An ode to 27A South Main Street
by Keith Forrest ’88

hen almost everyone’s thoughts have turned to air conditioning and the Jersey Shore, mine are cooled by nostalgia for semesters of old. For one magical day every year, I am transported back to 1986. My Glassboro apartment jumps out of my mind’s eye and lives and breathes again. When we get together for our annual roommate reunion, Tony, Wendy, Karen and I are restored to our youthful, adrenaline-charged days in Glassboro.

Our GSC family of four has grown since the roommates first met in 1985. Tony, a financier, always arrives for our reunion in a streamlined black car—a grown-up version of his college Trans Am. Wendy and Gary, her husband and fellow alum, appear in an SUV appropriate for two music teachers who haul around band instruments plus their two youngsters. Karen and her husband Larry, also in finance, arrive in a minivan with their two kids. My wife Kris and I make a middle-ground entrance with a four-door passenger car. Kris, too, is in finance and I am a recovering journalist.

Once reunited, we begin reminiscing, and more importantly, making new memories. Kris looks forward to these nostalgic get-togethers now as much as I do. Gary makes sure that no one’s glass is ever empty. Larry whips up some fattening gourmet delight. Tony reprises his role as big brother to all of us as he was during college. And the four children run around.

We were quite a quartet back then with precious little in common except life in Mimosa (we called it the zoo) and a desire to live somewhere else. I know that they’re called residence halls now but in the mid-1980s, Mimosa was a dorm. After our freshman year, we left dorm life in the dust and got an apartment together.

Our living quarters at 27A South Main Street were probably a hair above a slum. But to us our new home was something out of a Frank Capra movie. Located on the second floor of a house, the entrance was in the back. The stairs leading up to the door rumbled as if an earthquake had beset all of Glassboro. To get in, we had to push the weathered wooden door with all our might and hope that it would thud open, echoing like a SWAT team had just kicked it in.

But this was only the beginning of the apartment’s charms. We decorated our two-bedroom domicile with posters of faraway places and stacked the shelves with the best dishes mom was willing to part with. The kitchen was Tony and Karen’s domain. Tony, whose family owned an Italian restaurant in New York, had been cooking since he was 12 years old. He used our rusty old electric burners and mismatched pots and pans to put together culinary masterpieces. Karen, for reasons we could never quite fathom, saw washing dishes as some kind of spiritual exercise. These two made us different from most college students—we had a roommate who could cook and another who was willing to clean.

The centerpiece of our living room was a bright yellow couch that we had found at a yard sale on Delsea Drive. We felt like Wall Street raiders the day we got it. Tony, a business major, talked the owner down from $25 to $20. And then Karen, a political science major, got the man to take a check. Getting a Gloucester County resident to take a check from college students was no easy task. She might have been ready for international peace talks right there and then.

Of course, what would a college apartment be without the constant pounding of pop music? This was Wendy’s department. A music major, she had invested in a real stereo instead of the Sears model most of our friends had.

Our combined efforts turned 27A into a home and transformed the four of us into a family. Every December we set aside a day for Christmas and exchanged presents. The year I received a pink blazer—all the rage back then, of course—I proudly wore it with a leather tie.

More than 10 years later, we are still a family, bonded not by DNA but by coming-of-age recollections and newer memories. Drawn together again by what was and what has become, we celebrate our ever-expanding clan and pay homage to a place and time called 27A South Main.

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Keith Forrest, a former broadcast journalist, is a doctoral student in political science at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.