My grandfather, Mark Snellgrove came to LSU in 1958 as an 18-year-old freshman from Plaquemine. Throughout my childhood, he told me countless stories of his time at LSU and of LSU football.
He celebrated the National Championship victory with his classmates at a bonfire atop the Indian Mounds. He watched firsthand as Billy Cannon rumbled his way into the end zone and the history books against Ole Miss.
And in 1960, he lived in Tiger Stadium.
My grandfather’s room was in the Tiger Stadium South residence hall. None of the rooms had air-conditioning. As a result, the windows to the room were always opened and the all-male occupants would immediately “strip down to their skivvies and flip-flops,” to keep from over-heating.
Instead of resident assistants, rectors supervised halls. He said his rector embraced his duties more fully than others.
As an officer in the ROTC program, this rector was always in uniform and would march down the hall for his impromptu room inspections. The rector was given a key to all student rooms and would walk at any time unannounced. Untidy residents were reprimanded with “sloppy slips.” Three citations could mean a trip to the Dean of Men and a suspension from school. Serious offenses, such as having a beer in one’s room, led to immediate expulsion.
The only warning of an inspection residents had was the click of the rector’s shoes as he marched down the hallway.
My grandfather would often hop into his unmade bed and pretend to nap to avoid being cited for keeping a messy room. The rector would barge into the room, halt and turn on his heel before inspecting the area.
No one in the hall liked the rector, my grandfather said.
My grandfather recalled an incident between the rector and three students from the same neighborhood in New Orleans who lived in larger room at the end of the hall.
“Paul, they were tough, but they were very serious about their studies,” he said. “They came from a rough neighborhood and were determined to better themselves and move up in the world.”
After the last day of final exams, most of the residents had left for the holidays, but the three boys from New Orleans, the rector, my grandfather and a few other residents remained.
The boys from New Orleans, who mostly kept to themselves, quietly shared a six-pack in their room to celebrate the end of the semester. My grandfather said he would have never known they had beer in the room.
Beer was technically prohibited in dorm rooms, but in most cases the policy was loosely enforced. The rector on my grandfather’s floor in Tiger Stadium South was the exception.
After an unannounced room inspection, the rector found the empty six-pack in the students’ room and loudly confronted the three roommates. He told them they would be expelled from the University by the morning, and he confiscated the empty bottles.
In the middle of the night, the entire hall was woken up by a series of deafening bangs and the smell of smoke. In the hall, smoke was billowing from the transom above the rector’s door. Someone had thrown a handful of lit cherry bombs through the rector’s door.
All the students were in the hall except the three boys from New Orleans.
The rector burst through his door without his usual uniform. His glasses were askew, as he looked around the hall for someone to accuse. After a moment of hesitation, the rector walked back into his room and picked up the six-pack. He placed it by the New Orleanians’ door at the end of the hall, and barked at the students in the hall to go back to bed.
When he finished his story, my grandfather chuckled and said, “It was a little bit of frontier justice. I guess that doesn’t happen anymore.”
And I think RAs and administrators in every residence hall on campus are thankful for that.
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Paul Braun, Contributing Writer
Andrea Gallo
