University Tee Shirts

In 1975-76 Spain was a cheap, cheap, cheap place to take a vacation. That made it attractive for college-age people to go walkabout in those days as part of their coming-of-age experience. Armed with backpacks and Eurail passes, you could find them in every town in Europe.

You could especially find them in Torremolinos, which had a cachet to it thanks to James Michener’s book The Drifters. First published in 1971, was a hugely influential book, translated into at least ten European languages. Five translations, Dutch, Finnish, German, Portuguese, and Spanish, featured the name “Torremolinos” in their titles. It would have been the answer to the Chamber of Commerce’s prayer, if only the Hippies brought more money with them.

Many of the young people traveling in Torremolinos on the cheap were university students during the fall, winter and spring months. They wore tee-shirts all over the street advertising this university or that. I suspect there were far more university tee-shirts than university students, but I’m of a suspicious nature. I think the expectation was that Ohio State people would see each other and hang out together. But why you would go all the way to Spain to hang out with someone from your own university? I never understood the thinking there.

Confounding the scheme, however, was the practice of exchanging tee-shirts. After a few brewskies there would be a round of tee-shirt exchanges and someone wearing an Oxford shirt might not even speak English. He might be a Heidelberg student and the person he exchanged with spoke no German.

We saw lots of Oxfords and Sorbonnes, lots of Georgetowns and Ohio States. Didn’t see too many Bob Jones Universities. The most popular tee-shirt of all was UCLA’s. You could probably get two Sorbonnes and a beer for a UCLA shirt in good repair. Free market economy, nothing like it.