SJU made an indelible impression on Dave. Coming from a working-class neighborhood in Minneapolis, it was his first exposure to higher education. He was shaped by the spartan spirit of a 1950s college campus surrounded on all sides by farms and lakes. 

 

Dave joked that he was shaken and intimidated when he met his freshman roommate for the first time. He walked into the dorm room and saw a tall, spindly guy smoking a pipe and reading Toynbee. 

 

Dave majored in English. When he wasn't studying, he was working to cover the cost of tuition. Like many of his classmates, he served in the Army for two years after graduation. He then got married and raised three children in Minneapolis. He spent his entire working life as a high school English teacher, and he worked as a park policeman in the summers to earn extra money to pay for family vacations. 

 

Dave used to take his wife and children to SJU for special events, and he loved telling stories about sneaking into the dining hall for late-night snacks, drinking in the dorms, sending his laundry home to his mother to have it washed, watching John Gagliardi's football teams playing games in the fall, swimming in Lake Sagatagan, hitchhiking to Minneapolis during school breaks, enduring long and cold winters, and generally figuring out ways to break rules to make life more fun. 

 

The thing that came through in all of those stories: His love and affection for the wide variety of characters who descended upon St. John's from all over the Midwest. Some of them smart, some funny, some eccentric, some directed and focused--and some not, some natural athletes and some couch potatoes, some business-minded and some headed back to the farm. Many of them became Dave's life-long friends. The common denominator among all of them, at least through Dave's eyes, was the inner goodness and predictability that came from being molded within a self-contained Catholic community in the 1950s. His stories honored the bonds that form when a group of teenagers from varied backgrounds are pulled together for four years--to a place that was as remote and austere as it was full of life, energy and optimism about what the future might hold.