By JJ Bowman
Staff Writer
DORM ROAD – Check around campus and watch seniors go sentimental. Watch them spend extra time eating lunch in the Caf. See them sitting by the fountain, staring at the ocean. Now stop staring, you freak.
Senior sentimentality is almost as ubiquitous as senioritis. I hadn’t experienced the former until recently when I walked into the Howard A. White Center. Back in the day (the day being fall semester, 2000) I spent most of my life in that building. Besides serving as my late-night playground, snack bar and procrastination center, the HAWC also provided me with some of the easiest paychecks ever when I was the guy handing out pool cues behind the counter.
I returned to the HAWC this week not to praise but to bury it. As a freshman I resented the HAWC. Like the Firestone Fieldhouse, the HAWC falls short of what a top-50 Division 1 school should offer. In other words, it’s so high school. College was supposed to be different – the way I saw it on TV shows and in movies.
Like so many other freshmen, I wanted to drop Pepperdine and find a so-called real school, and the HAWC was the most blatant example of why Pepperdine did not meet my expectations. If the buildings of Pepperdine were members of the Corleone crime family, the HAWC would be Fredo.
More than 20 possible improvements would leap into the mind of anyone walking through the HAWC. Upon entering the building, students must maneuver around the awkward circular benches surrounding a plant-adorned table. The benches do not invite one to sit and the plants fail to mask the odor of stale coffee, dried paint and human sweat.
Move to the game area and more problems surface. The pool cues are about as straight as an Elton John concert featuring the dancing of Richard Simmons. It would be easier to find usable Ping-Pong equipment at a yard sale.
The building once had a jukebox and a decrepit foosball table, but both have left without replacement.
The upstairs HAWC has its own problems. The Italian coffee shop, besides failing to make a drinkable espresso, lacks the hot stove to offer any of the wholesome nutrients a late-night taco or hot dog could provide. The second floor also could use at least one comfortable sofa.
I planned to write about these and all the other needs of our student center until I reached the inevitable conclusion that the HAWC would have to be gutted and rebuilt to something more appropriate for a normal college.
Then I walked back into the place. The HAWC is not the student center of that cool university life I anticipated, but it fits perfectly with Pepperdine. It’s small, impersonal and difficult to access for all but those who live on Dorm Road. Yet, it remains a good place to study or burn off a little steam.
Pepperdine, after all, is not Ole Miss – we don’t have legendary tailgates before football games. It’s not Florida State – we don’t have kegs on the lawn. We don’t attend Harvard with Cambridge and Boston easily accessible – instead we have Ralphs.
The HAWC wouldn’t work at any of those places, but it survives on this campus. It’s so Pepperdine. And that’s why I’m sipping my bad espresso and gazing toward space. But seriously, stop staring at me.
Submitted March 25, 2004