The spring semester had started, so two of the girls in our group were gone during the week because they were attending St. Mary's, a Catholic High School in San Antonio. Susan Turcotte and Jean Marie Huff had been attending Incarnate Word in Corpus Christi, which was a Catholic middle school. We would see them on weekends and sometimes they would bring down friends they had just recently made. I seem to remember both Catholic schools were women only, but that may have changed by now.

In the meantime Bud Turcotte was a senior finishing his final year as a Riviera Seahawk in Riviera, Texas about five or six miles north of the Turcotte "three story haunted house" at Sarita, Texas. I was still commuting from home in my freshman year at Texas A & I University in Kingsville. A & I stood for agriculture and industry where they had great programs for farming and ranching as well as civil and petroleum engineering. There were a lot of students there from Iran.

A couple of months into the spring semester I was driving down the street that led to the Administration building looking for a parking space. This particular street was actually just a long drive with a ten foot wide grassy median separating the lanes. Where the northbound lane reached the Administration building there was a large one way traffic circle around a very large fountain. The circle was about one hundred twenty feet in diameter including pavement, and the drive was wide enough for people to stop and left off or pick someone up at the front of the building. It was made so you could drive around and around the grassy circle with the fountain, but if the campus security saw you make a U-turn to go down the south drive lane, you would be pulled over. You were supposed to go all the way around to catch the south lane and head out from the Administration building.

As I was looking for a parking space, I glanced to my left to see if there were any empty spaces on the other side as I was not seeing anything in the northbound lane in front of me. I just happened to get a glance of a very tall lanky guy with a familiar gait walking south. I took a second look, then hollered "Hey Joe!" He stopped to look in my direction, then I yelled across the median that I was coming back around. He waited until I drove around the circle, and came back. There were no parking spaces, but I stopped in the road and rolled the window down. He came up to the car and said "What are you doing here?" I replied "I was going to ask you the same thing!"

In the weekend Joe Bowlder had just spent hunting with us in December just a few months earlier, neither one of us had talked about school. Joe didn't know I was a freshman at Texas A & I, and I didn't know he was a Sophomore who had transferred there for the spring semester. He got in the car and I took him to his apartment which was very close and within walking distance to the campus. We had a short visit as I had to get to class, but we both had a great feeling that we would now be able to spend more time together becoming friends and talking boat racing. It was one of those "cloud nine" moments as I headed to class. Not quite like meeting a new girl who would soon become a girlfriend, but close.