Last week, Flint Chaney sat down and got me going about the old days, and I figured we'd said our piece. Turns out we were just clearing our throats. So here's Part Two, where things get weirder, and I make Flint try to hand a Saluki hat through the internet like a hot casserole smushed through a fence.

This one's about SIU in the '70s: a farm-town university that somehow became a legend, a Playboy party school, and maybe, if you squint and believe hard enough, the reason John Belushi ever pulled on a "COLLEGE" sweatshirt. Grab your coffee or whatever addictive substance you like to combine together while watching my Podcast.

Or don't. I'm not your damn dad.

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Joe Witwer strutted into Lawson Hall with a grin under his US Grant beard and shouted, “Well shit! I’m easy! I’m easy!”

Fifty radio and TV students shouted back, stamped their feet, and applauded as Joe strode up to the lectern to deliver his media marketing lecture.

It seems like Joe was all over Carbondale at every hour of the day and night.  When he wasn’t lecturing, he was driving the Munchie Wagen from dorm to dorm, selling cheap food to hungry students to go with the beer they had snuck into their rooms from liquor stores that rarely checked IDs.

Then there were the bar sightings.  One time, I spotted Joe sporting high-top jeans, waving a beer at a Chick (girl) in The Club, one of a dozen bars along South Illinois Avenue in Carbondale, the home of Southern Illinois University.

“Hi Joe! Getting polluted?” I queried.

“No, no, no….this is part of a research study!” 

Oh Yeah!

Joe fit right in because he was faculty advisor to the 500 radio and TV students, the largest department in the College of Communications and Fine Arts, which was the largest college on the SIU-Carbondale campus.

SIU was a notable party school according to Playboy magazine in the 1960’s and 80’s.  And John Belushi of Animal House fame bought his “College” sweatshirt in The Dale while visiting his younger brother Jim Belushi, a theater major, in the 80s.  Did SIU inspire Animal House?

We hope so.

And why would a university located in a small town surrounded by farms, 50 miles north of where the Mississippi and Ohio rivers intersect, be so wild?

One would be expected to read that there is One Hell of a Good Reason!

Actually, there are three good reasons, one was man-made, by Delyte Morris, and the other two:  One rose from hell, and the other descended from it.

Delyte Morris took over Southern Illinois Normal University when it was a square block teachers' college in 1947.  When he retired in 1970, SIU-Carbondale boasted a student population of 24 thousand and SIU-Edwardsville, 90 miles to the north near Saint Louis, was at 5000 students.  One of Morris’ philosophies was that everyone should be able to go to college.

Like me! I was ADHD before it was ever diagnosed, near the bottom of my high school class, and kept flunking algebra. The difference between me and too many other SIU characters was that I was wild about broadcasting. I started on WRHS, my Rich East high school radio station…and never looked back.

But other so-called students didn’t care about getting educated.  They cared about the draft, and a college deferment was a great way to avoid fighting in Vietnam.  Hell, party, go to class, party some more, cut class, party all weekend along The Strip (south Illinois Avenue), and party on until the end of the war.  Between legitimate anti-war protestors and the partiers, Old Main, the oldest building on the SIU Campus, was burned down in 1969.  The fire marshal found rags with accelerant scattered inside the burning building.  In the spring of 1970, after several students were killed by the National Guard at Kent State, the Illinois Guard was called to Carbondale, and SIU was closed down because of riots.

I arrived in the summer of 1970 for registration, and while walking from the train station to campus found every door and window boarded up along the strip.

So the Vietnam war, partying and rioting was a hell of a way for students to behave, but that type of hell was nothing like what came from below. In the winter of 1811 and 1812, a series of earthquakes buffetted 50-thousand square miles, including southern Illinois, with tremors estimated to be as high as 8’1 on the Richter scale.  Thousands of homes were destroyed, an unknown number of people were killed, and the Mississippi River changed course.  It was the most catastrophic series of earthquakes east of the Rockies.  Carbondale is in the New Madrid seismic zone, named after the Mississippi River town of New MAD-drid.  Scientists believe that if the New Madrid zone were to cut loose in modern times a serious earthquake could inflict "the highest economic losses due to a natural disaster in the United States" 

So Carbondale is sitting over a veritable hell.

And above?  

In 1925, the deadliest tornado outbreak in history spawned the Great Tri-state tornado, which started in Missouri, crossed the Mississippi River, destroyed the Illinois town of Gohram, and killed half its population.  Then, Murphysboro was struck, followed by several other southern Illinois towns.  The F-5 monster reached a mile wide at one point. The time it took to travel  from Missouri through Southern Illinois and across the Ohio River to Indiana lasted  3 and 1/2 hours.  It was the deadliest tornado or tornadoes at the time, killing 695 and injuring 2027.

So how do these events affect the party scene at SIU? William Orley (name changed to protect the guilty), the SIU professor who edited Saluki Marooned, the novel I wrote about SIU and the party scene in the 1970’s, has a theory:

But shit! The hell with.  Let’s have a beer!

We're back with Part Two of the conversation with Flint Chaney of Flint Chaney Photography. This time we go deep into the strange, wonderful history of Southern Illinois University in the 1970s.

We get into it all:

You know the "COLLEGE" sweatshirt. Belushi. Animal House. The single most famous piece of clothing in the history of dumb, glorious college movies.

Damn it, you kids don’t know culture. It’s this one:

Now that you’ve got your visual stimulation, the story goes that John Belushi bought that sweatshirt in The Dale, while visiting his kid brother Jim, a theater major at SIU in the '80s. Which means the most iconic frat movie ever made might trace a thread straight back to a farm-town campus in southern Illinois.

Now, do I have a notarized receipt? I do not. Could a fella maybe want it to be true so badly he stopped asking hard questions? He could. That fella might be me.

But every time somebody tells me it couldn't have started in Carbondale, I think about that damn Munchie Wagen, I figure if any place on God's green earth cooked up the spirit of Animal House, it was ours.

Well, I'll be damned.