My connection with Academe, that sweet-and-sour bitch, started in fall 1962 when I enrolled as a freshman at Saint Louis University. Taking the entrance exam is only a faint blur; my only clear memory of that dreaded event is nervousness suffered in a dark hallway of a no-name lecture building (a good guess is that it was pre-renovation DeSmet Hall), whose very walls dripped unvoiced tales of failed exams, dashed hopes, and ruined lives. Whatever my score, I was admitted unconditionally.
I shall not bore you, Gentle Reader, with a course-by-course recitation of Pilgrim’s Progress through the Wilderness of Learning. Suffice to say, even after a full year’s sabbatical from intellectual pursuits at R.L. Polk, I was not emotionally prepared or sufficiently mature to be a serious college student.
During that first week, my disorientation was total. Not knowing the names of the buildings, where to study between classes, I felt lost and completely alone. Then, almost in desperation, I started hanging out with my brother, Jack, and his friends at the Arts Lounge on the first floor of DuBourg Hall. That quickly and permanently became my home away from home. Someone from that group was in the Arts Lounge at all times through the day, from 7:00 AM through 5:00 PM. You could leave your books, coat, whatever, go to class, come back and the same guys would still be there talking about classes, whose professors were the bigger assholes, studying, or, and this was far more likely, playing cards at the same tables, morning, noon, and into the evening during exam weeks. We actually called ourselves the Arts Lounge Good Times Society (ALGTS) and had sweatshirts made up that featured a totally bogus heraldic shield with the ALGTS initials floating over it and wore those sweatshirts to class every Thursday and refused to tell anyone what it meant because it was a secret society and if we told them we’d have to kill them. It was our less than potent dig at the asshole fraternities and sororities that ruled social life on the University campus. We, of course, were streetcar students lived somewhere in the surrounding city and reveled in our status as GDIs (God Damned Independents).
It probably won’t surprise you, Gentle Reader, if I note that our time was only occasionally occupied with studying. What we really did was play cards all day long. Mostly bridge but sometimes hearts. Bridge was the ruling passion. Well, it never was my particular passion because I didn’t get ego-involved like most of the others. Hearts was my game and I was a tiger, constantly going after the big, spectacular win and getting it more often than not. I was a savage hearts player but barely tolerated bridge, largely because everyone else seemed to live and breathe it and I found their absorption off-putting.
But it was bridge that occupied most of our time and energies, not studying, discussion of young women, or other card games. As my distinctly mediocre grades attested. That first year I nearly flunked out of Spanish through a near total lack of studying and barely managed to earn a ‘D’. Somehow, in sophomore year, my irresponsible party attitude, much in evidence during school days as well as on week-ends, worsened a good deal as I fell into the rhythm of college. The inevitable result was I flunked my first and only course, Introduction to Philosophy. In truth, all I had to do to pass was take the final exam and the Philosophy professor, a nice guy but a terribly ineffective teacher, assured me I would receive a ‘D’. No way, hose-head. Even in the mental stupor that then characterized my classroom performance it had dawned on me that by accepting the ‘D’ I would set the tone for all future Philosophy courses, of which I had to have at least three, for a minimum of 15 hours. So, intentionally, and with a heavy heart, I declined to take the exam and received the only ‘F’ of my college career. I did it because I knew a failing grade would force me to take a “make-up” course during the summer session; I was determined to do well in that course.
That summer of 1963 was the season of my intellectual awakening. In the first Summer Session I first re-took the two parts of First Year Spanish and in the second Summer Session I re-enrolled in the Introduction to Philosophy course. The Spanish was a whirl-wind 11 hours of course work, actually divided into two separate sub-sessions. The first Spanish class met from 8:00 AM to 10:00 and the second from 10:00 to noon. The teacher was a fairly young guy in his late twenties named Bill Walker, a grad student working on a PhD in Spanish. He may have been a good teacher in many ways but he also was an arrogant dickhead who obviously enjoyed terrorizing and bullying his students.
To everyone’s surprise, including my own, I earned a ‘B’ and then an ‘A’ in Spanish 101 and Spanish 102. In the next summer session I received a very solid ‘B’ in the Philosophy course, discovering in the process that I actually enjoyed the subject, probably because the young Jesuit instructor introduced us to Existentialism and ignored the intensely boring Scholasticism of Thomas Aquinas to which I had reacted so negatively the previous semester.
That summer was a true watershed in my life. It marked a distinct change in direction for me and constituted the beginning of the end of the intellectual immaturity that had so dominated my previous moments. For the first time I worked on becoming a relatively serious student. Naturally, that transformation did not occur overnight. But at least by junior year I was on the way.
It was during that summer that four of the ALGTS crowd traveled to Seattle
One night after work, Bob J. dropped a bombshell. His father had turned him down on a $1,200 loan to cover the costs of the trip and he didn’t know if he could go, which meant the trip was off. When I questioned him about why he needed so much money it turned out that only $500 was for the trip; the rest was for tuition for the coming year. I did a quick mental calculation. The more than $2,300 in my savings account, savings from my job at R.L. Polk and the Dairy, was easily enough to cover my tuition for the coming year and Bob J’s expenses as well. So I agreed to be his banker. I simply told him that I would lend him the money and not charge interest.
For a few minutes he didn’t believe I had that much cash in the bank. Not until Jack confirmed my assessment of my financial reserves. From the frown on Jack’s face I knew he wholeheartedly disapproved. Always the wiser, older brother, even though my loan to Bob meant the trip was back on. When Dad found out what I had proposed he hit the roof. From birth a cautious accountant, he wanted to know what I planned to do if Bob J. couldn’t or wouldn’t pay me back. How could I go to college without that money? He ranted and raved for quite a while but to no avail. I lent Bob the money anyway. I really didn’t give a rat’s ass what my father thought.
As ridiculous as this may sound, I might have listened to Dad except the year previous I had read in the financial pages and various magazines how well AT&T was doing and wanted to invest about $1,500 in their stock. Dad had talked me out of it, using the same reasoning expressed above concerning the possible loss of the money and the resulting inability to pay my tuition. Not three months later the stock went through the roof, split, rose, and split again. Had I followed my instincts, I would have almost tripled my investment within a year. So much for Dad’s acumen as an investment counselor. That incident had really pissed me off and colored me feelings about my father’s supposedly superior financial acumen.
That situation certainly colored my decision to lend Bob J. the money. After all, he was a good friend; if friends wouldn’t help each other what kind of world would we live in? Okay, that’s a horribly naive reason for lending your hard-earned money but that’s exactly how I felt. Hey, you have to remember I was twenty years old. And very impulsive. Meaning immature as hell. But I knew full well where my priorities lay.
Once the deed was done I worried about it for a couple days but when they hit the road I simply forgot it. Until Jack called home collect from a Los Angeles California
It turned out the four adventurers had spent the previous night in Las Vegas Los Angeles
Why they all weren’t killed was a mystery to the California Highway Patrol officer who was behind them and witnessed the whole thing. He had seen their car weaving and attempted to catch up with lights flashing and siren wailing but the car went off the highway before he pulled close to it. When he ran down the slope to the wreck at the bottom of a steep arroyo there was the car, lying across two sets of train tracks. He was astounded to see four guys crawl out, virtually unscratched. Well, either Bob J. or Jerry O. had a broken finger but that was it. In the confusion, no one realized the implications of a car sitting on the railroad tracks until a train whistle blasted away the atmosphere of serendipity. Even if the car had not been destroyed in the initial accident, not much was left after a monster Union Pacific engine precipitously removed the intruding vehicle from its right-of-way.
All four weary but unhurt (emotions do not count in that assessment) travelers stayed in Los Angeles
Bob J. wound up having to pay the State for the fence. But he also paid me back in full by the next summer. It was later than he had originally promised, but pay he did. He offered to give me a couple hundred dollars to cover the interest but I declined, figuring he had been hurt enough. Dad was the first person I gleefully told. What a malicious bastard I could be. Yeah, I had learned at the knee of the master.
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