University of Florida 02

One of our fellow grad students (who shall be nameless for reasons that will soon be obvious), did his doctoral research on settlement patterns in the wilds of one of the countries located in the northern tier of South America, which one I can’t recall. When he returned he was asked by Dr. Raymond E. Crist, a Latin Americanist who specialized in both land tenure issues and physical geography, to present a slide show on his research area.

Allow me to digress a moment to set up the story. Professor Crist was one of those rare professors of enormous erudition. He had doctorates in two very different and unrelated fields, the first in petroleum geology and the second in human geography and had performed original, published research in both. He had studied as a grad student in Switzerland, Germany, and France and was fluent in French, German, and Spanish, not to mention his native English. He had worked for more than a decade in four or five Latin American countries as an exploration petroleum geologist before doing the PhD in geography in Grenoble, France. Plus, he was a courtly gentleman who treated grad and undergrad students with kindness and consideration. His courses were always full and in 1967-1968 he was selected Teacher/Scholar of the Year by the University. In short, Crist was a terrific person and a scholar of distinction.

Our evil brains began clicking as soon as our friend had been asked to do the slide show. The potential for a great practical joke was in the air. We knew we could zap him if we could get to his slides immediately before Crist’s class. But he knew what we were capable of so guarded those slides as though they were made of the purest gold, never letting them out of his sight.

The first thing we did was to make our own slides so we could insert them unbeknownst into his carrousel. Then we watched like hawks for weeks for the right opportunity, thinking eventually he would lose focus and give us the opening we needed. No luck. The days counted down without a single chance. He began bragging in the grad room where we all had carrels that there was no way we would screw up his presentation, which was sort of a tradition among a certain group of us grad students who lived on the edge of respectability and maturity.

As luck would have it, on the day before the presentation I was in the Grad Room reading at my carrel and our friend was loading his carrousel for the next day’s lecture. The two fake slides we had prepared were under a book on my desk, waiting to be inserted. To my amazement and delight our friend’s doctoral advisor came in and approached my friend and started talking to him about a problem he found in one of the chapters of his doctoral research. As they bent over a table and examined several typewritten pages and hand-drawn maps their backs were to the carrousel.

Recognizing what was a golden opportunity I grabbed the slides and casually made my way to the front of the room. No one noticed me. Sneaking silently to the exposed carrousel I quickly pocketed the ones that had been loaded, inserted the new slides, and slipped back to my carrel, bending over a book as if engrossed. At that instant my friend looked around the room suspiciously but saw that no one had moved, or so it seemed.

The next morning four of us plotters sat in on the slide show in Crist’s Latin America class. We occupied the back row, trying to look bored and painfully disinterested, as if we were in attendance only out of reluctant courtesy to a fellow grad student. On his way to the front of the classroom, Crist stopped, took one look at us, and raised one bushy eyebrow, “Well?” was all he said.

I simply winked at him and he immediately turned and headed for the front of the room. We all looked at each other, stunned that he had an inkling as to what was going on. Shows you exactly how smart he was in comparison to the idiot grad students. Ha.

A few minutes into our friend’s presentation he advanced to a slide that was supposed to show a local, open-air, farmers market. But the slide was one of ours, a rear shot of a very large Missouri mule with its tail up in the act of taking an impressive dump. Naturally, the class roared. Our friend stared at the slide in open-mouthed astonishment and quickly clicked the hand-held device to advance to the next. But the next slide was that month’s Playboy centerfold in all her pulchritudinous, full-color glory. In our friend’s desperate anxiety to advance the slide the remote slipped from his hand and skittered across the floor with the slide staying emblazoned on the screen. The class erupted and we quietly exited, having done as much damage as we possibly could. And, of course, fleeing before our apoplectic friend could mercilessly slaughter us.

An hour later Crist stopped in the Grad Room, came over to where we were talking, and gave us the thumb’s up. “Good job, men. It was a classic to be treasured.”

Before he could leave I asked, “Which slide, Professor? The mule or . . ?”

He grinned like a naughty boy and said, “Why, the centerfold, of course.” And left us rolling in laughter.