Altogether, I spent eight years in college earning four degrees, and another 45 years teaching college. I learned many things as an undergraduate student in the College of Agriculture at the University of Wyoming, including the following:
- I learned that a cow has four stomachs, including the rumen, reticulum, omasum, and abomasum. I recite these four stomach names periodically in case someone comes up to me and asks, "Can you name the four stomachs of a cow?"
- I learned that I could scrub toilets, dustmop large gym floors and hallways, empty waste paper, and spend 30-40 hours every night, getting back to bed about 2:00 a.m., up at 7:30 a.m., off to eight o'clocks, earn 75 cents an hour, and still graduate from college. I was always a bit concerned about whether Mother would make me do any of it over again, which she did a time or two (or three) while I was still at home.
- I learned that I could start college by living in a room at the University of Wyoming Stock Farm in the sheep barn, and that sheep emitted a potent lanolin odor that permeated everything you wore.
- While working at the University Stock Farm in the dairy, I learned that the only milk I wanted to see the rest of my life was in a glass bottle (before they had plastic cartons).
- I learned how to dissect countless embalmed and smelly, slimy, species in Zoology, convincing me that I was too delicate to pursue more than a year of Zoo.
- I learned that I could draw countless species of plants in botany, and that botany smelled better than Zoo.
- I learned that it would have been helpful had I gotten around to doing the lab exercises in organic chemistry.
- I learned that if I got married to a cute little Laramie High School graduate during the middle of my senior year, that she could finish paying off the engagement ring and life would be better. Come mid-December, that will have been exactly sixty years ago.
- Above all, I learned that I could start college with $75, earn every penny of my expenses through school, and graduate with a degree in four years without a penny of debt.
- I learned that however arduous, discouraging (at times), and uncertain my undergraduate years at the University of Wyoming were, I still consider those years to be among the best years of my life and I would not trade them for anything. The opportunity to learn what I had time to absorb, associate with students from every where, and be taught by talented teachers, was a priceless experience for a country boy who spent the last summer before college hoeing sugar beets.
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