Pardon us while we wipe a tear from our eye over the plight of students at CSULB on the first day of classes.

In a front page article Wednesday, we learned that parking was a mess, lines were long and slow-moving. Books, we learned, carried outrageous prices -- if you could even get into the bookstore. Some students waited endlessly in line for parking permits. And don't even mention actually getting to class on time. It was, sobbed one student, the worst first day of classes.

Poor babies.

Back in the middle of the last century, after we completed a summer of back-breaking labor building the railroad across states most of today's kids have never heard of, we gladly got in line to pony up bargain-basement tuition at our local land-grant university.

When we realized that the line for Sociology 101 was too long, we improvised, and switched to Journalism 101, a quirk of fate that has driven more than one editor to drink and worse.

For 20 bucks we could buy a semester's permit to park our old VW in the Mud Flats parking lot, which, as the name suggests, was not paved, except for winter when it was frozen solid. The lot was so far from campus we'd get frost- bite trudging into the north wind, both ways, to our 7 a.m. classes. Our professors locked the doors when the class bell rang, and the janitor threw us out in the cold if we were late. Our biggest challenge was at lunch time, trying to find a warm spot to scarf down baloney sandwiches. We couldn't even afford the mayo.

But did we complain?

Heck no. We knew that if we got locked out of class too many times, the draft would get us. And we're not talking about the north wind, either.

So, kids, complain all you want. Just don't expect much in the way of sympathy from this corner.