Saint Mary's Magazine Fall 2004 - Saint Mary's University of Minnesota

COTTER RATS, CLASS OF 1964 • THE GUYS OF ’ 76-’ 79 •
Friends
for life
For 40-some years, Vince Morneau ’64 has held onto a
small note, mindfully preserving it as it aged.
Written by a good friend, this small scrap of paper
takes Morneau back to 1964 — when women had bouffant
hair, the Beatles were taking the country by storm and
everything was “groovy.”
“I had a car on campus in 1964 while living in Cotter
Hall,” Morneau said. “Brother Frank (Walsh) was dean of
students at the time and enforced rules for those of us with
cars. One of these rules was that we were not allowed to
take our cars off-campus during the week without
permission from the Dean’s Office, and you better have had
a good reason. Leaving campus to visit your girlfriend at (the
College of Saint Teresa) was not an acceptable reason. If you
got caught, the car was to be returned home. My home
was in New Jersey.
“Upon returning to campus after one of those ’rare’
weekday visits to CST without permission, I found a note on
my desk which said:
‘For Vin: Br. Frank called
... wants to see you at 8:00 a.m. in his office.
He says check your oil and water.’
“Needless to say, I started to hyper-ventilate, imagining
what my dad would say when I arrived home with the car
for breaking the rules,” Morneau said. “I was left to ponder
my fate all night. Early the next morning, Ken Sichz told me
the note was a joke ... written by him.”
Morneau kept that note. He sent a copy to Sichz this
summer and saved it as “Get even.”
COTTER RATS,
CLASS OF 1964
These are the stories that endure the years and get funnier
with each telling. For the “Cotter Rats,” (no one is sure
where the name originated — perhaps from the number of
rodents in their rooms at Cotter Hall) the stories are many.
A group of guys from 1964, including Rich Macko,
Dennis Wareham, Pat Murphy, James Herlihy, Bob Mitchell,
Jim Dougherty, Vince Morneau, Ken Sichz, John Michaels,
John Polka, Merrill Kline and Jim Peterson, have stayed
friends for 40 years. Their friendships grew stronger with
each practical joke. They battled over thermostat control
and became professional rodent removers. They crammed
long into the night for tests, but somehow they made time
for a little mayhem.
Wareham remembers bending one rule in particular: no
televisions in student rooms.
“The old student union had a TV, but that was the only
set available for student use on the entire campus,” he said.
“Our faculty resident advisor, Norm DeLue, had a TV in his
spacious residence on the first floor of Cotter Hall, and he
would occasionally allow us lowly students to view a
program with him, but it bugged us up on the third floor
that we couldn’t add TV to the other homelike amenities we
had up there. So I brought an old 12-inch black-and-white
TV from home and placed it in a walk-in storage room
leading from our suite to the ‘back deck.’ We knew it would
be safe and undetected back there, although it wasn’t all
that comfortable to close ourselves in that storage room to
watch TV. To overcome the lack of any local TV stations in
the area, we snuck down into DeLue’s room and ran some
16 SAINT MARY’S MAGAZINE FALL 2004