Charlie Catlett seconds Nick Offerman’s emotion: Campustown just isn’t the same without the late, great Nature’s Table.
"I loved getting huge cookies and listening to low to medium quality blues bands at Nature’s Table, which was across the street from Krannert,” says the 1983 computer engineering alum.
“One night in around 1982 or so, a blues band had driven down from Chicago and the drummer was a kid, probably 12 or 13 years old. He fell asleep at the drum kit — the band continued to play.”
Now the director of the Urban Center for Computation and Data and a senior computer scientist at Argonne National Laboratory, Catlett also still yearns for The Etc., where he loaded up on Wassel.
“Years after graduating while still living in Champaign, my wife and I went back to The Etc on a date,” he says. “She was about eight months’ pregnant at the time.
“That evening, we determined that Wassel has loads of caffeine, as the baby kicked and danced for ours.”
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