I attended college at the University of Kansas, where I lived for four years in the Scholarship Hall system. The first year I lived in Joliffe Hall, where I met some really remarkable people, but which was essentially condemned after that year as being unfit for human habitation. There’s more of a story involved, but that’s not the story I’m going to attempt to tell here.
After the announcement of the decision that Jolliffe would be closed, those residents who were not graduating were offered the opportunity to move to other men’s scholarship halls. Many of the upperclassmen declined the offer. A lot of the underslassmen did move to other men’s halls; I was one of only a few who chose to move to Stephenson Hall, where again I met some remarkable people. In my sophomore year, my roommate was an incoming freshman named Stan Pittman (of course they put both residents with the first name “Stan” in the same room). Anyway, we got along well, and remained friends after that first year, although we did not remain roommates.
In my senior year (Stan Pittman’s junior year), we both lived on the same floor at Stephenson, with two rooms (as I recall) between us. We both went to our respective homes for Christmas vacation. Stan Pittman had started doing some experimentation with home brewing, and before leaving for vacation he had started some test batches fermenting. He used no-deposit glass pop bottles with twist off caps which had originally held store-brand pop from what was then (again, as I recall; my memory may not be entirely accurate) a Kroger Family Center.
My mother frequently sent homemade cookies back with me when I was home for a few days, using a sturdy square box that had originally held several small jars of jelly, jam and preserves that she had received as a present some years prior. She again sent this box back to Stephenson with me, full of homemade chocolate chip cookies. At some point on my first day back, I walked down the hall to see Stan Pittman, who had also returned that day. He explained his brewing experiment, and showed me the bottles he had left to ferment over the break. I believe he may have picked up one bottle and held it up to the light coming in through the window to get a better look at. He may or may not have wiggled it slightly in order to stir the sediment just a bit, but he certainly didn’t agitate it any more than that.
A few minutes later I happened to mention that my mother had sent cookies back with me, and suggested that we walk back to my room to sample them. Not long after we had started in on the cookies, we heard a loud noise, and went to investigate. We soon discovered that the source of the lound noise was Stan Pittman’s room where the pressure in one of his test samples (presumably the one he had picked up) had built up in the sealed bottle to the point where it had exceeded the strength of the glass, and exploded, spraying glass fragments all over the room and embedding some of them in the plaster walls but not, fortunately, in either one of us.
The title of this post may be somewhat inaccurate, since I’m not sure that being sprayed with sharp glass fragments from an exploding bottle would have killed me, but I’m very glad I did not have the opportunity to find out what the effect would have been. This was not the only time in my life when by sheer dumb luck I have avoided circumstances that could have been very unpleasant, to say the least, and at some point I intend to post about one other such time, but that will have to wait for now.