I was an undergrad at UoM for the first three Hash Bashes, and remember them fondly (so perhaps I was doing it wrong ; -) I still enjoy hearing about it every year…the only “college tradition” I ever truly took part in. (Maybe football counts as well – back in the day, students got free tickets to home games. Tickets were transferrable, so I’d sell mine and use the cash for books. Go Blue!)
Those first bashes were great – great cause, great people, great hash. It was a very novel experience at the second one to sit in the diag as a teenager, smokin’ down with my state rep (Perry Bullard?) Also, vague memories of a Sun Ra show…
In the late '80s I was a reporter on the west side of the state. As though a switch had been flipped, college students got back into public drunkenness in a big way – property damage, ODs, assaults on kids and cops, very messy. Virtually every authority figure I interviewed, from college deans to police captains, would privately tell me that they longed for the “old days” when kids smoked pot – along the lines of, “the worst problem from pot smokers was that music might get too loud, and you controlled that by simply knocking on their door.” Sad to think of the Bash going down that same road.
