“I worked the second shift, 3-to-11. I’d never done that. Eleven o’clock we’d just go home, although on Friday the guy I was living with, it was another black family I was living with, he had five kids and they were all home. Friday, at 11:30, we’d get home and he was gone after that and he was drunk from the moment until Monday morning. So I couldn’t have kept up with that. That’s the first experience I ever had with an alcoholic. He was just smashed. And I thought, “What the hell was this?” I remember the first night that I realized it. I went over with him to his mom, who was next door, because his wife wouldn’t want him around.

–Jim Samenfeld-Specht '74