zlacker

Star Wars came out the summer before I got to Caltech. I don't remember how many years ahead of me you were--were you still there when The Empire Strikes Back came out in 1980? Someone on Caltech's board was also high up at the studio and arranged for two free showings at Caltech a week before release. One showing was for undergraduates, and one was for faculty and board members. I think there were only a few undergraduates who did not sign up their tickets to that.

Now that I think about it I'm not sure if the ASCIT Disneyland trips were actually annually. I know that ASCIT did one in my frosh year, which was 1977-78, and I'm sure they did one in my junior year because I took advantage of a lot of people being away on that trip to try magic mushrooms. I didn't want to have to deal with a lot of people while tripping.

That didn't quite go as expected. As I wandered around campus enjoying the hallucinogenic effects of the psilocybin, I kept running into Chinese people I did not recognize, many of whom were speaking Chinese.

Walter of course knows this, but for the rest of you Caltech is small enough (under 1000 undergrads) that one should be able to recognize most of the other students on sight. Also, the percentage of Asian students at Caltech was a lot lower back then, so I could tell most of these people weren't Caltech students just by the shear number of them.

I was starting to freak out a little bit because I'd read up on the effects of psilocybin before trying it and highly realistic full sensory interactive hallucinations of Chinese people was way outside the bounds of anything I expected, so I thought something might be going really wrong like the 'shrooms I bought were laced with something else.

It turned out that I was in fact seeing real Chinese undergraduates--but not from Caltech. I was not the only one who decided to take advantage of the campus being a little less crowded that night. The Chinese Students Association had decided to throw a party and invite all the Chinese students from all the other schools in the Los Angeles area including UCLA and USC.

They (ASCIT, not CSA!) were still at least occasionally doing this at least up to the mid '80s. There's an article in an '84 issue of the Tech [1] that mentioned Disneyland trips as one of the things that wouldn't be happening if not for ASCIT.

[1] https://campuspubs.library.caltech.edu/1221/1/1984_11_02_86_...

>>tzs+(OP)
I started in the fall of 75 and graduated in the spring of 79. So, yeah, Empire Strikes Back was later. You were two classes behind me.

I was also off-campus for the 78-79 year, which in retrospect was a mistake, as that caused me to miss a lot of went on.

I'm wondering if the Disneyland trips started in 78-79?

Anyhow, fun story about the Chinese students!

We also had Page House excursions to the premier of Alien, which was pretty exciting for me, whereas today doesn't even elicit a flicker of interest :-/

The best was a House excursion to see Animal House. The one-liners from that movie became memes from the next year. One dude was taking an extra year to get his degree, and all year people would pass him in the hall with <cough>5 years of college down the drain!</cough>.

It's nice to see a fellow techer here on HN, especially a vintage 1970s one!