College Commuter's Nightmare, '50's Style

    Our Freshman college classes began September 17, 1956.  I had no idea what to expect, and that turned out to be a good thing.  Otherwise, my sister and I (she only 16 years old)  would never had made it through.
    As commuters, and dependent on various means to get there-car, bus, trains---there was no time for any activities or entertainment, or even enough sleep. So many negative memories, but I was reminded of this horror the other day.
   We majored in English and Social Studies,as well as the requisite Education courses,  and there were  tons of mandated reading assignments.  In those days, the professors, elitist you might call them, disdained the idea of restricting assigned readings to the many textbooks that were required for their courses,  vigorously pursuing the idea of having us read specific passages from books that were, for the most part, out of print. Therefore, rare, and found only in the college library on the dreaded Reserved List. That meant you had to sign up for them. The rest of at least your class had the same requirement, so that meant a race to the library desk to sign up first, or early enough to glean a time slot before the assignment was due.
   That would have been trying enough under the best of circumstances, but for commuters who had to catch a number of rides at strictly scheduled times, it was a nightmare. Having to find a time when the book would be available was so difficult to do. Of course the books on the Reserved List could be read only in the library, not signed out. Trying to squeeze an assigned reading into the only free time we commuters had was a hellish venture, not one to be soon forgotten, or ever, as witness this writing.
    And remember, in this primitive time period, before modern inventions, there was no way for the professors to copy any of these revered passages they were assigning,  The utilization of copy machines was still in the future. Today's student could retrieve the book, snap picture of the pages, and read at their leisure.  Then, the student had to physically pick up the book and cast their eyes over the pages as quickly as possible.  Can't miss that bus in Albany, because then we'd miss the connection to the last train from Troy to Valley Falls. And to compound the horror, at times the book would be unavailable somewhere along its route because an unscrupulous student had sneaked it out of the library, security not being very aware in those times. Even worse, was to finally sign the right book out at an advantageous time, and find  that, though you had access to the book, the assigned pages had been snipped out.
    If I had it to do over again, I wouldn't have.