RIVER CITY JOURNAL: YOU JUST ABOUT NEED A LAW DEGREE TO PARK AT UNIVERSITY

No one walks in this age of the automobile. So why are so many students walking so far to class every day?

When I was growing up on that Kelo Valley farm, our mailbox was a mile from the house. Actually, its was exactly nine-tenths of a mile, but it was a lot easier to say a mile.

Having a mailbox a good distance from your house was fairly common on most rural routes in those days. There were folks who lived on Kelo Valley who had to go a lot farther to get their mail than we did.

The reason, of course, that the mailbox was so far away was that the mailman's route followed main roads that actually went somewhere. So our mailbox was where our gravel road turned off the blacktop road at the top of the hill. Our gravel road went to the four or five farms on the valley. Then you had to turn around and go back.

The mail carrier went on a lot of gravel roads. But they were roads that started somewhere and ended somewhere else without having to do a lot of backtracking.

In those growing-up years, walking was what we did. We walked to school. We walked to each other's houses, sometimes a mile or more away. We walked to go hunting. We walked to go fishing on Black River. We walked to get the milk cow in the morning and at night.

In my earliest memories, our family vehicle was a two-ton truck equipped to haul logs or large loads of hay or hogs and cattle to the stockyards all the way up in East St. Louis. On Saturdays the family would get in the truck and go to town.

Once in town, we parked the truck, usually near Ward's grocery store, which was always a major destination for Saturday shopping. If we went anywhere else -- Toney's Drug Store, Gayle's Mercantile, the movie theater for the matinee, Stewart's Toggery, Harris Department Store, the Ben Franklin 5-and-10-Cent Store, Sweazea's Hardware & Lumber, the post office, the bank -- we usually walked.

Eventually, we got a second vehicle, this time a real car. And we started driving to more places. Which meant finding a parking space.

My favorite hometown, like most others in America, installed city-sanctioned slot machines, otherwise known as parking meters, on all the sidewalks. It didn't seem right to pay a penny or a nickel for something that had been free forever. But we fed the meters like everyone else.

And we grumbled if we had to park too far from where we wanted to go.

Nowadays, we are so dependent on our automobiles that it would be tough for most of us to get through a week without one. We have two cars for two people at our house. My wife's car wouldn't start yesterday. This meant we had one car for two people. That just doesn't work.

Most of us never walk anywhere.

I mention all of this because, now that school has started, the Southeast Missouri State University students have renewed their complaints about campus parking.

These motoring students are a curious blend. They can't get to school without a car, but once they get here they park on city streets as far away from their classes as our mailbox was from the house on the farm.

The university acknowledges that parking in the heart of the campus is at a premium. But campus officials also point out there is plenty of parking (with a fee and a permit) and plenty of shuttle buses to move students around.

But I don't see a lot of students riding the shuttles. What I see is a lot of students walking long distances from their cars to classes.

Someone sent me an official university brochure. In white letters on a bright-red background, it says "PARKING REGULATIONS."

Out of curiosity, I read the brochure. It's a miniature law book: Do this. Don't do that. A dozen kinds of permits. Waiting lists. Dozens of different fees. Fall permits. Spring permits. Summer permits.

I'm not kidding. The brochure's fine print not only has four major headings, it also has 41 subsections, 109 sub-subsections and 39 sub-sub-sections.

If I were a student who wanted to park on campus and someone handed me a document with 193 fine legal points, I'd think twice before plunking down my money for a permit.

But that's not why students don't park on campus. They don't park on campus because they don't see the sense of paying for the privilege of parking so far away you still have to take a bus to get to class.

And you know what? There's no easy answer.

Still, I wonder where all those parking meters are that the city took down.

~R. Joe Sullivan is the editor of the Southeast Missourian.