Reflections

The Lottery

• By fannieb
• July 25, 2014
• No Comments

I’ve never been that lucky. So when I picked #69 of 70 during the dormitory lottery at the end of my freshman year I shouldn’t have been surprised. Why was I expecting to be able to pick the dorm I wanted to live in, one on the green close to the academic buildings and the student center? When it came to matters of chance my luck was not that good, but my luck wasn’t all bad. I had interviewed for the position of Student Advisor as a freshman (soon to be sophomore) and had actually been selected – one of only two freshman selected to be student advisors the following year. My biggest motivation for applying was and my reward would be that I’d be living in a single. No more roommate strife.

Me and Barbara, the other soon to be sophomore Student Advisor, had chosen to move together. She had allowed me to draw during the lottery and I selected the second to last number possible! Afterward an overwhelming feeling of guilt enveloped me because Barbara would have a horrible sophomore year and it would be all my fault.

A high lottery number meant that Barbara and I were headed to Rankin Hall on the outskirts of campus. Rankin was one of the newer dorms built in the 1970s and it overlooked a lake surrounded by trees. In the fall the view was breathtaking. But the view had not been on our radar, all we knew was that Rankin was an undesirable dorm. In addition to being a distance from the campus center the other stigma attached to Rankin Hall (at least during my four years at the college) was that it was known as the “lesbian” dorm.

You would think that at a women’s college there wouldn’t be this sort of separation, gay versus straight, and perhaps now in 2014 there isn’t, but in the 1980s there was. I think the feeling some students had was that if you lived in a dorm where a large population of lesbians resided and you were straight, that your classmates would assume you were a lesbian too. This was far from the case, but at 19 many of us felt this way.

By the beginning of the end of my college career I had returned to Rankin Hall but by choice this time. Junior year I’d selected a lower number in the lottery and got my chance to live on the green at the center of campus. That year was just so-so though and probably my least memorable. Rankin Hall had a reputation, but I had seen beyond that.

The hallways were brighter, the bathrooms newer, the view spectacular. Certainly the architectural features could not compare to the dormitories that had been built in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries, but there was a lightness about Rankin Hall- in its rooms, its halls, and its common areas- that wasn’t present in the older dorms. Perhaps fewer dramas had played out within the walls of Rankin and so the energy that lingered was not weighted down by an accumulation of suicides, fires, or other tragedies that might have a taken place many more times in the older dorms.

In 1986 when I’d drawn such a high number in that lottery I hadn’t considered myself a lucky person when it came to matters of chance. But by 1989 I was beginning to see that knowing the difference between good luck and bad was not so simple.

Photo Credit: Håkan Dahlström Photography