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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.

I should perhaps add the phrase “to the best of my knowledge and belief” to the title of this post, since I was not directly involved in the incident which I will describe below, and it was not described to me by anyone who was directly involved. However, I was told about this by a person who knew both me and the person involved, the person who related this story to me had no reason to make it up, and it is not at all hard for me to believe that the perpetrator person involved actually did this, given his somewhat offbeat sense of humor. I’ll identify him only by his first name, Theron.

Before describing the incident, I need to add that, in addition to having an ideosyncratic sense of humor, Theron was slender to the point of being skinny, had dark hair and a pale complexion, and in general looked a bit like he might have died recently, after a long struggle with some wasting disease. It’s easy to imagine his being cast in a vampire movie.

With that out of the way, I will explain that the event I’m about to describe resulted from the intersection of two different needs. First, there are always needy college students who need to find ways to save money. Second, because people have an inconvenient habit of dying at all hours of the day and night, rather than only within normal business hours, funeral homes find it necessary to make arrangements to have their phones answered 24 hours every day. In an arrangement that I suspect is not unique, one funeral home in Lawrence, Kansas met both needs by having a small apartment on premises, and making this available rent free to a college student, in return for that student’s promising to be available at specified hours to answer the business’ phone. This is where Theron came in, as the student in this arrangemtnt.

As I mentioned above, Theron had a somewhat offbeat sense of humor, and this got the better of him one night. He knew that a body was to be brought in at a particular time, and a few minutes prior to this time he lay down on the slab and pulled the sheet up over himself. When, shortly thereafter, the two individuals escorting the body wheeled the gurney into the room, they found the slab already occuopied. One said to the other”Oh, they already have a body; what are we going to do?” At this point Theron very slowly sat up, while slowly saying “I’d … be … happy … to move.” Two people then very quickly left the room, only to return shortly thereafter and explain to Theron, in forceful terms, that if he ever did that again he would need the slab. I have to assume, since he lived to tell this story to the person who related it to me, that he was able to restrain himself enough not to tempt fate by trying this again.