Iowa State: Kwik Shop Runs

I miss the little things of college. It’s not like I didn’t appreciate them at the time–but the distance of age makes me sentimental for some things.

With where we lived in Westgate Hall, it was about three blocks to the KwikShop, the nearest convenient story. Back then, there weren’t convenience places inside dorms. Drinks at KS were inexpensive–roughly $0.59+tax for 47 ounces (of “liquid pleasure”…which should remind some reading this of Matt Crum).

The walk there would often be a whole bunch of joking around, pretty much like the rest of our existence on Foster. I mean, I wish I would’ve written down so much back then–I could have created a TV series at least as good as Cheers, equal parts shenanigans and one-liners.

So since I wrote a different memory regarding Paul and Cyberball…I got to thinking about KwikShop.

Story 1: There was one night we went down with a group of people…like 5-6 of us. We weren’t the only ones at KS though. It was warm and in those days, residence halls didn’t have air-conditioning, so there were quite a few other people there getting drinks. The two cashiers were slammed. We didn’t really care–we were talking and having a good evening regardless.

The thing is, one of us, Smitty, got his drink and was sipping on it while we waited. And waited. Eventually, we got up to the cashier and we all paid. Except Smitty. We’d waited long enough in line that he finished his drink before getting to the cashier. They didn’t even ask him to pay.

Story 2: Didn’t take place in Kwik Shop. As you can guess, most of us kept KS cups around–KS was cheaper with a refill. Well, one night, there was someone on the floor who made sure his roommate wasn’t around…because that was an opportunity to invite a young woman into the room. We’ll call the guy “Chris”. Also important–Westgate was built originally to prove you could make a square/block version of a Quonset Hut…so the building was nothing but metal, really…and that meant the walls and floors didn’t muffle sound much.

So…Chris was in his room with the young woman and we all decided to get obnoxious. We took our KS cups and put them up against the hall wall or the room wall (Westgate was set up as suites) to listen in on whatever was going on in the room. At one point, we probably had 12-15 guys there with cups against the walls. The question was raised, “What if they suddenly pop out of the room?” The answer was provided quickly by Ron S., “We’ll just ask if they want to go on a KwikShop run with us.”

They didn’t come out…and we all wound up down at KwikShop after all.

Story 3: I think it was January of ’88. May have been February. In any event, it was cold enough across the United States that the Army cancelled a field exercise in Alaska because the temperature hit -40F with a wind chill low enough bare skin would freeze/be frost-bit in under five seconds. (When the temperature dropped to -10F in Ames, I have this recollection of it having been in the 50s/60s the day before…think we played football on Clyde Williams Field…destroyed the Johns Hopkins sweatshirt Erik Johnson gave me as a gift)

Ames wasn’t -40 cold–but it was really cold. No one wanted to go outside. Well, back then, I had no problem with cold at all and I wanted something to drink other than water. So…I asked Paul if he wanted to go to KwikShop. He said, “We’ll freeze, Dietz.” I said, “We’ll just walk fast.” He shrugged, convinced by my impeccable logic, so we bundled up and off to KwikShop we went.

My God…it was *cold*. COLD. That was not a shining moment of intelligence on my part…or Paul’s for agreeing. Hah. But we went because that’s what we did every night…even with gloves, couple sweatshirts under a coat…still wound up with numb fingers and face skin where it was exposed. The only bright spot of it…the frozen skin helped with acne.