COTTER RATS
Class of 1964

For 40-some years, Vince Morneau ’64 has held onto a small note, mindfully preserving it as it aged.

Written by a good friend, this small scrap of paper takes Morneau back to 1964 — when women had bouffant hair, the Beatles were taking the country by storm and everything was "groovy."

"I had a car on campus in 1964 while living in Cotter Hall," Morneau said. "Brother Frank (Walsh) was dean of students at the time and enforced rules for those of us with cars. One of these rules was that we were not allowed to take our cars off-campus during the week without permission from the Dean’s Office, and you better have had a good reason. Leaving campus to visit your girlfriend at (the College of Saint Teresa) was not an acceptable reason. If you got caught, the car was to be returned home. My home was in New Jersey.

"Upon returning to campus after one of those ’rare’ weekday visits to CST without permission, I found a note on my desk which said:

‘For Vin: Br. Frank called ... wants to see you at 8:00 a.m. in his office. He says check your oil and water.’

"Needless to say, I started to hyper-ventilate, imagining what my dad would say when I arrived home with the car for breaking the rules," Morneau said. "I was left to ponder my fate all night. Early the next morning, Ken Sichz told me the note was a joke ... written by him."

Morneau kept that note. He sent a copy to Sichz this summer and saved it as "Get even."

These are the stories that endure the years and get funnier with each telling. For the "Cotter Rats," (no one is sure where the name originated — perhaps from the number of rodents in their rooms at Cotter Hall) the stories are many.

A group of guys from 1964, including Rich Macko, Dennis Wareham, Pat Murphy, James Herlihy, Bob Mitchell, Jim Dougherty, Vince Morneau, Ken Sichz, John Michaels, John Polka, Merrill Kline and Jim Peterson, have stayed friends for 40 years. Their friendships grew stronger with each practical joke. They battled over thermostat control and became professional rodent removers. They crammed long into the night for tests, but somehow they made time for a little mayhem.

Wareham remembers bending one rule in particular: no televisions in student rooms.

"The old student union had a TV, but that was the only set available for student use on the entire campus," he said. "Our faculty resident advisor, Norm DeLue, had a TV in his spacious residence on the first floor of Cotter Hall, and he would occasionally allow us lowly students to view a program with him, but it bugged us up on the third floor that we couldn’t add TV to the other homelike amenities we had up there. So I brought an old 12-inch black-and-white TV from home and placed it in a walk-in storage room leading from our suite to the ‘back deck.’ We knew it would be safe and undetected back there, although it wasn’t all that comfortable to close ourselves in that storage room to watch TV. To overcome the lack of any local TV stations in the area, we snuck down into DeLue’s room and ran some very thin copper wire from his cable TV hook-up, out his window, and all the way up to our third floor storage room. Voila! We had our choice of 10 channels in the ‘comfort’ of our walk-in closet. We were pretty proud of ourselves for being able to beat the system and remain undetected.

"After a couple of weeks, I was walking down the hall by the Dean of Men’s office. Brother Francis emerged from his office and greeted me as I walked by. Almost as an afterthought he turned to me and asked, ‘Anything good on TV lately?’
For the Rats, Homecoming has been an annual, inexpensive family vacation and a way for the group to reunite and reiterate old stories.

"We have, of course, aged 40 years since leaving college, and have aches and pains, memory lapses, hair graying and hair loss, weight gain and other minor physical impairments to testify to that process," Wareham said.
But having each other has provided constancy in their lives.

"We became friends in the first place because we mainly shared similar values and ideals. I am thankful that Saint Mary’s was instrumental in helping us form solid, Catholic, faith-based values," he said. "Because of these shared values, we have been able to provide support and encouragement to each other throughout the years. Also, reminiscing seems to provide a measure of stability and foundation to our lives."