It began inauspiciously enough as something falling through the rusted trunk of a Buick 225 abandoned along I-90 near the 222nd Street exit and grew. A group of residents of Johnson Hall on the main campus of Kent State University were gathered in a dorm room on second floor short corridor one warm late summer evening, windows open. A sudden gust many commented that smelled oddly like strawberry l
ip-gloss filled the room only for a moment. That moment left a footprint in time, as later that evening as if by design, a yet uncorked bottle of Galen 190 was discovered under a flap of hallway carpeting that no one there remembers being loose, and a crude initiation ritual was conducted. Photos and a roster were combined and hung on a dorm wall. The organization’s repute grew throughout the year, becoming nearly iconic. Its charter members left K.S.U. happy they had not wasted the last nine months of their lives. But a few returned the following September. The hall was comprised of brash, energetic, despicable potential – a wild group lacking focus or organization. Soon however, design compelled all there to one dorm room and through the ritual. Following a photograph and roster assignment the organization was brought into existence as the Zoo Crew II. This group accomplished many things; multihandedly conquering communism in a single night, initiating drone warfare against suspected communist spectators on the softball field, and defeating divisively the communist politburo in the all campus relay, swearing eternal and ethereal allegiance to something they called ‘the E-bay’ (no one knew the meaning – perhaps the hidden word of the great architect (or not)), only to dissolve into infinity (and antiquity).
