby side street. Sure enough, it was a cop, who saw the light Dean had stashed under his seat. He made Dean drive back to the parking lot and re-install the light. Ah, yes, those were the good old days.
    Dean was the champion of the "Alley Two Roadrace," which consisted of going down the stairway from Alley Two to the little alcove outside the lounge where the vending machines were located. It went down half a floor, made a short turn for a couple of steps, then went down to the ground floor. Dean would take it three steps at a time in a kind of Groucho Marx walk/glide.
    Most of the time we drove around in Dean's gray 1947 Plymouth coupe, John riding shotgun, while Norm and I crouched in the space behind the seats.
    About half of the Caltech campus was honeycombed with steam tunnels, running from the Atheneum (where the faculty ate) to the beginning of the class buildings at the other end of the campus, with the student houses in between. One day John Price and Dean took me under the student houses (where the laundry room and the game room were) to a locked door. They picked the lock and we entered a storeroom. At the other end a bunch of mismatched plywood sheets made a makeshift wall with a lot of space at the top. We scaled the wall and were in a steam tunnel. They showed me where they went and we came up under the statue of a classical figure at the other end. The statue had once had a staff in its hand and a figleaf--both of them were gone and the statue seemed to be looking aghast at the stump of a staff left in its hand while its pelvis had shattered concrete where the figleaf had been.
    A lot of the students at Caltech owned lock picks and knew how to use them. Someone at Fleming House sold them but I forget who. I never bought a pair and never learned how to use them because Dean and John were always able to do so for me.
    At Christmas I went with Dean as he drove Bob Smoak to an armed forces airbase, where Smoak caught a flight in an army transport to spend the holidays with his family (in Virginia, I believe). His father was a career Marine. The plane was all struts and cross-braces, a shell of a plane and nothing else. Smoak would be flying with military people, on hard benches, wearing parachutes.
    I spent Christmas with Dean Anschultz' family in Lakewood, a section of Long Beach. Although Dean was an only child, Dean's parents (whom he called by their first names, Kenny and "Toots") required him to do chores while he was home from college. One night we toured the Lakewood area where they lived, looking at the Christmas lights. There was a contest each year for the best lights.
    During the Christmas break, Dean fixed me up a date with Wendy Huntington, one of the heirs to the Huntington-Holladay millions. She was a high school senior, 17 years old, and had her own house, attached to her parents'.
    In the 2nd quarter, Fleming House had "barn dances," which were held in La Canada with another house and "crew races." These had nothing to do with boats but were competitions in which the participants chugged a mug of beer and the team that finished first won. There were ten competitors on each team, with alternates in case any of the first ten had too much "spillage." Dean was the fastest on the Fleming House team, draining a mug with one swallow and a mouthful. I was the only freshman on the team, as an alternate. If I remember correctly, I had to participate and had a slow time but no spillage.
    One of our favorite pastimes was trolling for cops. I'm not sure how it got started; probably one night around 3 a.m. we were slowly driving down Pasadena's main drag on our way back to the campus, we got pulled over by a cop who found it suspiciously that we were driving so slowly when everyone else was challenging the speed limit. We told him we were Caltech students relaxing after a hard night of studying. (Try pulling that one today!) He let us go but it gave us the idea for our "game."
    Another time we had gone out in John's car, which belonged to his maternal grandfather. We ran out of gas in the Arroyo Seco and walked to a gas station. When we came back, there were cops from four jurisdictions around the car, since it was at their intersection. We managed to convince them we were okay but John said if the cops had looked at the registration, which by California law was visible through the windshield, they would have seen the name was different from any of ours and his grandfather had told him if he got in trouble with the police one more time, he was going to take the car back.
    One time we picked up the same cop in three different cars. Since neither Norm nor I had a car, I have no idea where we got the third car.
    Some time in the spring, Dean, John, and Norm went out trolling for cops without me but with another upperclassman, Dusty Rhodes. When a cop in San Marino pulled them over and asked what they were doing, Dusty said, "Trolling for cops." He explained the game to them and he let them go. A week or two later, I went out with them again. In San Marino, Dean looked in the mirror and said, "I think we got one." The cop pulled up alongside them, looked over, and made a sign with his hand that said, "Oh, it's you guys again." Dean waved him over. He told us to go to a side street, where we talked with him for a while.
    One time during the spring, I mentioned to Dean that I missed the real rivers of the east, in place of the ones in southern California that ran through cement trenches. Next thing I knew, he and I were riding up in the mountains to a lake and river and beautiful country. But the trip back was frightening, as we went round hairpin pin curve after hairpin curve at a breathtaking twenty miles an hour past steep dropoffs. When we got to the bottom, I said, "Dean, I was scared shitless." He laughed that inimitable laugh of his (which I can still hear now but know no way to explain it to you) and said, "So was I."
    Dean dropped out at 3rd quarter (he eventually got his degree from Caltech in 1960) but he came back to campus every now and then. The weekend after I met Shannon, Dean showed up on campus. "I want to talk to you, Dean," I said. Then John Price walked up and asked Dean to go out to eat or something but Dean gave him some excuse.
    We went for a long drive out to Calico, California, a ghost town in the desert, and got lost in its canyons while I told him about Shannon. "Do you think I love her?" I asked. "I don't know. You're just impetuous enough."
    Nine months after coming to Caltech, as I was about to leave it forever, I almost broke into tears as I said, "Dean, I want you to know you're the best friend I've ever had."