St. Louis University 02 and 03

Sometime in my junior year, the University started construction on the then proposed August A. Busch Student Center, at the intersection of Grand Boulevard and Laclede Avenue. Like many college students, I tried to save money by not purchasing the University’s expensive parking stickers and parked on public streets or in any space available. Which forced Jack and me to park in various spots teetering at the edge of legality. The very best parking place for all the ALGTS guys was right across Grand Boulevard from DuBourg Hall in a vacant lot owned by the University. It was that lot on which the Busch Center was to be located.

Construction of the Busch Center signaled the beginning of the end of our easily accessible free parking. But, like optimists and poor students everywhere, we were determined to park there until the bitter end. Naturally, we weren’t alone in using what unpaved lot. Dozens of other students whose pockets were as threadbare as ours had the same intentions. Consequently, you had to arrive well prior to 8:00 AM to have a ghost of a chance at a spot. Not that there was anything as formal as designated parking spaces. As I related above, the lot was unpaved, with poorly delimited access and egress lanes.

One afternoon, slightly after 3:30, Jack and I left DuBourg Hall to drive to our jobs at the Dairy. As soon as we arrived at the lot we realized we were faced with a big problem. Construction material stockpiling had even further reduced parking availability and cut the access lanes to one. And there, parked smack in the middle of the only access/egress to and from the lot was a new yellow Volkswagen Beetle, blocking the departure of at least six frustrated and very angry drivers who had been sitting in their cars fuming impatiently for quite a few minutes. Since Jack and I had to be at work at 4:00 and had no intention of showing up late and getting chewed out by our angry boss and having a full hour docked from our salaries, we immediately decided to remedy the situation.

While Jack waited by the car, I returned to the Arts Lounge and persuaded seven or eight ALGTS guys to help us. We charged across Grand Boulevard and, filled with righteous indignation and the strength of the pure of heart, positioned ourselves around the Bug, picked it up, carried it a few feet away, and placed the car so it straddled length-wise a recently poured concrete median.

The beauty was that median featured steel stanchions at either end that would prevent the car from being driven away. Poetic justice, indeed. Then we removed the valve stems from the tires and pitched them as far as we could. And left a nasty note on the windshield warning the inconsiderate owner what would happen to the car if we ever found it parked in a similar position again. Need I say we received a standing ovation from the people whose cars had been blocked by the Beetle and had been waiting most impatiently for the driver to return.

Mineralogy Field Trip

Several of my geology professors were first-class teachers with remarkable intellectual abilities. Easily the best of the lot was Dr. Kenneth Brill, with a PhD in Geology from Yale, who taught me geomorphology and paleontology. Brill was a man of obvious erudition who delighted in teaching students in the classroom and out in the field. From him I learned to love the discipline of geology. He was about average height, balding, with the wiry build of a man accustomed to vigorous outdoor activity. When I took his courses he had to be in his late 50s, but you would never know it from the way he out-hustled his students on field excursions. Brill forced me into a learning mode perhaps more than any other professor, with the exception of Bert McCarthy. He demanded that his students put in the work necessary to understand the materials. And he was the first professor who placed his discipline in both historical and personal contexts. He told us who his teachers had been, who their teachers were, and where they all stood in the intellectual tradition that was geology. It truly fascinated me.

Then there was Dr. Albert Frank, an exceedingly strange but very bright guy with a BS in Geology, MS in Mineralogy, and PhD in Geophysics. Frank taught the department’s grueling eight-hour course in Rocks and Minerals that lasted two full semesters and was mandatory for all majors and minors. Frank was a certified “Character” on campus. A rotund 5’7”, he exhibited a striking physical presence, partly because of his limping, nearly crippled, rolling “seaman’s” gait but largely because his right eye was sharply angled with respect to the left. In other words, Dr. Frank always appeared to be looking in two different directions simultaneously, like a chameleon. Imagine having a mineralogy professor who seemed able to watch both the front and the back of a room simultaneously during a rock and mineral identification exam. Disconcerting, to say the least, if you were contemplating cheating.

Frank was a master of his field. His standing bet with his mineralogy students was, at 5:1 odds, that he could identify any rock native to the State of Missouri and the formation it came from using only his hands. And those hands would be positioned behind his back. I personally lost $1 each in two separate bets. A couple other guys lost a lot more. Frank was incredible. He knew every rock and mineral in the State by touch. No joke. It was an uncanny demonstration of erudition.

In late April of 1964, Frank took five of us mineralogy students on a week-end field trip to the diamond mine in Murfreesboro, Arkansas. We left right after noon on Friday and were scheduled to return in the early evening on Sunday. Frank drove his car, a huge, fairly new Ford Victoria with an enormous interior that resembled the inside of a garbage truck. The man was not a paragon of cleanliness. The first leg of the trip was to Hot Springs. And the second to Murfreesboro. It was on that trip that I was first exposed to the reality of being in deadly fear of losing your life.

Frank drove like someone who was either demented, possessed by an uncontrollable desire to commit suicide, or half-blind. We assumed the latter case was operative. How many times he wandered across the double yellow lines, heading straight for an on-rushing vehicle, I can not recall. But it was in the dozens. Soon after we hit the single-lane highways south of St. Louis (no Interstates then in that part of the country and dual lane, divided highways were few and very far between), the other four students delegated me as quasi-official co-pilot since I was sitting in the middle of the front seat right next to Frank, ready at any moment to grab the wheel to avoid a collision. Which I actually did on at least three or four occasions.

By the time we stopped for dinner in northern Arkansas, I was so sick to my stomach from palpable fear I was unable to eat a bite. And quickly retired to the men’s room where I threw up violently. I was so nauseated I could scarcely walk. When I returned to our table in the restaurant, I saw a glass containing a whiskey sour in front of Frank and thought the worst. If his best driving was sober, what would he be like half-plastered? No way was I going to find out. I immediately ordered another drink for him, a double, paying for it myself. My fellow class-mates stared at me as if I were absolutely mad. Until I explained my plan when Frank went to the toilet. By the time he returned someone else had ordered another double for him. Which he initially turned down, on the grounds that he had to drive another four or five hours. That’s when I said it was only fair that we share in the driving duties. My turn was next. He could relax in the back seat until we got to Hot Springs.

At first he refused, saying as our professor he was responsible for us. Several of the guys at the table blanched at the terrifying thought that our attempt to get him loaded might just backfire and get us all killed. But when we walked back to the car I simply stood by the driver’s side and wordlessly held my hand out for the keys. Which, to our immense relief, he readily gave up. And promptly fell asleep in the back seat five minutes after we hit the road. We all relaxed and chatted like crazed magpies for hours, which was probably an indication of the enormous tension we had been under.

The visit to the diamond mine was anti-climactic; no one found anything remotely resembling a precious stone, despite grubbing in the dirt for most of Saturday. But the scenery on the journey back, on State Route 7, through the Ouachita Mountains and southern Ozarks, was truly spectacular, breathtakingly beautiful at every turn. It made the trip more than worthwhile. Route 7 is a winding, twisting devil of a road. Frank started driving on Sunday morning but we very quickly persuaded him to relinquish the wheel. And then we refused to give it up until we were safely back at the University. Whew! Were we overjoyed to be back in one piece. None of us got into a car that Frank was driving ever again. We might have been young and immature but we weren’t stupid.