Did You Know?

Did You Know?

January 9, 2013
'Cheers!' to the youthful endeavors of Floyd Myers as a UR student

By Floyd Myers, R‘60 (Photo by Tim Hanger)

In the fall of 1956, I entered the freshman class of the University of Richmond. My living quarters were in Thomas Hall. My room was on the third floor, which offered not only a rewarding view of the campus but also an interesting, attic-like space due to its quirky alignment with the adjacent room. This space could be accessed through my room’s closet and would become significant to me and several of my entrepreneurial floor-mates.

I occupied the same living space my sophomore year but shared it with a new roommate. Most of my other floor-mates had returned to their same rooms. It was after Christmas break of that year that the entrepreneurial spirit took hold of us.

It was all due to one of my floor-mates returning with a recipe for home-made beer. Now what group of college men could resist trying out a recipe for home-made beer? Certainly not us! We used the next several weeks gathering the necessary recipe ingredients and brewing paraphernalia from local merchants. The project was assembled, coincidentally, in my room’s “mystery” space. Once we had everything we needed and operational, we figured we would have as much home-grown brew as we could drink in a matter of days.

A week later, when we “unveiled” the project, we were presented with something that looked, smelled, and tasted like beer but lacked the necessary aging. We allowed some time for aging but when we did our next tasting, we determined that rather than improving with age, it was definitely going the other way. We decided it would be wise, at this point, to give up the project. We did so reluctantly and moved on with our college lives.

I left my Thomas Hall room my junior year and chose to live in a fraternity but I remembered an old rocking chair that I had left in my dorm room and went back to retrieve it. The new occupant didn’t have any questions about the rocking chair but he did want to know if I had any idea what might have caused the large explosion that he had heard behind his closet. Apparently our project that we walked away from had reached its “aging” climax. I told him that I had no idea and chuckled to myself as I walked away.