That's Dedication

by Brian Collier

At the old Bethune industrial building, art students put in many hours of working late into the night. I remember the public safety guys coming and trying to kick us out. They didn't try that hard, though, and we would break in when they wouldn't let us in, so that we could work.

That's dedication. We were supposed to be out of Bethune by 11 at night, and on Sundays it was closed all day. Grad students had 24-hour access. If you were an undergraduate, you could stand outside the front and yell up at the building. Sometimes a grad student would hear you and come open the door for you, but when they didn't, you'd have to do one of the break-in things.

Before I found out the secret of getting into Bethune without a pass card, there was a place on the front door where you could scale the front of the building without too much difficulty up to the second floor. The window was never locked, so you could climb inside. We would send one person to scale the side of the building up to the second floor to climb through the window, then come back and open the door for everyone else.

In my junior year, I discovered that the lock on the back door actually turned in its case. So all you had to have was a key that fit in any of the doors in the entire building, and you could turn the entire lock mechanism inside the case and open the door that way. You wouldn't have to have the actual back-door key. That was much easier than scaling the building.

When we weren't working, we spent a lot of time hanging out in Amy's Place. It was so close that we could walk up there - it was only a few blocks away. We would go to Amy's Place to eat lunch whenever we could afford it. Usually I could only afford french fries. We would go have french fries and coffee.