By Scott Shephard

I was not really a cat person when I took this photo sometime in 1975. But Deb loved cats and so I guess they became an acquired taste. I was living in a little silver trailer off campus in Vermillion and was working towards my degrees in Classics and English. Deb couldn’t keep her cats in the dorm so that fell to me.

The trailer was perfect for a single guy whose idea of a good time was reading Roman history, studying all 37 comedies and tragedies of Shakespeare and writing papers about ancient Greek Dionysian cults. My trailer was my little space ship and I was on an amazing journey. I was also simultaneously taking care of who-knows-how-many of these hairy things.

USD was known in the early 1970s as the party school in South Dakota and before moving to the trailer, my dorm on campus was the place to go if you were looking for a little pot. I didn’t indulge in illicit things then (or now) though I figured if I lingered long enough by some of the rooms, I might get some kind of passive high from smoke seeping out from under the doors. Back then, because I craved silence, I would retreat to a cubicle in the government documents section of the USD library to memorize Greek vocabulary and read Roman history, among other things.

Was I a nerd in college? Only if aspiring scholars are nerds. (Don’t weigh in on this, please.) By the end of my college life, because of moments like the one revealed in today’s photo, I guess I was a cat lover, too.

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