Crunch Time For DU

I took a walk across the University of Denver campus the other day, and everything was quiet and serene, as seen in the photograph on the left. However, all that will change very soon. Tomorrow the law school starts classes, which when I worked at the DU Bookstore marked the first wave of students coming to the store to purchase their required textbooks. However, I have heard that the now Follett Higher Education Group run DU Bookstore angered the law school so much that they now buy the books and sell them to the students themselves. That, of course, must make things much calmer on the sales floor these days.

Of course, the start of law school classes only resulted in 2 or 3 busy days on the sales floor. All the action was back in the stockroom, where boxes of books were stacked to the rafters, filling every nook and cranny, the staff desperately trying to get them unpacked and on the shelves before the first day of regular classes at the beginning of September. The campus itself still seemed outwardly calm, including University Hall, the oldest building on campus, dating from 1892 and seen in the photo on the right.

I worked at the DU Bookstore for 28 years, most of them as the store's Finance Manager, and my focus was preparing the sales floor for the peak periods, which started Labor Day weekend with the arrival of the freshman class, and their parents, for orientation week. By Friday, the sales floor was packed with students, preparing for the first day of classes on Monday. It was hellishly busy, and the summer lull was just a pleasant memory. The photograph on the left shows the new student center, on the right, replacing Driscoll North, constructed in 1984, the year I started working at the bookstore. Hard to believe a building only 35 years old would become obsolete, especially since University Hall has been around for 130 years, but amazingly enough, I was never consulted on the matter. The bridge in the center, over Evans Avenue, leads to Driscoll South, where the bookstore was relocated to from the Carnegie Library Building. Carnegie, by the way, truly was obsolete (a stockroom and offices in the basement that flooded after every rainstorm, and a sales floor above it with only a dumbwaiter for books connecting it with the basement). It deserved it's fate, and Carnegie Garden now stands in its place. A truly great improvement.