So this weekend while I ventured out to the far west suburbs for a party at a farm in Yorkville, I took a detour to DeKalb so I could see what happens to be my Funniest Charitable Donation EVER. Took me a while to find it, but there it is.
Freshman year at Northern Illinois University I was assigned to live in the Stevenson Towers South dorm, floor 7B. Fun group of guys on that floor, although a few of them could run on the volatile side from time to time (as the lounge furniture, windows, fire alarms, etc. could attest to).
We ran up so much floor damage back in the day that when the end of the year came they asked all of us to find other places to live for the next academic year. Most of the guys had already made new arrangements... either off-campus accomodations or another dorm floor. But still, seemed a little heavy-handed to come down on the boys like this. So one nigh a few of us (Greg Ashline, Nick Wand, and myself) decided to form a fund-raising group: The 7B Preservation Alliance. Our motto: SAVE 7B.
We typed up a little flyer (on a typewriter, no less... none of us had computers of our own back in those days). We made a few thousand copies. We taped them up all over campus--in the dorm lobby, in elevators, in bathroom stalls, in the MLK commons, in DuSable Hall to name a few locations. We got ourselves a mention in the Northern Star. We even got ourselves a slap on the wrist and an order to not accept any actual donations. It was fantastic.
So when the brick thing came around, I thought about what would make for a good brick. I didn't want to put some kind of yearbook-like message or take it too seriously. My buddy Tim had a good idea for his brick. So after much consideration, I figured the boys of 7B should get one last shout-out, etched in stone at the NIU Alumni Center.
7B set the tone for what is still to this day the best four and a half years of my life. And thinking back about it almost 15 years later, well it still just makes me laugh. Cheers.