To satisfy both the OP and the people who have complained:
Ten years ago this weekend, I came home from my last class of my sophomore year at the University of Southern California to find everyone on the dorm floor crowded around my roommate’s TV. This happened a lot, so I didn’t think anything of it.
“The Rodney King verdict’s in,” someone told me. “Innocent.”
Whoa, I thought. People are gonna be maaaaad. And indeed, we were watching a live shot of Reginald Denny getting his ass kicked. I watched for a few seconds, until the announcer said this was happening at Florence and Normandie.
“Um, guys?” I said, the last tumbler clicking in my brain. “That’s a mile and a half from here.”
My roommate and I changed our answering machine message:
Hey, this is Gary and George. We’re not here right now – we’re too busy dragging guys out of their trucks and beating them.
That only lasted about two hours, and then people started dying, so we changed it:
This is Gary and George. We’re fine. Don’t tie up the phone lines – we’ll call if anything changes.
That night, we went to the roof and counted fires. We got to twenty before we realized that those other sounds we were hearing really were gunshots, and then we went back inside.
The next morning, the dorm was empty except for our floor. Most of the people on the lower floors had simply fled, leaving their stuff, and the remainder had heard about the crazy bastards on Eight who weren’t going anywhere. We figured the looters had to make their way up seven floors of perfectly good stuff before they got to us, and they’d be tired. We blocked the elevators open at our floor and welcomed the last few lower-floor people to stay with us.
At some point during the night, I received word that finals had been cancelled. I told my RA, who asked where I’d heard that.
“Travis heard it from Glen, who heard it from Robin, who heard it from Liz, who heard it from Mark.”
“Mark, the head RA at Parkside?”
“Yeah.”
“Man, I’m glad you work at the paper.”
Some time after that, he sidled up to me when no one else was around and asked, “You know that gun that you don’t have because it’s in violation of university rules?”
“You mean the one I didn’t load about an hour ago and didn’t put back in my lockbox, to which I’m not handing you the other key?”
“Exactly. Good to know you’re still following the rules.”
The next day, my roommate and I walked around campus with his tennis racket and my pool cue to keep away any rioters, and my pistol under my jacket in case the racket and cue didn’t work. We checked on our friends, made sure people were all right and generally passed around information.
The third day, we were almost used to it. The school had recalled its entire security force (the largest private police force in California) to protect campus, the convenience store kittycorner to a friend’s apartment complex had been looted (by students, mind you), and the local video store had burned. The National Guard had arrived, and I struck up a conversation with some of them at the grocery store, as I was in ROTC at the time. They told me, very carefully, that they didn’t have ammo yet. I sighed and went back to the dorm.
On the way back, we counted a row of twenty-three police cars zooming down Vermont Avenue. That street ended up being the main axis of the riots, and is the western boundary of USC’s campus. Total losses to the University: None. Total injuries to my circle of friends: One (cut hand on glass while taking pictures for the school paper).
That summer, we had three major earthquakes, two of which were within two hours of each other. And that was the dull part of 1992.