COLLEGE YEARS

Duke was pretty new at that time; it had been established about 1928, from Trinity College, an old Methodist school. They granted my tuition as the son of a Methodist minister. It was a prestigious school of course and became more and more so through the years. In retrospect I can identify three elements in my decision to go there. The first, already mentioned, was the financial. Secondly I had seen an air view of the Duke campus in my 9th grade civics book, which led to a tremendous aesthetic attraction. (I still find Duke super- beautiful and feel like I could be deliriously happy there under the right circumstances.) The third and perhaps most important was Duke's football prowess. (Obviously football was still important in my mind although I had ceased to be a participant.)

In recent years Duke had gone to the Rose Bowl twice. I think it was 1938 when Duke playedSouthern Cal at Pasadena. They had a phenomenal kicker named Eric Tipton. He kicked the ball along way, and he put a peculiar kind of spin on it making it very difficult to catch; Duke scored many 40 yard gains that way. Even bigger than Eric Tipton were the seven men of iron who constituted the defensive line; Duke had not been scored on that year. The Rose Bowl game was scoreless until late in the fourth quarter. Duke kicked a field goal. Then in the last minute or so USC scored on a long run or pass, and we lost.  

In 1942 Duke played in the Rose Bowl again. This time it was at Durham, as far as I know the only time it was ever held outside Pasadena. The authorities feared the Japanese threat and moved it from the west coast. I don't remember our opponent or the outcome of that game.

The second and third decades of my life seemed an essentially lonely time.  Painful personal experiences had led me to withdraw into an introverted life. I found satisfaction in impersonal activities and no longer sought close relationships. At Kentwood interest in sports served to some extent as a counterweight, but when we moved to New Orleans that interest largely came to an end.  My jobs with Western Union and with the insurance company helped to structure my time, but didn't provide any particularly meaningful relationships that I can remember.

This loneliness intensified when I went up to Duke. I received by chance a roommate from New Jersey, a boy older and more mature than I. He was amiable enough, but his primary interest in life was "planking women", and he found me most deficient in that respect. I heard him once describing me objectively as "sexless as an anemic nun". I don't recall any closer personal relationships that semester.

There was one boy, also from New Jersey, much less socially oriented than

my roommate; I believe his name was Bob Albanese. I had more in 

common with Bob. I suppose we  both found Duke a little bit awesome.  

Bob had academic problems and in fact was not allowed to finish the 

semester on that account.

 

Incidentally in our orientation I remember sitting in Page Auditorium with 

the rest of the new men listening to the hard nosed dean impress upon us
the seriousness of our situation: "Look at the man on your right, and the 

man on your left.  Now when graduation time comes, one of you won't be 

here."
 

The academic problems at Duke held no terrors for me, but social 

development just didn't happen during my years at Duke.

Duke was not a coeducational school at that time; it was "coordinate".  

At Duke that meant the East Campus held girls--a mile away.  Senior girls 

had the freedom to take classes on the West Campus.The West Campus 

was real Duke to me. The East Campus was the old campus of Trinity 

College with Georgian architecture, just like dozens of small colleges 

scattered through the south.  That first semester at Duke I had no 

relationship of any sort with any girl that I can recall.

 

I continued my violin study at Duke. I found an instructor, a young woman 

married to a faculty member. The only thing I remember about her was

her impatience with me for a lack of aggressiveness. When I came to a 

problem, I had a habit of just stopping the music, to her a serious offense.  

I never learned how to fake it.  I had the key to a room behind Page 

auditorium for practice.

 

In the spring of 1943 West Campus was rapidly becoming integral to the 

war effort.  Many soldiers were enrolled in the School of Finance, learning 

to be pay-masters, financial clerks, etc., I suppose. These military students 

more or less dominated the campus at that time. They constantly marched 

back and forth from class to dormitory, often shouting cadence as they

marched.

 

One of the relative handful of civilian students there organized a 

demonstration against the military, exactly the sort of thing that a Duke

student would do. The military had to retire very early and got up very 

early with a certain amount of consequent noise.  One night about ten 

o'clock practically all the civilian students went over to the military 

quadrangle and began to serenade them vociferously, probably for a few 

hours.  I don't know how long because I didn't stay long; I observed the 

scene briefly and went to bed.

 

The semester duly came to an end. I did quite well academically, and 

that's all. I had a chance to get the second semester of physics in an
accelerated three week course--physics 10 hours a day. I always enjoyed 

the campus and the academic life most in summer.  For one thing my mind 

seemed to work best when concentrating on a single subject. And I found 

the relative quietness and peace of the campus very refreshing.  I still feel

very much like that when we visit Clemson in summer.

 

I had a fairly mild admiration for the physics teacher--Dr. Carpenter. We 

had heard that he was a distinguished physicist. I found it quite impressive 

that Dr. Carpenter could always be found among the worshipers at Duke 

Chapel on Sunday morning--in spite of being a physicist. He seemed a truly 

religious man, although he didn't display any outstanding social gifts in the

classroom.  Probably I was too young and inexperienced to be very 

discriminating at that point.

The chapel at Duke is the most 

impressive thing about the campus. 

At the end of the main quadrangle it 

connects the two sides of the campus-

-the living areas on its right and the

academic areas on its left.  To its 

immediate left is the Divinity School 

and then the Library. At that time 

Duke probably had the best library 

south of Charlottesville, maybe south 

of Washington. On the chapel's 

immediate right was Page Auditorium,

scene of assemblies and of Friday 

night movies, concerts, etc. Then the

Union where the dining halls, book 

store and snack shop resided.

 

That semester I got in the habit of consuming two milk shakes per day at 

the snack bar.  I went from about 116 to 130 during the four months.  At 

least physically I had filled out a bit.  That extra 14 pounds improved my 

self image considerably.

 

We learned that for the fall semester the West Campus would be used 

exclusively by military students--the Army Finance School and the new
Naval and Marine reserve office training courses. The remaining civilian 

students would live and work on the East Campus. At age 17 I wasn't
willing to go to a girls' school, so I gave up Duke for the time being.  After 

a short visit home I enrolled in Louisiana Tech.

In many ways Tech suited my needs better than Duke. A lower pressure place with much less sophisticated students, I found the environment more relaxed and relaxing. I got a room in a boarding house run by Mrs. Smith. I enjoyed a fairly normal relationship with the 7 or 8 boys who lived there. We had some animated conversations around Mrs. Smith's table. Mrs. Smith served milk in a large pitcher, and she set table with a clean glass upside down at every plate. During one of the animated conversations I was talking heatedly about something, and I grabbed the full pitcher of milk and tried to fill my upside down glass. Everybody had a laugh at that. Mrs. Smith was a long suffering woman.

I had no trouble with the academic regimen at Tech. One amusing thing happened in my English class. It was composition. I had studied composition at Duke, so I guess this was sophomore English. In the English class I had begun with a very rare mistake, I chose a seat on the back row.

My compositions started coming back with quite low grades--a D, maybe even an F. I requested an interview with the teacher at which I explained to her that I was not a D student; I was an A student. Thereafter I sat closer to the front but continued to work at the same level; I began to get much better grades--maybe not A's, but B's. I will say that toward the end of the year they started to go down again.

I must have been taking journalism this semester. I was still small and not 

very impressive and the teacher, who I'm sure remembered my mother did 

not mean for me to get a big head. I had been inadvertently assigned the 

biggest story of the week, the new class, the registration procedure, etc.  

I got my stuff together and took it to the professor.  He looked at it a 

minutes and said, "oh this might make a few lines on the back page." The 

student editor thought differently and made it the lead story on the front 

page with a large headline.  (For another story about this professor see 

'first day'.) 

 

I have already mentioned (in the 'first day') my history class.  The only other

class I remember was violin.  This was a regular part of Tech's curriculum.  

My teacher seemed pleased with my performance and gave me an A. After 

a couple of weeks she sent me to the student orchestra. The day I came 

someone directed me to the place I was to sit, but I didn't understand. I 

think in all likelihood I was directed to the second violin section, but I went 

and sat in the first violin section. No one said anything, and that's where I  

proceeded to play.  I don't remember what we played or the level of 

difficulty.

 

I finished the first semester at Tech with very good grades and duly enrolled

in the second. In the second semester I received a small stipend as monitor

of our living group. I think all of the older students must have gone on to 

other fields--largely the military by that time. I also got a job waiting on 

tables in the college dining hall.

 

At this time there were some 1200 military students at Tech, 600 naval 

midshipmen and 600 marines.  I had the responsibility for 3 tables of
marines. I worked hard to provide them sufficient food to cope with their 

ravenous appetites. They were always impeccably dressed, that being a 

large part of their training as marines. One morning we served pancakes. 

The syrup being soon exhausted, I was asked for more. I grabbed a full 

dispenser and rushed to the boy who had asked for it, and proceeded to 

pour a good bit of it right down the front of his shirt--completely inadvertent,

nevertheless a traumatic event.

 

One of my classmates had had another of the continuous series of small 

traumatic events which made up our life together.  An engineer he had
carried out a photography assignment to photograph a simple device.  He 

had chosen a railroad switch. Unfortunately some law enforcement people 

came along, and afraid that he might be a spy, they confiscated his film. I 

wrote what I thought was a good story about the event, but of course the

journalism professor made the editor tone it down considerably.

In general I was more comfortable at Tech than I had been at Duke.  I was 

really a country boy from Louisiana, which put me solidly in the majority
group. At Duke there was no majority, but the largest plurality was probably

from New Jersey, a completely alien place to me at that time. My primary 

discomfort at Tech stemmed from the fact that my 18th birthday was rapidly 

approaching.

 

This anxiety came to a head during the Christmas holidays. My parents 

closest friends at St. Marks, the Mandlebaums, had a nephew who had
become a radio operator in the merchant marine. I met him during the 

holidays and got the idea that I could also do that, and that it would be very
preferable to the Army. So I never went back to Tech; I dropped out in 

midterm and enrolled in the Gulf Radio School on St. Charles Avenue.

 

I spent two months learning to be a radio operator and went to the Custom 

House and took and passed the FCC exam.  Students at the school had 

spent two years trying to reach that point; I was in fact pointed out as the 

fastest learner and biggest success, but of course this didn't surprise me; I 

always knew how brilliant I was, in spite of being a social misfit-- maybe 

because of it!

 

By the time March 7 came around I was on the payroll of the War Shipping 

Administration waiting assignment to a ship. I had to report every Thursday

morning and collect my check for $7 per day (a handsome sum at that time

and especially to me). This was the first "real money" I had ever received, 

and my obligation to earn it was about 30 minutes every Thursday morning.

The catbird seat as they say.

This happy situation went on for about a month. I read Will Durant's Story of Philosophy--and fell in love with philosophy in fact. Too bad I haven't pursued it much further in the past 45 years. I also did some thinking, trying to live into my new role as an adult. I remember enchanted moonlit nights walking along Esplanade Ave with my mind bursting with life and intellectual vitality. Alas, that Esplanade Ave. and that magic moment are gone forever.

About twenty blocks along Esplanade from Rampart St. was a McDonough # something, where my draft board had its location. Here on my birthday I duly registered and informed them of my status with the WSA. It happened that the first merchant seaman 2B deferment had emanated from this very board, and I immediately became another. The draft board had no further interest in me until 8 years later when I began to approach my 26th birthday. About that, more later.