[Rain Man]

I'll share a few stories of patteeu just to show everyone how cool he was.

I first saw his name when I was a freshman at college. We were in the same major. It took another couple of years to meet him since we generally didn't start our major-specific courses until our junior year. He was one of the top students in the program, and he was also very well liked and respected. He was a pretty quiet guy - not a rah rah type - but he was welcomed into every social group because he was a genuinely personable and witty fellow.

But here's what made him cool in college: for at least part of his college career he lived in a motel.

Now, I guess I can't give him credit for the idea, but he executed it well. For those of you in your late 50s, you'll remember that we were pretty much the last year of the baby boom and so we had a crowded existence in many respects. When patteeu and I showed up at college, the school didn't want to build a new dorm with the baby bust coming, so they did all sorts of things to find housing for students. At UMR, one of those things was to book up the low-end 1950s motels out on the highway and turn them into dorms. They then ran a bus service to get the students to and from campus. Patteeu got assigned to one of those, so he lived in a classic 1950s motel for at least a year, and I think it was notably longer than that. As a low-caste townie who had to commute from my parents' house, I thought the motel guys had the best of all worlds.

Patteeu and I were very friendly in college, but he had a built-in social group at the motel so we didn't do a lot of social stuff together in those days, even though we seemed to have a lot of common interests. That changed, though, when.....