Bending the Twig
Pages from the Journal
of a Pilgrim Parent
by
Larry McGehee
WOFFORD COLLEGE
Spartanburg, South Carolina
December 1998
BBeennddiinngg tthhee TTwwiigg:: PPaaggeess ffrroomm tthhee JJoouurrnnaall ooff aa PPiillggrriimm PPaarreenntt // 22
Bending The Twig
Pages from the Journal of a Pilgrim Parent
The cover engraving of Main Building,
the original Wofford College campus in 1854,
is from an 1895 Commencement invitation.
 Copyright is held by Larry T. McGehee and Wofford College, 1998.
BBeennddiinngg tthhee TTwwiigg:: PPaaggeess ffrroomm tthhee JJoouurrnnaall ooff aa PPiillggrriimm PPaarreenntt // 33
Preface . . ......................................................................................................................................... 5
A Few Words ...................................................................................................................................... 6
An Undelivered Commencement Address............................................................................................ 7
Is The Phone Company Still On Strike?............................................................................................... 8
How You Say It................................................................................................................................... 9
Take Your Pencils And Prepare To Write .......................................................................................... 10
The Leaves Leave.............................................................................................................................. 12
End Of The Yellow-Brick Road......................................................................................................... 13
Pro Bono Vita.................................................................................................................................... 14
The Uncommon Becomes Common .................................................................................................. 15
Bowled Over ..................................................................................................................................... 16
The Queen Of Swats And Stats.......................................................................................................... 17
Singing The 1492 Blues..................................................................................................................... 18
Sons And Daughters Of Willie Loman............................................................................................... 19
What It Was, Was Football!............................................................................................................... 21
On Alloys And Allies ........................................................................................................................ 23
Exchanging The Magi’s Gifts ............................................................................................................ 24
Taking A Powder From School.......................................................................................................... 25
A Tree Planted By The River Of Waters............................................................................................ 26
Mything The Point............................................................................................................................. 27
Moving On Up .................................................................................................................................. 28
Staying Within The Lines .................................................................................................................. 29
September Song................................................................................................................................. 30
Good Morning, Miss Dove ................................................................................................................ 31
Picking Up The Tab........................................................................................................................... 32
High March Winds Of Anxiety.......................................................................................................... 33
Sailing Into Summer Sales................................................................................................................. 35
Granite Gratitude............................................................................................................................... 36
A Great Aunt..................................................................................................................................... 37
Automatic Defrost: Salvation Illusion................................................................................................ 38
Consistent Catalyst Of College Change ............................................................................................. 40
Out Of The Nest And Out On A Limb ............................................................................................... 42
Handling The Troops......................................................................................................................... 43
Upper Limits Of Ratings Usefulness.................................................................................................. 44
At A Loss For Words ........................................................................................................................ 46
Rough As A Cobb ............................................................................................................................. 48
The Ne’er-Ending Dance ................................................................................................................... 49
Talking About Tolerance ................................................................................................................... 50
The Joy Of Assuming Others’ Debts.................................................................................................. 51
Going The Extra Mill......................................................................................................................... 52
Motherhood: A Way Of Life.............................................................................................................. 54
Every Dog Has Its Day ...................................................................................................................... 55
Plugging Into The Learning Channels................................................................................................ 57
Missing Link In The Great Chain Of Being ....................................................................................... 58
Poetry By Phone................................................................................................................................ 59
A Sermon In Celluloid....................................................................................................................... 61
Modern Art As Paleolithic Pictures.................................................................................................... 62
Rust On The Globe’s Axis................................................................................................................. 64
Feet Feats .......................................................................................................................................... 65
BBeennddiinngg tthhee TTwwiigg:: PPaaggeess ffrroomm tthhee JJoouurrnnaall ooff aa PPiillggrriimm PPaarreenntt // 44
Drop-In Company Welcomed ............................................................................................................ 67
In A Class All Its Own....................................................................................................................... 68
Carrying A Torch Of Quality............................................................................................................. 69
Good In-Breeding.............................................................................................................................. 70
Better Than Being There.................................................................................................................... 72
None Bene Olet, Qui Bene Semper Olet ............................................................................................ 74
Heroic Education............................................................................................................................... 76
Refugees And Refuges In A Storm .................................................................................................... 79
Worst Kind Of Inheritance Taxes ...................................................................................................... 80
The Message Beyond The Story ........................................................................................................ 82
Behind Terrier Smile–A Big Bite....................................................................................................... 84
Old Prophecy About To Be Fulfilled ................................................................................................. 85
Overdoing A Good Thing .................................................................................................................. 86
Walking The Walk And Talking The Talk ......................................................................................... 87
Learning To Speak ............................................................................................................................ 88
The Winnows Of War........................................................................................................................ 91
Commencement Aisles Are Dark Tunnels ......................................................................................... 93
Lives Of Great Men And Women Remind Us.................................................................................... 95
Hard To Find A Calendar Date .......................................................................................................... 97
A Tree Worth Meditating Upon ......................................................................................................... 98
Pride Takes A Dive ........................................................................................................................... 99
Learning In Fertile Rural Soil ...........................................................................................................100
The Past Isn’t Dead; It Isn’t Even Past..............................................................................................102
Grasping Fingers: The Devil’s Workshop .........................................................................................104
Power Outage In The Trophy Rooms................................................................................................105
The Real Old South--The Facts Of Fiction........................................................................................106
The List That Shows America Listing...............................................................................................108
A Good Place To Be.........................................................................................................................109
Unsung Hero Of The Old Frontier ....................................................................................................111
There Never Blooms So Red The Rose.............................................................................................112
Happy 90th: Welcome Home, Woodward..........................................................................................113
Transfixed And Transfigured In Transit............................................................................................115
The Selling Of Dixie.........................................................................................................................117
A Few Words Ii ................................................................................................................................119
About The Author . . ........................................................................................................................120
BBeennddiinngg tthhee TTwwiigg:: PPaaggeess ffrroomm tthhee JJoouurrnnaall ooff aa PPiillggrriimm PPaarreenntt // 55
Preface . . .
Parenting and educating are close to being universal experiences.
Few of us parents think universally about rearing their children. We take our children personally, not globally.
It’s odd how oblivious we are to the obvious truth that parents are everywhere. Despite the fact that there are close to
thirteen million college students in America alone in any given year, every parent thinks his or her son or daughter is the
center of the universe and that being a parent is a lonely, unique, awesome responsibility.
Parents grope their ways in hope and trembling where millions of others have gone before, but in terrain that
seems as untrammeled as a newly-discovered island. Nothing focuses parents upon the most important center of existence
as much as does their responsibility for their offspring. We are never as much alive and alert as we are in the lives of our
sons and daughters. Nothing challenges us to be as creative, innovative, and flexible, nor as cautious, prescriptive, and
omnipresent, as does being parents. Nothing else tests or fine-tunes our senses of taste, irony, and direction as much as
does being parents. Parents are pathfinders as much as were Lewis and Clark.
This little book celebrates the two highest callings in the human race: parenthood and education. It does so by
passing on some stories, observations, biographies, and tributes selected from over 1,100 weekly syndicated newspaper
columns I have written since 1982.
In an idle moment one evening, my wife, Betsy, and I estimated the numbers of college students with whom we
have rubbed shoulders over the years–as students ourselves at Northwestern University, Transylvania College, and Yale
University, as an administrative and teaching family at Transylvania, Yale, Alabama, Tennessee, and Wofford, and as
parents of students at Salem, William & Mary, Nice, Davidson, and Mississippi. In another idle moment, we made a stab at
guessing the number of parents of college students with whom we have mixed. Forty-four years of studying, working, or
enrolling daughters at one campus or another surrounded us with half a million students and a million parents--give or
take one or two.
Realizing that, it dawned upon us that we are not alone in the universe.
This little book was compiled with fellow space travelers in that universe in mind. It is not a “how-to” book. It is a
sampler of musings and meditations on some themes that most well-meaning parents occasionally contemplate. Try it on
for sighs.
Higher education is a very large institution in America. In recent years, the emphasis upon quantity (numbers of
students) has been subtly shifting to a search for quality. It has always been natural and common for universities wanting
to provide personalized education and substantive academic content to look to the better liberal arts colleges for models.
The new honors colleges at universities rely heavily upon the private college pattern and practices. Discerning students
and parents—and grandparents, too-- know which colleges are good colleges and what is it that makes them good. This is
a collection of essays for such discerning, like-minded, liberal arts education folks.
If references to Wofford College appear more frequently than references to other fine institutions of higher
learning, it’s mostly because this particular planet in the parenting universe is where we have been since 1982. Wofford is
a symbol of a certain style of education that can be found at Transylvania and Centre in Kentucky, Rhodes and the
University of the South in Tennessee, Birmingham-Southern in Alabama, Millsaps in Mississippi, Davidson in North
Carolina, Washington & Lee in Virginia, or at near-by Furman here in South Carolina.
Of course, our special and pleasant experiences may have warped our perspective. There likely are
parental galaxies and solar systems elsewhere that make our views provincial rather than universal. If so, the differences
only substantiate our initial hypothesis: that despite the experiences of billions of parents, every college student is
amazingly solitary and unique–and every parent of such a youngster, therefore, must also be.
Larry T. McGehee
Wofford College
December 1998
BBeennddiinngg tthhee TTwwiigg:: PPaaggeess ffrroomm tthhee JJoouurrnnaall ooff aa PPiillggrriimm PPaarreenntt // 66
May 14, 1972
A FEW WORDS
(Commencement, The University of Alabama, reprinted in TIME)
RAGE
Age and education give you the authority,
citizenship the responsibility,
to rage against mediocrity and injustice in your society,
more especially in yourself.
Lest you leave your life on an altar of ethical neutrality
or find your soul eroded by gentle raindrops of moral detachment,
heed Dylan Thomas:
Do not go gentle into that good night;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
REASON
More things are wrought by reason than this world dreams of;
wherefore, make reason the nuclear weapon of your arsenal of rage,
and by its use convince others of your integrity, if not your rightness.
The hand that cradles the rock, the heart that heeds not the head,
must not rule this world.
READ
Bury yourself in good books and read them often;
too soon the minister will bury you and read for you.
Develop a thirst for printer’s ink and quench it by reading,
for from books flows the fountain of youth found by few.
LAUGH
He who cannot laugh at himself always appears ridiculous.
LINGER
Everything has its season;
time will wait for what’s worthwhile.
Heed the South Alabama philosopher:
Pause to pick some flowers along your way.
LOVE
Love is the most unnatural human emotion.
Although we have learned to transplant the human heart,
we have not learned to transform it.
Commit an unnatural act: love one another.
BBeennddiinngg tthhee TTwwiigg:: PPaaggeess ffrroomm tthhee JJoouurrnnaall ooff aa PPiillggrriimm PPaarreenntt // 77
June 14, 1983
AN UNDELIVERED COMMENCEMENT ADDRESS
As you march into your high school commencement this week, eldest daughter Elizabeth, I
have made long lists of mental notes for you–about yourself, your family, the nature of the world, and
the history of civilization.
But I’ll spare you. Not that my lists are unimportant, nor that sharing them would be wasted
effort. But mainly because this is your week, not mine–much as I try, like all fathers, to live my life
over by living your life for you.
You are going to do all right for the next half century, and are probably already better prepared
to deal with it–with its complexities of cities and computers–than I, who came from an age of small
towns and pencils.
Your mother and I like to fool ourselves by saying that you are "ours" and that we are proud of
what we have produced. A month before you arrived, we took you to see the movie, "The Sound of
Music." We had some notion that the joys and stirring sounds of that occasion would transmit
themselves to you in the womb.
Truth is, we've not had that much to do with how well you've turned out. You aren’t a product
of the human reproduction assembly line.
Who you are and what you are are as much of your own making as they are our influence or
that of the places you have lived, the teachers in your schools, or the interests you have acquired.
Love lasts, Elizabeth. That's the first thing–and the important one–to tell you at
commencement.
A second thing–take your baggage with you.
Politicians are always talking about "A New Beginning." Every four years they try to make the
voters think they are going to jettison the past and start everything all over again. Births, graduations,
initiations, weddings, retirements, and even deaths, are usually described as new beginnings.
On my way to the typewriter today, I passed a Goodwill Store that deals in secondhand
clothing. It's called "Second Chance." The first suit I had was a brown wool double-vested suit that
was handed down to me by my cousin. It was new to me, but it wasn't new. Use what you’ve gotten.
Everything you've stored in your memory, all the impressions of sight and sound and sentiment
and smell, are important. Don't make the mistake of thinking you are entering a whole new world
where that baggage is worthless.
A final thing I want to tell you, Elizabeth. John Donne said no one is an island. He meant we
are self-defined by our relationships, by the company we keep, by accidental and intentional meetings
with other people and experiences. We are nothing in a vacuum, only in relationship to something
outside ourselves. There are a lot of relationships that are shallow, or even destructive. If you run with
snobs or bigots, chances are you will become one.
Contacts are important, but some are more important than others. If you choose only those
contacts that can help you climb up in society or in earnings, you will find yourself really out of
contact. Never think yourself too good to mix with the great rainbow variety of people in this world.
‘Nuff said. I could write a book for you, but I had rather enjoy the suspense of watching you
write the book of your life yourself.
But as you write, maybe these three notes will help: love lasts; take your baggage with you;
stay in touch with real people.
BBeennddiinngg tthhee TTwwiigg:: PPaaggeess ffrroomm tthhee JJoouurrnnaall ooff aa PPiillggrriimm PPaarreenntt // 88
September 6, 1983
IS THE PHONE COMPANY STILL ON STRIKE?
Once I start writing, I don't want to have my train of thought interrupted.
Usually.
Right now, derailment of the train would be welcomed. We want the phone to ring.
Last Saturday we took our eldest off to college. Less than a week later and only a three-hour
drive away, it seems to us she is somewhere off in another century and on the other side of the globe.
We resist the urge to plug in a blow-drier and turn up a rock station to full-blast in her empty
bedroom above ours, and to pretend she's still here.
We've even entered into a tacit agreement not to speculate aloud every ten minutes about what
she might be doing now.
But we can't resist hoping our phone bill will be higher this month, her first away from us. And
perhaps, when her bank statement comes, we can pick up some of her trail from the canceled checks.
We thought we were immune from the anxieties and blues we have seen September after
September on the college campuses we've served or attended for 25 years now, where other parents
have delivered their offspring up tearfully and nervously into the hands of strangers. When our turn
came, we knew, we would go cheerfully and stoically.
But ever since we drove away, there's been a chill in the evening air. And for some reason, my
mind keeps repeating over and over the title of a play: “Come Back, Little Sheba."
And Sheba isn't even our daughter's name.
Her mother vacuums her room a lot more than it is accustomed to. Her younger sister has
stopped giggling at being called by the wrong name. We eat a lot of pizza with pepperoni, as if the
taste will bring her home.
And, as this column bears witness, we get very sentimental.
What is it about we humans that we should be constantly amazed that the seasons change, that
we age, and that our children leave as we left before them?
Why is it that the procession of life can parade before our eyes a hundred times, and still retain
its mysteries, its suspense, its excitement, and its illusion of being brand-new?
How is it that for the very first time, thirty years after it really happened, we feel we have
actually left our parents' homes just because our daughter has just left ours? And will she, well into the
next century, still feel that here with us is still her special place?
How our perspectives change in a twinkling! Suddenly the Parable of the Prodigal Son seems
misnamed to us. It is really the Parable of the Wistful Father, waiting to rejoice and to kill fatted calves
and to throw welcome-home parties. We count the days until Thanksgiving, and laugh at the song line
that says "the days hurry by when you reach September."
We had always thought this kind of wrench would wait until she wed. Every adolescent boy
who darkened our door was my natural enemy, a potential abductor. Even the paperboy cowered
before my glare when he had to collect each month. But college came and got her from us before a
groom did. There was registration day instead of a wedding day, and tuition to pay instead of a caterer,
and the parents drove away instead of the bride and groom.
And four nights later, it's 9:28 in the evening, and we wonder if she's waiting until the rates
change at 10:00 to call.
A few minutes ago the television flashed its nightly question: "It's ten o'clock. Do you know
where your children are?"
We know.
Far too well.
BBeennddiinngg tthhee TTwwiigg:: PPaaggeess ffrroomm tthhee JJoouurrnnaall ooff aa PPiillggrriimm PPaarreenntt // 99
November 19, 1983
HOW YOU SAY IT
A fund-appeal flier in my mail this week asked for a donation to help make English the official
national language.
I thought it already is.
Quite a debate has been raging in government and education circles in recent years over
teaching English. Some parties feel that racial and national origins are so important that teachers and
textbooks should use the primary language of the majority of the students. There is a rather legitimate
concern that the students may lose their sense of their heritage or that they may be handicapped by
having to learn and to compete in the English-language mode that is unnatural for them.
Opponents of that view make the case that an American heritage shared by all can only develop
if we all speak and read the same language. They counter the handicap argument by pointing out that
the handicap is only deferred by sticking to a non-English native language, because once school days
are over and the students enter the competition for jobs, the workman's language is English.
If both sides are right–and to a degree, they are–then the real question is not whether an
American citizen will ever learn English, but at what point should it be learned? There is no easy time
for a non-English-speaking American to learn English. It's a hard language.
If English-speaking Americans who try to learn a foreign language are any guide, most would
agree that a second language is learned more easily in the early years, from age 3 through high school,
than in the college and adult years.
A little controversy going on in Atlanta these days may shed some light on this subject.
Atlanta has become a center of national and regional offices for major national and
multinational corporations. Some of those headquarters have been hiring speech teachers for their
employees, to train them in how not to speak in a southern accent or drawl.
Perhaps we could have a little more sympathy for our Hispanic- or Oriental-speaking fellowcitizens who fear losing their tongues if forced to learn English. If the price for the South entering the
mainstream of American economy is that we have to learn English as our second language, surely we
can understand how hard it is for others.
Then, together, perhaps we can focus more on what we can all–government, educators, parents,
citizens–do to make the learning English more natural and welcomed.
BBeennddiinngg tthhee TTwwiigg:: PPaaggeess ffrroomm tthhee JJoouurrnnaall ooff aa PPiillggrriimm PPaarreenntt // 1100
November 29, 1983
TAKE YOUR PENCILS AND PREPARE TO WRITE
If students think today's entrance tests are hard, with their check-the-right-box answers, they
should try to pass the old exams, such as those used at Clemson University in 1924: a two-hour
English exam and a one-hour history exam. It might be fun for you to see how you would have fared.
Here were the questions:
History
1. Explain briefly the importance of the following: (a) Alfred the Great; (b) Norman Conquest; (c) War
of the Roses; (d) Joan of Arc; (e) Louis XI; (f) Revocation of the Edict of Nantes; (g) Copernicus; (h)
Martin Luther; (i) Treaty of Westphalia; (j) Oliver Cromwell; (k) Sir Isaac Newton.
2. Explain the importance of the French Revolution.
3. Explain Napoleon's Continental System and state its effect upon Napoleon's power.
4. How and why did France aid the American colonies in the War of Independence?
5. Explain the importance of the following: (a) Battle of King's Mountain; (b) Thomas Paine's
Common Sense, (c) Philadelphia Convention of 1787; (d) Neutrality Proclamation of 1793; (e) Genet's
visit to the United States; (f) Purchase of Louisiana; (g) Alexander Hamilton; (h) Commodore Perry's
visit to Japan, (i) Hay's "Open Door" policy.
6. (a) Why were the first ten amendments to the federal constitution adopted? (b) Explain the
difference between a grand jury and a petit jury.
7. (a) What is the work of the United States Supreme Court? (b) What are the duties of the Interstate
Commerce Commission?
(Your first hour is up. Take two more for this next part.)
English
1. Copy and correct only the misspelled words you may find in this list: Possiable, coming, disapear,
closter; recieve, relief, supprise, business; rouster, writing, reddy, government; probally, accidently,
alright, sophomore.
2. Punctuate the following selection, explaining every mark inserted: It is raining said the coach get the
balls bats gloves and the bases and well go in It wont rain long Coach its just a shower pleaded the
captain we have a game tomorrow therefore we want some more practice.
3. Give directions for writing a good business letter. In what respects does a friendly letter differ in
form from a business letter?
4. Explain carefully the grammatical errors in the following sentences. Correct the sentences:
(a) He was borned on his father's farm, but he made a fortune for hisself.
(b) Between you and I John and Charlie is good fellows.
(c) He ran quick for the doctor; the doctor give him some medicine.
(d) He don't like those kind of apples.
(e) "I shall go!" he shouted; "you can't stop me!"
5. Give a few details about the life of any one of the following American writers: Bryant, Longfellow,
Whittier, Poe, Lanier.
BBeennddiinngg tthhee TTwwiigg:: PPaaggeess ffrroomm tthhee JJoouurrnnaall ooff aa PPiillggrriimm PPaarreenntt // 1111
6. Write, as fully as you can, the story contained in any one of the following poems, naming the author
of the selection you choose: "Evangeline," "The Raven," "The Skeleton in Armor," " The Vision of Sir
Launfal," “Snowbound”, "Maude Muller."
7. Discuss unity and coherence in the sentence and in the paragraph.
8. What is meant by the point of view in description?
9. Make clear the difference between description and exposition.
Those were admissions questions for 1924. They assumed, of course, that high school
graduates were well educated in history and literature, and can write essay answers.
If you can pass the 1924 entrance exam above, you had good teachers. If you want your
children and grandchildren to pass such a test today, you need to support your local school people
every way you can.
BBeennddiinngg tthhee TTwwiigg:: PPaaggeess ffrroomm tthhee JJoouurrnnaall ooff aa PPiillggrriimm PPaarreenntt // 1122
October 28, 1986
THE LEAVES LEAVE
Our oldest turns 21 this week.
The leaves have almost finished turning, and each year at their turning she also turns–another
year older.
Leaves not only turn; they also leave.
Passing 21 is a special turning. It is the age our society has arbitrarily set as the milestone for
being grown-up.
Why do we pick 21 as the legal age for our young? They are permitted to volunteer their bodies
in the service of their country as early as 16, and many do. They are capable of bearing children as
early as 11 and 12, and some do. They are allowed to enter the work force at 16 or 18, and many do.
They are granted marriage licenses at pre-21 times, too, and many apply. Many also drive at 14 and 15,
and almost all by 16. They can even vote by 18.
There is a time–not a moment, but an extended time–when our offspring's minds and manners
and maturity catch up with their bodies. Our society thinks it averages out at about 21 years of age.
Our children think it is at 6 or 12. We thought so ourselves at those ages.
One curse of being parents is being given the gift of foresight. Foresight means we probably
can predict some of what's ahead for our young, having lived through something like it ourselves.
The curse is that once our young turn 21, we can have so little control over what we do about
what we see ahead for them.
We stop being controllers and become counselors or critics after that point. We notice the
turning time of 21 more than do the turners. For them, there is no difference between what they are the
day before 21 and the day afterward. For us, the difference is monumental.
If they don't feel any older on their 21st, we parents sure do. The release from responsibility for
them doesn't come with their 21st birthdays.
Maybe it never comes.
BBeennddiinngg tthhee TTwwiigg:: PPaaggeess ffrroomm tthhee JJoouurrnnaall ooff aa PPiillggrriimm PPaarreenntt // 1133
April 28, 1987
END OF THE YELLOW-BRICK ROAD
Dear Eldest Daughter,
Is it possible that nearly four years have passed since we bundled you up and sent you off to
college?
We hope you'll take a minute to look back while you're getting dressed up to step out on
graduation day.
What were those four college years for? What we wanted them to be for you was "in-between
time", with the right mix of just enough independence and yet just enough security to ease your way
from high school into the real world. We wanted you to have the luxury of enough time to fall in love
with learning and to make it habit-forming at the same time you were learning some marketable skills
for making a living to support your learning habits. And we wanted you to have some fun and new
friendships, too. If you had gotten too old for us to keep to ourselves, you were still too young for us to
throw to the world, and your college has served you and us well as a half-way house.
Maybe you'll look back on college, as Yalies do, as "bright college years". You'll rarely meet
alumni who dislike their college memories. Maybe that's why they call colleges "Alma Maters"–"our
mothers". Colleges are maternal surrogates.
But the analogy we like better than Alma Mater for the college experience is Oz.
Think about that story for a minute, while you are struggling with the unfamiliar button eye at
the back of your unfamiliar white dress. (We're sorry the petition to wear designer jeans to
commencement wasn't approved!)
Like Dorothy, you lived in the black-and-white world of the Midwest, until a whirlwind of
college recruiters came after you, swept you away in a tornado of promises, and set you down in a
technicolored campus. She brought Toto for tuition, and her letter of acceptance was the gift of the red
shoes. Lots of other students were around, too, called Munchkins. During Orientation, they explained
that the way out was to follow the yellow-brick road, which you recognize as curriculum
requirements–course after course, brick after brick. They also warned to watch out for witches and
goblins, which you would call flunking or getting booted. Fortunately, she had some good help from a
cowardly lion, rusty tin woodsman, and mindless scarecrow, such as you had from some kindly
professors and administrators,
And now you're at the end of the road.
Pretty soon you'll be seeing that Wizard, the president who tries to keep the college running,
and he'll be handing you a diploma just like what happened to Dorothy's friends. If he's humble, as we
think he is, he'll probably admit that you could have left Oz anytime you chose and have made it on
your own without the college.
Probably so. Half your high school classmates did. But you would have missed the flowers
along the road. You would have missed the yellow in the bricks. You would have missed that eccentric
love from bumbling, but bright, scarecrows. You would have missed the Munchkins and the witches,
the Wizard and the castles. Most of all, you would have missed the technicolor, which now you can
spend–and are duty-bound to spend–the rest of your life trying to bring to any corner of the black and
white–and gray–world you are entering.
Love, Mom and Dad
BBeennddiinngg tthhee TTwwiigg:: PPaaggeess ffrroomm tthhee JJoouurrnnaall ooff aa PPiillggrriimm PPaarreenntt // 1144
August 25, 1987
PRO BONO VITA
"What will look good on my vita?" may have replaced "Who am I?", "What are the Big
Issues?", and "How big is the universe?" as the highest priority question for today's college students.
With so much emphasis upon job competition and professional school admissions
requirements, students who have trouble writing essays on how they spent their vacations or book
reviews of Catcher in the Rye do their most serious writing in compiling their resumes.
Employment is not automatic, so the importance of first impressions cannot be exaggerated.
Furthermore, because minimum age and minimum wage laws have dried up the youth employment
markets, young people do not have the "hands-on" experiences their soda-jerk, paperboy, housepainter,
road-paver, dime-store-clerk parents had. Material to expand a "vita" into something more than a home
address with test scores and grade point averages is hard to come by.
Generations of college students have claimed, with some justice, that "we learn as much outside
the classroom as in it". There is strong evidence that significant learning does take place in the
extracurricular and co-curricular interstices of college years. But putting "bull sessions" and "fraternity
parties" on a vita doesn't play well in personnel offices.
What college students find increasingly helpful for their vitas are disciplined and sacrificial
learning experiences. Internships, in the form of unpaid or barely-paid work for government, corporate,
and philanthropic institutions, have become very prominent. Apprenticeships, study abroad, and
supervised field work are other ways in which enterprising students expand their experiences and
merge practice with theory.
It is cynical, of course, to think such energy and creativity from students come only for the sake
of well-rounded vitas.
A genuine resurgence of student excitement about college is taking place that deserves notice
and praise. Both learning for its own sake and learning for the sake of being of true service to others
and to society are enjoying nationwide campus revivals. They open up careers undreamed-of for many
students.
Ironically, in the joy and satisfaction of doing, students everywhere become less anxious about
their written career "vitas" and more and more concerned with Life.
For which, incidentally, the Latin word is “Vita".
BBeennddiinngg tthhee TTwwiigg:: PPaaggeess ffrroomm tthhee JJoouurrnnaall ooff aa PPiillggrriimm PPaarreenntt // 1155
September 1, 1987
THE UNCOMMON BECOMES COMMON
At a mid-August college fraternity reunion in Kentucky, someone observed that the divorced
and remarried brothers of the 1950's present outnumbered those of us still married to our original wives
or never married.
One divorced and re-married brother broke the ice with another and his new wife by asking if
their new marriage involved merging pets from their separate homes. This unique icebreaker question
taught the non-divorced minority a lot about the art of conversation. It certainly was better than our
cautious queries about where "he" and "she" met, where "she" was from, and where "she" went to
college.
Strained as our questions were, at least no one asked what had happened to a former wife or
called a new one by the old one's name. In fact, the evening wound up being a rather successful
orientation session for the newer wives to the nicknames, exploits, and idiosyncrasies of their
husbands. New spouses need to know that there was life before the second wife.
One of the best divorce adjustments we've seen took place in this same group two years earlier.
A divorced but not remarried brother came with his ex-wife, remembered and loved by all. They
shared freely their collective memories of old times not forgotten, as well as stacks of pictures of their
children and grandchildren. That, too, was a lesson in civility for us all.
Beneath all this careful harmony, of course, were scarce-concealed scars and a lot of pain.
Part of the pain in parting is the length of the partnership. In the cases described here, we are
talking 20 to 30 years of marriage before middle age crises and attrition set in, not the "hitch 'em and
ditch 'em in mid-honeymoon" divorces of too many youngsters today. Longevity and endurance ought
to count for something.
Divorces are both deeply personal and widely public, for each private person is to a large
degree made up of a public self of many friends and acquaintances from many places and many pasts.
Divorce is a modern phenomenon, as young as World War II, and so the art of facing those
who have faced it is new. It is a reality that has to be confronted unless the bridges of the past between
people are to be broken permanently.
Those bridges of past associations are important, and in times of crossings and stress, they need
reinforcement, not abandonment.
We welcome all the help we can get in the art of taking awkwardness out of our associations.
BBeennddiinngg tthhee TTwwiigg:: PPaaggeess ffrroomm tthhee JJoouurrnnaall ooff aa PPiillggrriimm PPaarreenntt // 1166
April 5, 1988
BOWLED OVER
College football bowl games were scarcely over at the beginning of the year before the pro
Super Bowl came and went, only to be succeeded by the Winter Olympics and then by the NCAA,
NIT, and NAIA basketball tournaments, with some golf tournaments thrown in wherever they could
find a vacant time slot.
Obviously what businessmen-philosophers have been preaching for years is true–our world
runs on competition.
Competition being a major fact of life, I find myself lately thinking about ways education used
to use it to prod us into learning. I have in mind something more subtle than the competition for
grades–which if anything has increased as other forms of academic competition have declined.
Memory work is an example. Once school children were required to learn by heart and recite
long passages from Shakespeare, the Bible, or Wordsworth, complex formulae from mathematics and
chemistry, principles from physics, and dates and events from history. Today's Trivia Pursuit winners
are yesterday's memorizers.
Recitation of memory work, usually rendered from a standing position, was the form classroom
competition took. To be able to quote the Hamlet soliloquy (or Brutus's eulogy for Caesar) rapidly and
without an error was the slam-dunk, the end-run, and the hole-in-one of the schoolroom.
Elocution contests and spelling-bees were other forms of the sport. What gymnasium today can
match the thrill of a well-rendered "The Death of Socrates" pitted against "The Gettysburg Address"?
What could match the exhilaration of a properly spelled "onomatopoeia" crushing the dropped ball of a
careless "ossification" in a spelling bee?
There was a time when the GE College Bowl was watched as fervently as any athletic play-off,
when cheerleaders led yells for rival teams and returning conquering heroes and heroines were hoisted
upon the shoulders of entire student bodies, and when students fought for a seat on the "first team".
There was a time when "I have a student in the balcony, Doctor" on the Dr. I. Q. radio show was every
schoolchild's intimation of immortality.
One need not lament that the playing fields of Eton have replaced the halls of academe or that
stadia are more visited than libraries or that locations of sports halls of fame are better known than
birthplaces of authors.
One may lament, however, the failure to acknowledge that there is room in the schoolchild's
life for both. If competition is a basic rule of life, neither side of growing up ought to have a monopoly.
The Greek model of "a healthy mind in a healthy body" requires both if there are to be well-rounded
citizens in a well-rounded society on a well-rounded globe.
BBeennddiinngg tthhee TTwwiigg:: PPaaggeess ffrroomm tthhee JJoouurrnnaall ooff aa PPiillggrriimm PPaarreenntt // 1177
May 24, 1988
THE QUEEN OF SWATS AND STATS
Our 7th-grader's math this six-weeks hovers just below the line, nearer B than A.
"Maybe the teacher will drop the lowest grade," she hoped aloud after averaging her grades for
the sixth time, "like in the Olympics."
I reminded her that in the Olympics they throw out the highest grade as well as the lowest. If
she did that, her average would drop another point, not gain one.
Then I threw her my real zinger. "Your Aunt Bess would turn over in her grave at the idea of
changing a grade."
Daughter Molly was unimpressed. "Who is my Aunt Bess?" she asked.
I became indignant. "You mean you're kin to probably the world's greatest junior high school
math teacher and don't even know who she was?"
It seemed completely irrelevant to me that Aunt Bess died years and years before our daughter
was even born.
She was a fine teacher, married to John Q. Adams (not the president) but childless, who
adopted all her students and painstakingly initiated them into the extraterrestrial universes of
Pythagoras and Euclid.
She was in every aspect of her appearance and manner the picture of how a real lady was
supposed to look. By the time I entered her class her coal black hair, piled faultlessly atop the back of
her head, was graying–not randomly but in careful geometric patterns (acute triangles) swept back
from her temples. Her Victorian long-sleeved, frilled, white blouses were pinned at the neck ("the
Adams Apple", our Mrs. Adams said) by an oval cameo with a raised circular face upon it, perpetually
reminding us of the contrasts between the enigmas of the ellipse and the simplicity of the circle.
Behind her back, we called her Queen Bess; she was regal.
Perched above the cameo oval and between her triangular temples was Aunt Bess's only fault–
rimless glasses with two circles of glass so thick that her eyes were also invisible behind them. Without
the glasses, she was practically blind–which was why we were so delighted to have her stand behind
the catcher during our recess baseball games as umpire, Victorian dress, frosted glasses, coiffured hair,
cameo, and all.
The symmetry of the infield square and of the outfield arc, the pentagon of the batter's plate,
and the rectangle of the pitcher's mound, all seemed part and parcel of her.
Playground time with "Miss Bess" was her classroom extended, and we hated the rained-out
days. She loved math, she loved baseball, and we found that she loved us, too. She taught us math by
using baseball statistics. She knew them all by heart. She could have made a fortune writing them
down for a bubble gum company's baseball cards. Her grading was like her umpire calls–clear, certain,
inarguable. We fought to make home runs on her tests, to improve our performance "stats", to set
records for RBl's and at-bats in her drills. Her own ambition was to get all of us to where none of us
would “strike out"
Mathematics is supposed to be the most basic and most universal language known to man. By
mathematics, we supposedly can communicate with strangers in other vocations than our own, with
people in other countries than our own, and with generations long gone and yet to come.
You would think anything that fundamental would be duck soup. Two plus two equals four
everywhere and for all times, right?
Wrong. This most elementary language is complex: a maze of laws, rules, processes, and
connections that makes learning English look like child's play.
Blessed indeed, therefore, is the struggling math student who slides into a Queen Bess's home
base.
BBeennddiinngg tthhee TTwwiigg:: PPaaggeess ffrroomm tthhee JJoouurrnnaall ooff aa PPiillggrriimm PPaarreenntt // 1188
October 12, 1988
SINGING THE 1492 BLUES
Once upon a time, it was safe to say everyone knew “in fourteen hundred and ninety-two,
Columbus sailed the ocean blue".
Don't make that assumption anymore. A survey of 7,812 eleventh graders, most of them
enrolled in U.S. History courses, finds that almost a third of them (32 percent) believe Columbus
discovered the New World after 1750!
The survey was conducted by the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a government
agency in operation since 1969, and funded under the auspices of the National Endowment for the
Humanities. Diane Ravitch and Chester E. Finn, Jr., directed the study. The title of their report, just
published (Harper & Row, 1987), asks: What Do Our 17-Year-Olds Know? A Report on the First
National Assessment of History and Literature.
Nearly 8,000 students, carefully selected to reflect geography, race, sex, income, and other
diversities in America, answered multiple-choice questions, 141 in history and 121 in literature.
The answers to the Columbus question–with 68 percent of the students able to date his
discovery prior to 1750–are frightening, not just because only two-thirds of the students got the right
answer, but also because it was one of only a very few questions on which students could score that
high.
Using scores below 60 as failures, the national survey shows that the average test score for 17year-olds is only 54 in history and only 52 in literature. Our 11th-graders, poised to enter either college
or the work-force, have only a little more than half of an elementary knowledge of history and
literature.
The tests were designed to give the students the best possible advantages for scoring well. All
of the questions are very simple. There are no trick questions. None can be answered by "Don't Know",
which means the scores are inflated by successful guesses. Any question left unanswered was not
counted against the student. Questions that were the hardest in the test-design stage were removed
altogether.
Despite such an edge, the test scores were distressingly low.
The study does have some good news for America, however. By studying the habits and
features of the students who took the tests, the test scores can tell us something about how to help the
students yet to come and how to improve the national profile.
For example, test scores are higher for those students who average two hours a day on
homework. Furthermore, the higher the education level of the parents of the students, the higher the
student's scores. In the best scoring homes can be found a dictionary, an encyclopedia, at least 25
books, a newspaper, and magazine subscriptions–and increasingly a home computer. The less
television is watched, the higher the scores are. Students with part-time employment (15 hours or so a
week) perform better than those who don't work at all. Students who read daily for their own pleasure
outperform students who don't or seldom do. Students who perform well have a better knowledge of
the Bible and of Greek and Roman mythology. Students who take a history course every year out-shine
those who get through high school with only one history course.
Ultimately, what creeps through all of these statistics is that learning depends upon the tone of
the total environment around the student.
If a community cares deeply about its young, it sacrifices for them to get them the best of
school systems. If parents and grandparents care deeply, they sacrifice to get them all the edges they
can.
Where love abounds, learning grows.
BBeennddiinngg tthhee TTwwiigg:: PPaaggeess ffrroomm tthhee JJoouurrnnaall ooff aa PPiillggrriimm PPaarreenntt // 1199
October 25, 1988
SONS AND DAUGHTERS OF WILLIE LOMAN
College presidents ponder what is happening to their graduates. Time was when their alumni
went on into the ministry, teaching, law, medicine, and engineering. Today, the biggest hunk of them
seems to go into "sales".
These learned leaders offer several explanations for this trend. College has been costly and the
graduates are in hock, so they have to go into something with a salary or a commission to pay off their
loans. They can't afford to go straight into more study at the graduate level.
Secondly, educators suggest, sales is a foot in the door into America's largest employment
market–the business world. Any further graduate training former students need once inside the
establishment and on the ladder upward will be supplied free by their companies, which collectively
today offer more post-secondary courses to more people than do all the higher education institutions
put together.
Thirdly, educators say, ours has become a consumer society, and consumption is pushed by
salesmen. A generation of students nurtured at the trough of television commercials can't help wanting
to get into sales.
Yet a fourth explanation is found in that commercial about the young girl who works hard all
day and lives in a $150-a-month dump so she can afford $850 weekends. By that reckoning, any job is
only a means to free-time ends, not work for the joy of the kind of work to be done. Work as
"vocation" or "calling" disappears when the only reason for a pay-check is to be able to afford things
one has spent the week selling to others.
Maybe those are the reasons sales is at the top of the job list for college graduates.
But then again–maybe not.
No one has addressed the most obvious pro-sales influence of all–education itself.
We've had one daughter or the other in local schools over 17 years now. We get a better idea of
what they have learned by going back through our canceled checks than by reviewing their report
cards.
Only a few minutes ago our youngest presented us with a bill for four magazine subscriptions.
She had thoughtfully–sales in mind–even filled out our check for us. All we had to do was sign.
In our time, we have bought from the two of them–pity those with more than two–over two
gross boxes of Girl Scout cookies, twelve subscriptions to My Weekly Reader, another twelve
subscriptions to junior versions of National Geographic, ten renewals subscriptions each of TIME,
Newsweek, Harper's, and Atlantic Monthly, 105 quarter-pound chocolate bars with almonds or hazel
nuts, 132 rolls of Christmas wrapping paper and corresponding numbers of rolls of ribbon and of
packages of gift tags, 43 raffle tickets, and enough candles to light the house a full month any time the
electricity has been cut off because of insufficient funds in our bank account after buying all these
things from our girls.
Every relative and any fellow worker or friend has been likely prey for their innocent smiles,
both in their early snaggled-tooth stages and at their later braces-and-retainers ages. (They learn early
that the reason for visiting the dentist twice a year is to boost sales.)
Our guilt in this attack upon our friends is relieved by the unwritten law among parents: always
buy as much from the children of others as your children sold to others.
What we've spent buying from our own children so they can win T-shirts would have to be
multiplied by about 4 to include the Golden Rule costs of reciprocal purchasing from friends.
Never yield to your children's pleas to let them just call everyone in the phonebook or go doorto-door everywhere in town. You’ll go broke in reciprocal buying.
This Golden Rule of doing to others what they do unto you gets a little fuzzy when dealing with
single or childless friends, but our children learned early that such friends are poor customers anyway.
The real hook in this whole not-for-free enterprise bait is charity.
BBeennddiinngg tthhee TTwwiigg:: PPaaggeess ffrroomm tthhee JJoouurrnnaall ooff aa PPiillggrriimm PPaarreenntt // 2200
Selling and buying all these things is always "for a Good Cause"–like band uniforms, or school
copy machines, or parking lot pavement, or senior trips.
How can anyone be against Good Causes?
What kind of parents wouldn't let their children learn about Good Causes?
What kind of music could a band play without uniforms? How many high schoolers would
demand cars if there were no paved parking available at the schools for them? How many
announcements could be sent home about coming fund drives if there were no copy machines?
We’ve bought them all.
And in the process given our heirs an education in begging.
BBeennddiinngg tthhee TTwwiigg:: PPaaggeess ffrroomm tthhee JJoouurrnnaall ooff aa PPiillggrriimm PPaarreenntt // 2211
May 16, 1989
WHAT IT WAS, WAS FOOTBALL!
This is the Centennial Year of South Carolina intercollegiate football. On December 14, 1889,
Wofford defeated Furman, 5-1. It wasn't the first game in the nation or even in the South: the
Intercollegiate Foot Ball Association was founded in 1876; Centre and Transylvania played in
Kentucky in 1879.
The rules used by Wofford and Furman probably were from an article by Alexander Johnston
in The Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine for 1887:
"The undergraduates of American colleges, taking the so-called Rugby game of foot-ball, have
developed it into a game differing in many of its phases from any of its English prototypes.... The
peculiar feature of the Rugby game was the 'scrimmage,'... and American players, working out the
scrimmage in a new form, have changed the possibilities of the game very greatly, and have made it, in
addition to its individual opportunities for the exhibition of skill, one of the most scientific of outdoor
games in its 'team-playing,' or management of the entire side as one body....
"Each side, while defending its own goal, necessarily faces the goal of its opponents, and its
object is to advance the ball, by running with it or by kicking it, toward its opponents' goal-line, to
plant the ball on the ground on the other side of the opponents' goal-line, which constitutes a 'touchdown' and scores four points in the game, and to kick the ball over the cross-bar of the opponents' goal
or force the opponents to make a 'safety' touch-down in their own territory. When a touch-down is
made, the successful side takes the ball any distance it wishes straight out into the field, its opponents
remaining behind their goal-line until the ball is kicked. One man, lying on the ground, holds the ball
in proper position: another, when the ball is dropped to the ground, kicking it; if the ball goes over the
cross-bar, it counts two points in addition to the four points for the touchdown, and, if the goal is
missed, it counts nothing. A touch-down and a successful goal thus count together six points; a goal
kicked from the field, without a previous touchdown, counts five points; and a 'safety' touch-down
counts two points against the side which makes it.
"The feature in this process of advancing the ball which is most difficult for even the practiced
eye to follow, and which will probably always remain a profound mystery to the unskillful, is the
prohibition of 'off-side playing'.... it is merely that no player has legal rights when he is between the
ball and his opponents' goal; he is then 'off-side' until the ball has touched an opponent, or one of his
own side carries the ball ahead of him or runs in front of him, having touched the ball while behind
him....
"'Passing' the ball, or throwing it from one to another, is another feature of the game. Hardly
any combination of team-playing and individual skill is more noteworthy.... A 'pass forward' is not
allowed.... the ball must be thrown straight across the field, parallel to the goal-line, or in any direction
back of that line....
"It is not to be supposed that its opponents are idly watching the ball's progress.... The more
common way of checking the advance of the ball is by a 'tackle.' Any player may run with the ball.
While he is doing so, any opponent may seize him and cry 'Held!' or throw him and hold him until he
cries 'Down!' If the tackle is made by seizing the runner above the shoulders or below the hips, it is a
'foul tackle,' and penalties are imposed for it....
"The introduction of the American form of the scrimmage has quite changed the character of
the game. It soon forced a reduction of the numbers engaged, from fifteen on a side to eleven.... The
game has, in fact, become a miniature game of strategy, and can best be comprehended by comparing
the football-field to a battle-field, limited by the side-lines, and the respective sides to two armies,
managed on military principles by two captains. Four arms of the football service have been
developed.... Across the field stretch the foot-ball infantry, the 'rush line,' or 'rushers.' They are the
seven heavy men of the team.... The two players on the ends of the line, the 'end-rushes,' stand slightly
back of the main line, –in more military language, 'the wings are slightly refused,'.... Behind the
BBeennddiinngg tthhee TTwwiigg:: PPaaggeess ffrroomm tthhee JJoouurrnnaall ooff aa PPiillggrriimm PPaarreenntt // 2222
'center-rush'... plays the 'quarter-back,' answering very much to the quartermaster's department....
Behind the quarter-back, and covering the two sides of the field, are the 'half-backs,' the cavalry of the
team.... The most brilliant playing is done by the half-backs.... Farthest to the rear... is the eleventh
player, the 'full-back.'
"One who gets the full force of the military nature of the American game of football will have
comparatively little difficulty in following intelligently the real course of the game....
"The criticisms upon it have run in two general lines.... They are, first, the innate roughness of
the game, and the likelihood of severe accident, or even death, from it; and, second, its tendency to
degenerate into brutality and personal combat....
"The real evil of the game is the betting.
"There is...a satisfaction in knowing that this outdoor game is doing for our college-bred men,
in a more peaceful way, what the experience of war did for so many of their predecessors in 1861-65,
in its inculcation of the lesson that bad temper is an element quite foreign to open, manly contest."
Johnston erred in one conclusion. He wrote, quite seriously: "The game has found little favor at
the South .... " Any groom explaining the game to his bride in hopes of a long marriage would be welladvised to hand her a copy of Johnston's lucid essay. In fact, he ought to test her on it during the "let
him now speak" part of the ceremony.
BBeennddiinngg tthhee TTwwiigg:: PPaaggeess ffrroomm tthhee JJoouurrnnaall ooff aa PPiillggrriimm PPaarreenntt // 2233
July 18, 1989
ON ALLOYS AND ALLIES
An alloy is a compound metal made by combining two or more metals into an artificial metal
made stronger by the alliance.
We are all alloys. None of us stands alone. We are indeed, as poets such as Tennyson and Eliot
often reminded us, made up of bits and pieces of others whom we have met. To "learn from" someone
is to draw strength from her or him, and we all learn from others.
We especially think of such re-enforcers when they die. We feel diminished ourselves by their
passing, for we know the strength we drew from them. When they go on, we feel something inside us
passing away, too.
Two such influences on my own life recently died.
One was a high school history teacher who taught us the joy of discovery by sending us out to
look for the grave of one of Patrick Henry's six sisters thought to be located somewhere in our county.
Mary Sue Dunn taught us curiosity and research. It little matters that it was decades before we learned
that the grave was across the street from her classroom all along. She touched us and made us stronger.
The second was a school superintendent whose every word and every deed bespoke the value
of education. I recall the first speech I heard him make, to our junior high assembly. He didn't talk
about school rules, nor about education. W. O. Inman talked about chess. In a town in which checkers
players could be found on courtyard benches any day of the week, there probably were not three chess
sets in existence. Most of us had never seen one; none of us had ever played the game. Yet, somehow,
Mr. Inman made chess a parable for life. He gave us a hunger for unknown things that lay in front of
us that could be learned and relished.
Miss Mary Sue Dunn and Mr. W. O. Inman were much on my mind as our family watched the
movie, "The Dead Poets' Society." The point of the movie is that learning is a matter of passion. It is a
matter of being excited by discovery, of being stretched to reach unknown territory, of being incited by
finding footsteps of others who have found ideas and ways of expressing them that we have had and
have been unable to express.
Most of all, learning is an awareness that Shakespeare and Whitman live on, even in the lives
of mill-hands and lawyers, mechanics and doctors, clerks and accountants. We are far, far better
humans for being challenged to see beyond ourselves and to be something beyond ourselves. We are
infinitely fortunate and continuously blessed when we have had Miss Dunns or Mr. Inmans to help that
happen. They, too, live on.
BBeennddiinngg tthhee TTwwiigg:: PPaaggeess ffrroomm tthhee JJoouurrnnaall ooff aa PPiillggrriimm PPaarreenntt // 2244
January 2, 1990
EXCHANGING THE MAGI’S GIFTS
Yogi Berra used to say, "It ain't over until it's over." Christmas can be like that.
Some of us stretch Christmas all the way to January 6th, "Twelfth Night". That tradition has to
do with the visit of the Three Wisemen.
I'm rather fond of the Magi. Dressed in bathrobes with towel-turbans, these scholar-kings spent
their year's-end holidays studying–racing across the desert to find an unknown.
Learned as these three wise men were, they were still humble enough to confess that there was
much they didn't know. Wisdom to acknowledge one's ignorance is true wisdom indeed. The Magi
were smart enough to know learning is a hard and slow road; and they were bright enough to recognize
something important when they found it in a very strange place.
The Magi are gone, and with them some of the magic of Christmas, but they still teach us.
One thing we can learn, if we would be wise, is that learning doesn't stop. Learning goes on for
us, as it did for the Magi, life-long.
The Magi were also wise enough to know that we can't learn what we already know. If they had
known what they were going to find, they would have had little reason for going.
The Magi were also wise enough not to go back to Herod to report what they had found.
Instead, they “returned another way."
Many say going away to school is “leaving the nest", and others say, "You can't go home
again." But those aren't the voices of wise men. Learning doesn't have to separate us from our
homefolks. Learning is only another ways of continuing habits we formed there.
The Magi made a point of going home and of sharing there the wonderful things they had seen
and heard. You can bet there were some pretty proud Papa and Mama Magi. They had not seen nor
followed the star to Bethlehem, but all parents see special stars over their own children and bask in
their light—and in the journeys that take them to it.
BBeennddiinngg tthhee TTwwiigg:: PPaaggeess ffrroomm tthhee JJoouurrnnaall ooff aa PPiillggrriimm PPaarreenntt // 2255
January 30, 1990
TAKING A POWDER FROM SCHOOL
At a recent Parents' Night, we noticed that the school blackboards were green, not black. Some
college classrooms we have visited have no blackboards at all, but use plexi-glass instead, with
markers instead of chalk.
Can there be education without chalk and erasers?
Our earliest–and dustiest–memories of school are so frosted with chalk as to make knowledge
and chalk inseparable. The highest honor in elementary school was being asked to dust the erasers. The
honored student got to gather the black erasers, leave class, and take them out to a giant oak tree which
must have been two centuries old. Pounding them against the roots, the base of the tree was left white
with the accumulated and erased wisdom of whole generations of students.
It was wartime, too, and in our minds, the chalk dust was straight from the white cliffs of Dover
none of us had ever seen, over which were flying the planes we saw only on the four-color cardboards
from the Coca Cola Company thumb-tacked above the blackboards. We beat those erasers against the
tree as if they were the enemy.
No matter that our little hands were left powdery and gritty, nor that we inhaled great gulps of
the clouds we made. Somehow dusting erasers was linked to learning.
No Eraser Duster ever turned out to be a bad student or, in later life, a bad citizen.
We were the Elect, and the office carried with it Responsibility. The Future was in our hands–
and in our lungs.
And now, nearly half a century later, we still believe that–no matter what color or material the
blackboards have become.
We still believe in education–in passing on to the young the mystic symbols of spelling words
and numerals that were the stuff of which our chalk dust–and our dreams–were made.
You can take the learning off of the blackboard, but you can't take it out of the mind, once it
has been written there. Good education sticks with you like chalk dust.
The school lunchroom in those days served a lot of government surplus food–cheese, peanut
butter, and peaches from gallon cans. We had appetites that were never filled, but the fragrance and the
taste that has lingered most is of chalk dust.
Our craving was for knowledge. We wanted to devour every book in the tiny summer library;
we wanted to digest and use forever the parts of speech; we wanted to sup at the multiplication and
division tables.
The appetite for learning comes early, but fades fast after infancy. It has to be an acquired taste
thereafter. And it tastes of chalk dust.
We know who fed our insatiable appetites–sacrificing parents, ill-paid teachers with
unforgettable names, unbegrudging taxpayers, and unpaid school boards.
We know, too, why they did it. Chalk dust lingered in their own lungs enough that they yet
tasted it, enough so that they wanted us to have more of it than had they. Feed a child enough chalk
dust, and he is fixed for life.
In Mrs. Beard's class, we played a game that had no name. One student would scribble some
chalk marks on the board, and another would try to turn them into a picture. A numeral 2 would
become a swan, and a 4 would become a locomotive. We were learning not only the past, but creativity
as well. Inventiveness and imagination were as priceless as memorization and recitation.
Life is a blackboard.
Each day we are called to the board in front of the world and told to calculate, to spell, to
outline, to organize, to create, to recite, to explain and to erase, dust off the erasers, and start over
again.
Life isn’t a breeze; it’s a blackboard-eraser sneeze.
BBeennddiinngg tthhee TTwwiigg:: PPaaggeess ffrroomm tthhee JJoouurrnnaall ooff aa PPiillggrriimm PPaarreenntt // 2266
February 20, 1990
A TREE PLANTED BY THE RIVER OF WATERS
Miles away from here, down in Bennettsville, S.C., three trees sprouting from imported seeds
have survived the winter that their sower, a young college student, did not.
His studies and curiosity had carried him once to England, where he was entranced by the
trees–especially large drooping pines which seemed inverted from those of his native soil.
Did he wonder who had planted them and why?
That a male American college student abroad would have even noticed such trees is unusual.
That he would have researched English plants and where seeds for them could be ordered is even more
so. And when these uniquenesses are added to his unanticipated early death in an automobile accident,
his three surviving plantings from English seeds assume cosmic significance.
Among other things, his seedlings testify he used the past to declare his faith in the future.
They are also wooden bridges spanning an ocean between the Old World and the New. And
they are signs of the harmony of a sensitive soul blending with and bound to the natural world.
For such high purposes, this trinity of plants should be–as his are–evergreens.
His death was untimely. But how often is there a right time for dying?
His dying was accidental. But how often is dying intentional?
What those adjectives, untimely and accidental, really mean is that his death was unexpected–
and therefore inexplicable and unacceptable. Bennettsville could be anywhere. His family and friends–
like thousands of others who have lost parts of themselves by losing their young–grope for
understandings and moorings.
Perhaps the three trees will provide them.
Perhaps in this case his three transplanted trees in time will grow to cast shade that soothes.
Perhaps they are whispering pines which will share secrets of life's cyclical movements and translate
the mysterious language of life's transportations.
We need assurances that what has been taken from one place has only been transplanted to
another, that what has moved is not therefore gone. The three English trees of Bennettsville speak to us
all in plain English language we can understand.
They tell us of roots and place, of continuities and endurance, of going onward by reaching
upward, and of planting beauty and leaving it behind to grow for others.
They offer trunks that can be hugged, and they spread their limbs as umbrellas to shelter us.
Members of a global family forest, they point us to our own thickets of kin where sorrows can
be shared and memories revisited whenever storms strike.
If we look at them closely when we are most lost, such trees can be our compass.
Three trees were left behind by one who left early. What a legacy! What a memoir! What a
testimony! What a sign!
What a challenge to those of us blessed with longer lives–to plant along our own trails as we
pass something of significance for others to find later!
Spring is hovering just over the horizon. Already the grass is regaining its green, and new buds
are forming on the bushes. Crocuses have already pushed up to trumpet the jonquils soon to follow.
Sustained by others' plantings of the past, we renew our annual subscription to Life.
BBeennddiinngg tthhee TTwwiigg:: PPaaggeess ffrroomm tthhee JJoouurrnnaall ooff aa PPiillggrriimm PPaarreenntt // 2277
March 26, 1990
MYTHING THE POINT
Our daughter has discovered the wonderful world of allusions.
An allusion is a word, phrase, or image used as a capsule for a wide range of ideas.
For example, we can allude to Shakespeare's famous line, “All the world's a stage," and get
instant communication of the world as a theater stage upon which we act our parts, or get the notion of
role-playing to remind us that we all play many differing parts during the course of a lifetime or even
of a day, or get the sense that life comes in stages, an evolving and changing of our appearances and
identities from infancy to old age.
Among the allusions in which our daughter is taking special delight in her English themes these
days are those that involve Greek and Roman gods and myths.
Prometheus is the story of the man whose curiosity and ambition to be godlike drove him to
steal fire, one of the first symbols of man's power, from the gods. To call some character in a story
Promethean is a great way to impress a teacher.
Recently this daughter had a difficult poem to analyze. When she decided that its main
character was really Pan–the half-animal, half-human field and forest creature who delighted in
playing a flute and chasing nymphs–she broke the code and scored a hit in class.
Antaeus is a good allusion for southerners. This character drew his strength from the soil. As
long as he kept his feet on the ground, he was unconquerable. Hercules defeated him by lifting him off
the ground until his strength was drained away. Antaeus is a great allusion to toss into a history paper
explaining Lee’s loss at Gettysburg.
Proteus is a bit more obscure. Proteus had the ability to change shapes, but the weakness of
having to tell the truth when shackled. This allusion is useful for describing how persistence pays off.
Things are seldom what they seem on the surface–or even several layers beneath the surface. But if one
sticks to the subject and digs deep enough, one will finally get to the truth.
A current favorite for us is Procrustes. It refers to the human tendency to force equality. A
"Procrustean Bed" was a torture rack which would stretch short people or cut off the legs of tall people
to make all the same size. When the queen in “Alice in Wonderland” runs around shouting, "Off with
their head," she is saying that someone is "too big for his britches" and needs to be "cut down to size".
There are similarities between Prometheus and Procrustes, who both had to pay penalties for
aspiring to be above average.
I had the good luck during my first six years of schooling to have an aunt as my grade school
principal. She let me pick out a book each Christmas from the school book fair. The one I recall with
the most pleasure–and still own–was a little yellow-back called Chariots of the Gods.
By the time another teacher–Mrs. Montgomery in 6th grade probably– uncovered the history of
Greece and Rome for us, I was ready and willing to dive in.
The same importance can be attached to other sources of allusions. All of us quote the Bible,
Shakespeare, and probably Thoreau and Emerson, without knowing it.
Maybe a good prescription for making sure "the twig is bent" (where does that phrase come
from?) in a person's youth is to give them a few good books, 101 Best Loved Poems and Bartlett's
Quotations among them. They help us follow plots or answer quiz questions on television.
Someone has said that the purpose of education is to destroy our illusions. I don't share that
philosophy. But if it is what education is about, then let it at least leave us with our allusions.
BBeennddiinngg tthhee TTwwiigg:: PPaaggeess ffrroomm tthhee JJoouurrnnaall ooff aa PPiillggrriimm PPaarreenntt // 2288
April 10, 1990
MOVING ON UP
Many are over 55 (eligible for Senior Citizen discounts), but few are Old People.
The truth is that no one really thinks of himself or herself as old.
Oh, there may be occasional flashes in the morning or little firecracker pops in the evening that
cause us to pause. But we quickly forget them and move on because there is no such thing as an old
person. Our bodies do us and the world a great disservice by lying about us. We are never as “old as
we look". Don't be deceived by our disguises.
The great thing about age is that we save up so much of it. We are pack-rats of the first order.
We don't throw our youth away; we take it with us. Reaching 60 doesn't mean giving up being sixteen.
No one can take away from us-–without our consent–our first year in school, our first date, our senior
prom, our first car, our first job, our wedding, or our first hour as a parent.
Whence comes the ridiculous idea that each birthday erases all the others before it? No matter
how old we may be in years, we always have our youth. Not only do we still have it, but we have time
to reflect on it and to embroider it and to reorder it the way we like it best. We have our youth over and
over and over again.
Now, that does make it hard for those going through their youth for the first time. They see us
as we appear to be, not as we are. They think we drive slower, think slower, and react slower than they.
They think we get in the way of progress–and of them.
Lord bless them. They are right.
We do move at a slower pace than they. But it has little to do with old age. We slow down to
enjoy our youth because the first time around we were too busy–like them–speeding through it to enjoy
it. We slow down because we have more–not less–youthfulness stored up to enjoy than do they.
We have taken our own young years and revisited them and embellished them and chewed on
them in ways and degrees to which the newly-young are not yet privy. If they speak with the authority
of youth, surely so do we. The only difference is that they are more impetuous and impulsive, and we
are more introspective and deliberative.We haven’t surrendered our youth. We dwell upon it; thrive
upon it; water it and nurse it.
It isn’t our fault that our hair sometimes gets too fine to grow as long as theirs, or that our
hearing is so sensitive that we miss some of the words and harmony of their Hard Rock. We can see
better than they. We see them and rightly call them young; they see us and wrongly call us old.
We can drive as recklessly as any of them, eat as many French fries and as much candy as any
of them, spend as much time in malls as any of them, watch as much television as any of them, and
over-run our allowances as well as any of them. We can wear sneakers as well as any of them.We can
out-love our youngsters, too. In our rehabilitated youth, we have found a hundred ways to love that
have nothing at all to do with hormones and juvenile sex.
It's hard to get out of their way. Giving them up and letting them go is losing our youth twice–
in seeing them leave us and in seeing ourselves go with them. We love them for reminding us of
ourselves as we were, and for being our playmates, youngsters sharing our youth despite the years
which separate us.
There comes a time when our hold on our own youth does get in the way of the younger young
trying to get going, a time when we have to give up being the captain of the sandlot team and “it” in
Kick-the-Can. Our young people need their own chance to pick the team and do the counting.
Just don't mistake our willingness to back off as a sign we are aging. We dislike calling it that.
We may not be saplings, but underneath the bark of these mighty oaks which we are, the rings
of youth are still there–close to the center and core of our being. We are forever young inside, if not
evergreen outside. No matter how we look in the mirror in the morning, each day we see ourselves as
we were in our best and happiest times. In the best of fossils, a leaf of life can still be seen exactly as it
was–and still is.
BBeennddiinngg tthhee TTwwiigg:: PPaaggeess ffrroomm tthhee JJoouurrnnaall ooff aa PPiillggrriimm PPaarreenntt // 2299
July 17, 1990
STAYING WITHIN THE LINES
Surely some psychologist can explain why most of us are so fascinated by colored crayons.
You know the type I mean. I'll avoid using their brand name--the ones in the yellow-orange and
green boxes with matching yellow-orange and green paper wrappers around them, each labeled with
the color it is. Not many of us really use them to color with. But they are nice to have around.
You can rearrange them in color groups, either by contrasts or in sets by degrees of shading,
with “blue-green” or “red-orange” for transitions between sets. Beyond stormy “black” and “gray” is a
“silver” lining, and beyond it an infinite rainbow of color, with “gold” at the end.
You can learn spelling and vocabulary from them. What poetry there is in "magenta" or
"turquoise" or "burnt sienna" or "puce"!
You can count them, and learn to count by using them for number 1's, the shape they bear.
You can line them up on end in triangles at the end of a hardwood hallway and make a bowling
alley, using marbles or melted and molded crayons for bowling balls.
They come in boxes of six, eight, twelve, 24, 64, and 72. Once I even had a box of 96!
Breaking one is enough to make you cry. Wearing down and rounding out their sharp points or
having to tear their wrapping to use them are the next greatest tragedies in using them.
I don't recall never having them around. I can't imagine them being rationed and using as
bullets in World War II, even though they are shaped like them. My earliest memories of crayons are
from the third grade.
One memory is of someone in class occasionally eating a crayon or chewing it for gum. I don't
recall who it was–probably Billy Oliver or one or more of the King twins, Horace and Morris.
A second third-grade crayon memory is more vivid. One day our regular teacher, Miss Rebecca
Bayer, was absent. Her substitute passed out pages of outlined Thanksgiving turkeys and told us to
color them. I recall this lady walking up and down the aisles and looking over our shoulders and
telling us over and over, "Don't color outside the lines. Make your strokes in the same direction."
It was my first introduction to fascism--which I though we had just fought a war to defeat.
Kindly Miss Rebecca with her beautiful silver hair heaped up atop her head, except for stray
strands she never seemed able to control, and bearing the worldly experience of what I assumed to be
at least 97 years, had never forced us to stay in the lines or to make our strokes in the same direction.
Our world consisted of lines. We lined up outside the front door each morning, waiting for the
opening bell. We lined up to go to the restroom or to recess, to lunch and from one classroom to
another, and to file out in the afternoon. We sat in assigned lined desks, rows of them bolted to the
floor. (Remember the kind? With slanted tops that lifted and inkwell holes in the right hand upper
corners and generations of initials carved in the tops and generations of chewing gum stuck beneath?)
In those days of regimentation, when our lives were organized by math drill numbers and by
the alphabet and by writing rules and by Palmer Method penmanship practice, Miss Rebecca was the
symbol of promised freedom. She occasionally stopped class to play games at some time other than
recess. And even at recess, she played sandlot ball with us. She kept books of her own in her rented
room a block away, and encouraged us to come by and borrow them.
And she let us color outside the lines–any color we wanted.
My turkey the day she was absent was a drab brown. In my memory, I picture it as it would
have been if Miss Rebecca had been there that November day.
Purple. For royalty, for this king of the birds. And purple, too, for regal Miss Rebecca, with
whom the color purple is indelibly entwined in our hearts and minds.
Twenty years later, when Hippies and Flower Children appeared–shocking children whom
Billy Oliver and the King twins would have loved–we recognized them instantly. They were
multitudinous, pale imitations of Miss Rebecca, who let us color outside the lines.
BBeennddiinngg tthhee TTwwiigg:: PPaaggeess ffrroomm tthhee JJoouurrnnaall ooff aa PPiillggrriimm PPaarreenntt // 3300
August 28, 1990
SEPTEMBER SONG
In my time, I’ve seen roosters chasing dogs and geese chasing humans, flapping and squawking
across a yard like noisy hovercraft. Last week, I saw a blue jay chase a squirrel.
We keep large birdfeeders hung out back, plus others suctioned to the window. Judging from
the large number of bird-feed bags on store shelves, apparently a whole lot of other folks do the same.
We get pretty bored by people who talk about nothing but their dogs and cats as though they
were their children, but the more we watch the birds who have adopted us the more we understand the
temptation to transfer family feeling to creatures of nature.
They have the virtues of innocents, and their songs and antics are sales pitches for simplicity
and naturalness. They are messengers from a world we see too little of and recall fondly. They are
umbilical cords to an unasphalted past, and prophecies of what an Edenic life beyond may be like.
One of my favorite tear-jerker movie scenes is from "Mary Poppins". In the middle of the
movie, an elderly charwoman, played in her old age by veteran actress Jane Darwell (the stoic mother
in “Grapes of Wrath"), sits alone on the steps in the midst of a public square, scattering bread crumbs
while Julie Andrews' voice is heard singing, "Feed the Birds." In her poverty, Miss Darwell collects
pennies with which to buy the crumbs. As the song ends and the camera moves up and away from her,
she becomes a dot in the midst of marble banks and offices and government buildings. The effect of
that scene is as strong as hearing Mahalia Jackson sing "His Eye is on the Sparrow."
The institutions we build in order to tend to the work of the people in the public square often
expand into layered bureaucracies which misplace their statements of original purpose. If we forget the
birds, soon we will forget each other. We may feed only the faceless economy or our egos instead.
We need our institutions, of course—our churches, schools, and charities. They are our own
birdhouses and feeders, our networks to one another and our systems of communication. We cannot do
without them, and so we create them. The trick is in keeping them from becoming ends unto
themselves, cut off from their original purposes.
We have had in our yard for several years now a pair of cardinals, a pair of redheaded
woodpeckers, a family of wrens, several doves, a pair of jays, some mockingbirds, and a pair of
thrushes–not to mention the pair of rabbits, the dozen squirrels, and the half dozen chipmunks. It is
impossible for these to be the same creatures year after year, and so they must be the children and
grandchildren of those here before. We notice the birds never nest in last year's nests. Sometimes they
use debris from old nests, but they use them to make new ones. Even the wrens in the wren-house
remove last year's bedding and build anew.
So here, in microcosm and in the city, our birds teach us about the annual cycles of nature's
renewal. Theirs is a lesson we and our institutions need to copy and to learn: the importance of being
clear about purposes of institutions and of selves, and the need for renewal of them.
Once I held a hummingbird on the palm of my hand.
I thought it was dead. But it lay warm in my hand and I thought I felt a beat from its oh-so-tiny
heart. It had knocked itself unconscious against the plate glass window of our sun porch.
It suddenly awoke and arose, straight up like a helicopter, then hovered and switched from
vertical to horizontal warp-speed in a ninety-degree angle–and was gone.
But not really gone. No one who has held a hummingbird is ever the same. I held on to it
forever by releasing it. It hovers in my memory. The blue jay squawking after the squirrel reminds me
of the moment eternity lay in my hand, and that memory calls me to revival of purpose and renewal for
myself, for my family, and for the institutions we help build and sustain.
To hold a hummingbird! I knew then what poet William Blake meant two hundred years ago:
To see a World in a Grain of Sand/ And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,/ Hold Infinity in the palm of your
hand/ And Eternity in an hour. In the Septembers of our lives, what more could we ask than this
privilege of rediscovered purpose?
BBeennddiinngg tthhee TTwwiigg:: PPaaggeess ffrroomm tthhee JJoouurrnnaall ooff aa PPiillggrriimm PPaarreenntt // 3311
September 18, 1990
GOOD MORNING, MISS DOVE
Billy Oliver, my grade school classmate whom I haven't seen in 36 years, has written to correct
my story a few weeks back of his eating crayons.
He ate only the short green ones, he claims. Then he changes the subject to recall that we
shared fanatical love for our red-headed fourth-grade teacher who left mid-year to join her military
husband. Beyond being irrationally in love with the teacher, I remember very little else about the
fourth grade.
It was the last year I had to wear knickers, the year that Eugene Maddox practically beat me
into accepting his insistent information that there was no Santa Claus, the year our class had two sets
of twins–the red-headed King boys and the pig-tailed Meals girls–and the year I served as class health
inspector, making weekly cootie inspections of all scalps and sending helpful health notes home to my
classmates' parents.
That was not exactly my “Summer of '42", but it was close enough–that "Fall of '45". And did I
ever fall! According to Bill's letter, so did he. It comes as a shock at this late date to find he was as
smitten with the teacher as I. I had always thought that, with her husband away, I had her all to myself.
She was red-haired, green-eyed, and petite–a Maureen O'Hara beauty, but not as tall. And I,
just inching my way into manhood at age nine, felt duty-bound to be her Knight-Protector. By some
twist of my psyche I associated her with Bambi's mother–the vulnerable teacher of her young whose
high purposes and virtuous life were threatened by dark forces surrounding us out on the fields of war.
On the pretext of playing with classmates a mile from home, I daily patrolled the street in front
of her house. As the fall turned to winter, she began to invite me in, out of the cold. In her living room,
before an open fire, we played with metal mechanical toy cars her absent husband had shipped from
occupied Germany–toys such as we had not seen in America because of metal rationing. And finally it
ended, just as Bill recalls, with her resignation and departure in midyear and with my inconsolable
sadness at losing her.
It was to be three long years before I fell in love again, this time with our seventh-grade
English teacher, who was also coach of the women's basketball team. The risk of heartbreak seemed
reduced, because she was unmarried. But, alas, she too was whisked away, to teach and coach at the
high school. And though I found her there when I arrived two years later, it was not quite the same. In
the time lapse in between, I had discovered other women, of my own age, and she could never reclaim
the possession she had over me when I had been twelve, or that my first love had when I was nine.
I think of them both at odd moments–when I walk through the metal cars on toy aisle shelves,
or when trying on tennis sneakers, or when breaking a sentence into component parts and diagramming
it in my mind. In moments of memory such as those, teaching and learning do not seem lost causes–
though the first-love glow of great teachers has faded.
In fact, looking back to my fixation with that red-headed figure from our fourth grade, I wonder
how much of what I have done–having been in school for 48 years now–has been from fear of leaving
her behind and thereby losing her forever. Have I stayed in school awaiting her return?
Love and learning are too entwined to be separated. Looking back over all those years as a
student, I can't recall having any poor teacher. Each one, young or old, female or male, luckily loved
teaching, and consequently implied that they loved those students it was their lot to teach. Now that I
know how little they were paid and how seldom they were praised, I am more certain than ever that
what they did had to have been done out of love.
Often sheer necessities of survival drive such teachers away from the profession today even
before they can get into it. Conditions within the schools drive away others. Only a brave few manage
to get into it and to stick with it. Great teaching is more than techniques and testing, and the root of the
educational crisis in our country today is that so little room has been left for love. We are right to dread
that the great ones will be taken away by dark forces in the fields.
BBeennddiinngg tthhee TTwwiigg:: PPaaggeess ffrroomm tthhee JJoouurrnnaall ooff aa PPiillggrriimm PPaarreenntt // 3322
October 30, 1990
PICKING UP THE TAB
Our oldest daughter is “grown and gone.” We've been saying that about her for at least two
years now. Before that she was away for five years in college and graduate study, but we date her
departure with getting her own apartment and working full-time. She still brings her laundry once in a
while to be washed and ironed and always gets home for Christmas. We’ve been gingerly inching our
way into admitting her absence.
Although she lives 150 miles away, the full realization that she is in fact grown and gone struck
me full in the face when I stopped by her apartment recently. I was not prepared to find it clean and
orderly, a break in the long-standing pattern of disarray. But what aged me overnight was going to
lunch with her. She insisted on driving, used her own car, and picked the restaurant herself. Then, once
we had eaten, she insisted on paying for lunch.
I didn’t think anyone could age as quickly as I did in that instant. I turned gray. If your
daughter buys you lunch, how long will it be before she puts you in a nursing home?
This is the little girl whom I would not let cross the highway until she was twelve without
holding my hand. This is the little girl with whom I agonized for hours over English themes and
history dissertations. Now she writes pages of stories for a good-sized newspaper each day. This is the
little girl whose checking account never balanced.. Now she has enough money saved up to fly to a
cousin's wedding and to talk about a vacation in Europe or California.
In my own childhood, the end of a visit with my grandparents out in the country was a walk to
the country store, where my grandfather would buy me a half of a pint box of vanilla ice cream, sliced
with the store's cheese knife. Even after they moved to town and he was in his eighties, he still would
pay when we ate lunch together at the American Cafe or McDaniel's. My own father was the same
way. The only meals of his I ever got to pay for were those my wife served in our own house. It was an
important act to him that he pay the restaurant bill, even though he had given up morning coffee breaks
on principle when the price of a cup of coffee went up to ten cents. It was also important for his last
words, each time I left after a visit, to be a question: "Do you need anything?"
The only way to give our offspring their independence is to give up some of our own, to accept
dependence upon those who were for years our dependents. Most of us resist it. The habit of having
our children depend upon us is deeply rutted in us. The pride of being responsible for them is gigantic.
A graceful acceptance of reversed roles is awkward. Worst of all is the psychological shock of
realizing they are free of us.
Parents have enormous pride of authorship. These grown-up children of ours are our creations.
We gave them birth, and then molded their lives. Parents are as creative as inventors, writers, artists,
and architects.Most of us do fairly well at being parents. There aren't too many Frankenstein monsters
running around. We have some right to be proud of our creations.
But when a creation becomes independent of its creators, pride takes a fall. Godlike as we are, a
child’s declaration of independence hits hard and opens our eyes like the apple falling on Newton. We
are accustomed to thinking that our children's transitions into adulthood and freedom come easily and
routinely–through graduations and weddings. But then we stumble suddenly onto hard evidence that
they are really grown and gone.
The turnip greens, creamed corn, black-eyed peas, cornbread, chess pie, and iced tea at the
truck-stop to which our daughter took me were super. But the revelation at the cash register floored
me. I wish I had gotten her to autograph, date, and frame the greasy menu or the meal ticket.
What a glorious blessing it has been these 25 years, to be needed! We are proud of our creation
and selfish about surrendering her. We have a second daughter with ten more years of needs for us to
handle. By then, we'll be old enough for roles to be reversed, retired and ready to move in with them. If
they buy us lunch, we'll follow them home.
But not just yet. A bit longer . . . please.
BBeennddiinngg tthhee TTwwiigg:: PPaaggeess ffrroomm tthhee JJoouurrnnaall ooff aa PPiillggrriimm PPaarreenntt // 3333
March 5, 1991
HIGH MARCH WINDS OF ANXIETY
March is the month when the anxieties of high school seniors and their parents reach a peak.
March is the month in which most colleges notify applicants of their admissions decisions and
their scholarship awards.
In the South, this anxiety over whether a student gets into the college of choice and receives a
scholarship to attend it is a relatively recent phenomenon. As recently as forty years ago, going to
college was not an option for most southern youngsters. Back then, the region's proudest achievement
was in seeing larger numbers make it all the way through the twelfth grade. Only a few out of each
graduating class went on for further study.
The great majority did not have to worry about national test scores, grade-point-averages, class
rank, college ratings, spread of club and sport activities, campus visits, interviews, college nights,
guidance counselors, application forms, reference letters, federal family income reports, and college
quota systems.
Even the few who were college-bound back then usually had little difficulty in applying and
being admitted at one or two campuses. Outside the Ivy League, few colleges showed much selectivity
or over-crowding.
The G. I. Bill, federal financial aid, expansion of state universities and community colleges,
and shifts in employment patterns changed all that. Higher education enrollment grew from five
percent of the college-age population at the beginning of the century to 20 percent by World War II,
and since then to 50 percent of college-age population. Since 1945, the number of campuses has
increased to 3,340.
The choice of not going to college has declined: half of our young do go. The choices of where
to apply have increased; there are three times the number of campuses to consider that there were only
a few years back.
But what have also changed are the costs of attending any of these colleges and the selectivity
standards of many of them. Going to college today requires finding "the right-fit" financially and
academically at several more colleges than one used to apply to, passing over all sorts of barriers and
checkpoints, and hoping that one gets in.
Springtime admissions anxiety is much higher among parents than among their offspring.
Admission to the "right" college is anxiety-producing for parents because they consider it a test
of their own success in their work, in their social standing, in their income level, and in their parenting.
Often, failure to get their son or daughter into the chosen niche is considered a personal failure on their
part as parents.
College admission is also anxiety-producing for parents because they want and compete to get
for their children what they wanted and often forewent for themselves–"the best", rather than secondor third-best. One has only to look at their children's clothes, electronics equipment (stereos, CD
players, computers, automobiles, TVs, phones, and even FAX machines), and entertainment
allowances (fast foods, movies, parties, travel), to see that parents in a consumer-society may still be
depriving themselves but are satisfying their consumption-urges by buying for their children. College
is but another of many modern "necessities" through which parents can materially express their
affection for their children and measure their own success.
The symbols of parental success are children with the right autos enrolled in the colleges,
smiling happily with orthodontic teeth. Choosing, chasing, and catching the right college takes on
gigantic proportions in parental psyches.
Admission to the right college is as close as parents can get to a guarantee that a son or
daughter 1) will not have “to go through what I did" in finding jobs and spouses; 2) will be assured of
social standing with fellow students who become important "contacts" as alumni; 3) will receive
parent-like personal attention to their health, morality, manners, safety, career counseling, and
BBeennddiinngg tthhee TTwwiigg:: PPaaggeess ffrroomm tthhee JJoouurrnnaall ooff aa PPiillggrriimm PPaarreenntt // 3344
homework needs away from home; 4) will be entertained and educated enough to be kept so busy as to
be insulated from drugs, crime, AIDS, war, pregnancy, and early marriage; and 5) will develop
abilities simultaneously to conform and to shine, to "fit in" and to "stand out".
A great deal of work and a whole lot of expectation go into selecting and waiting to hear from
that one college of choice which seems best able to fulfill these hopes. Parents and their children
psychologically settle upon only one "first choice". The fact that some 3,339 alternatives are available
does not relieve the pressure they place upon themselves in settling on that one choice–nor does the
fact that these students are much more adaptable to varying places of learning than they are given
credit for.
The consumer-system of higher education is the counterpart of brand-name buying, designerlabel costuming, and prestige-marketing, one of many ways classless, egalitarian democracy creates
distinctions and “edges".
We puff up the importance of a college choice beyond reasonable proportions. Our minds can
tell us that the "advantages" of admission to the right colleges are probably not nearly as certain as they
appear, but our parental hearts tell us not to risk our children's futures on that probability.
Heart wins out over head every time. All of our anxieties over ourselves, our posterity, and the way our
society works entwine in the March of our offspring's senior year in high school.
BBeennddiinngg tthhee TTwwiigg:: PPaaggeess ffrroomm tthhee JJoouurrnnaall ooff aa PPiillggrriimm PPaarreenntt // 3355
May 21, 1991
SAILING INTO SUMMER SALES
Where do all our young people go in summertime? In former times, they were visible to the eye
everywhere. They owned the summer months and nights, and were evident all around. But nowadays,
once the schools recess in June, they just disappear.
More and more of them are using their summers for education. The number of high school
camps in music, science, math, art, language, computers, government, marching band, cheerleading,
flag-bearing, football, basketball, soccer, and study abroad is almost as astonishing as the astronomical
numbers of students enrolled in them. Learning the best way to avoid boredom and to acquire an "extra
edge" for college adulthood has become the major summer employer of young people's time.
Proposals to extend the school year to twelve months may strike many of us as radically
extreme ideas, but the truth is that young people and their parents have already made that extension of
learning to cover summertime.
College students spend their summers much the same way as do high schoolers–in some form
of learning. Many of them do tend towards beach and resort work, towards construction, and towards
internships away from home.
In the old days, a popular summer employment for college athletes was selling Bibles door to
door. Later on, the same system was used for selling vegetable and flower seed packets for seed
companies. A fine former student of mine is now heading up a company that uses college athletes
during summer season to sell home fire extinguishers.
There's a parable in that trend somewhere. The Bible was the secret to securing a blessed life
after death, and seeds provided sustenance and beauty for life in this world; but the fire extinguishers
help us to hold on to whatever we have accumulated and want to protect.
Does this change in the products being sold (and sought) indicate a progress for our society–or
a retrogression? Have we become more possessive and protective, more frightened and insecure and
less forward-looking to a "better life"? Does the future, which always has offered us "more and better",
now seem clouded with "less and worse"? If scriptures and seeds promised our parents "a way up and
out", but extinguishers offer our children "a way to hold on”, what this change mean?
One sad sense to the change is that the relationship between work and play for young people
seems to have changed. Although we do not seem to see as many of them working in as many places
as we once did–except in sacking groceries, perhaps–they do seem to be very hard at work.
They seem terribly earnest. Hard work once was what they did in between having fun. In fact,
hard work was even a way of having fun. But now they study and work as if their futures depend upon
it. They have a sober, solemn, systematic seriousness conspicuously about them, as if they have
already learned that their survival, or success, or superiority, depends upon their getting skilled in selfselling.
Social analysts and trend-tracers who are making prophecies today about life in the 21st
century tell us that–unless catastrophe occurs and we all revert to hunting and farming–the mainstream
American occupation will soon become that of brokering and marketing information and services.
Selling one's own personality and acting as an agent for "networking" far-flung "contacts" and
"contracts" will become the dominant vocation. It will be international in scope and highly
computerized in content, with an emphasis upon information-access and communication technology.
Because they are chronologically closer to the future than we oldsters are, the antennae of
young people are always more sensitive to the future than those of us set in our ways.
I find this somewhat sad and unsettling to see and to say. Somehow summer for the young
ought always to be a season of sharing scriptures and seeds and sunshine silliness, not a fire
extinguisher drill for insuring their future possessions.
BBeennddiinngg tthhee TTwwiigg:: PPaaggeess ffrroomm tthhee JJoouurrnnaall ooff aa PPiillggrriimm PPaarreenntt // 3366
May 28, 1991
GRANITE GRATITUDE
Our pasts catch up with us.
The other day a former student of mine from back at another campus and some 14 years ago
walked into my office. He was a stand-out quarterback during our few winning football seasons then.
It took me a moment to place his face because he had lost most of his hair. As it turned out, he
has been battling serious cancer problems for the past few years.
He’s only in his mid-30's. A continuing sore mid-way down his spine had shown up malignant.
An operation was supposed to have arrested the malignancy, but then it had popped up again with a
very large tumor pressing on his brain. That, too, was treated and thought to be arrested.
Then the cancer came again, in his abdomen and on a lung.
Courageously, he has undergone about every cancer treatment known to medicine at one of the
great cancer centers of the nation. As of December, there was no evidence of cancer remaining
anywhere in his body.
It has been a physical and mental ordeal for him surpassing anything he ever experienced on
the football field.
As I listened to him describe his odyssey through pain and suffering, it became clear that he
had learned a hard way how very little that we have and how very few of the blessings we enjoy can be
taken for granted. For this star athlete and bright scholar whose primary assets were fine physical
health and sharp mental agility, the loss of both could have been a shattering blow.
Fortunately, in his case, those assets he had taken for granted–as we take for granted flowers
blooming each spring or water coming out of the faucet each time we turn the handle–were key
elements in giving him the will and physical strength to resist this new opponent.
There is a very good chance that he has won this game. Even if he hasn't, he has won
something just as important.
"I learned most of all," he told me, "something I knew all along but never thought that deeply
about before–the importance of loving support. My family and friends, and even strangers, pulled in
around me and held me up with their love. I never had to play alone."
Whenever his will power, our energy, and alertness sagged, they were there with him. They
didn’t number in the thousands as had the Saturday fans of his college days who had cheered his
wizardry and booed his errors. These supporters were fewer in number, more like teammates on the
field with him.
No good quarterback faces an opposing eleven men alone. What makes a good quarterback
good are the ten players on his team between him and the opposition.
How many funerals have we attended where we heard sons or daughters lament through tears,
that they "never had a chance to say how much they loved them"?
How many of us have buried cherished co-workers we depended upon every day but seldom
had time to praise?
How many of us have pledged to our closest classmates and childhood friends to "stay in
touch", only to find decades have passed without doing it?
How many of us have been indelibly indebted to a special teacher or a sustaining citizen
without ever going back to express thanks to them?
Sometimes we forget the team we play on.
We goof up.
This young man was fortunate to have a good team around him.
They were the people–and they carried the love–he "had taken for granted".
BBeennddiinngg tthhee TTwwiigg:: PPaaggeess ffrroomm tthhee JJoouurrnnaall ooff aa PPiillggrriimm PPaarreenntt // 3377
August 13, 1991
A GREAT AUNT
Christmas came on the Fourth of July this year. My mother couldn't wait until December to
give me my present, a Christmas bell.
It’s no ordinary bell, but a brass hand-bell that belonged to my late Aunt Charlie, principal from
1922 to 1955 of the Robert E. Lee Elementary School that my mother, her brother and sisters, my
brother and I all attended, and across from which we lived for the six or so best years of my life.
Aunt Charlie–or “Miss Charlie” as generations of school children remember her–had joined the
school faculty in there in 1909. When she was forced by law to retire 46 years later, she went back to
college to upgrade her teaching certificate with a folk-dancing course, lied about her age and taught in
Florida five more years, and then came home to Paris, Tennessee.
Her students recall her mostly for her discipline. She used the big bell to start and end the
school day and to call each class in from recess, but she didn't need it. More often she simply clapped
her hands. Her legion of former students liken that sound to a crack of thunder. She commanded
instant attention and respect from every student she supervised. In her retirement, in her eighties, she
attended a dinner across town, to which she walked. She had never learned to drive, and she preferred
not to waste scant teachers' retirement money on a taxi. It was dark when the dinner was over, and a
middle-aged former student, recalling the manners she drilled into him, offered to walk her home. She
refused his offer, saying she was unafraid because "I can lick any man in this town–and have."
Her middle name was Irene, but no one ever used that. The “Charlie” allegedly came from a
relative who died young, although some claimed it had something to do with a lost suitor. Through her
career, she left behind more children she called her own than any spinster I ever heard of.
She was actually my great-aunt, one of my grandfather's four sisters, all of them school
teachers, all well-educated and well-read. Granddaddy himself didn’t go to school, but he was superb
at reading and figuring. After 30 years delivering rural mail, he gave the 33 years of his retirement to
politics, chairing the Democratic Party, serving in the legislature, Constitutional Convention, and on
school boards, building a high school and then roads connecting county schools, and pushing an
education agenda.
So Aunt Charlie's school bell has within it a lot of family tradition in the cause of good
education. I have always lusted after the bell for what it symbolizes, and have tried to lead my own life
in continuity with the service to education those great aunts and their brother bequeathed me. Next
year will mark my own half-century of being in an institution of learning, with 28 of them as an
administrator and teacher and all 50 of them as a student. I know I am here in faithfulness to the family
fixation with education, but I've never had the slightest temptation to leave; there's too much left to do
and to learn ever to think of not being in education.
I’ve said often that I never had a bad teacher. Aunt Charlie used to say she never had a bad
student. We probably have both been naive and utopian about how important education is and about
the prospects for making and keeping education's institutions good. But in a world where good causes
go begging, she chose one of the best ones to champion.
Giving me her cause to fight, she gave me her greatest gift. She was truly a great great-aunt.
But getting her bell is icing on the cake. It passed upon her death to her youngest sister, and
from her to her son, and thence to the son's widow, whose own children unselfishly agreed that I
should have it. After several unbroken decades of getting pajamas and shirts from Mother for
Christmas, she was at last located for me the perfect gift. It more than makes up for not getting an
electric train years ago.
The bell will rest conspicuously in a glass dome on a walnut base with a brass plaque as long as
I am still around. To my absolute delight, our daughters have already begun to lay claims for who will
get it after that. It pleases me that they have developed such keen eyes for things of true value.
I suspect they got some of that from a great, great Aunt Charlie they never knew.
BBeennddiinngg tthhee TTwwiigg:: PPaaggeess ffrroomm tthhee JJoouurrnnaall ooff aa PPiillggrriimm PPaarreenntt // 3388
September 17, 1991
AUTOMATIC DEFROST: SALVATION ILLUSION
You know "the frost is on the pumpkin" when your children don't even know what frost is. We
have created a frost-free world for them.
We were brought up on the principle that one should not shoot, cook, and eat a rabbit until after
the first frost in the fall. Frost kills rabies.
It is a sign of both a generation gap and of a rural-urban transition that our daughters shudder
when we mention eating rabbits and that they have no first-hand experience of having seen any animal
with rabies.
We come from the Rabid Rabbit Age; theirs is a Rapid Transit Age.
They also sneer in disbelief when we mention eating opossums and barbecued goat. Even the
mention of eating a baked sweet potato gives them the shivers. Country gourmet cooking is galloping
off into the sunset. The ritual of passing on secret and unwritten family recipes from mother to
daughter has been lost. Who would have thought that yesterday's commonplace kitchen fare would
ever become exotic and threatened with extinction?
Our prodigy's obvious absence of a sense of good taste gives rise to a greater fear. Without
eating what can be taken from field and forest and stream, are they prepared well for sheer survival?
What are they going to eat if the power plants close down and the microwaves and freezers disappear?
Will they be able to dig beneath the pavement and live off the land beneath it again?
In his famous autobiography, Henry Adams spent the 19th century looking for God and
meaning, only to conclude at life's end that the closest thing to such Power in the modern world is the
dynamo.
In a world accustomed to splitting atoms rather than hares, Power is produced for us rather than
being uncovered and developed within us. Machines and human manipulation training seminars are
today's sources of power, replacing a self-sufficiency once sustained by gathered fruits of the land and
by occasional neighborliness.
Little good is accomplished by passing judgment on what has come to be. Age makes
malcontents of us all, but in all fairness, the fault may be as much within us as in the new society
which we lament. We are intimidated by the unfamiliarity of the new terrain, and so we defend
ourselves the best we can–by looking backwards. Among the oldest of us, the trait of recalling nothing
but the remote past is very evident.
Our minds resemble our bodies. Both move in circles rather than straight lines. We arc upward
from infancy to middle age, reach an apex, arc downward, and complete the loop. It all comes out even
in the end. Our lives imitate in threescore-and-ten years nature's annual cycle of seasons.
Except for the human spirit.
Our bodies may blossom and then decay. Our minds may move from making and storing
memorable moments in our youth into reviving and reliving those memories more and more often in
our maturity. But the human spirit moves on. The human spirit is ever-progressive, never-cyclical.
Spirit informs our bodies and our minds; it even influences their options and actions. But spirit
exists autonomously of both mind and body. It moves ever forward, not in circles. It brings the past
along with it, even as it anticipates the future and turns it into the present. United with others it forms a
general spirit of an age, but without being repetitive and also without breaking continuity. Each era has
its own spirit-characteristics.
The instinct for survival is no weaker these days than it was in earlier times of famine, flood,
epidemic, and wilderness. What has changed is the definition of what is needed for survival.
Today's survival kit often consists of human manipulation skills, relativistic ethics, contacts,
networking, some academic degrees and certificates, investment capital, friendliness with technology,
and a certain type of cold-heartedness and self-love–along with a legalistic ability to threaten to take
anyone to court while managing to stay out of court yourself.
BBeennddiinngg tthhee TTwwiigg:: PPaaggeess ffrroomm tthhee JJoouurrnnaall ooff aa PPiillggrriimm PPaarreenntt // 3399
That's a different level of survival than we knew in the age of frost. Unlike our young people,
we are not familiar with nor unafraid of technology and city life. It is foreign to us, and so we fear it.
We come from the frost age and know how the landscape lies when the power is cut off. That
experience gives us an advantage, because we are less likely to be caught unprepared if the modern
infrastructures decay and the bridges fall in. It also gives us a disadvantage, because we are less likely
than our young to be daring, to take risks, or to sample or invent new things.
We wish there were a way for our heirs to learn about and be able to live in both worlds if ever
it is necessary. Telling them about it doesn't always sink in, not does reading about it.
Maybe the generations should spent more vacation time together out where survival means
feeding off the land. Maybe life in the frost age is something "you have to be there to understand".
But then, so is life in this frost-free age–and I'm not sure I'm all here at all.
BBeennddiinngg tthhee TTwwiigg:: PPaaggeess ffrroomm tthhee JJoouurrnnaall ooff aa PPiillggrriimm PPaarreenntt // 4400
October 29, 1991
CONSISTENT CATALYST OF COLLEGE CHANGE
The unheralded and silent work of a philanthropist who died forty years ago this year has
become as important for higher education in this second half of the 20th century as Andrew Carnegie
and his libraries were in the first.
His name was Franklin W. Olin, and his legacies are the F. W. Olin Foundation, Inc., and its
works. Since 1940, the foundation has built nearly 60 academic buildings at nearly 50 American
campuses.
Franklin W. Olin was born in Vermont in 1860 and reared in relative obscurity and hardship:
His formal education consisted of only one year of school, but he studied hard on his own and
qualified himself for admission to Cornell University in civil engineering. Olin taught school and
repaired farm machinery to get the funds to enroll and played professional baseball in the summers to
pay his way through. His batting record was .316, and he was so good he could have chosen a career in
baseball. Fortunately for higher education, he didn't.
Instead, Olin started off working for a patent attorney, then designed textile machinery, and
then became superintendent of construction for a powder mill in New Jersey being built by a cousin.
The cousin abandoned the project, and Olin took over, saving the project so much money that his
bonus was as big as his salary. For the next five years, he built more powder mills on contract, and
then went into the powder manufacturing business for himself. He reduced risks by inventing
processes to lessen the danger of explosions, and he founded the Equitable Powder Mfg. Co. in East
Alton, Illinois, in 1892. The duPonts were impressed enough to buy heavily in his stock and then to
offer him management of the Phoenix Powder Mfg. Co. in New Jersey and West Virginia.
As this century dawned, explosives were being transformed. Dynamite was becoming a major
industry, and breech-loading shotguns were replacing muzzleloaders. Olin began making powder for
shotgun shells, then expanded to making paper shell casings for his powder, and expanded again to
make shot, primer, and wads for the shells. He prudently avoided heavy debt and escaped the fate of
competitors who expanded too much in the euphoria after World War I. Such caution made it possible
for him to buy the famous Winchester Arms Co. in New Haven, CT, when it was in financial straits in
1931. He could then make guns as well as ammunition.
Then came World War II, and Olin's United States Cartridge Company, a subsidiary, became
the largest small arms ammunition company in history, churning out 14 billion rounds. In 1944 all Olin
companies were united into the Western Cartridge Co. and the whole renamed Olin Industries, later
changed to Olin Corp.
Using his personal funds, Olin established his foundation in 1938. He assigned to it upon his
death in 1951 the bulk of his estate. He turned over management of the foundation to three
businessmen, who ran it in their spare time and without the aid of professionals. One of them, Charles
L. Horn, was president of Federal Cartridge Corporation.
Over the years, the foundation moved towards its 1960 policy, still in effect, of making sizable
building grants to independent colleges. The foundation insists on providing total costs, including
furnishings, for each building it funds.
In the southeastern states alone, it has given a computer science/mathematics building to
Birmingham-Southern, a science and computer science building to Centre, ceramic engineering and
chemical engineering buildings to Clemson (pre-1960), an engineering building to Hampton Institute, a
sciences building to Millsaps, an arts and humanities building to Roanoke, a library to Rollins, an
engineering building to Vanderbilt, and a physics building to Wake Forest.
The Franklin W. Olin Building at Wofford College cost of $5.9 million. Its 46,000 square feet
houses faculty offices and classrooms for departments of mathematics, computer sciences, and foreign
languages, offices for visiting professors and a summer program for talented students, and the very
latest video, computer, and audio teaching equipment.
BBeennddiinngg tthhee TTwwiigg:: PPaaggeess ffrroomm tthhee JJoouurrnnaall ooff aa PPiillggrriimm PPaarreenntt // 4411
This is a gift that has transformed Wofford ways of planning, teaching, learning, and
collaboration between faculty and students. A catalyst for significant change, this building was already
revolutionary even before its doors open early in 1992.
Grants are made only to those institutions showing they can multiply the positive effects of the
building. A quest for a grant becomes an impetus for campus planning, for expanded alumni and
trustee investment, for curriculum and teaching renewal, and for momentum and reform.
The foundation's president, Lawrence W. Milas, uses a metaphor of a planted seed to describe
the blossoming and harvesting effects of a successful grant.
Because of Franklin W. Olin, a foundation with over $230 million in assets committed to a
singular purpose, private colleges have shown resiliency and progress, surviving the run-away
economy of the last fifty years to remain the adaptable model for undergraduate liberal arts education
they have been for America since Harvard's founding in 1636.
That, even more than the Franklin W. Olin buildings, is quite a legacy for one man. It is a
legacy of wizardry. Bullets have been turned into buildings, and buildings into academic excellence.
BBeennddiinngg tthhee TTwwiigg:: PPaaggeess ffrroomm tthhee JJoouurrnnaall ooff aa PPiillggrriimm PPaarreenntt // 4422
June 9, 1992
OUT OF THE NEST AND OUT ON A LIMB
In our daughter's high school annual this spring we noticed several parents and other relatives
of seniors bought ads congratulating their graduating offspring.
We like that tradition.
Most of the ads are relatively simple. "We're proud of you. You are everything we hoped you
would be." One says, “Thanks for coloring my years."
A few include photos of the graduates. Some have two pictures: "Then", as a baby, and "Now",
as a young adult. Some of the photos include the whole family, often at a family picnic or other rare
(these days) occasion when they were all together.
Our favorite is of a rock musician whom we happen to know. The photo shows him as he is.
His hair is down below his shoulders, and except for his blazer, white shirt, and tie, he looks like
someone left behind by the Sixties. But we know him as one of the gentlest of souls and most generous
of hearts.
Beside his picture a quotation from e. e. cummings's “A Poet's Advice to Student" reads: "To
be nobody but yourself–in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else–
means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting."
The lines say as much about the parents as they do the son, and choosing them for publication
upon his graduation says pages about the nature and depth of love they share as a family.
Graduations are not as happy and as carefree as they appear. No moment of rites of passage
ever is. Being born, entering school, joining a church, graduating, entering a full-time job, getting
married, becoming a parent, and then seeing your own children reach the same milestones you did, are
pit-stops along the raceway of life, and it takes extra effort at each one to get revved up to get back out
on the monotonous track and back into the race.
For the graduates, the fears for the future natural to the experience of transition are
momentarily counteracted by the exhilaration of achievement and the novelty of becoming responsible
for themselves.
But their parents have been there themselves before, and the experience is more wrenching for
them.
"Have we done all we could have done to prepare them?" they wonder. “Are we ready to see
them leave childhood and us?"
Parents seem to age overnight after high school graduations. It’s as if, having preserved their
own youth by 18 years of transfusions from their offspring, they are suddenly deprived of the elixir.
Parents live for their children because they need children to keep themselves charged with
meaning and purpose.
It is a symbiosis as old and as wondrous as anything in nature.
Giving them up hurts. It hurts because parents know they will not be needed as much or as
often or with as much intensity afterward.
It hurts because parents know where the grease-slicks and curves are on the track ahead and
want to keep on steering.
It hurts because authorship and authority, art forms though they are, have to be ceded;
biography-making gives way to autobiography, and children grow up to write their own books.
Parents properly accept congratulations at the same time as do their graduating children.
But look closely at them that day.
See their wry forced smiles and quivering lower eyelids.
And applaud their courage for letting loose as much as their achievement of having held close.
BBeennddiinngg tthhee TTwwiigg:: PPaaggeess ffrroomm tthhee JJoouurrnnaall ooff aa PPiillggrriimm PPaarreenntt // 4433
August 4, 1992
HANDLING THE TROOPS
Geared less and less to producing goods through agriculture and industry, the American society
of the 21st Century will be dominated by sales and services.
This people-oriented society will require large numbers of administrators. Education for
administration of people serving people is rapidly becoming a major industry within itself.
The field of organizational leadership management is packed with assortments of motivational
experts, social psychologists, behaviorists, time-and-motion specialists, management professors, and
retired executives. What all these theories have in common is a belief that no one “is a born leader".
Leaders arise in response to societal needs and are educated formally and informally to respond to
those needs. I have a couple of bookshelves full of books on leadership education. “Total Quality
Management" (called TQM by those in the know) is the current best-seller in industry and education.
Personally in my career in higher education, I’ve always found Civil War history to be about as
reliable as any method for learning about administering college. Let me give some examples of the
things one can learn about college administration from reading good Civil War histories.
No Civil War army ever had enough resources. I realize that is not true for the northern forces,
since their endless supply of men and materiel were the primary reason the South lost. But until Grant
took command in 1863, shortages of resources were perceived to be a fact even in the North.
McClellan and others always thought they were outnumbered. Pinkerton spies turning in inflated
counts of rebels abetted this myopia.
No college or university I have every known among the 3,400 operating today ever has enough
resources. Pushing to keep the doors open is a given, common to all levels of the American education
system. Those Civil War generals who performed the best-–Lee, Jackson, Forrest, and Joe Johnston on
one side, and Sherman and Sheridan on the other–did what they could about the shortages but never let
them keep them from moving and fighting. They adapted to the landscape, relied on the initiative of
their hungry troops to get by, and kept moving ahead. Sometimes a strong sense of purpose and
surprise are more powerful motivators than rumbling stomachs and grumbling troops.
When they did move, the more successful armies were those which did not waste men or
opportunities. None of Forrest's independent engagements were full-scale major battles, but he kept the
countryside alarmed and many a northern general in his tent by striking suddenly and disappearing.
Sometimes a continuous barrage of small advances does more good than a major encounter of
Armageddon proportions. (Lee seemed to have forgotten this at Gettysburg.)
The morals are obvious: Lose your purpose and your improvisation skills and you lose the war;
the best generals cared about their troops. The lessons from Civil War history could go on and on: the
importance of spontaneity, the importance of ceremonies (Grand Reviews, awards events, promotions,
playing Taps), the importance of symbols (flags and songs and nicknames and heroes), the importance
of planning, the importance of assessment (topographical study of “the lay of the land" for short cuts,
lines of advance and retreat, supplies, and post-battle evaluation of performance and results and costbenefits), and the importance of communications.
What commends Civil War history most to us as a means of learning administrative skills is
that, in contrast to textbooks on management, it is just plain interesting. Business models merely imply
battles; Civil War history gives us the real thing.
BBeennddiinngg tthhee TTwwiigg:: PPaaggeess ffrroomm tthhee JJoouurrnnaall ooff aa PPiillggrriimm PPaarreenntt // 4444
November 17, 1992
UPPER LIMITS OF RATINGS USEFULNESS
With his popular “Ten Most..." or “Ten Best..." or "Ten Worst..." routine, David Letterman
knows that most of us are suckers for ratings and rankings.
Football fans are more interested in the Monday rankings of the top 25 university teams than in
the Saturday game. Voters are more interested in polls than in candidates. Whole evenings of
television are reserved for acting and music awards, beauty contests, and for “People's Choice" awards.
There are lists for Best Dressed and Worst Dressed. Media have phone-in numbers for polls on all
matters of things.
Whole bureaus of government and education do nothing else but compile comparative statistics
on everything from infant mortality rates to literacy levels and per capita income, comparing sections
within the United States or comparing the United States with other countries.
“Biggest," “Best", “Top", “Leading", “Highest", and “No.1" are America's frequently used
adjectives.
During World War II metal toys were scarce. Our neighborhood gang used sticks and fingers
for pistols to play cowboys and Indians. Somehow a couple of the older boys got real cap pistols, and
then refused to let my brother and me play because our weapons weren't good enough. Our dad
marched us to the dime store and invested in a couple of cap pistols, actually of better quality than
those of our reluctant playmates. We jumped instantly from last place to first in armaments. As it
turned out, the problem had little to do with pistol whippings. The other fellows just hadn't wanted to
play with us that day.
Ratings and rankings often are excuses for having to wrestle with sharing space. They are
seldom what they seem to be. They appear to address numerically the defining of quality, but
appearances deceive. Excellence cannot always be reduced to statistics and measured in figures.
Part of my work at the fine college I serve has to do with marketing, a matter of communicating
the college's nature to the general public and to prospective students and donors. The college has had
extremely good fortune in ranking very well in almost all media polls and ratings and in comparative
college guide books used by high school counselors, parents, and prospective students. These books
and magazine ratings sell very well. The annual fall U S. News & World Report issue allegedly is as
popular as the swimsuit edition of Sports Illustrated. Over the past ten years, these college opinion
ratings have improved themselves considerably, both in the quantifiable data they compile and share
and in the narrative judgments they reach. Accuracy and credibility are major moral issues for them,
and for our society as well, because the guides and rankings have gigantic influences on college
enrollments and reputations.
As they have become more accurate, college ratings books have become more helpful. Being
helpful to colleges and college-bound students is precisely the niche these books should serve in our
culture.
The very great danger in such ratings is not inaccurate data, although that happens sometimes,
but in being assumed by readers to be definitive and comprehensive. Being helpful means providing
the first word, not the last, to students and parents.
Their best use is as hints, clues, and leads for their readers. They are the circus barkers, not the
circus. The serious prospective student has to get past the reviews and inside and under the tent.
Beyond the rankings, campus visits, conversations with alumni, faculty, and students, study of the
courses offered and of where faculty got their degrees, and the feel of the roads to and the town around
the campus are important.
Most important of all is the student's instinct. Motivation for doing well in college ultimately
depends upon the student, and motivation ultimately gets linked to emotions, to the “feel" of a place.
BBeennddiinngg tthhee TTwwiigg:: PPaaggeess ffrroomm tthhee JJoouurrnnaall ooff aa PPiillggrriimm PPaarreenntt // 4455
There are hundreds of campuses of every imaginable type that don't make annual ratings. Some
are good, even superior, colleges. No one should ignore them just because they aren't in a magazine or
guidebook.
As a matter of fact, enterprising students will look closely at some of them precisely because
they aren't listed in the ratings.
Lacking ratings visibility, many such colleges are making up for it in recruiting students by 1)
offering more student financial aid grants, and 2) playing the Avis game of “trying harder because we
are #2." Consciously-improved personalization, living conditions, and teaching often are found in
unlisted colleges, just as some of the greatest places in America to live or visit are off of the main
roads and out on the back roads.
Don't be thrown off by ratings.
Double-check.
BBeennddiinngg tthhee TTwwiigg:: PPaaggeess ffrroomm tthhee JJoouurrnnaall ooff aa PPiillggrriimm PPaarreenntt // 4466
November 24, 1992
AT A LOSS FOR WORDS
Our daughter, filling out another scholarship form last week, ran into a stumbling block.
All these forms ask for short essays, but usually indicate they can be written in black ink or
typed. This one didn't give that option. It insisted on the essay being typed, double-spaced, and fitting
in the space allocated for it on the form. The problem was we don't have a typewriter any more.
Neither do our friends. When we took the form to my office to type, we found five typewriters,
but all of such dated models that we couldn't figure out how to use them. Many people now have
computers (word processors) instead of typewriters, but many will not print on questionnaire-spaced
forms or envelopes. Isn't that amazing?
A commonplace typewriter has become a thing of the past. It was a significant invention which
had a lifetime of little over a century. You can see them in a museum like William Faulkner's home in
Oxford, Mississippi, or Carl Sandburg's home in East Flat Rock, North Carolina, or in an occasional
old-timer newspaper editor's office in a small town. The technology of our youth is now an antique.
The same week we discovered the typewriter is becoming extinct we wandered into an office
supply store. It had a couple of seductive glass cases filled with pens, expensive pens with famous
brand names such as Parker, Cross, and Sheaffer. Not a one was a fountain pen. Isn't that amazing?
Fountain pens can still be bought, but usually on special order. In the ink section of the store,
there were rows of ballpoint pen refill packages, but only one short row of liquid ink cartridge refills
and only three bottles of ink, kept for old-timers like me, l suppose.
I work with a young man whose most shining distinction is his beautiful handwriting. He says
the best advice his father ever gave him was that “good handwriting will get you anywhere in this
world". (My own father said that about Saturday night shoe shining, but my mother felt a smile was a
more important asset.)
But good handwriting is disappearing. Letters preserved from previous generations are genuine
works of art, because the handwriting was so beautiful. Now it is a lost art. Isn't that amazing?
I have noticed a parallel decline in poetry and speeches over the years. People don't memorize
and spout poems the way they once did, nor compose poems themselves as anyone in earlier other
generations was unafraid to do. There's a conspicuous decline in political and pulpit oratory, and there
is the advent of the ten-second sound-bite for media use. Isn't that amazing?
And the same is the true for music.
In our neighborhood, when we were growing up, we would gather around upright pianos and
sing over the shoulders of pianists Ann Powers, Harriet Wheatley, or Martha Sue Fitzsimmons (who
were equally at home in sandlot baseball games) from sheet music taken from piano benches.
Songs don't seem to have meaningful, or even decipherable, lyrics anymore. Isn't that amazing?
What does this all mean, we may well ask ourselves?
If typewriters, fountain pens, penmanship, poems, songs, and oratory disappear, are words
themselves on their way to oblivion?
I feel certain the disappearance of word-love is not caused by the disappearance of wordcarriers (typewriters or pens, poems or speeches). Such vehicles are indeed vanishing, but something
else than their demise is causing the parallel decline in the love of written words. Their passing is an
effect, not a cause.
Why are we at an increasing loss for words?
Is it stage fright caused by the world getting more and more public and smaller and smaller–
some inner instinct for not standing out in the crowd?
Is it national senility, a feeling that everything worth saying has already been said, and “there is
nothing new under the sun"?
BBeennddiinngg tthhee TTwwiigg:: PPaaggeess ffrroomm tthhee JJoouurrnnaall ooff aa PPiillggrriimm PPaarreenntt // 4477
Is it a loss of cultural norms, moral codes, or standards, a feeling that speed is more important
than form in handwriting, or that sound volume is more important than lyrics in music, or that a face is
more important than ideas in oratory?
Is it multi-culturalism, providing so many competing languages in this nation of immigrants?
Is it the lack of home or school influence?
I used to think that a love of words was linked to a love of land, and that as land ownership
declined, love of words would decline as well. Maybe there was a simplicity in agrarian America that
bred a love for words. Maybe modern modem life is too complex for words.
But I'm not sure of the assumed relation between land and poetry. l don't see why there can't be
appreciation of language in the cities.
We may not know why we are at a loss for words, but we lament the loss and salute their
passing.
BBeennddiinngg tthhee TTwwiigg:: PPaaggeess ffrroomm tthhee JJoouurrnnaall ooff aa PPiillggrriimm PPaarreenntt // 4488
December 1, 1992
ROUGH AS A COBB
Wofford College has reason to remember baseball-great Ty Cobb. A visit by the Georgia Peach
in 1913 turned out to be almost as bloody as the World War that followed four years later.
The Spartanburg Journal of Saturday, April 4, 1913, headlined “Ty Cobb's Bunch Play Here
Today", announced “the much heralded game between Ty Cobb's famous bunch of All-Stars and the
Wofford Invincibles, who have yet to taste defeat this season," and predicted a victory for the
professionals but a lively contest nonetheless. Reporting the next Tuesday, April 7, the same paper
noted that Cobb's bunch won a close one, 9-8, but that the ninth inning proved especially “amusing".
“Osborne, a Wofford player, was coaching on the third base line and Ty was pitching. What
passed between the man and the child could not be heard in the stands, but the Wofford boy bristled up
like a Bantam rooster and wanted to fight. He was just so small and Cobb was just so big that the
whole incident was really amusing. After the words, Cobb stated that he would see the player after the
game. About 613 boys gathered about Cobb intent upon killing him, or doing something else equally
as harmful, and the prompt arrival of officers saved Cobb's life."
(Notice the ambiguous accuracy of the reporting: “about 613 boys", not “about 600", and also
the imaginative understatement of the mob's intent: “intent upon killing him, or something else equally
as harmful". What could be “equally as harmful"?)
But the story didn't end on the field. Two days later, on Thursday, April 9, the Spartanburg
Herald headlined: “Tyrus Cobb and Wofford Player Fight in Hotel". Both Wofford and Cobb’s AllStars were in Greenville to play Furman University on Monday, April 6. Traveling salesmen brought
to Spartanburg the suppressed news of a fist fight between Rutledge Osborne, Wofford student from
Anderson, and Tyrus Cobb. “One report was that Osborne publicly cursed Cobb in the dining room of
the hotel; another was that Osborne drew a pistol, which was wrested from him."
The Spartanburg Journal of the same day reported that “Dr. [Henry Nelson] Snyder, president
of Wofford College, lectured the boys [i.e., the student body], deplores the affair," but would not bring
charges against the student or team.
The full story came out in the Spartanburg Herald of April 11, 1913:
“Mr. Osborne yesterday admitted that he drew a pistol when attacked by Cobb, but justified it
on the ground that Cobb was much larger than he and had made threats against him.
“After his trouble with Osborne in Spartanburg Saturday, Cobb, it is said, declared he would
‘beat Osborne's face into jelly' when they met on Monday in Greenville. Osborne said that he borrowed
the pistol to protect himself, but tried to avoid the difficulty.
"'Cobb went to [Wofford] Coach McCarthy's room and asked my name. When I was told this,
just before dinner, l slipped up to my room and put the pistol in my pocket.
“‘When dinner was over, one of my teammates and I took the elevator for the room to dress. As
the elevator started, Cobb and one of his men stepped in. When we arrived at the stop, he grasped me
by the collar and pulled me out into his room, my companion going to the first floor for the rest of the
team. l was thus alone with Cobb, Coles, McMillan and another member of Cobb's team. He struck at
me and I naturally drew the gun. This made him release me, but Cad Coles slipped up behind me and
wrenched the gun from my hand. Cobb then jumped on me and it was an easy matter for a man of his
size to beat me up considerably. l did not hunt a scrap and I hated to be mixed up in one. Cobb acted
cowardly and overbearing, and I, being only a boy, acted on the impulse of the moment."'
How's that for excitement?
Osborne later transferred to the University of South Carolina and graduated in 1916. Years
later, his service as chairman of its Board of Trustees led to naming the USC central administration
building for him. Cobb played in over 3,000 games, holds the record for runs scored, and is among the
top five all-time players in rbi’s, stolen bases, and hits. No record exists of his ever returning to the
Wofford campus.
BBeennddiinngg tthhee TTwwiigg:: PPaaggeess ffrroomm tthhee JJoouurrnnaall ooff aa PPiillggrriimm PPaarreenntt // 4499
May 5, 1993
THE NE’ER-ENDING DANCE
For safety's sake, we seek something secured: some constancy, some consistency, some
certitude. Docks on the expanding sea of change around us are fewer and farther between than ever.
The world around us changes with accelerating speed before our eyes. We live longer, but we
also live much, much faster. We see in a decade more seismic shifts in the way we live than our
parents saw in a lifetime. We dwell more and more in the fog of the coming world of our prodigy and
less and less on the solid ground of the familiar world of our progenitors.
The No-Man's Land between past and present, between verities and questionings, between
energizing innocence and paralyzing sophistication, belongs to Everyman–and Everywoman. Once,
like Icarus, we flew freely towards the heavenly sun; now we are happy for a less dizzying crag to
which to cling or at which to aim.
Be at peace. Verily, such a thing does yet exist.
The Senior Prom lives on.
It is one of the few dinosaurs that survived the post-World War and post-industrial Ice Age.
Other entrenched Truths have fallen by the wayside, buried by the avalanche of Modernity and
entombed in the glacier of Our Times. Among them: family dinners every night, Sunday night church
services, circus tents, calling cards, front porch swings, Nash and Packard cars, passenger trains, Army
football, and Classics Illustrated comic books.
The Senior Prom lives on.
The trauma of getting the right date (or a date at all) is still there. So is the quest for the perfect
dress and the most current tuxedo (pastels out-rent black). The florists still mass-produce corsages.
Parents still teach their sons how to pin them on. Daughters still prefer dresses with as little to which to
pin a corsage as possible. The theme (usually something about "Reaching for the Stars" or "Over the
Rainbow”) is still stretched in cut-out letters over the stage. The balloons are the same shapes and
colors they always have been. The hall still smells like Noxzema.
The band still plays (though less frequently) a dance slow enough for everyone with words any
waltzer can understand. The dances of preference are still outrageous and still have names; Electric
Slide and Achy-Breaky Heart line dances are great-grandchildren of the Bunny Hop. The Twist, the
Shag, and the waltz are still "in". The girls' high heels still wobble, and their feet (once the shoes come
off early in the evening) still are tinted with fresh shoe dye. The boys still huddle on one side and the
girls on the other, eyeing each other with fear and lust across wooden floors. Sideline critiques still
focus on breasts and buns. Old girlfriends still snipe with catty comments at new ones, and old
boyfriends still call new ones out for parking lot brawls.
The chaperones still glower in little corner bunches, better at guarding the punchbowl against
augmenters than at keeping dancers at arms length from each other. The punch tastes the same as it did
forty years ago. The white cakes and the cookies look and taste the same as well. There are still
breakfasts afterwards.
"Fantastic" is still the favorite word.
A few changes are noticeable.
Parents used to drive boys and their dates to the prom; now they arrive in new graduation gift
cars or rented limousines. Prices have gone up; tuxedo rentals cost now what buying a tuxedo used to
cost; dresses are the price of monthly house mortgage payments; and you could paint your house for
what a girl shells out for cosmetics. Hooped skirts are rare, and used flashbulbs don't litter the floor.
The amplifiers for the music are louder. No one has heard of no-break cards.
But little else has changed. Proms provide us with the permanence our lives need. They are as
reassuring as the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace.
Parents still take snapshots and give advice at the front door as their fledglings leave their nests.
And they still worry and wait up for them, knowing they'll never really come home again.
BBeennddiinngg tthhee TTwwiigg:: PPaaggeess ffrroomm tthhee JJoouurrnnaall ooff aa PPiillggrriimm PPaarreenntt // 5500
June 2, 1993
TALKING ABOUT TOLERANCE
At our college reunion last month I renewed a friendship and dialogue with a classmate I
haven't seen since we graduated 35 years ago. Actually, because he married in his sophomore year, we
haven't been in much touch for nearly 37 years.
In our freshman year he had a single room next to mine. An intense math major from a small
town, he was arch-conservative and absolutely impossible to budge from his opinions. Night after
night we would spend our study breaks together in never-ending debates, he wearing boxer shorts and
undershirt and green visor and reared back in his straight-backed desk chair, and I sprawled on his
upper bunk or the floor, or stalking the little room. While we had practically no beliefs in common, we
argued night after night because we trusted each other and because we loved the mental exhilaration of
debate.
From the instant we spied each other across the reunion reception floor, time instantly faded
away. Within minutes we were quoting each other to each other, picking up the dialogue where it
ended nearly four decades ago.
When we parted the next day, we told each other how grateful we were we had decided to
come to this reunion. Picking up our arguments where they had been left lying made us youngsters
again. But also, the memory of those nightly encounters encapsulates the meaning of college better
even than visiting its old buildings and finding a surviving professor.
Much of education tends to be side-dishes and desserts: fraternities and sports, courting and
cramming, reading and noting. But the main course is–or ought to be if it isn’t–what my unaging
classmate and I found it to be: intense engagement in the life of the mind.
Too often education is reduced to single-track exercises: assignments, grades, true-false or
multiple-choice questions, a single textbook, canned lectures, memorization and recitation. But
education can be so much more than that. It can be as exciting as panning for gold or drilling for oil,
and as elating as finding it.
The ability to disagree agreeably is an art form. One likes to believe it is an art which can be
taught and learned, and that it is central to our educational system.
Learning to analyze, to think, to reason, to argue, to articulate, to abstract, to illustrate, to
organize, and to connect–and enjoying the process for its own sake, simply because it is great fun–is
heavy and heady stuff. But the light bulbs of the mind turned on by the enormous energy from the
dynamo of dialogue can light up a life and a world.
The world needs light badly. It is being darkened by Balkanization, as newly-liberated
countries split into ethnic war parties and as our own country disperses into group interests based on
gender or ethnicity.
Our century was supposed to be the age in which people became color-blind, class-blind, and
sex-blind, but the reverse has happened. Because we have lost the art of bridge-building across the
chasms that naturally or traditionally bind us, we have become protectionist and isolationist in our
identities. We are struggling with our identities, and we are strangling on our diversities.
My old classmate demonstrated the fact that differences can be overcome, even without
destroying the differences themselves. Co-existence of diverse ideas, backgrounds, and biases is
entirely possible when dialogue and respect are habits of the heart.
We do not have to become clones of one another to love one another. We can have our
provincial prejudices and still live with and like one another, if we will only work at it.
If we do not make greater efforts to reach out to our differing others, we face a paralysis from
gridlock in our society and world that will make that between the presidency and Congress seem like
small potatoes.
We used to have a word for it. Some say it is sentimental and old-fashioned and inadequate, but
no adequate replacement for it has come along. It used to be called “tolerance."
BBeennddiinngg tthhee TTwwiigg:: PPaaggeess ffrroomm tthhee JJoouurrnnaall ooff aa PPiillggrriimm PPaarreenntt // 5511
June 16, 1993
THE JOY OF ASSUMING OTHERS’ DEBTS
The death in May of my special old friend, Ralph Bowden, came during a time of great changes
in federal student aid programs.
Mr. Bowden's special assistance to me covered the dozen years I was away at college and
graduate school. He was an assistant cashier at my hometown bank, and somehow the money in my
bank account always seemed to run out before the end of the month. He would deposit enough of his
own funds to cover my cold checks until after the first of the next month. He kept a couple of hundred
dollars tied up in me, without which I couldn't have completed my education. After I got out and
became independent, he continued the practice for a couple of other students. Years later I set up an
emergency student loan fund at the nearby Tennessee campus in his honor, to keep his exemplary
assistance going in perpetuity.
This nation has made a mammoth moral commitment to provide higher education opportunity
for all its young people. Half of this year's high school graduates will be in college next fall. Other
nations are content with a "natural aristocracy" of five or ten percent of their youngsters getting into
college.
Education is this nation's greatest trait, and this nation's largest industry. It surpasses in scope
the defense business, the auto industry, the computer industry, the clothing industry, and the fast foods
industry. The president who said, years ago, that "the business of America is business” would have to
amend that today. America's business is education.
What Ralph Bowden saw was that education was a good thing, that the more young people
there are who get a good education the better off the country is, and part of education is in learning
how to take care of one another.
He wrapped all of that deeply-held philosophy up into his home-made, no-interest, short-term,
loan program. It made all the difference for a few of us, and for him, too, in self-satisfaction.
Not a bad epitaph for him at all: "He made a difference."
BBeennddiinngg tthhee TTwwiigg:: PPaaggeess ffrroomm tthhee JJoouurrnnaall ooff aa PPiillggrriimm PPaarreenntt // 5522
August 11, 1993
GOING THE EXTRA MILL
Our daughter has never been to Disney World.
But she has been to Auschwitz.
She and her fellow travelers, performers in the Spartanburg High School Orchestra, have just
returned from 17 days in Europe. They visited Poland, the former Czechoslovakia, Germany, Austria,
and France, and played seven concerts.
In Poland, distant relations of the conductor in his family's ancestral hometown made a concert
especially poignant. Tears flowed freely.
They saw Krakow and Innsbruck and Paris, stayed in one fine hotel and some that weren't so
fine, stayed with families two days in Germany, received standing ovations, played encores at every
concert, signed autographs, stretched their budgets to make ends meet, fantasized over the
MacDonald's burgers they would be able to buy at journey's end in Paris, learned a lot, and had an
experience they can never forget.
These orchestra students have had the good fortune of having been in a superior school system.
Many have been enrolled in the school district's strings program since they were in the fourth grade.
The string and orchestra programs are parts of a larger music program, which includes choruses and
concert and marching bands.
Once orchestra members reach junior high school (grades 7-9), they start saving funds for their
trip abroad. They sell citrus fruits in November and December, and the school banks about five dollars
a box for them. With a little work over several years, most orchestra members save enough from sales
to cover the cost of the trip.
When they reach high school (grades 10-12), they become eligible to go on the orchestra's
European tour. Since high school is a three-year school and since a summer tour is made every third
year, each high school orchestra member could go.
The same school district begins its language programs in the fourth grade as well. A student
can get nine years of language training, either in one language or split among several. Many of the
orchestra members have had extensive foreign language courses, and most find an opportunity to use
their French, Spanish, or German on their tours. In Germany, our daughter lucked into rooming with
the family of a French teacher of English and had good opportunities to use her French. In France, the
orchestra conductor surprised her by asking her to translate for him to the audience.
Rome, once the center of the world, was built upon seven hills. Spartanburg is a center of
education built upon seven school districts, each with its own tax base and each with its own
superintendent. Citizens in most of the districts have been willing to pay higher property taxes in order
to make the schools good ones.
They have succeeded. Music and language programs are available to all students. In addition,
high school classes prepare college-aimed students wishing them for College Board and Advance
Placement exams. A wide range of supervised student activities and guidance programs makes for a
very involved and invested student body. Teachers are dedicated and excellent; the curriculum is
varied and substantial.
The emphasis upon education in this Carolina county–which also has five college campuses–
makes it one of the very best places to rear children in this nation.
In this it is aided by being a place of manageable size, with four great seasons a year, at the
crossroads of two major Interstate highways, and with easy access to the Smoky Mountains and to the
Atlantic beaches.
But the public education system here is what makes this one of highest quality counties in the
nation. What has made education succeed is a rugged and almost universal determination of many
citizens, mostly African-American and Caucasian natives, with a sprinkling of Orientals and first-
BBeennddiinngg tthhee TTwwiigg:: PPaaggeess ffrroomm tthhee JJoouurrnnaall ooff aa PPiillggrriimm PPaarreenntt // 5533
generation Europeans, whether they have children in the schools or not, to go the extra mills in taxing
for education.
These sacrificing citizens focus on education. Educational quality is even more important to
them than lower taxes, than garbage collection, or than sewers and streets.
The seven free-standing districts have good racial balance and diversity in them. The districts
compete with one another for public honors and recognitions for what they offer their students.
They protect themselves from pouring taxes down the drain through the watchdog services of
highly involved school boards, but they decided years ago that they would build a system in which
languages and the arts would draw as much fame to their schools as their outstanding athletic
programs. They have done just that.
They get great mileage out of their millage, because they address their tax assessments
fundamentally towards quality education. As a consequence, at least in this corner of the sleepy South,
the economy is optimistic, unemployment is low, economic diversification is taking place (BMW is on
its way, Flagstar and Milliken Company headquarters are already here), and both the completion rates
for students finishing 12 grades and the percentage going on to further study are admirably high.
Elsewhere myopic taxpayers see millage as a millstone around their checkbook. But here,
millage is the way on, up, and out–through education. The taxpayers have been willing to pay the
millage price. Quality taxpayers are the secret to quality education.
BBeennddiinngg tthhee TTwwiigg:: PPaaggeess ffrroomm tthhee JJoouurrnnaall ooff aa PPiillggrriimm PPaarreenntt // 5544
October 5, 1993
MOTHERHOOD: A WAY OF LIFE
Six weeks ago our family concern was how our daughters' mother (a.k.a. my wife) would adjust
to having no children at home after 28 years. Free at last, what would she do with liberty?
All in all, after a slow start, she has coped fairly well. The first week she papered the bathroom
and scrubbed sticky stuff left by old tape off of walls, doors, and desks. The first three weeks she
mailed our absentee nestlings letters or cards every day. Then she took to roaming Walmart's for “little
things they may need" and mailing them things like dental floss, light-bulbs, and artificial leaves. Last
week she found a half-time job.
She was developing a vacant look around the eyes, and she was so used to having the phone
ring constantly that she would talk with anyone unfortunate enough to call. She dotes on wrong
numbers who get her by mistake; they obviously need her motherly help. She refuses to hang up on
magazine or credit card salesmen who call at suppertime each evening. She has mastered the art of
having personalized ten-minute conversations about TIME or Visa Gold. She can ferret out the life
story of any Tom, Dick, or Harry who calls–and that of Jason, Sheila, Shondra and Geneva, as well.
But she has exercised self-discipline, too. When she found herself talking back to Ophrah and
Alex Trebeck on television and trying to remember birthdates for characters on "Days of Our Lives",
she forced herself to stop watching them.
And that's when an amazing thing happened.
Salvation comes in unsuspected ways. She flipped channels to TBS, and a miracle came along.
She adopted the Atlanta Braves.
When she stumbled across them on Turner Broadcasting, the Braves were a miserable lot,
hopelessly marooned behind the Giants, too far gone ever to catch up.
Then my wife found them, took them to her bosom, and burped them back to life.
Loving baseball requires a fascination with statistics and detail. There is a special vocabulary
that has to be learned–words like bunt, balk, fade, fly and ground. There are RBIs, HPs, ERAs, W-Ls,
and DUIs that need to be memorized and then updated instantaneously. She learned the game quickly.
But she has brought to the game a whole new dimension. She can tell you the names of most
Braves players, whether or not they are married (and, if not, whether they are engaged), which ones
scratch in public, which ones refuse to shave on road trips, which ones chew gum and which others are
secretly chewing tobacco in the dugout when the camera isn't on them, which ones read a lot, and what
the likely SAT scores would be for each.
She thinks Jeff Blauser is very intelligent and has a great sense of humor, that Mark Lemke is
lovable, that David Justice is a hunk, and that Steve Avery needs someone like her to take care of him.
Otis Nixon is experienced and dependable, and she says I could learn a lot from him about aging well.
In between games she does strange things, like reading the sports page each morning before
even getting her coffee, or going to the dentist's office to read Sports Illustrated. (We don't subscribe.
She thinks the swimsuit edition is too overdone.)
The awful thing is that when she discovered this tribe of orphans they were about 12 games
behind the Giants in the division race. Actually, that was what attracted her in the first place. These
were obviously young men in need, and Jane Fonda just wasn't getting the job done. Soon after she
started watching the Braves, they started climbing in the ratings and by late September were three
games ahead.
She is convinced she is the reason. It is almost to the superstition point. When she misses a
game, they lose. When she skips an inning to microwave our dinner, the other team scores. We miss
parties and concerts in order to watch the Braves. She is sort of a reverse Oral Roberts; she sends
power back through the TV set. In her book, she came along just in time. The Braves needed her, and
she heeded the call, and she has mothered them along very well indeed. I haven't the heart to tell her
that when she adopted them and they started winning was also about the time they hired Fred McGriff.
BBeennddiinngg tthhee TTwwiigg:: PPaaggeess ffrroomm tthhee JJoouurrnnaall ooff aa PPiillggrriimm PPaarreenntt // 5555
January 4, 1994
EVERY DOG HAS ITS DAY
We have a nephew and a brother-in-law named for the long-deceased (since 1904) Senator
George Vest, the man made famous for a speech 110 years ago in the U S. Senate, in which he said,
“The one absolutely unselfish friend that man can have in this selfish world, the one that never deserts
him, the one that never proves ungrateful or treacherous, is his dog.... When other friends, desert, he
remains.”
Senator Vest may have been paraphrasing Lord Byron's tribute of 1808, which included the
lines: “The poor dog, in life the firmest friend, / The first to welcome, foremost to defend."
Our family never had much luck with dogs. We love them, but never were able to keep one.
They always ran off, got dog-napped, were struck by cars, or developed fatal diseases. So we gave up
and came to rely upon the kindnesses of friends and kin willing to let us pet and play with their
canines. We are a drop-in uncle and aunt for other's dogs.
We sat silently awe-stricken at a Christmas office luncheon as a young couple, favorites of
ours, described what they were getting their dog for Christmas. They had their entire den reupholstered
in dark browns so the dog's shedding wouldn't show. They told us of shops that sell clothing especially
for dogs and of medical insurance plans that can be purchased for dogs. They described matings and
blood-lines that elsewhere would have been the conversation of British peers or of Kentucky horsebreeders.
We asked facetiously about doggie dental plans, and received a serious answer in return. We
are scared to ask about the dog's age, for fear of being expected to send a birthday gift each year.
Back during football season we chanced to be seated at a pre-game buffet with a bachelor
named Doane James, a Wofford alumnus, Class of '59, from Latta, S. C., who regaled us with stories
about his home companion, Snyder. Snyder is a Boston Terrier (Wofford's teams are the Terriers),
named for Snyder Field, the football team's home field, which was named for Henry Nelson Snyder,
Wofford's president from 1902 to 1942.
James is such an avid Wofford football fan that he couldn't risk the heart-strain of actually
attending Wofford's games this year against bigger-league teams at The Citadel and at Furman. He
stayed home with Snyder, and they shared a six-pack and listened to the games on the radio. When
Wofford surprised the world and itself by beating The Citadel and tying Furman, James says, "Snyder
and I were so happy, l kissed him on the lips!"
Senator Vest and Lord Byron would have appreciated Doane James and Snyder, but somehow
the image reeked of one of those parody commercials for dog perfume we see on Saturday Night Live
re-runs.
Over in Norfolk, Va., another Wofford alumnus, David Viccellio, Class of '68, has a story that
almost tops those of James and Snyder. Viccellio's golden retriever is named Wofford. Columnists Guy
Friddell and Fred Kirsch of the Virginia Pilot-Ledger Star have been intrigued by this dog's story and
reported on it in detail.
Wofford will not retrieve ordinary things like sticks, ducks, or quail. But he does have a love of
books–as does the rest of his family, David and Kat (the perfect name for the mother) and their teenage daughters, Megan and Katie. Wofford usually curls up in his corner with a good paperback when
he goes to bed each evening, and when company comes, he gets a book off the coffee table and offers
it to a guest.
Most of his daylight hours, however, Wofford spends at the Larchmont branch of the public
library behind the Viccellio's house. A broken slat in the fence became his door. The first time
Wofford strolled in, he went straight to the children's section, retrieved a book (to his liberal-learning
credit, not Lassie, Come Home), and holding it gingerly between his teeth, waited patiently in the line
at the check-out desk.
BBeennddiinngg tthhee TTwwiigg:: PPaaggeess ffrroomm tthhee JJoouurrnnaall ooff aa PPiillggrriimm PPaarreenntt // 5566
A library staff member took Wofford outside and gave him some chew toys from his truck.
Minutes later, Wofford was back inside, in line and with another book in mouth.
Animal Control was called and took Wofford home, along with a warrant (# 710662714)
charging him with being a "dog at large" and a summons to appear in General District Court's Criminal
Division.
A hearing was set for January 4. Meanwhile, Wofford was out on parole, which he continued to
violate by escaping daily from his back-yard prison and showing up in the library.
With Wofford's growing criminal record, Viccellio was afraid the court was "going to throw the
book at him."
We are more alarmed than Viccellio. We have numerous friends who have been trying
desperately to convince us that since the November elections the country has been going to the dogs. If
they hear about Snyder and Wofford, they'll just have that much more ammunition for their verbal and
copy-machine barrages.
Personally, l think Wofford College, an old (1854) Phi Beta Kappa campus that happens also to
have a superior athletic program, ought to offer Snyder one of its athletic grants-in-aid and Wofford
one of its Scholars academic leadership scholarships and enroll them. It would be interesting to see
how they get along with the NFL's new Carolina Panthers team that will be having its summer camps
there.
BBeennddiinngg tthhee TTwwiigg:: PPaaggeess ffrroomm tthhee JJoouurrnnaall ooff aa PPiillggrriimm PPaarreenntt // 5577
February 14, 1994
PLUGGING INTO THE LEARNING CHANNELS
In its 358-year history, American Higher Education has seen two major revolutions (and some
dozen minor upheavals). A third is at hand.
The first revolution in college education came in the mid-1800's, along with Civil War. The
Morrill Land Act is its symbol. This revolution was a major overhauling of the college curriculum,
away from the old emphasis upon theology and ancient languages (Latin, Hebrew, Greek) towards the
more applied fields of professional studies (engineering, law, medicine, business) and modern
languages (English, French, German, Spanish).
The second revolution started in the late 1940's, in the aftermath of World War II, and
continued through the 1960's. It was a revolution in admissions standards. In a single generation,
college went from being a privilege reserved for a minority of American high school graduates to
being a right accessible to all graduates and used by over half of them. The G. l. Bill and the Civil
Rights Act symbolized this revolution.
Now a third revolution is sweeping across our campuses. This one has to do with informationaccess and the ways students learn. Its symbol is high-tech technology: computers, data banks, fiber
optic lines, information networks, and things called E-mail and Internet.
Like all revolutions, it has a world a-trembling. Old-line educators who have relied upon chalk
and library card catalogs and laboratory test tubes as their main teaching tools are finding themselves
left behind by the revolution in learning technologies. Their laboratory experiments can be simulated
on computer screens; their lectures can be produced on video or audio tapes; their library research
assignments can be achieved by computer links; and their statistical studies which once required
months of accumulating and counting figures can be run by machine in mini-seconds.
Both the speed and the sophistication of the technology are dizzying, but what is most
humiliating to old-timers is not their ignorance of this strange new automated world. The humiliation is
in finding that their students can explain and use the learning technology better than they can.
If you have been around long enough to recall President Eisenhower's inauguration of the
transcontinental interstate highway system, you are familiar with the invisible effects that ripple off
from some single momentous decision of that sort. Where we live and what we do have been
transformed forever by that single interstate highway innovation.
But it pales in comparison to what is going to happen as the technological highways open up. A
whole new world of information and linkages is being born before our very eyes.
All three higher education revolutions, interestingly, have been in the direction of greater
democracy. The first revolution made more types of knowledge relevant to the leadership classes and
expanded those classes in the process. The second revolution made access to higher education
institutions easier for millions of students and expanded the numbers of educated citizens.
Now comes a third revolution, democratizing access to information and the teaching-learning
process. It is conceivable that college education in the future will be machine-produced and delivered
right into the home.
Happily, for the moment anyway, what is happening is not the isolation of students from
faculty members. They are actually seeking each other out and forming new types of learning
relationships in which the professors are counselors, partners, mentors, supervisors, advisors, and
colleagues with students. Ironically, one of the initial results of increased learning technology so far
has been an increase in personalized education, not the predicted decrease.
If our colleges have the wisdom to learn from that irony, it could well be that they will have
time to adapt to the new day that is dawning. One thing is certain, however, in the meanwhile. The
campus without technology will be left behind. Technology mastery already represents a survival skill
to most students, and the college which ignores that student demand will find itself left behind in the
new century just ahead.
BBeennddiinngg tthhee TTwwiigg:: PPaaggeess ffrroomm tthhee JJoouurrnnaall ooff aa PPiillggrriimm PPaarreenntt // 5588
May 24, 1994
MISSING LINK IN THE GREAT CHAIN OF BEING
A nice thing has happened to me on my way to old age.
An important missing person has reappeared in my life.
You read about separated siblings finding each other or adopted children finding lost parents
after being apart for half-centuries. Heartwarming stuff, indeed.
This reunion isn't quite that dramatic as those. It isn't about blood-kin, nor has it been, at 34
years, all that long a separation. l have cousins I haven't seen or been in touch with less recently than
that.
This is about a fellow who was an assistant professor teaching freshman English when I
enrolled in college in 1954.
It turned out that he was the best professor I ever had. Since there were then another ten years
of classes and professors ahead for me, there was no way to know at the time just how good he was.
The realization soaked in over time, but our paths never seemed to cross again. He had left
Kentucky for another job around 1960, which is when I was leaving for graduate study in Connecticut.
As the years passed, l began to appreciate his pedagogical talents more and more. l even started
citing him as an example of great teaching to my higher education colleagues.
I kept assuming that we'd be bumping into each other.
Then it suddenly struck me that forty years had gone by, and that he might be dead. He was
only 31 when we first met, but that would make him 71 now. I set out to find him.
I checked out a New Jersey college to which I understood he had gone in 1960. They showed
he had left there in 1963. The trail suddenly turned stone cold.
Then I happened to catch a little announcement of a lady's retirement from a position at the
University of Kentucky. A little circumspect inquiring revealed she had been his wife, but that they
were divorced. At the risk of offending her, I contacted the ex-wife. She turned out to be charmingly
gracious, and even remembered me as a student. She passed on a New Jersey address, and I wrote my
former professor there. A couple of weeks later I heard from him, now retired, from a Florida winter
home.
We’ve exchanged several letters now. He is in marvelous good health and has a fantastic
memory for names and events from the distant past. Best of all, he is as witty, well-read, and
interesting as I have recalled him being. It has been a most happy reunion.
I'll take finding him alive and well over winning the clearinghouse stakes any year! What a
prize to find at the bottom of my Crackerjacks!
BBeennddiinngg tthhee TTwwiigg:: PPaaggeess ffrroomm tthhee JJoouurrnnaall ooff aa PPiillggrriimm PPaarreenntt // 5599
July 12, 1994
POETRY BY PHONE
John Lane is a young Carolinas poet here at Wofford College.
Earlier this year, Thomas Rain Crowe's New Native Press up in Cullowhee, NC, printed Lane's
longish poem, “Against Information".
It’s a a fine poem, a controlled histrionic tinged with anti-technology sentiments that would
have done the Luddite and Agrarian movements proud. Lane wafts it with Whitmanesque exuberance.
It takes issue with the loss of poetry, desire, and spontaneity in our lives, as they are replaced by
consuming interests in consumption and career paths.
“I have rewritten the Bill of Dreams in the left ventricle/ of the human heart," Lane tells us. “I
have etched a new compact there/ with a laser finer than sunlight."
The poem covers eight pages in its one dollar fold-out edition. When Lane read it at the Green
Door in Asheville, over a hundred people paid $5 each to hear him.
Down in Columbia, S.C., Lane's poem caught the eye of Point, a moderately-left monthly 20page tabloid popular among the avant-garde, which got permission to reprint the poem on a two-page
spread in the June 1994 edition. It appeared in an attractive format, with a few little illustrations.
It is not traditional rhymed poetry. In fact, except for each stanza beginning with its first line
set back, one could easily think the stanzas are prose paragraphs.
Which, in fact, is exactly what appears to have happened once the poem reached Point's several
thousand readers.
The poem starts off with a headline like a news announcement:
1. NEW SATELLITE DISHES
Then this message follows:
Today the next satellite dish is announced,
“pizza-sized," 18 inches across, pulls in
150 channels, mounts on rooftop, railing,
window sill, $699.95, includes decoder box
and remote control.
Then, regular type is used for the next stanza, which seems to explain what in the preceding one could
have been taken as an advertisement:
This is the latest machinery. This is the council of technicians.
User friendly. Installs in minutes. No adjustments necessary.
Lifetime guarantee. Call now for a free demonstration.
1-800-555 dish.
The greatest innovation since the tractor.
Get rid of the old dish in your yard. Plant seedlings in it.
You out there in Iowa, feed your hogs from the bowl.
In California, fill it with water for a pool.
Or put it in your barn, in the attic like your grandmother's hat box.
It is important to this story that we understand that Lane's television satellite dish was entirely
in his head, an imaginary product dreamed up to portray the enemy against which the bulk of his poem
inveighs.
Unfortunately, the readers of Point missed this point.
BBeennddiinngg tthhee TTwwiigg:: PPaaggeess ffrroomm tthhee JJoouurrnnaall ooff aa PPiillggrriimm PPaarreenntt // 6600
The first clue that the poem was being misread came from a little old lady who called the editor
to complain about the false advertising. She had, she said, wanted to get the new miracle television
receiver and to convert her larger and older one into a food or water dish for her dog. But when she
called the 800 number in the “ad" (Lane's poem), she had been told they had no such product for sale.
Curious that Lane may actually have accidentally used an actual 800 number in his poem, the
editor called the number himself.
Lo and behold, it’s a live number.
Not only that. It belongs to a bait and tackle shop on the Carolina coast, the owner of which
was very exercised about the cause of the 200 inquiry calls he has received wanting to order $699.95
pizza-sized satellites.
The most encouraging thing in this whole episode is the hard evidence that people still read
poetry. Most marketing experts would agree that 200 callers from a reference in a relatively obscure
monthly tabloid would indicate that at least 10,000 people read it.
With that big an audience, maybe Lane's alarm about the death of poetry in this careerist
technocratic age is premature.
We'll settle for believing thousands of people did read it. It's irrelevant that they don't seem to
have understood it. It is evidence that Poetry Lives.
That's an important victory for the John Lane Quixotes of the world. Never mind if the poetry
readers all seem to want to buy satellite dishes. Just bask in the possibility of poetry having an
audience.
Incidentally, don't try dialing Lane's fabricated number. We've changed it here, out of respect
for the bait and tackle shop owner's privacy, substituting 555 for the digits Lane chose.
BBeennddiinngg tthhee TTwwiigg:: PPaaggeess ffrroomm tthhee JJoouurrnnaall ooff aa PPiillggrriimm PPaarreenntt // 6611
August 9, 1994
A SERMON IN CELLULOID
I know a fellow from Alabama whose first name is Forrest. Except for an IQ of 175 instead of
75, he resembles Forrest Gump, the wonderfully gentle hero of Winston Grooms’s book and this
summer's blockbuster movie.
Through my friend of the same first name, I learned years ago about many of the places and
people in the movie–the University of Alabama, Bear Bryant, Greensboro (the Greenbo of the movie),
shrimp-boating, and Bayou La Batre (properly pronounced “bowel-luh-bat-tree").
My own Forrest and I have been close friends during most of the series of events in American
history for which Gump's life story serves as Scotch tape–Alabama's winning football years, George
Wallace's stand in the doorway, the assassinations of two Kennedys and a King and attempts on
Reagan and Ford, Viet Nam, hippie protests, retreats into jogging, Chinese rapprochement, the rise of
rampant affluence and capitalist entrepreneuring, and the coming of bumper stickers and pithy
epigrams ("Have a Nice Day") and Apple computers and VCRs to replace talk and theater as primary
means of communication.
Those of us middle-aged and over recognize Forrest Gump immediately. He is more than
Gomer Pyle. He is our day's version of Frank Capra's Jimmy Stewart from the 1940's. Forrest Gump is
the legitimate son and heir-apparent of George Bailey from "It's a Wonderful Life". He is the epitome
of the innocent Little Man who makes a big difference in the world simply by being natural in a world
where simplicity and basic bottom-line decency, although rare, are still potential human traits.
Forrest shames us for our tendency to make prisoners of ourselves in webs of our own
spinning.
But his message is not that reasoning and brains are evil things. He does not fault us for
thinking–only for thinking too much about ourselves. Whenever we do that, we mess things up.
For Forrest Gump, self-identity is always in identifying with others. He achieves elevated
selfhood by being selfless.
When a friend appears unexpectedly, or when his mother is dying, the shortest and immediate
distance for Forrest is a straight line. He jumps into the bay and swims directly to friend and kin as
directly and deliberately as he raced down Denny Stadium and through Viet Nam battlefields. His
circling boat and business are completely unimportant. What matters are the others, not himself. And
each time, his quiet virtue is rewarded–as it should be in life, even if it is not.
Gump owns the Grace of one of the Elect, and it makes us hunger for a real world to match the
mountains of this cinematic one.
Our post-Capra years have sent mixed signals.
We began them trying to put a man on the moon and succeeding, only to see an advanced space
ship explode before our eyes. We began them with the Camelot of the Kennedys, only to see politics
turned into Gunfight at OK Corral.
Have you noticed the progression and ambiguity of Kevin Costner roles: JFK conspiracy
investigator, secret service bodyguard, Robin Hood, and Wyatt Earp? Our world is one of such
ambiguities as those for which Costner is usually cast, not the world of Forrest Gump. Costner
characters only reached the moral heights of Forrest Gump (as portrayed by Tom Hanks) in “Field of
Dreams".
We are indebted to Grooms and his movie for a perspective from which to view the landscape
of our times and to bring judgment to bear upon ourselves and our society. As our century ends, his is
the gentlest of touches, rousing our sleeping better instincts of hope and good will and unkept promises
just as we need them most.
BBeennddiinngg tthhee TTwwiigg:: PPaaggeess ffrroomm tthhee JJoouurrnnaall ooff aa PPiillggrriimm PPaarreenntt // 6622
September 6, 1994
MODERN ART AS PALEOLITHIC PICTURES
Lecturing to a class of 15 under-graduates last year, I mentioned Paul “Bear" Bryant. The glaze
that passed over the students' faces puzzled me, and I paused to ask how many of them knew who
Bryant was. Only one of the 15 did. It reminded me of a similar scene a decade ago in another class
when I mentioned Pearl Harbor.
In mid-August our office gathered to celebrate a colleague's birthday. While waiting for the
cake to be passed, I asked if other famous people shared this birth-date. No one came to mind, but
someone noted it was the anniversary of Elvis's death. Then, some half-dozen persons told us where
they had been when news of Elvis's death came. I expressed astonishment that so many people recalled
that day. One whispered to me later that not he only did he recall where he was, but that he had started
for his car, determined to drive the 800 miles to Graceland. He said he has always regretted that he
turned back.
As for more recent times, note that of the 31 million viewers riveted to O. J. Simpson's Bronco
ride along the California freeways, very few were young people. The young simply don't know who O.
J. Simpson is–or was. Their parents and grandparents remembered him as a celebrity and responded
accordingly, as if they were watching Scarlet O'Hara and Rhett Butler retreating south from the
flaming Atlanta, the rich and famous reduced to flight.
Fall and flight–a theme throughout history, from the falls of Adam and Achilles to that of
Nixon. People are fascinated by it. No one liked Job, because he refused to fall.
The most obvious point to the anecdotes, of course, is that we share very little history. We live
separated lives and wind separated ways, as if in separated worlds.
E. D. Hirsch, Jr., a UVa scholar, a few years back published an essay on cultural illiteracy in
The American Scholar, and then turned it into a best-selling book. He followed that with a textbook
and test suggesting a long list of historical and literary events and figures that ought be common
currency in the American realm. He recalled a day not too-distant when schools taught a canon: “Julius
Caesar", Silas Marner, Wordsworth, Declaration of Independence, Gettysburg Address, and such. Most
schools in most places taught mostly the same materials and mostly at the same grades, and in a mobile
America, one could slip easily in and out of several schools when required by work and wars to move.
In the 1950's, seventy percent of the people moved at least once.
Orderliness of knowledge and sharing of information among many people appealed to Hirsch,
as it did and does to many others. His critics unfairly oversimplified his argument, as I border on doing
here, but at the heart of it was a search for a “unum" to keep us “pluribus" together. Having a history
and a language in common were supposed to do that.
We lament today sizable slippage in the old standards of manners, morality, and civility. We
need to note, with Hirsch, that the falling-away into our separated selves extends beyond behavior and
faiths into language and history as well. Ours is an Age of Enclaves, a shattering and scattering of the
whole-body politic into molecules of self-interest and self-protection of like-minded atoms.
Enough said. A sense of loss, tinged with sadness, is the expected response to my Bear Bryant,
Elvis Presley, Pearl Harbor, and O. J. Simpson stories. It has its difficulties: commonality is more
easily preached than achieved, and the question of “whose culture?" rears fears of elitism and
irrelevancies. The point I actually set out to make is a little more subtle.
What impresses me is that the means by which we learn things has changed so much. We used
to dig our knowledge out of books, or pass it across backyard fences, or memorize it at family
reunions. The old modes of transmission have faded away.
We learn mostly from television sets. That is where most of America spends the bigger hunk of
its days, and nights. Television sets are as central in the dens of our homes as fires were in cavedwellers' caves. We are loathe to leave them. They warm us. If we really want to see where studying
the past can help us understand our present, we ought to be studying prehistoric days.
BBeennddiinngg tthhee TTwwiigg:: PPaaggeess ffrroomm tthhee JJoouurrnnaall ooff aa PPiillggrriimm PPaarreenntt // 6633
We have been drifting, on a current growing ever faster, backwards into primitive conditions,
in which nearly everything–faith, manners, government, education, economics, language–has to be
invented all over again and force-fed to us for our mutual survival.
Out of the utter necessity of living together or of dying separately we are being pressed
backward in time to that pre-history moment when the experiential was no longer enough and the
experimental had to be tried. There was no question of individuals holding their own. Everyone
conceded that some kind of society had to be built, some individualism sacrificed.
Some tried to build civilization with conflict, only to find that when they killed others, those
others tried to kill in return. That led to trying to build by consensus, through rules, institutions, and
contracts– harder than making war, but in the long run, when successful, infinitely safer.
The point of my anecdotes, and of my reading of Hirsch, is a simple one. Cultures don't come
easily or even naturally. They are the products of great masses of people with survival at stake working
hard in common to invent a common culture.
We have just begun to peek out of our caves. The hard work of getting together is ahead. Surely
we can connect for something other than to watch one another fall.
BBeennddiinngg tthhee TTwwiigg:: PPaaggeess ffrroomm tthhee JJoouurrnnaall ooff aa PPiillggrriimm PPaarreenntt // 6644
October 18, 1994
RUST ON THE GLOBE’S AXIS
Human beings are pack-rats. We have a hard time keeping our nests clean. Attics, shelves,
closets, and boxes help us delay making tough decisions about what is truly essential.
Days of reckoning come to us all, soon or late. We move, or someone dies, or our young grow
up and leave us, or we simply get to the point where we are tripping over our amassed possessions. We
can all use need a good spring cleaning–at least once every ten years or so.
With our two youngsters gone, we've been going through some of that sifting, sorting, and
discarding process recently. It's taking us quite a while. We have a tendency to wax nostalgic over each
faded corsage and every partial deck of worn-out Old Maid cards. By prolonging the agony of
throwing things away, we fool ourselves into thinking the youngsters aren't really gone yet. We want to
hold on. If we throw too much away too soon, things will speed up faster than we can stand.
We've managed to give away most of their old clothes. For some reason, we found their old
sweatshirts the hardest to surrender. We have given away most of their games, including several with
dead batteries, but kept a few we played together (Monopoly, Scrabble, and Trivia Pursuit) in case the
girls ever want to spend long holidays with us again. Their books (Curious George, Babar, Nancy
Drew) are boxed and stored–as are their stuffed animals–just in case they send us grandchildren
instead of themselves.
The current dilemma is what to do with their old set of encyclopedias and their old globe. I'm
sitting here leafing through P (World Book's volume 15) with my right hand while twirling the world
(a Rand-McNally version) with my left. (Don’t ask how I am able to type at the same time.) No matter
which one gets my attention, what is immediately apparent is how outdated both are. They aren't really
very old–twenty years for the encyclopedia and 10 for the globe–but a very great deal has changed.
What they represented when we bought them was the accumulated knowledge of our
generation, my wife’s and mine, which we hoped to past on in easily-used packages to our successors.
But they meant more to us than they did to our offspring. The knowledge in and on them is the
knowledge from our times, not of theirs. They have moved on far beyond them. The whole terrain of
what our globe calls the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics has changed, and most of the names of the
nations of Africa have changed, too. As for the encyclopedia, there have been other popes since Paul
VI, and the description of how phonograph records are made somehow seems archaic.
What we mistake for education always lags behind. Cleaning house is makes us realize that.
We mistook education to be passing along of collected information. Education is only partly that. A
great deal of it, which can't be packaged in books and on visual aids, is about interacting with changes
all around us, living history even as it is being made.
When we listen to our daughters–or watch teenagers competing on television's Jeopardy–we are
struck with our ignorance. They know art works and music we’ve never seen nor heard, decipher lyrics
that sound like screeches from outer space, know science and geography we can't comprehend.
Our generation still lives in dread of being struck by a shower of meteors. In the midst of a
bombardment of information that makes our fears seem more fantasy than fantastic, our children cope,
absorb, and adapt much better and much more rapidly than do we. They are light-years ahead of us.
We marvel at their interaction with change.
We claim only a little credit for these abilities of our children. We read to them, worked on
their homework and class projects with them, and praised them. Beyond that, we trusted their teachers
and to luck. We supported the school systems, never begrudged being taxed for education, and crossed
our fingers. Their teachers, underpaid and over-worked and harassed from all sides, worked miracles.
In the retrospective light of time, our gratitude for teachers grows greater and greater. They
bridged the gap between our generation's globe and the real world in which our children live as young
adults. They–those who have been willing to stay with teaching despite how they are abused–deserve
better than they are getting from us. They succeed often in spite of us.
BBeennddiinngg tthhee TTwwiigg:: PPaaggeess ffrroomm tthhee JJoouurrnnaall ooff aa PPiillggrriimm PPaarreenntt // 6655
November 15, 1994
FEET FEATS
If you watch late-night sports or early-morning entertainment digests, you may be vaguely
aware that a new sport is working its way into our American fabric.
We don't know how to spell it, but it is pronounced (approximately) "Say Pak Ti Craw". Some
places it is called Takraw for short. It is sort of a national sport in some southeastern nations such as
Thailand and Laos, where youngsters start playing and practicing it at age two or three.
The sport combines soccer and volleyball. It is played on a volleyball-size court separated by a
volleyball-height net. Players may hit the ball (originally a rattan sphere about ten inches in diameter,
but now manufactured in plastic) up to three times before sending it over the net, but it may not be hit
with the hands. Feet especially, but also shoulders, elbows, ankles, knees, and hips are permissible
contact parts, but no hands.
The sport has an international association, a global Southeastern Games, and a lobbying effort
to make it an Olympic sport, perhaps by 2010. In the United States, Takraw has been taking root in
California (mostly outdoors), but–oddly–also in Spartanburg, SC.
The missionary-evangelist for Takraw in South Carolina is Wofford College's Dr. Ben Dunlap.
A charismatic fiftyish holder of the college's Chapman Chair of Humanities and a native of Columbia,
SC, Dunlap attended the University of the South, and went on to become a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford
(his roommate was singer-actor Kris Kristofferson), and to get a Harvard Ph.D. in English.
Dunlap has ever been anything but orthodox. A diminutive 5'9", he played football in high
school and college. At age 40 he danced the rat part in “The Nutcracker” for the Columbia ballet. He
bicycled across Europe with his preadolescent daughter. He has written an opera that was premiered in
New Hampshire last month. He is well-known for a number of public television series he has
produced. He has a novel seeking a publisher.
Selected as the outstanding teacher at USC but wanting to know more about non-western
cultures in order to be an even better teacher, Dunlap and his wife, son, and daughter allegedly spent
three years in a grass shack in Indonesia. Takraw there is like sandlot and ghetto baseball used to be in
America–the universal pick-me-up game played almost anywhere with very little equipment.
Dunlap came back as a self-anointed Acting National Commissioner for American Takraw.
This fall he talked some students into practicing with him, and by October the team had moved to clubsport status.
Dunlap is so enthusiastic that he amounts to an irresistible force. When rain recently forced
Wofford's varsity football, baseball, and soccer practice indoors, they found the Takraw team already
on the gym floor, refusing to be bumped. Word is out that Dunlap has scheduled matches with
Davidson and Amherst (where his son is enrolled) and is scrounging for uniforms. The other sports
have taken to locking their lockers. He steals tape from the athletic trainer to line off his court.
Sheerly by coincidence, the Wofford Takraw Club found out it wasn’t the first team in
Spartanburg. Attracted by travel loans from the United Methodist Church or by relations with a
growing core of Laotians, exiled Laotians have been winding their way to Spartanburg since 1979,
growing into a colony of 360 Laotians. For several years it fielded a highly-skilled Takraw team. Two
years ago the team competed against twenty other teams in Washington, DC, and won the national
championship. One of its players–a stunning fellow with shoulder-length hair and heroic posture–
played in the East-West Takraw Games at Philadelphia and is a local superstar.
"When our star player moved to Tennessee", the local Laotian team gave up the sport in 1992
and turned to badminton–until Dunlap's Wofford team popped up. The dormant Laotian team has
revived, and has been practicing with the Wofford teams periodically.
Interestingly, the scrimmages have not been racial or cultural American/Laotian competitions.
By the end of the first half of the game, the Laotians and Americans were mixing on both sides, with
the highly-skilled Laotians patiently teaching their new white students the art of the bicycle kick
BBeennddiinngg tthhee TTwwiigg:: PPaaggeess ffrroomm tthhee JJoouurrnnaall ooff aa PPiillggrriimm PPaarreenntt // 6666
(leaping into the air, twisting sideways, kicking the ball down over the high net, competing the twist
while descending, and landing on one's feet) and other necessary moves.
To enhance jumping, an indoor gym floor is preferred to playing on grass outdoors. Practicing
landings is important. So is dodging. Kicked balls move faster than human heads that get in their paths.
Some of the Laotians are recent arrivals for whom English is still an unlearned second
language. Over half of Wofford's students are volunteers in the local community through the Twin
Towers service bureau, and it appears some Wofford students will soon be teaching English as a
Second Language to local Laotians.
The president of the college, older than Pele and half as agile, has been spotted lurking around
practices and kicking Takraw balls. Word is that he may sign on.
BBeennddiinngg tthhee TTwwiigg:: PPaaggeess ffrroomm tthhee JJoouurrnnaall ooff aa PPiillggrriimm PPaarreenntt // 6677
March 14, 1995
DROP-IN COMPANY WELCOMED
John Egerton blessed our campus last week.
The Nashville author was on a southern tour for Alfred A. Knopf publishers promoting his
magnificent new book, Speak Now Against the Day. It is a 704-page tribute to 1,100 southerners
involved in civil rights in the pre-Movement years from the 1930's up until the Supreme Court's 1954
Brown v Board of Education decision.
At Wofford he addressed five history, religion, and sociology classes, a luncheon of student
service volunteers, and a dinner for historians and writers. He used his afternoon break to drive to a
Greenville bookstore for an autographing session.
It's hard work, but Egerton does it willingly and well. He believes absolutely and sincerely that
the years and people about whom he wrote were some of the South's noblest and best, but that the
heroes and heroines have been unsung. He wants to guarantee them a proper place in the regional
history they did so much to shape.
Egerton speaks movingly of these people, of the ilk of Virginia Durr, Osceola McKaine, Frank
Porter Graham, Lillian Smith, Myles Horton, Will Alexander, Ralph McGill, Richard Wright, Clarence
Jordan, Hodding Carter, Jr., John Popham, and Mary McLeod Bethune, and hundreds of others less
well-known. He has spent his adult whole life searching for the best in his native soil.
Egerton speaks without notes, and his unpretentious simplicity and humility are matched only
by his prodigious memory of others. He is a living, breathing war memorial, a Homer for decent
commoners, the product of the selflessness of silent crusaders whom he resurrects and celebrates.
Born in Atlanta, reared in Cadiz, Ky., and based in Nashville, Egerton is now 60 years old. I've
known him only for the last 25 of those years. As a young joumalist, he roamed the South, covering
civil rights stories as a race relations reporter.
Then the books started coming, one after another. The first, in 1970 (A Mind to Stay Here), was
a semi-autobiographical account of a dilemma common to many educated southerners about whether
or not to put down roots in ancestral places or to leave the region. It was followed by a little work
(Visions of Utopia) on 19th-century intentional communities in Tennessee (Ruskin, Rugby, and
Nashoba), one on the southernization of America (The Americanization of Dixie), another
(Generations) on the 142 living members (all of whom he interviewed) of a single Appalachian family,
a collection of his best magazine essays (Shades of Gray), and two others (Southern Food and Side
Orders) applauding the arts of southern cooking and lamenting their demise.
It doesn't bother him that he is confused with a North Carolina novelist, Clyde Edgerton, newer
to the publishing world and author of Raney and Walking Across Egypt. His own books sell only
moderately well, well enough for him to eke out a living doing on his own what he likes to do: uncover
and lift up what is best in this southern region of exaggerated ironies and paradoxes.
Egerton is a master of both anecdote and analysis, but he lacks the hellfire-and-brimstone
simplicity of a born-hater. That means that his focus is upon sins more than upon sinners, upon racism
more than upon racists, and that his works lack the devils and villains that attract to successful
evangelists, novelists, or politicians their followings.
He is engagingly genuine, but he is also generous and a gentleman, and that means that he
understands and practices forgiveness and grace. He chronicles an era of stark black-and-white
ideologies but interprets it with ambiguities and ironies. Gray is his best color.
Although he digs deep in history, his real subject is the future. Egerton believes fervently that
the keys of the kingdom ahead lie buried in the lessons we can learn from our past, that somewhere
deep within our heritage and ancestry lie the nobility and common sense to improve our lot and to
create a culture and civilization noted for humaneness, racial harmony, moderation of appetites and
consumption, affection and acceptance for one another, and a common love for storytelling and for
sharing.
BBeennddiinngg tthhee TTwwiigg:: PPaaggeess ffrroomm tthhee JJoouurrnnaall ooff aa PPiillggrriimm PPaarreenntt // 6688
May 30, 1995
IN A CLASS ALL ITS OWN
One percent of the Wofford College student body wrote and published novels this spring.
If one undergraduate student publishing a novel is “extraordinary", what adjective describes 11
novels being published by 11 undergrads at the same campus, enrollment 1,100, in a semester?
“Mind-boggling"? Perhaps. Yet, it happened this spring right here in Spartanburg, SC.
Eleven students enrolled in a creative writing class pledged to write and publish novels as the
major assignment in the course. The class had seven women and four men: six seniors, three juniors,
and two sophomores. One was from Thailand (and Sumter, SC), another from India, and the rest from
Silver Spring, MD, Charlottesville, VA, Athens, Augusta, and Carrollton, GA, and Greenville, Greer,
and Charleston, SC. It was taught by Dr. Benjamin Dunlap.
The novels (actually novellas) ranged from 50 to 150 pages. All were written on wordprocessors, capable of easy editing, and all went through several revisions and drafts. In the end, the
completed works were set in a camera-ready format, easily transferred to offset printing.
As an incentive to write, each student was promised ten bound copies of his or her work, plus a
display of all eleven in the college library, plus publication of the best novel in an edition of 2,000
volumes, to be distributed to students entering Wofford next fall, prospective students for subsequent
years, high school English teachers and guidance counselors, newspaper book review editors–and
parents and other relatives. The students covered some of the publication costs themselves, using funds
they normally would have spent for textbooks. Donors provide the bulk of the printing.
The first weeks of the semester were spent in mastering the discipline of fiction. Special focus
was given to characterization, plot, structure, and dialogue. Once into their writing, the students
critiqued each others works frequently. The professor read drafts straight from the computer screen and
typed back extensive comments and notes.
The novel-writing course is part of a major emphasis on writing that has begun to crystallize at
Wofford around faculty writers such as John Lane, Deno Trakas, Phil Racine, and Bernard Dunlap.
Student creative juices seem to flow more freely in such a highly personalized learning setting. But the
gain is reciprocal. The faculty find their own creativity stimulated and their writing improved by
working frequently and intensely with aspiring student writers.
The course was enhanced considerably by being taught in Wofford's new high-tech F. W. Olin
Building in which is housed the campus computer center. Transfer of texts by e-mail or disk to and
from the students' personal computers back in their residence halls was relatively simple. Technology
is being used to improve writing by providing faster exchange between writers and readers, speedier
editing and revisions, and quicker transition from machine to print.
Surprisingly, all of the books were good. Some tended to be more autobiographical than others,
several were adolescent-to-adult pilgrimage novels, and some bordered on being Gothic romances or
movie scripts. All were especially tight on plot, resisted lures to meander, and developed dialogue and
setting descriptions well.
The first-place winner, The Stars of Canaan, by Sumter's (and Thailand's) Rucht Liliavivat (a
junior), is set in the Middle East, where an angel-in-waiting is left on hold while being kept busy
assassinating people in a chilling apocalyptic war between heaven and hell.
Silver Springs' Lauryl Smith's B Cups is a Dostoevsky-like story of a girl trying to make a go of
life as a liberated woman in the city, where her cat is her primary companion. Smith is a junior.
Carrollton's Micah Johnson (a sophomore) wrote Wind in the Poplar Trees, a coming-of-age
novel best depicted as Holden Caulfield meeting Intruder in the Dust.
Their achievement has left the students both ecstatic and exhausted. One lad, after typing “The
End" at daybreak one May morning, after fifteen hours of writing, phoned his girl and woke her with
“Baby, you are dating the author of a published first novel." His choice of the word, “first", says
volumes about the intensity and ambition of this novel experience.
BBeennddiinngg tthhee TTwwiigg:: PPaaggeess ffrroomm tthhee JJoouurrnnaall ooff aa PPiillggrriimm PPaarreenntt // 6699
December 4, 1995
CARRYING A TORCH OF QUALITY
Among America's 3,400 campuses, Wofford College with its enrollment of 1,100 students, by
numerical standards, is relatively small potatoes. It may be the smallest NCAA Division I member. Yet
its basketball team opened its season this winter against Missouri, Vanderbilt, and North Carolina
State, and will face Auburn, Army, South Carolina, Clemson, and Navy by February.
The first preseason polls ranked Wofford 305th, at the bottom of the list. Later it moved into a
three-way tie for 301st place. For sheer bravery in scheduling alone, it deserved to be at least 300th.
The line between bravery and fool-heartedness is a thin one, and lots of sportswriters and some
fans think Wofford has crossed it with this schedule. But Wofford College has a point to make, and its
David-and-Goliath, Jack-and-the-Beanstalk basketball schedule is one way to make it.
The point is the same one that Thoreau made by going to the woods and returning to write
about it. “Simplify, simplify," he advised. E. F. Schumacher said it, too: “Small is beautiful."
Higher education has propagated at such a dizzying pace since the 1960's that it is strangling on
their own umbilical cords. Before then, the small college, liberal arts at the core, was the American
model. All of that changed, and very rapidly. The number of campuses has tripled since World War II,
and their enrollments have exploded, with about thirteen million students now pursuing college
degrees of more differing types than Joseph had colors in his coat.
With this great expansiveness in the breadth of the curriculum, the career tracks of education,
and the numbers of students has come an erosion, perhaps even a loss, of the central mission of higher
education: which was to select from and to prepare for a democratic society a leadership class.
The attributes of leadership included several clear imperatives. Educated leaders were to be
founded in the traditions of liberal arts, using the classical fields of history, literature, language,
mathematics, social sciences, and sciences to acquire and pass on from generation to generation the
cultural heritage of the nation. At the same time, the same liberal arts tools were to be used not merely
to conserve the past, but to innovate for the future. The twin attributes of the educated leader were
hindsight and vision. The liberal arts core was the means to this end.
The large campuses which sprawl across the landscape in our time still pay lip service to those
purposes. Hardly a campus catalog fails to establish the centrality of the old classical liberal arts in the
institution's mission and purpose. But with all of the accessories which have grown up around the
liberal arts core--multiple degree avenues and professional schools, research functions and graduate
studies, continuing education and public service, not to mention athletics and professionalized student
activities programs--the old core has become so camouflaged as to be almost invisible.
Beyond the education of some few of America's students each year, a larger function of a small,
uni-purpose liberal arts undergraduate college is to demonstrate to all of higher education what
standards of liberal arts learning are. It’s a museum in which classical learning can be visited and
viewed, just as it’s a laboratory in which the nature and norms of learning can be tested and reformed.
In short, the good small college acts as a conscience to the newly-extended higher education
enterprise, pricking its illusions of quality and excellence by always bringing focus back to the basic
fundamentals: the need for clearly stated purposes, the need to remember that the institution exists for
educating students, the need to continue searching for a cultural core heritage for the nation, the need
to place teaching above research and other distracting functions, the need for moorings in a relativistic
world, the need for standards in a free-wielding world, the need for liberal arts, and the need to excel.
What the little players of the Wofford basketball team do by taking on giants is playing, purely
for the fun and challenge of it, against themselves, oblivious to the season's end won-loss record and
NCAA Final 64 picks. In that process, they bear public witness to the basics, calling their bigger sister
institutions back to the ground-level aspirations of their liberal arts foundings and forward to the liberal
arts wholeness of vision which our nation so sorely needs and which education keeps promising it.
BBeennddiinngg tthhee TTwwiigg:: PPaaggeess ffrroomm tthhee JJoouurrnnaall ooff aa PPiillggrriimm PPaarreenntt // 7700
January 9, 1996
GOOD IN-BREEDING
Modern psychology has made much of the old Greek myth of Oedipus, in which a son
outshines his father and replaces him in garnering his mother's affection. Psychology classifies this as
the Oedipus Complex and finds it in almost all males.
The Oedipus Complex isn't limited just to humans. The compulsion to outshine a progenitor is
also found in corporations, churches, and countries.
Colleges and universities are not immune from it either.
Two thick university histories–Paul K. Conklin's 810-page Gone With the Ivy: A Biography of
Vanderbilt University and Robert F. Durden's 572-page The Launching of Duke University, 19241949–demonstrate that an Oedipus Complex played a major role in getting those super-power
universities off their shaky launching pads.
The forgotten father figure of importance in the founding years of Vanderbilt and Duke was
little Wofford College in Spartanburg, SC.
According to Conklin, Vanderbilt's ambitious beginnings were modest and tentative. The
campus almost folded in its first years. The partnership of Methodist Bishop Holland N. McTyeire, a
South Carolina native, with Commodore Vanderbilt, put the college on firmer ground. McTyeire,
without much clear authority for handling Vanderbilt campus affairs, imposed himself on the campus
significantly. The chancellor, Landon C. Garland, held severely circumscribed powers.
Perhaps the most substantive contribution McTyeire made, beyond attracting Vanderbilt funds,
was in rebuilding the faculty. He was, without office, the chief academic officer for the young college.
McTyeire hired two young professors who would have lasting influence on the direction of Vanderbilt.
Charles Forster Smith, a classicist, came from the University of Virginia, but had earlier taught at
Wofford. With Smith came his friend, William M. Baskervill, who had replaced him at Wofford and
had remained there. Both had Ph.D. degrees from Leipzig, in Germany. McTyeire liked their
Methodist and South Carolina connections.
In 1881, the year of their appointment, there was a young fellow, an undergraduate back at
Wofford, named James H. Kirkland. He went on to graduate study at Leipzig, keeping in touch with
his friends, Smith and Baskervill. He joined them at Vanderbilt in 1886 and later became its greatest
chancellor.
The Wofford triumvirate hoped to replace Vanderbilt's Chancellor Garland with Wofford's
outstanding and long-time president, James Carlisle, but Garland lingered on too long. Nonetheless,
the three professors succeeded in reorganizing the academic program and elevating the standards that
would make Vanderbilt distinctive in an impoverished South still lacking a major private university of
the stature of Yale, Harvard, Columbia, or Princeton.
Over in North Carolina, a few years behind Vanderbilt's blossoming, three other Wofford men
were transforming little Trinity College into Duke University.
Like Vanderbilt, Duke would benefit from its Methodism, its reliance upon an available and
affluent benefactor (the Duke family: Washington and his sons Ben and Buck), and the lack of major
universities in the Reconstructed South.
In Duke's case, the evolution began with the accession of John Carlisle Kilgo to the presidency
of Trinity College in 1894, two years after it moved to Durham. Kilgo was a dynamic Methodist
preacher, a South Carolinian who had graduated from Wofford. The English and history departments
and the library and research received special attentions from Kilgo, along with his growing connection
to the Dukes.
Kilgo brought to Duke two other Wofford men.
William H. Wannamaker, a Wofford alum with graduate studies at Harvard and in Germany
came in 1902 to teach German, soon rose to dean, and served until 1947.
BBeennddiinngg tthhee TTwwiigg:: PPaaggeess ffrroomm tthhee JJoouurrnnaall ooff aa PPiillggrriimm PPaarreenntt // 7711
More important than anyone to the early Duke University was William Preston Few, a South
Carolinian who graduated from Wofford in 1889, taught school and then went to Harvard for his
doctorate in English. The exposure to serious scholarship and to Harvard President Charles W. Eliot's
educational reforms would influence Few's administrative career enormously.
Arriving in Durham in 1896, active in founding the Southern Association, Few became dean of
Duke (its first) in 1902, and when Kilgo was made bishop in 1910, became the president, serving until
his death in 1940. The bulk of Durden's book is mostly a history of Few's (and Duke's) achievements.
As for Wofford College, the mother of the two trios that elevated Vanderbilt and Duke to
national prominence, it chose to remain the proud parent. It has been content to bask, like a Kentucky
Derby winner, as a champion in its own race and as a breeder to subsequent champions.
Over forty Wofford alumni have headed other campuses, as have a comparable number of nonalumni Wofford faculty members, and a couple of hundred Wofford alumni have become professors,
carrying on the outreach impacts of Vanderbilt's Smith-Baskervill-Kirkland and Duke's Kilgo-FewWannamaker models.
BBeennddiinngg tthhee TTwwiigg:: PPaaggeess ffrroomm tthhee JJoouurrnnaall ooff aa PPiillggrriimm PPaarreenntt // 7722
April 9, 1996
BETTER THAN BEING THERE
Charleston’s Will King is winding up his college career the same way he began it, with a
success.
Five years ago, King was graduating from high school, sought after by several colleges because
he combined soccer skills with high academic achievement.
Recruited by Wofford College’s soccer coach, King competed for the Richardson Scholarship.
Nominees demonstrate academic ability, leadership, and athletic skill. Each year’s winner gets four
years of full tuition, room, and board, plus three summers of intern experience, the last abroad. King
won in 1991.
Then, at the end of his junior year, King was picked as the tenth Wofford College Presidential
Scholar, personally selected by the college’s president, a rising senior “most likely to make a
contribution to humankind”. The recipient postpones the senior year and spends a year abroad in
underdeveloped Third World nations, mixing with the common people of the countries. In
collaboration with a mentoring professor, the Presidential Scholar prepares an itinerary and a research
topic. (For King, ironically, the proctoring prof was named Dr. Proctor.) The recipient returns to
Wofford for his senior year, expected to speak to student and civic groups.
One would think his cup runneth over.
Hardly. To cap it all off, at age 22 and with graduation only a month away, the finance major
has written a truly fine book. King’s yet-unpublished manuscript tentatively is titled To Market, To
Market . . . Home Again, Home Again: An Experience in Third World Markets.
King’s thesis is that the rest of the world isn’t like us. Our nation’s economy is an impressive
array of conglomerates, corporations, industries, and megalithic businesses. For much of the rest of the
world, earning a living is still highly personal and individualistic, a matter of living off the land,
surviving from day to day, bartering and trading. The characteristic people of other lands are
entrepreneurs– rickshaw pullers, money changers, fruit and fish vendors, water hawkers, souvenir
peddlers, guides, and traffickers in vices.
These adaptive types converge in markets that form at railway stops and river junctions in
underdeveloped countries, a dozen of which King visited.
King has invented a literary style. Regular type recounts some memorable experience at each
stop, but it is interrupted frequently by italics which tell what he was thinking as it happened, and
interrupted yet again by bold italics when his conscious self is having an ethical dialogue with his
conscience. He writes in the short sentences of a Hemingway. Each sentence zings.
The funniest episode comes early, in Mexico. King trails the market to a beach, only to find
that he is the only person there wearing trunks. Wrestling with whether to go native, his perplexity
becomes a parable for his entire book. His dive into cold beach waters parallels his dive into the Third
World. It is an eye-opening baptism.
The essence of his journey is the contrast between two cultures and the dilemma and impasse of
one ever understanding the other. Barriers are far higher than merely those of language. They are
social, religious, and especially economic and educational. Most Americans, worldly as we may claim
to be, just have no idea how provincial we are. King documents the discrepancy. The reader smells,
tastes, and hears the difference, borne by the mesmerism of King’s pithy and poignant prose.
He dines on bananas in a Japanese market in St. Vincent, negotiates over a statue of a god at
the Teotihuacan pyramids, roams a market that feeds 267 Solomon Island boarding school children,
follows “The Enforcer” who polices the Honiara, bicycles through Bali, discovers thousands of
American T-shirts for sale in a little Bangkok shop (including one from a Greensboro Youth Soccer
Tournament in which he had played as a fifth-grader), adjusts to eating at 1:00 a.m. in Thailand and
visits a floating market there, finds a market between Thailand and Myanmar (formerly Burma) that
exists solely because the border is closed, visits a Mai Sai jewel market, gets his life threatened in a
BBeennddiinngg tthhee TTwwiigg:: PPaaggeess ffrroomm tthhee JJoouurrnnaall ooff aa PPiillggrriimm PPaarreenntt // 7733
Bangkok bar (in a market strip which eerily resembles Bourbon Street in New Orleans), gets swept up
in the cows and cabs that crowd the clothing and money-changing markets of Kathmandu in Nepal,
tries desperately to work his way in 120-degree weather to markets in India’s Agra (only to find all
roads lead back to the Taj Mahal), finds in holy city Varanasi’s banks that bureaucracy didn’t leave
India with the British, banters with a vendor of pirated CD disks in China’s Beijing, and is befriended
by a saintly female guide in Xi’an (home of the famed Terracotta Army), before going to Canton,
Athens, and home.
King’s scholarly stroll through back-country economics turns slowly into a spiritual pilgrimage.
In the end, he puts all he has in a wife’s lap for her homeless family in Kathmandu. Her only response
is to ask for a cigarette.
King makes his readers vicarious and sensitized co-passengers through the frugality and futility
of some of the world’s alley-way nations. It is more than as good as being there ourselves; it is better,
for being spared the actual pain of it. King suffers for us.
BBeennddiinngg tthhee TTwwiigg:: PPaaggeess ffrroomm tthhee JJoouurrnnaall ooff aa PPiillggrriimm PPaarreenntt // 7744
May 7, 1996
NONE BENE OLET, QUI BENE SEMPER OLET
In high school, our teacher, Miss Mary Lou Diggs, was determined to prove that Latin was not,
as it was usually reputed to be, “a dead language.”
We had trouble believing her. Our range of experience didn’t throw us into frequent contact
with the local Catholic priest, and Classic Comics we used for book reports weren’t written in Latin,
not even “Julius Caesar”.
Besides, Miss Diggs (and her two sisters, who all lived at the foot of the hill in a house with
dormers that we called the House of Seven Gables) had snow-white hair and seemed past retirement
age, leading us to think Latin wouldn’t last much longer, if it was indeed still alive.
So, when our school suddenly dropped Latin III and IV just as we finished Latin II, we knew
we had been right about it being a dead language. The Catholic Church confirmed it shortly afterward,
at Vatican II, by allowing mass in other languages. (Episcopalians, not to be outdone, revised their
Book of Common Prayer.)
Some of us have always lamented the lapse in Lain learning that seemed to coincide with the
end of our puberty. We had visions of going on to college and being able to astound the professors by
starting all of our essays with memorized epigrams in Latin. Some wanted to be able to write Latin
epigrams in phone booths and on bathroom walls. Those thinking about becoming doctors assumed
they had to be able to write prescriptions in Latin, and those aspiring to be lawyers assumed most legal
cases have important Latin phrases in them.
I‘m terribly impressed to find that Yale’s president still reads its diploma citations for Ph.D.
degrees at annual commencement ceremonies in Latin. The ability to pronounce it properly may even
be a requisite for holding that office.
I am rapidly reaching that age at life where I can no longer depend upon my good looks, quick
witticisms, and athletic prowess to impress others. (In fact, I never could.) My children and friends
have expressed weariness with my faltering ability to recite whole pages of Vachel Lindsay poetry or
to sing medleys of Pat Boone’s greatest hits. I have been lamenting, like Alexander the Great, standing
on the banks of the Indus or Ganges (or some other I can’t recall) River, that “there are no more worlds
to conquer”.
“O tempora, o mores!” (Cicero, In Catilinam, I, 1) [Translation: “ What times! What
manners!”]
I’m rediscovering Latin. I suspect it is not dead, but only lost.
My theory is that if I can make Latin bones rise again after 42 years away from them, I can
recapture my fast-fading family’s and friends’ attentions. In short, somehow a resurrection of dead
Latin can be translated into a personal resurrection for me.
Alas, it is difficult for the language to “come back” with only a little prodding. The truth is that
I never had enough proficiency in it to shelve. There’s nothing to retrieve.
All of us back then relied on “ponies”, from which we painfully copied translations between the
lines of the textbook and texts we were given. We didn’t really read Caesar’s Gallic Wars; we read the
pony translations of it we had copied inter-lineally. (The only Latin word I learned was a Latin
derivative: “inter-lineal”.)
The glossaries in the rear of the textbooks also helped.
I’ve always blamed my Latin deficiency on the school system for dropping it when I had had
only two years of it.
Actually, I’m also tempted to blame Van Olds, a sophomore who sat in front of me in Latin I
and who turned around every time Miss Diggs had her back to us and made me hold up my left arm for
him to knuckle-punch in the upper muscle.
BBeennddiinngg tthhee TTwwiigg:: PPaaggeess ffrroomm tthhee JJoouurrnnaall ooff aa PPiillggrriimm PPaarreenntt // 7755
But I never have claimed retrospective child-abuse by my family or teachers, and it wouldn’t
help to cry peer-abuse at this late date against old Van Olds, who otherwise was as decent a fellow as
one could hope to know.
The fault, dear Brutus, actually was in myself. I learned a lot of Latin rules about tense,
conjugation, and declension that later made me a better English major in college, but I didn’t learn
Latin. Oh well, “Omnia fert aetas, animum quoque.” (“Time takes away everything, including
memory.”)
Happily, I have found a Latin pony to ride into my old age. There’s a relatively inexpensive
paperback available, entitled The Anchor Book of Latin Quotations with English Translations. It was
compiled by (I love this name) Norbert Guterman, in 1966, at the nadir of the modern Latin demise.
With this little book in hand, I can turn any common letter into an art form, any ordinary little
speech into a masterpiece.
“Parturiunt montes, nascetur ridiculus mus,” joked Horace (65-8 B.C.). [“The mountains labor,
but give birth only to a mouse.”] But I say to you the opposite: with this Latin shorthand book, a mouse
can labor and bring forth a mountain.
Simply throw in some Latin and stun an audience into awed silence.
I could use a little help, however. I’m having trouble finding a good use for my favorite lines
(from Quintus Ennius, 239-169 B. C. Annals): “Oscitat in campis caput a cervice revulsum /
semianimesque micant oculi lucemque requirunt.”
Which translates: “His head, severed at the neck, rolled down the field, the half-alive eyes
twitching and longing for light.”
“Quo” should I “vadis”?
BBeennddiinngg tthhee TTwwiigg:: PPaaggeess ffrroomm tthhee JJoouurrnnaall ooff aa PPiillggrriimm PPaarreenntt // 7766
May 19, 1996
HEROIC EDUCATION
The Class of 1996 was offered here at Wofford something reserved for only the aristocracy of
college students.
Wofford offered it a classical education. Wofford tradition and devotion are in the classical
liberal arts.
In the early days of this republic, liberal arts education was the only form of higher education
known. That changed. Now this is one of a very few campuses still committed to that ideal.
The heroism of Wofford (and its sister outposts such as Davidson, Sewanee, Rhodes, and
Furman) has been its lonely sentinel duty as the conscience of higher education, calling unwashed
masses of colleges to preserve the liberal arts, to raise the quality of learning, and to educate shepherds
instead of sheep, great leaders instead of goats, and inventors instead of robots.
Arthur Levine, a Harvard professor and college president of some acclaim, once wrote an
analysis of American college students titled When Heroes Died.
The assassinations of the Kennedys and Martin Luther King, Jr., the national ill-feeling over
the meaning of Viet Nam, and the impeachment of Richard Nixon–Levine found– created a national
absence of heroes to whom the young could look for models.
With that vacuum in idealism, the general mill’s-run of students seemed to become anti-heroes,
content to get by with as little personal risk-taking and with as little public service as possible.
There is a desperate drought of heroes these days.
Our nation and our world, our workplaces and our families, are in urgent and pitiful need of
heroes.
The legacy of Wofford’s past–and the function that justifies its existence–is that it educates
heroes.
In his book, Gods, Heroes and Men of Ancient Greece, the great classical scholar, W. H. D.
Rouse, re-tells the stories of the great heroes.
I doubt that Rouse’s book is required reading today–not even in the rigorous and extended
fraternity pledge-training for which Wofford Greeks are noted.
There was a time when all school children knew the Greek stories of Pandora, Hermes, Ares,
Aphrodite, and Poseidon.
They knew that human knowledge began when Prometheus had the audacity to steal fire from
the gods and give it to mortal men. They knew that Hercules was half-god and half-human.
But, says Rouse, there came a time when the old gods who ran things faded away and left
humans to fend for themselves. Instead of Zeus and Apollo and Hera, there were humans like Achilles,
Hector, Aeneas, Helen, and Penelope.
That was the time, Rouse says, when true heroism began. Pre-history ended with the death of
the gods, but history began when mere mortals arose and took responsibility for themselves.
Humans reached that level by making heroes of themselves. They took chances. They sought
honors. They served and saved others.
Humans make history.
And heroes are the best stuff of human history.
The first Wofford commencement was in 1856. There was but one graduate, Samuel Dibble.
He went on to become a U. S. Congressman.
At the second commencement, in 1857, one of the six graduates was William Maxwell Martin
of Columbia. Martin taught school for three years, intending to enter law studies in 1860.
An admirer of Professor (later President) James H. Carlisle, Martin was a delegate with him to
the secession convention in December 1860. He enlisted in the Columbia Artillery soon afterward and
was sent to Fort Moultrie January 2, 1861.
BBeennddiinngg tthhee TTwwiigg:: PPaaggeess ffrroomm tthhee JJoouurrnnaall ooff aa PPiillggrriimm PPaarreenntt // 7777
A week later, Martin’s battery fired on “Star of the West”, the ship sent by President Buchanan
to provision Fort Sumter. Twenty days later, the battery was called to guard the shoreline and fired on
two Pee Dee boats that turned out to be their own.
Martin caught cold on duty, was sent to bed, wrote home on January 31st, and then was sent to
a Columbia hospital. He was sent to his home February 16th and died of typhoid fever on February
21st.
William Maxwell Martin, Wofford Class of 1857, was the first Confederate soldier to die in the
Civil War. A broken fluted shaft marks his grave in Washington Street Cemetery in Columbia.
He was 23 when he died, and later that year the Southern Methodist Publishing House
published a book, Lyrics and Sketches, a collection of 84 poems, 14 short essays, two orations, and
parts of letters Martin had written between 1853 and 1861. (Rucht Lilavivat of Sumter, one of our
published students in 1996, had Martin as his predecessor 135 years ago.)
Seven months before Martin died he gave the first annual oration to the Wofford Alumni
Association. His opening paragraphs make a point you members of the Class of 1996 can take as a
parting gift.
Here’s what William Maxwell Martin wrote and said, in 1860:
There was an earthquake once, and Rome had trembled through all her seven hills. The capitol
was shaken from its lowest foundation to its highest gilded pinnacle. Proud palaces and gorgeous
temples tottered and reeled. Monumental pillars, victory–commemo-rating obelisks and columns,
quivered from the shock; while the strong walls rocked to and fro, and triumphal arches were riven. A
yawning chasm opened wide, with fathomless depth, and emitted pestilential vapors in the most
crowded thoroughfare of the city, and as its black walls receded, threatened to engulf the forum itself.
And now there arose tremendous confusion. The senators assembled, the equites were seen
hurrying past on foaming steeds. Long processions marched to the temples, bearing gifts for the
shrines and victims for the altars. The vestals assembled around their sacred fire, and as its undying
flame arose, besought with tears and prayers their virgin goddess. Priests and flamens were convened.
Soothsayers and oracles were consulted. The people ran hither and thither in wild confusion, for their
proud forum and regal Rome were in danger of destruction.
And now came the priests, bearing wands, and their hair with fillets bound, and delivered the
oracular answer, “Rome’s best and richest possession must be thrown into the gulf as a propitiatory
offering to the offended deities.”
Loud rose the clamor now from a thousand tongues, as the citizens debated as to what was the
most valued possession which Rome could boast among her treasuries, rich with the gathered spoils of
conquered tribes, and the tributes of allied nations. Confusion was worse confounded, for who could
tell but that the city may be despoiled, and yet the desired end not be attained?
And now despair spread her black wing and hovered over the city, casting gloom like a pall on
the sky, while terror and dismay were legibly imprinted on every face.
But hark! a trumpet’s sound is heard from afar off.
Nearer now and nearer comes the sound until, with one wild clarion blast of triumph and
defiance, a knight, mounted on a gallant charger, bursts into the assembly. The sunbeams blaze in
reflected rays from the polished steel which girds his manly breast; they beam in dazzling splendor
from the diamonds which adorn his sword-hilt, and gleam in glorious radiance from the rubies which
blazon on his helm.
It is Marcus Curtius, a youth of noble ancestry. His fathers before him have fought for Rome
and died for Rome; and already has he proved by valiant deeds upon the battle field, that he is a
worthy scion of a noble stock, and that the honest name he bears never will be dishonored, nor will the
escutcheon of his fathers ever be tarnished . . . .
Then urging his steed, and waving his sword, and shouting aloud, . . . he plunged into the gulf,
whose closing walls became his tomb.
BBeennddiinngg tthhee TTwwiigg:: PPaaggeess ffrroomm tthhee JJoouurrnnaall ooff aa PPiillggrriimm PPaarreenntt // 7788
What this Wofford alumnus was celebrating at age 22, before becoming the first southern
soldier to die in the Civil War at age 23, was heroism.
Colleges such as Wofford exist to shape heroic humans who can and do make history.
If you would love and honor your alma mater, dare to be its heroes.
Plunge into the gulf, as befits its greatest treasure.
Have the courage to take some risks.
Have the curiosity to steal fire and share it.
Have the temerity never to be intimidated by an idea, a political party, a poem, or a painting.
A world awaits the well-educated.
A wide world wants and needs them to be its heroes.
Expectant faculty and staff who will watch them throughout their tomorrows fondly wish them
well today.
BBeennddiinngg tthhee TTwwiigg:: PPaaggeess ffrroomm tthhee JJoouurrnnaall ooff aa PPiillggrriimm PPaarreenntt // 7799
June 2, 1996
REFUGEES AND REFUGES IN A STORM
As a sideline service, a secretary in our office is a notary public. Mostly that involves
occasional calls to witness and to certify signatures on legal documents.
A few weeks ago, however, it led to something else.
A young couple, having learned she was a notary, dropped in to ask her to marry them. Having
been asked to do that only once before and having strong religious convictions about matrimony truly
being holy, she phoned Wofford College’s campus minister and asked him to come over to her office.
They had lost their jobs, and they had subsequently lost their house and possessions. They had
been taken in by acquaintances, but eventually had been asked to leave.
The couple was trying hard to get to New Jersey, where a retired aunt was willing to give them
housing. A small tax refund expected by the bride was supposedly on their way that would cover their
bus fares, but in the meanwhile they were stranded, homeless and penniless.
They had sought shelter in a nearby church haven for homeless people, but had been turned
away because they weren’t married. They had an official marriage license and appropriate tests, but
needed someone to unite them. The college minister checked out their credentials, counseled with
them, and finally united them in a candle-light service in the college chapel and gave them some
money for dinner.
The shelter took them in and even bent the “5-day-maximum” rule to allow them a few extra
days. Meanwhile, they visited our secretary again. The funds they expected had not come through, and
they needed help in paying for tickets for transportation.
The shelter had steered them to a service ministry across town. The officer on duty there,
following priorities of helping single women with children first, was forced to deny their request for
$146 for bus-fare.
Over the days they had been waiting, they had tried to find temporary work. The secretary
checked some of the places they claimed to have solicited hourly wage work and verified that they had
indeed made conscientious efforts, but with little success.
She also phoned the ministry for information on why they were denied help. She gave them
taxi fare to get back across town to the ministry, where the director reviewed the case personally, and
the end result was that the ministry provided the couple with the bus-fare.
Shortly afterward, the secretary got a cup with some flowers in it and a thank-you note from the
newlyweds.
Still concerned about them, she drove to the bus station to see that they got away as planned.
She also carried them a bag of fast-food hamburgers and some snacks to tide them over on their 16hour trip. She’s had a little experience with tight budgets herself.
They have her address and promised to write when they arrive to let her know they’ve made it.
If you know the story of Joseph’s and Mary’s trek to Bethlehem and also know the parable of
the Good Samaritan, you’ll find both in this report, but in modern dress.
The story carries its own sermons. It speaks clearly for itself, and doesn’t need our expansion
here. It’s sort of nice to know that after 2,000 years some things-–such as giving aid to strangers, and
graciousness in receiving such help–still show up. What makes me especially proud is seeing it show
up right here in a Wofford office.
BBeennddiinngg tthhee TTwwiigg:: PPaaggeess ffrroomm tthhee JJoouurrnnaall ooff aa PPiillggrriimm PPaarreenntt // 8800
July 29, 1996
WORST KIND OF INHERITANCE TAXES
I take the Atlanta bombing very personally. It confirms to me that someone is out to get my
daughter.
Visiting friends in New England after entering college, she made her first excursion to New
York. The World Trade Center was bombed shortly afterward.
Last fall she spent a semester abroad in France. After three weeks in Paris, she settled into
classes in Tours. Back in Paris, there was a bombing followed by nationwide rail strikes. She was
unable to return to Paris because of them.
During spring break, she and some friends found a super-saver deal that allowed them to fly to
London. There was a bomb in Trafalgar Square soon afterward.
A few months later, TWA Flight 800, a plane with other students going to study abroad as she
had, was apparently blown up by some type of missile or bomb.
She worked the first month of summer for the Smithsonian on the Mall in Washington. Tourists
visiting the festival found traffic more difficult this year because Pennsylvania Avenue in front of the
White House has been closed for security concerns. The first day she was on the job, a major fire atop
a government building across the street brought more traffic barricades and public alarms.
For the second half of the summer, she moved on to Atlanta, where the Smithsonian’s National
Folklife Festival staffed the popular Southern Crossroads program. It is located in Centennial Park,
directly adjacent to the AT&T global village amphitheater. When the bomb went off at 1:20 a.m. on
July 27, she had been left the site at 10:15 p.m.
Each day that passes, the bombings are getting closer and closer–in time and distance. This one
missed her by a hundred yards and three hours.
Of course, I don’t really believe someone is stalking our daughter. She is a symbol here of the
up-and-coming generation that is to take our place.
I do believe a growing–and alarming–number of “someones” is stalking that whole generation.
The most helpless feeling prompted in the shock of Atlanta is captured by the question
universally being asked by so many ordinary decent people: “What kind of world have we created for
our children?”
The world is filled with wonders, manmade and natural ones, we want our children to see. The
world is filled with marvelous people, diverse in histories and habits and languages and faiths and
colors and beliefs, whom we want our children to meet. The world is shrunk by rapid transportation
and communications to a size that makes such sightings and meetings possible as never before.
How then is it possible that a world of such unprecedented potentialities is being paralyzed by
paranoia, tyrannized by terrorism, hemmed in by hate, immobilized by insurrection, flattened by
fratricide, and imprisoned by psychopaths?
The great human heart-beat which has driven all nations, up until its rather recent replacement
by the Internet and by instantaneous self-gratification through consumption of goods and people, has
been legacy-leaving. We all love our children.
Our economy and social mores have been driven by each generation’s sense of obligation for
its successors. We work hard, buy cars, have medical check-ups, pay for schools, employ police,
invest in life and health insurance, build estates, employ legions of lawyers and armies of accountants,
set up savings accounts and trust funds, write wills, and move often–all in order to leave something of
value for our children.
These legacies are threatened by both terrorism and social unrest.
Perhaps our problem is that we are so intent upon looking out for our own–which is the same as
looking out for ourselves for our closest “own” are extensions of ourselves, our modern versions of
immortality–that we don’t want the distraction of having to look out for others.
BBeennddiinngg tthhee TTwwiigg:: PPaaggeess ffrroomm tthhee JJoouurrnnaall ooff aa PPiillggrriimm PPaarreenntt // 8811
Perhaps the reason we fear for our future is that we live flat lives that don’t look back to the
past, down to our subconscious demons, or up to divine nobility. We have no eyes or time except for
what is immediate and near. So we look out for ourselves.
The decision of the Olympics officials to go on with the games, unintimidated, is laudable. The
resolve of the president and bipartisan political leadership to seek out the perpetrators and punish them
is applaudable.
But the root causes of terrorism cannot be found and exterminated by resolve or revenge. They
lie much deeper, perhaps in the inequitable allocation of increasingly scarce goods and resources
among increasingly large numbers of people. On a media-heavy globe, everyone has glimpsed the
American Dream. Rock music and denims sell well abroad. The fall of totalitarianism in the former
Soviet Union, the spread of our textile factories into underdeveloped nations, and the chinks in the
armor of China’s economic isolationism are testimonies to the spread of the Dream.
The balloon of promises of the good life gets stretched so tightly it bursts from its own hot air.
Darwin and Malthus were probably right: there isn’t enough food or space to go around, and what
there is isn’t shared very well. The strong survive; the weak don’t. Terrorism is the way some of the
desperate weak try to show some strength.
The Dream without the substance to make it reality turns it into a Nightmare. We have sown
the Dream too well; now we must ride the nightmare it has bred. The line between aspiration and envy
is a thin one, and we may have already crossed it–as Oklahoma City, Ruby Ridge, New York, TWA
Flight 800, and now Atlanta, testify. What sort of legacy is that for us to leave our children?
Over the long haul, what is generating terrorism generally is a more important question than
who specific terrorists are.
BBeennddiinngg tthhee TTwwiigg:: PPaaggeess ffrroomm tthhee JJoouurrnnaall ooff aa PPiillggrriimm PPaarreenntt // 8822
August 5, 1996
THE MESSAGE BEYOND THE STORY
Nursery rhymes and fairy tales, and myths and legends, along with the alphabet and some
children’s songs, have always seemed to me to be the first block in a firm foundation for educating our
children well.
Surrounded by those influences, a child develops curiosity, appreciation for stories,
imagination, and a habit of listening and reading and talking, graduating from that into reading itself
and applying for a library card.
One side of the ongoing controversy over television and movies has it that shows appealing to
children sometimes displace the parents, to the detriment of the children.
The true importance of fairy tales and nursery rhymes and bedtime stories is in their being
passed on directly from parents to children. That way, a child gets the messages that he or she is
important enough to claim time from the parent and that talking, reading, listening, and singing are
important and fun things to do. Ten minutes spent reading a bedtime story just before a child drops off
to sleep probably can help offset the six hours of television the average child is watching passively
every day.
The content of the shared stories is not as important for creating the learning habit as is the
contact between parent and child. I doubt that children ponder the meanings of what they hear and
repeat and learn to read in their preschool days. Contact is more important than content then. But I
know that adults, looking back on their early years and remembering fondly the time their parents and
grandparents spent telling them stories and reading to them, sometime do wonder about what message
those rhymes and stories carried.
What lesson was there in the story of Tom, Tom the Piper’s Son, stealing a pie and running
away with it and eating it? What lesson was there to the story of Goldilocks entering the Three Bears’
house uninvited, breaking their chairs and beds, and eating their porridge, and then running away when
about to be found? What message was there in the Old Testament story of David taking the throne of
Israel away from Saul, his best friend’s father? Is that where Absalom, David’s son, learned to take the
throne away from his own father? What message is there in the legend of Jesse James, stealing from
the railroads and being hailed as a hero for doing it? What message was there in the tales of Robin
Hood, stealing from the King and being idolized for it? What was the message about Robinson
Crusoe’s island survival? Was it about the means for surviving (stealing and cannibalism being
considered among them) or about the will to live?
Poet Robert Bly’s new book, The Sibling Society, has chapters in it in which Bly retells the
Jack and the Beanstalk story in its original version and points out dangers in trying to make the story
mean something too simple and other than what it was intended to mean.
Jack and the Beanstalk is not a Marxist indictment of the remote corporate giants who live
above us in castles loaded with loot, nor is it a Horatio Alger story of a young man climbing the ladder
of success. It could be read as a Robin Hood or Goldilocks story of youngsters being led to steal and
running away from being caught, but children don’t seem to get that out of hearing it. It could just as
easily be read as a story about children being foolish enough to trade a cow for magic beans, a form of
child abuse and exploitation. Or it could be a story about a young man’s shouldering early
responsibility for his widowed mother.
My own favorite interpretation is to see it as a version of the Prometheus story. In that Greek
myth Prometheus, representing the human race, dares to steal the sacred fire from the gods on Mount
Olympus. He is caught and shackled for eternity to a rock as punishment. But to his fellow humans,
warmed by the fire he brought them, he is forever a hero. As for the remote gods, they are brought
down to human level by Prometheus, and eventually they fade away and humans take over their own
lives.
BBeennddiinngg tthhee TTwwiigg:: PPaaggeess ffrroomm tthhee JJoouurrnnaall ooff aa PPiillggrriimm PPaarreenntt // 8833
Similarly, Jack invades the giant’s domain high in the heavens and brings back a chicken that
lays golden eggs and a singing harp and bags of gold. When the giant finally chases him, Jack slays
him by cutting down the beanstalk. The giant is out of place on earth and dies, but Jack was out of
place in the heavens and is applauded.
Meanings aren’t all that important; good stories have many meanings.
But we don’t see hordes of kids running around stealing and citing fairy tales or nursery rhymes
or adventure stories as a license to steal or lie. Stealing and lying are learned somewhere else than from
parents’ putting children to bed at night.
What is important is that their parents encourage them to listen, to repeat in their own words, to
use their mind’s eye of imagination, to read, and to be curious about things. At the infancy stage, the
color and the action and the adventure in stories and rhymes seem more affective for their future lives
as quick learners than do the layers and nuances of what the stories mean.
And if much later, when grown or even when still in adolescence, they return to those stories
and rhymes and find in them mixed signals about Good and Evil, Crime and Punishment, Hierarchies
and Levelings, Privilege and Impertinence–why, all the better. Those are precisely dilemmas of life
that need to be wrestled with in adulthood.
Crawling has to come before walking. Before children’s story content non-concerns comes a
more urgent need of children for parents and imagination. Until the modern day, parents met that need
through bedtime stories and rhymes.
BBeennddiinngg tthhee TTwwiigg:: PPaaggeess ffrroomm tthhee JJoouurrnnaall ooff aa PPiillggrriimm PPaarreenntt // 8844
February 17, 1997
BEHIND TERRIER SMILE–A BIG BITE
With four games left, Wofford College’s basketball team has had a 6-16 season so far.
The courage of the diminutive 1,100 student campus for playing Little David against Goliaths
of basketball this season–such as Georgia Tech, South Carolina, Clemson, Wake Forest, Tennessee,
Colorado, and North Carolina State, many of them nationally-ranked–has been duly noted and
applauded. In most cases, Wofford made respectable showings. For example, against second-ranked
Wake Forest, Tim Duncan was held to under 10 points for the only time this year.
Game after game, the Terriers have hurled slingshot pebbles against giants. Each time, they
have been sent back to playing their harps.
However, there is an anomaly in their record.
Against the military schools they have faced thus far–Navy (on Pearl Harbor Day), Army, and
Virginia Military Institute–they have actually won! On Washington’s Birthday (himself a military
leader), they play Air Force.
The football team had started the trend of defeating the military schools by beating the Citadel
in November near the end of its season, just as the basketball team was beginning fall practice.
That streak of victories against the military academies is cause for pause. How is it possible for
a little college, fresh out of NCAA Division’s II and new in Division I circles, to do so well against
institutions that enjoy the full backing of the U. S. Department of Defense? What does four
consecutive defeats at a minor power’s hands tell us about the condition of the nation’s military?
The British used to boast that their wars were actually won on the playing fields of Eton, the
prep school from which many leaders went on to Sandhurst, their military academy. A great many of
the great names among our own nation’s generals and admirals played some sport or another at one of
our nation’s military academies. And, to be truthful, those institutions have not really fared poorly in
over-all wins-and-losses in their sports schedules.
As we noted earlier, Wofford’s winning streak against the military is a quirk.
What the American defense establishment has been having to learn ever since Korea–in the
Falklands or Vietnam or Iraq or Bosnia–is that small wars in small nations have replaced global World
Wars as a way of warring.
Complex and large though they were, World Wars I and II (which Lawrence Welk called
World War i-i), like Grant’s campaign to take Richmond in the Civil War earlier, spoiled the major
powers into thinking in massive mobilization terms.
In large wars, throw enough men and materiel into the conflict, and sheer weight of numbers
will soon silence the enemy. That is a logical conclusion to be drawn from fighting such wars.
Such truisms of warfare don’t always hold when geography and objectives of battle are more
limited. The British learned that when they sent ranks of well-dressed, well-drilled, and well-fed
soldiers against scruffy, retreating, American volunteers in the Revolution and in the War of 1812. The
North learned that in the 1860’s when it took four years to end a War that most northerners thought
would be over in six months.
Perhaps the point to be made is that the nation and the world need to brace itself for a far
different kind of warring in the 21st Century than it knew from Napoleon’s days up through World
War II. The inevitable wars that lie ahead–much as all of us pray that there will be none–are likely to
involve small, little-known opponents, with restraint, patience, and diplomacy as weapons as much as
men and armaments.
I doubt that the defense establishment has learned that lesson from its military academies
suffering defeat at the hands of little Wofford College. But perhaps the pattern of Wofford’s winning
streak can serve them and us as a symbol of our need nationally to be vigilant and armed, but flexible
and patient as well. Little underdogs like the Terriers can pack vicious bites, and even when they seem
to be losing, they keep coming back for more.
BBeennddiinngg tthhee TTwwiigg:: PPaaggeess ffrroomm tthhee JJoouurrnnaall ooff aa PPiillggrriimm PPaarreenntt // 8855
February 24, 1997
OLD PROPHECY ABOUT TO BE FULFILLED
Back in the late 1960’s I was on a committee in Alabama that devised ways and means to take
learning from university television networks into school systems. In the 1970’s, I served on similar
Tennessee committees. Those were the days before personal computers became as commonplace in
homes and offices as phones. IBM had a virtual monopoly on the computer industry, and personal
desktop computers were still rare.
Television sets were abundant by those times, but videocassettes and VCR players were not yet
around. But even then, because what technology there was seemed so fantastic, primitive though it
may seem today, prophecies abounded that education was on the verge of being revolutionized by
technology.
There is a direct line of parentage from Sputnik in 1957 to the Internet Learning of 1997 (by
way of computers and television), but the realization that massive changes in how students learn are at
hand is a revolutionary thought.
The revolution has been slower in coming than most educational prophets expected, but it may
have finally arrived. Peter Drucker, managerial expert and prognosticator, thinks so.
Educational technologies have far-reaching, radical implications and impacts for how and
where we learn, for who is or isn’t a student, for how teachers prepare and present their information,
and for the future of facilities and campuses as actual physical places.
Students who can use the libraries of the world need not spend much time in their own little
campus library. Students who can enroll in technology-based courses need not enroll in only one
college, and may not even need to enroll in any college at all. Faculty accustomed to lecturing may
find themselves directing students to video or transmission recordings or two-way communications
networks.
Everywhere one looks there are microwave transmitter towers, satellite reception dishes, and
desktop receivers and senders. Company and educational conferences once held at convention city
hotels now are often held by television or audio conferencing.
The youngsters of today are quite at home in this transformation, so much so that higher
education is changing itself rapidly, hurrying (as did Robespierre or Voltaire) to lead the revolution
before it sweeps by and leaves them behind.
One thing for certain, the Puritans of Harvard in 1636 would, in 1996, have difficulty finding
anything familiar on any of our American campuses, and by 2036 may not find campuses at all.
BBeennddiinngg tthhee TTwwiigg:: PPaaggeess ffrroomm tthhee JJoouurrnnaall ooff aa PPiillggrriimm PPaarreenntt // 8866
March 10, 1997
OVERDOING A GOOD THING
A successful business executive had himself cloned. His clone was physically an exact
duplicate. But its behavior differed from the original. It had a violent temper, and it also used
profanity to excess. The businessman, exasperated by it, tried to talk the clone into changing its ways,
but it became angry, seized a letter-opener, and tried to stab its originator. The businessman grabbed
the wrist and wrestled with the clone in the penthouse office. Finally, he flung it against the office
window, which shattered. The clone plunged to its death, shouting profanities as it fell. Whereupon,
the businessman was arrested…and charged with making an obscene clone fall.
When that joke made the rounds ten years ago, cloning was something one knew about from
watching “Star Trek” fantasies or reading science fiction. The humor of the joke was the fantastic
premise. Cloning was possible in theory, but not widely discussed.
But now that monkeys, ewes, and birds have been cloned successfully, suddenly the
newspapers, the barber shops, and the Internet are abuzz with a reality past the stage of being only a
possibility. ‘T’aint as funny now that it can happen.
Most folks aren’t asking if cloning of humans is possible. They are asking who and where the
first human cloning will be. They don’t even ask when it will be. They assume, since it is possible, it
may already be underway right now.
President Clinton has stepped in, upset like the businessman with the obscenity of the clone,
and has decreed that there will be no human cloning in the United States. When it comes to cloning
around, he is not of two minds.
But the President doesn’t make laws; he executes and enforces them. Legally, his
pronouncement has no more weight than a Sunday sermon. As our crime and drug rates show, “just
saying No” hasn’t stopped any one from doing anything wrong if they are determined to do it.
Not that President Clinton isn’t right to try to stop human cloning. What possible reason can
there be, in an overpopulated world in which nature has been rapidly eclipsed by artificialities, to
reproduce more of the same? We need fewer of us, not more, unless we are somehow able to clone
enough food to sustain our planet indefinitely.
And besides, who is to decide who is to be cloned? If it’s a political choice, will the party in
power decide? Will we have a new gaggle of Gingriches, throngs of Thurmonds, carload lots of Lotts,
or claques of Clintons? If it’s an academic choice, will someone clone on the basis of SAT scores or
grade point averages or number of publications? If it’s an arts choice, will we have a gross of Michael
Jacksons or a batch of Bachs? Maybe the medical profession will monopolize it–which would at least
create enough doctors to lower the costs of medical care.
The only case that has been made for human cloning so far is the traditional one made in the
name of all “Progress”, which is, “Because it’s there!” If man can make something, he will; if he can
break something, he will; if he can shake something, he will. Human curiosity is as insatiable as eating
potato chips: we have to try at least one, and once we have, we can’t stop gobbling.
Presidential edicts quite aside, human cloning will happen, just as certainly as the atom bomb
was made and just as surely as we started getting our vitamins from tablets instead of from foods.
Who among us is not vain enough to wish more of our self upon a world needing our
specialness? Isn’t that why we have children?
By century’s end, the obscene clones will fall into our midst, and somewhere Barbara Streisand
and her talented clone will be singing, in duet:
Where are the clones? Quick, send in the clones . . . .
Don’t bother. They’re here . . . .My fault, I fear . . . .
I thought you’d want what I want. Sorry, my dear.
BBeennddiinngg tthhee TTwwiigg:: PPaaggeess ffrroomm tthhee JJoouurrnnaall ooff aa PPiillggrriimm PPaarreenntt // 8877
March 24, 1997
WALKING THE WALK AND TALKING THE TALK
The long lives of writer Robert Penn Warren and critic-professor Cleanth Brooks persistently
intersected.
Both were born into relatively modest-income families in western Kentucky--Warren the son of
a storekeeper-farmer in Guthrie and Brooks the son of a Methodist minister in Murray. Both went to
boarding schools in Tennessee for their educations--Warren to Clarksville and Brooks to McKenzie.
Both were English majors at Vanderbilt. Both became Rhodes Scholars. They taught together at LSU,
collaborated in editing The Southern Review there, co-authored throughout their lifetimes monumental
textbooks on interpreting poetry and fiction, taught at Yale, shared many friends such as Ralph Ellison
and Fugitives and Agrarians, and kept in touch until Warren died in 1989, at 84. Brooks followed in
1994, just short of his 88th birthday. Both were subjects of biographies published within months of
each other: Mark Royden Winchell on Brooks and Joseph Blotner on Warren.
Considered individually or in tandem, few people have had as much impact on American
literature as this pair of complementary Kentuckians. Both were courtly, both conscious of their
southern roots, both scholarly, both transplanted to New England, both complexly influenced by their
fathers, both recipients of high cultural offices and honors.
Brooks, the literary analyst, was more precise and quiet and traditionally professorial, while
Warren, the creative writer known for poetry and fiction, was gregarious and loquacious. Brooks
married only once, to his beloved “Tinkum”, but Warren endured a wrenching and turbulent marriage
to Emma Cinina Brescia before finding his own true love in Eleanor Huntingdon Clark.
In their companion biographies, obscure paragraphs from their pre-college days hold a key to
how Brooks and Warren got started on the right foot (or feet) towards successful careers. Among many
other commonalities, they shared early immersion in languages other than English.
Brooks had four years of Latin and three of Greek at McTyeire School, a little academy with
fifty to sixty students. Warren heard his father recite Greek, studied Latin In Guthrie High School
through Cicero and Vergil, and German at Vanderbilt, and years later learned Italian as well. The odds
of two semi-rural western Kentuckians getting that solid a base in languages in high school were
against them. Not only were they able to translate classical literature as a result; they were also
influenced by its content. Heroes of mythology and legend inspired their ambitions and became meat
for allusions and metaphors throughout their careers. Most of all, they learned to express ideas.
Language untied their tongues, their minds, and their pens.
The importance of language studies needs to be underlined in every school curriculum. The
state of language learning is appalling. Misuse of the most basic language, English, should be cause for
alarm for all of us. Lack of a second language is of no less concern. Students who take language
seriously excel in non-language studies, in having international perspectives, and in chosen careers.
The problem is not enough student expose themselves seriously to English and other languages.
The link between language and academic achievement is strong. A spot-check of high
achievers among this year’s seniors here at Wofford College revealed that half of the 100 students with
the highest SAT scores upon admission and with the highest grade-point averages upon graduation
were foreign-language majors. Most of them actually had double-majors, one language plus one nonlanguage concentration (such as economics, government, a science, or psychology).
The lesson to be drawn from Brooks and Warren is that life-success often follows from early
achievement in languages. Difficult as this initial hurdle may be, those who clear it seem able to fit
comfortably into many of the rest of education’s treasure-houses of curriculum and to roam freely
throughout the nation and internationally thereafter. Expression is our most important expressway.
Language mastery can be a highway to high places. Alas, for too many youngsters (and too late for
their parents), it is a narrow unpaved country road, strewn with weeds and potholes, too seldom
traveled.
BBeennddiinngg tthhee TTwwiigg:: PPaaggeess ffrroomm tthhee JJoouurrnnaall ooff aa PPiillggrriimm PPaarreenntt // 8888
March 31, 1997
LEARNING TO SPEAK
For almost all of the 19th century, student life at most colleges centered in “literary societies”.
Literary societies were organized and operated by students themselves, centers for intellectual
activity in which they gained experience in public speaking, logical argumentation, formal debate, and
social graces. They were a training ground for the classroom recitations all students made and for the
commencement and oral examination speeches many students had to give. Usually wreathed in secrecy
and exclusivity, occasionally societies opened their doors to the public for presentations, especially to
groups of chaperoned young ladies, by members or guest celebrities.
Every college had them—the Harvard Speaking Club, Princeton’s Cliosophic and Whig
societies, Missouri’s Athenaeum Literary Society, Transylvania’s Philosophical Society, UNC Chapel
Hill’s Dialectic and Philanthropic Societies, Georgia’s Phi Kappas and Demosthenians, Tennessee’s
Chi Delta and Philomathesian and Dialectic Adelphick Societies, Vanderbilt’s Philosophic and
Dialectic Societies, and Williams’s Philologian and Philotechnian Societies. Some antebellum
colleges, such as Davidson, still have original stately buildings of their societies centrally displayed on
their campuses.
Professors (who in those days doubled as the colleges’ administration) embraced, encouraged,
and endorsed literary societies fairly fully, except when they became too secretive, too social, or too
outspoken. Clubs gave students something useful to do, especially on weekend nights.
The societies didn’t curb adolescent pranks entirely. Robert A. Law, an English professor in
Texas, recalling his alma mater Wofford College in South Carolina as it was in 1898, noted that the
college bell still was rung at midnight and squawking hens were thrown into rival literary society
meetings. Professor Henry Nelson Snyder’s’s cow, painted by a member of the Class of 1898, licked
the paint off and died, but Snyder survived to serve as Wofford’s president for forty years (1902-42).
The reminiscing professor out in Texas recalled especially fondly Wofford’s Calhoun and
Preston Literary Societies. Every student was in one.
“The society halls were comfortable, carpeted rooms, devoted solely to that purpose, were well
lighted and furnished with attractive opera chairs, and their walls were ornamented with many oil
paintings of distinguished alumni and professors. The president of the society sat on a high platform
under a canopy, and he always wore a black gown.... Regular meetings were held each Friday night,
beginning at seven-thirty o’clock and lasting frequently until midnight or later.... Half the society’s
members... came on duty to read essays, to declaim, or to debate each Friday night. Thus, if one was
not on the program at one meeting, he was sure to be at the next one.... Before the end of his freshman
year practically every student had gained some self-confidence in addressing the society....The average
Wofford graduate of that time would prove a readier speaker and a more skillful rough-and-tumble
debater than the average male graduate of the University of Texas....”
Wofford’s luminary history professor, Lewis P. Jones, recalls that the two societies promoted
good art. Members of Calhoun commissioned a painting of John C. Calhoun by the increasingly
popular South Carolina artist, Albert Capers Guerry, promising him $150. When the painting was
done, the boys didn’t have the money, so Guerry took the painting on tour. He copied it for the
duplicate that hangs in the South Carolina House of Representatives. The rival group, the Preston
Society, had paintings of W. C. Preston and of Wofford president James H. Carlisle also done by
Guerry. They and other Guerry works still grace Wofford today.
Virtually all of the thousand colleges established in America before the Civil War followed the
pattern of the first one, Harvard, established in 1636. They were small liberal arts colleges, most of
them for men, dedicated to preparing students for careers in law, medicine, or the ministry, or to run
their inherited family businesses or farms.
BBeennddiinngg tthhee TTwwiigg:: PPaaggeess ffrroomm tthhee JJoouurrnnaall ooff aa PPiillggrriimm PPaarreenntt // 8899
Only a fifth of them survived the Civil War, and higher education took new roads thereafter,
adding new fields to the curriculum and graduate schools and schools of engineering, education,
business, law, medicine, and divinity through which undergraduates continued their education.
Extracurricular life changed just as radically. Greek-society social fraternities and sororities
flourished, as did intercollegiate athletics, between them providing social outlets for the non-classroom
hours that the literary societies had tried to fill.
Professor Law had reason to lament the demise of the societies. “These organizations furnished
a training in the clash of opinion and a preparation for citizenship which, to my mind, are invaluable.
That such literary societies seem everywhere to be passing away...is a source of profound regret.”
One wonders, in these days of lectures and video presentations and packaged knowledge, with
the emphasis upon one-way impartings of data, where students can get the experience they need in
speaking in public, constructing logical arguments, and engaging in presentations?
Recitation, rhetoric, debate, parliamentary procedure, and dialogue are art forms relevant both
to making a living and to living good lives. Realizing that, even belatedly, the most alert colleges are
reviving those practices.
BBeennddiinngg tthhee TTwwiigg:: PPaaggeess ffrroomm tthhee JJoouurrnnaall ooff aa PPiillggrriimm PPaarreenntt // 9900
April 13, 1997
PRESIDENTIAL SILVER SERVICE
Without fail, George Washington is universally considered to have been a southerner. He was,
after all, a Virginian.
But if one retraces his steps throughout his life--stopping at those thousand places with signs
proclaiming “Washington Slept Here” and those places without such signs that Washington was
known to have been--it is amazing that this southerner spent so little time in the Southland.
Washington ventured west in his early career-- surveying, buying property, leading British
troops in the French-Indian War--but not far south. Later, in the Revolution, he spent military time in
the north, shuttling between Boston and New York and Philadelphia and New Jersey. As president, his
seat of government was in New York City and Philadelphia. The nation’s capital on the northern
Virginia line with Maryland was north of Mt. Vernon.
But in 1791, as president, he made a southern tour. His trek through the Carolinas and Georgia
led him on May 26 to spend the night at the James Ingram home near Hanging Rock in Lancaster
County, South Carolina.
By four the morning of May 27, 1791, he was on his way again, without breakfast. Eighteeen
miles later, passing through Barnettsville (now known as Lancaster), Washington paused for breakfast,
north of town, at Nathan Barr’s Tavern.
The Barrs were early settlers in that area. The tavern was located near the crossing of the
Charlotte and Monroe highways just below the North Carolina line, near the birthplace of another
president, Andrew Jackson. It was at the time also the temporary courthouse for the county.
In the Revolution, Nathan Barr had been a lieutenant in Captain Robert Montgomery’s
company of Joseph Kershaw’s regiment of militia. Census reports show a Barr family of five males
and five females in Lancaster County in 1790, the year before Washington arrived.
Washington had mush and milk for breakfast, and it was served in a glass pitcher and a bowl.
Inn prices were set by law in those days, and the standard price for breakfast was a shilling.
Washington, probably paying for his entourage as well or else trying to be generous to the
Barrs’s daughter for serving him, took a Spanish piece-of-eight, a dollar, and sliced it in half with his
sword and reputedly tossed one half into the bowl and gave it to the Barr daughter. The half-coin was
worth two shillings.
Spanish pieces-of-eight were made of soft silver. Because coins were so scarce in the young
country, large dollars were often cut into pieces, called “bits”. That practice is recalled today in the
chant, “Two bits, four bits, six bits, a dollar”, or in the song-tag, “Shave and a haircut, six bits.”
The silver dollar may have been one of 400 that Washington withdrew from Alexander
Hamilton’s cashbox at the treasury in Philadelphia on March 18, to take on his trip.
But the young daughter held on to the half-dollar, and when she was in her seventies, she gave
it to a kinsman, Andrew Mayer, the first mayor (no pun intended) of Lancaster.
Mayer’s second wife’s brother was Wilks Thurlow Caston, a local lawyer. Caston and James
H. Carlisle, Wofford College’s famous president from (1875 to 1902), had married Columbia’s Bryce
sisters. Carlisle persuaded Caston to speak on the college’s behalf to the Mayers. Caston talked the
Mayers into giving the Washington half-dollar to Wofford College. Carlisle said later that the Barr
family held on to the pitcher and bowl and passed them down the family line.
One side of the coin has the border letters VTRAQUE VNU arching the top of a crown and
what appear to be tops of two crowned scepters. The opposite side has as the border arch letters
I.D.G.HISPAN.ET in the semi-circle over a large crown under which is the top of a coat of arms.
Wofford College protects its coin, perhaps the only one in captivity that can be documented as
actually having been held by Washington, in a vault. It shares the vault with the $85,897 in
Confederate bonds into which Wofford converted its endowment funds in 1864.
BBeennddiinngg tthhee TTwwiigg:: PPaaggeess ffrroomm tthhee JJoouurrnnaall ooff aa PPiillggrriimm PPaarreenntt // 9911
April 20, 1997
THE WINNOWS OF WAR
In reading the names on a memorial plaque to alumni killed in America’s wars on the wall of
Wofford College’s historic Main Building, a shock of recognition shivered through me when I found
the name of Sergeant Horace Asbury McSwain.
The doctor who delivered me, as he had three thousand or so others in the little town of Paris,
TN, he served all of his professional life, was Dr. Horace McSwain. The names are too similar for the
two Horaces not to have been related.
McSwain left Wofford after his junior year to enlist in the Spartan Rifles of the Palmetto
Sharpshooters in 1861. In one battle, he captured the flag of a Michigan regiment, and received
commendations for that deed from South Carolina’s governor and legislature, who ordered his name
stamped on the flag and engraved on its staff. McSwain was killed, along with four other Wofford
soldiers, in his eighth battle, at Second Manassas, August 30, 1862.
Wofford had opened its doors in 1854 with three professors and nine students. In its seventh
year, with a student body of 79, the Civil War began. By summer, 29 of the students had marched off
to service, and by the fall of 1861, 40 had gone. Only 33 students were left, and within a month half of
those left behind enlisted. By December 1861, enrollment was down to 11 students, and by July 1862
only eight remained.
William Maxwell Martin, class of 1857, was the first Confederate to die in the Civil War, taken
by pneumonia February 21, 1861, almost two months before Fort Sumter was fired upon.
Equally as poignant as Martin’s death was the killing of three Wofford men with McSwain at
Second Manassas by a single a federal shell-burst among them as they were successfully leading
Longstreet’s charge on the flank of the Union divisions attacking Stonewall’s Jackson’s corps. Killed
by that shell on August 30, 1862, were James Jerman Palmer (class of 1860), Theodotus LeGrand
“Addie” Capers (class of 1860), and Whitefoord Andrew Smith, who had completed his freshman year
in 1861 and whose father was a Wofford professor of English.
One contemporary account, a letter from a relative back in South Carolina, said Palmer was
killed separately and that McSwain, Capers, and Smith were the three killed by the solitary shell. But
the more accurate account seems to be a letter from a surviving Wofford student, Arthur Harris, who
was in the same company and in the battle. The letters are in A World Turned Upside Down: The
Palmers of South Santee, 1818-1881, published by USC Press in 1996). An old photo in the Wofford
archives shows the three classmates together in life, decked out in their uniforms, as they were in
death.
McSwain died in other action that day, as did Thomas Elijah Dawkins (another class of 1860
classmate). Zachariah Linden Nabers (a junior who enlisted in 1861) died in 1863 of wounds received
at the battle. Eli Hoyle Miller (class of 1859), Albert Maximilliam Padgett (sophomore in 1861),
Benjamin Wofford Wells (junior in 1861), died in 1862 or early 1863 and may have all been killed or
wounded at that Second Manassas encounter.
Yet another poignant Wofford story from that war is that of the Simpson brothers, Tally and
Dick, who enlisted in their senior year. Dick enlisted twice but illness drove him out of service by July
1862, after fighting at First Manassas. Tally stayed on, constantly hungry and homesick, wishing
fervently , “Oh, how I wish I was at home and had as many possums as I could eat.”
Tally Simpson fought at First Manassas, the Peninsula, Seven Days, Antietam, Fredericksburg,
Chancellorsville, and Gettysburg, before moving west to Tennessee with Longstreet, where he died
charging George Thomas’s troops at Snodgrass Hill in the Battle of Chickamauga. The letters of the
two boys were printed by Oxford University Press in 1994 as Far, Far from Home: The Wartime
Letters of Dick and Tally Simpson, Third South Carolina Volunteers.
Once the smoke cleared at war’s end in 1865, at least thirty-five Wofford men had died. They
died too young, after aging too rapidly, and with them died some of the best seed-corn of the nation.
BBeennddiinngg tthhee TTwwiigg:: PPaaggeess ffrroomm tthhee JJoouurrnnaall ooff aa PPiillggrriimm PPaarreenntt // 9922
There are similar brass plaques upon the walls of other colleges in this nation. Harvard, Yale,
and Princeton student and alumni rosters were hit especially hard, as were Virginia and VMI. In death,
the casualties knew no sides.
The country paid a horrible price for its fratricide, with something like 1,600,000 young men
lost and scarred and with habits of combativeness acquired by the living that set the tone for Darwinian
economics and sectional politics for the hundred years afterward.
Moved by its local manifestations here where I work, I rummage among its ashes to find the
link between the Horace McSwain who died while dishing out death when he was perhaps 22 or 23
and the Horace McSwain whose long life was given to giving life to others.
BBeennddiinngg tthhee TTwwiigg:: PPaaggeess ffrroomm tthhee JJoouurrnnaall ooff aa PPiillggrriimm PPaarreenntt // 9933
May 12, 1997
COMMENCEMENT AISLES ARE DARK TUNNELS
In an early episode of one of those black-and-white documentaries we used to watch over and
over--probably “Victory at Sea”--the lights go out in New York City in 1941 while the narrator, with
Edward R. Murrow voice, says something like, “And now, the long darkness until D-Day begins, when
the flame of the Statue of Liberty will be re-kindled and the lights will go on again all over the world.”
That unforgettable image of silence and darkness nags us this week as we “celebrate” our
youngest child’s graduation from college. Chatting on the lawn with her professors and classmates and
rejoicing in her accomplishments and in her future, an imaginary cloud will mask the sunlight of the
occasion.
Because, after her graduation, we see ahead for us her absence and silence.
Her wise grandmother, who saw her own two offspring grow up and leave the nest, tells us that
this last child actually left four years ago, when she went to college.
Perhaps so. Perhaps the last four years have been sort of a decompression chamber, easing us
into our new status gradually.
My wife and I have certainly rediscovered each other in those four years, and we have used the
time to trim our lists of acquaintances to a select few with whom we feel especially close.
Still, with Molly’s college only ninety minutes away from us, we have never accepted this
separation as serious.
The one looming ahead seems more real. It has come too suddenly.
To make it even worse, Molly’s graduation day is also my birthday, giving us a double-barreled
reminder that time has gotten away from us before we were adequately prepared.
We grope for escapes from loneliness and loss that haven’t even occurred.
Groping, we have resorted to reason, but it doesn’t work. Logic and experience both tell us that
what is happening to us is natural, desirable, well-precedented, and good. Children must grow up. The
test of family ties is not in how tightly we hold on to each other, but in how well we manage to feel
closer to each other in our freedom to be apart.
Yet, knowing that of the 13 million other college students in America today, fully two million
of them also will be marching down graduation aisles over the next four weeks doesn’t ease the ache
much. They are anonymous millions; our one is ours.
Leafing through her scrapbooks and photo albums hurts more than it helps. It has all the
warmth of an unthawed frozen dinner.
Nor do we think that e-mail and phone calls will let us reach out and touch each other as well as
being close enough for eyeball-to-eyeball and cheek-to-cheek contact has been.
What will be do to replace the clutter in her room when she was around? Who will provide the
spontaneity and unpredictability of her interests and forays? To whom do we pass on our accumulated
sage advice?
We knew something of this ache when her older sister, Elizabeth, made the same trek ten years
ago. The difference then was she left Molly with us, to provide us with one more decade of comfort,
some one to parent.
To Elizabeth’s credit, since she has always been strong on instincts, she has sensed recently
what we are about to experience, and her own visits and calls have been more frequent, about the only
bonus we’ve found in this transition period.
But now there will be only a bedroom of stuffed polar bears and an unlikable cat, Hot
Chocolate, for company.
It is important for us--and the several million parents graduating with us this season--to see the
difference between separation and loss. There is a world of difference, and it is what makes parting
such sweet sorrow.
BBeennddiinngg tthhee TTwwiigg:: PPaaggeess ffrroomm tthhee JJoouurrnnaall ooff aa PPiillggrriimm PPaarreenntt // 9944
Two of the names carved into the black marble of the Vietnam memorial in Washington are
names of boys with whom I was in school in our mutual youth. They died before they were as old as
our graduating daughter. In our mind’s eyes, they are forever under 21, crew cut and muscled and
energetic and smiling. But for them there was no college, no waiting world to explore, and no
courtships, marriages, children, or careers.
That is true loss, beside which ours is trifling.
In that light, our impending separation by college graduation from our children-grown-up is no
loss at all. We have cause to celebrate, indeed. They live, and they must move on. Their futures are
uncharted, but they do have futures.
So, sadness at their leaving is self-indulgent, we must admit. It wraps up nostalgia, rituals of
passage, uncertainties, and transformations all in one messy package.
We rejoice that gateways and doors await them, and that they have health and education to get
them through them. Just knowing that brings us a joy that salves the ache of surrendering them to the
uncharted future and uncertain universe.
We’ll hold that thought of joy for this Sunday’s ceremony and beam with pride.
But, just in case, we’ll also carry clean handkerchiefs and a package of Kleenex.
BBeennddiinngg tthhee TTwwiigg:: PPaaggeess ffrroomm tthhee JJoouurrnnaall ooff aa PPiillggrriimm PPaarreenntt // 9955
June 16, 1997
LIVES OF GREAT MEN AND WOMEN REMIND US
After watching a Ken Burns documentary on Thomas Jefferson recently, I started reading the
background book on Jefferson, American Sphinx, by Joseph J. Ellis.
In his introduction, Ellis credits a man named Clay Jenkinson with getting him interested in
studying and writing about Jefferson.
Jenkinson makes a very good living by re-living Jefferson’s life. He has immersed himself in
Jefferson’s biographies, writings, and Jefferson-era history. Wearing a Jefferson costume, he appears
in character at all sorts of events: bar association conventions, antiquarian society meetings, corporate
board meetings, and colleges and schools.
This is not a performance of the type given by Hal Holbrook as Mark Twain, Sam Watterson as
Abe Lincoln, or James Whitmore as Will Rogers. They are professional actors who speak actual
memorized lines from their characters’ speeches or writings.
Jenkinson becomes a living, modern-day Jefferson. His performances are “as if”, rather than
“as”. He speaks to all sorts of contemporary issues and topics, but in Jefferson’s character. He ponders
what Jefferson would say were he alive and as intellectually alert as he had been in his own day.
A friend of mine who is head of the state humanities council in Arizona knows Jenkinson well.
He tells me a foundation has made a grant to his council for Jenkinson to train ten college faculty
members a year. Their home campuses give these selected professors sabbatical leave with pay to
study in depth historical characters and their times, and they return to their campuses to impart their
expanded knowledge by assuming the characters of regional figures and teaching students how to do
the same.
I believe the concept of immersion-impersonation is an idea whose time has come. It is all
about how history can be learned and enjoyed in an age when students and society are less historyconscious than any time in our--well--in our history.
Years ago, in the days of black-and-white television, Steve Allen and his wife with a guest or
two would don costumes of famous people and sit around a table impersonating those people meeting.
I don’t recall the show’s name, but it was probably something like “Meeting of the Minds”. Einstein
and Madame Curie and Mahatma Ghandi might get together to talk about some issues.
Many schools and colleges sponsor teams to Model United Nations events, with a school’s
team assuming the role of a member nation’s delegation at the UN. I heard of one college team that
was so successful in knowing about and representing a struggling African nation that the country’s
impoverished government, unable to fund travel and an embassy, actually hired the Americans to be
its official delegation at the UN, answering phones and giving tourism directions.
Any of us who have done any touring have seen battlefield enactors at various Revolutionary
and Civil War parks. At Williamsburg, we can see in-character blacksmiths and candlemakers and
merchants who explain their work and the history of Williamsburg to us. At TVA’s Land Between the
Lakes, the 1850 Homestead has people actually living on and working the farm, who also talk to us as
characters from that era.
Historical representation is a growing career opportunity. Think of all the places where such
interpreters would be welcomed: Biltmore Estate, Thomas Wolfe’s Asheville home, Jackson’s
Hermitage, Calhoun’s home, Jeff Davis’s home, Martin Luther King’s memorial in Atlanta, Booker T.
Washington’s Tuskegee, Mary Boynkin Chesnut’s Camden, Andrew Johnson’s tailor shop in
Greeneville, or Henry Clay’s Ashland.
Make your own list. It shouldn’t take long to come up with a dozen or more names: Davy
Crockett, Lee, Grant, William Faulkner, Margaret Mitchell, Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, etc.
Helen Keller would be a challenge, but not impossible.
BBeennddiinngg tthhee TTwwiigg:: PPaaggeess ffrroomm tthhee JJoouurrnnaall ooff aa PPiillggrriimm PPaarreenntt // 9966
More important than carving out a career track for educated folk, however, is the idea of using
impersonation as a means to learn biography in depth and contextual history around a character in
breadth.
Most high school and college teachers of history have trouble finding summer employment in
keeping with their academic year work. It would be a marvelous thing for state humanities councils to
cooperate with state education departments in funding summer workshops and semester leaves for
history teachers and drama coaches to study selected characters in depth, returning to their institutions
to teach in character but also to teach their students how to learn by assuming characters of their own.
Students could learn a great deal about the Revolution and the Constitution if a class assumed
the characters of delegates to the first Congress of 1775-76 or to the Constitutional Convention of
1787. Think of the young Adams, Jefferson, Washington, Hamilton, Madison potential. (Recall, too,
the success of the Broadway musical, “1776”.)
One need not be in school, of course, to become a character personifier. In the luxury of one’s
own home, one can read extensively and practice before a mirror. It’s a fun way to become our own
heroes and to learn history.
BBeennddiinngg tthhee TTwwiigg:: PPaaggeess ffrroomm tthhee JJoouurrnnaall ooff aa PPiillggrriimm PPaarreenntt // 9977
October 20, 1997
HARD TO FIND A CALENDAR DATE
The clock is ticking more quickly. The Millennium draws nearer and nearer.
Are we prepared for New Year’s Day 2000 A.D.?
Or do we have an extra year to prepare, if the Millennium is actually set for 12:01 a.m., January
1, 2001 A. D.?
Was the first year A. D. numbered 0 or 1? If it was O A. D., the millennium arrives January 1,
2000 A. D. If the first year was 1 A. D., the arrival is at the beginning of 2001 A. D.
Arthur Clark and Stanley Kubrick, we know from their movie 2001, favored the later date. So
did the presidents of the Ivy League colleges, when surveyed in 1899. So do most scholars, most
newspapers, and the Greenwich Observatory.
Ordinary citizens, however, prefer 2000. The popular vote is for the year ending in the doublezero, rather than zero-one. When the celebrations are held, mostly likely popular opinion will prevail.
Dating the millennium is a wonderful topic to debate. Few people have gotten killed over that
argument, fiercely though it has been waged. Passionate argument about it is useful, if you pardon my
poor humor, as a time-killer, using up time when we could have been employed hurting one another
intentionally or accidentally. It is good for the mind and for the soul—and for humanity in general—to
argue over things that have no answers and few practical consequences.
To add to the confusion, since the millennia supposedly mark thousand year cycles since the
birth year of Jesus, what do we do with the fact that King Herod, the ruler when Jesus was born, died
in 4 B.C.? (How Christ could have been born B. C.--before himself--is another question entirely.)
If that is the case, the second millennium actually ended at 1996, and we missed its observance
almost altogether (unless it had something to do with the Olympics in Atlanta or presidential elections
in the U.S).
There’s even more to confuse us. Our calendar is essentially European and Christian, but most
of the world is neither. Hindu and Islamic societies, African and Oriental cultures, and the majority of
the world, operate on different calendars. What difference would it make to someone for whom this is
year 4,278 that our own western calendars are observing a millennium, something that happens only
every thousand years? They will yawn and sleep on through the fireworks. One man’s day is another’s
night.
Actually millennia counting got started many centuries ago. It was religious in origin, for
Bishop Usher was trying to account for the six millennia prophesied by scriptures. The trouble was
that, in order for things to fit into his chronology, he had to assume that the world was created in 4,004
B. C. Science has had some serious reservations about that short a time span for global history.
But some starting point is necessary, if one is to keep count of thousand-year cycles. Tell us
when the world began and we can tell you when the next millennium really comes. In the meanwhile,
provincial and inaccurate though it may be, we will be celebrating at midnight, December 31, both in
2000 and in 2001.
Think of it. Those who are around to celebrate the ending of the second millennium and the
opening of the third can make a claim to an experience that millions of people have missed and that
millions more will miss over the following thousand years. We will have been present at a very rare
moment of transition.
Not only that, but we will see in 2000 A. D. another rare thing, something that hasn’t happened
in 400 years--a Leap Year day February 29th at the turn of a century. That has happened in the
Christian calendar only in 400 A. D., 800 A. D., 1200 A. D., and 1600 A. D.
Most of us are already watching our calories. Now we can have the fun of watching our
calendars.
We have a lot to which to look forward. Lots can happen in a thousand years.
BBeennddiinngg tthhee TTwwiigg:: PPaaggeess ffrroomm tthhee JJoouurrnnaall ooff aa PPiillggrriimm PPaarreenntt // 9988
November 17, 1997
A TREE WORTH MEDITATING UPON
Although mid-November has come, the leaves of the gingko trees outside my office window
are still green. Usually by now, they have turned their brilliant yellow and fallen in a single day,
forming perfect-circle golden skirts around their trunks. Gingkos are my most-favorite trees. The
stunning flames of fall’s maple leaves and the seductive pastels of spring’s apple, peach, and pear trees
take a distant second-place.
Its proper name is Gingko biloba, but it has nicknames. Some call it “the Maidenhair tree”
because its leaves resemble those of maidenhair fern. The leaves are fan-shaped, and the leaf veins are
unique. They are not “palmate” like maples with main veins diverging from a stem base, nor “parallel”
like grasses with main veins beside each other, nor “pinnate” like rhododendrons with a main mid-vein
with sub-veins radiating from it. Gingko leaves fan out from the stem to make a fan-shaped leaf with
diverging veins, none of which is a main vein, dividing over and over into pairs. (Technically, this is
called “dichotomous venation”.)
Native to eastern China, gingko trees are prehistoric, the oldest existing tree. Scientists say that
200 or 150 or 50 million years ago, gingko trees had spread around the globe, into temperate climate
zones. Somehow one species survived time and the Ice Age, but only in the China region from which it
originally sprang. They were plant-dinosaurs that lived, although fossils of their ancestors are still
found and treasured by serious rock-gatherers everywhere.
Ironical as it may seem, the same Orient that sent kudzu that threatens to strangle us sent
gingkos to make our lives golden. Legend has it that Buddhist monks in eastern Chinese mountains,
transplanting cuttings of male gingkos or planting foul-smelling seeds of female gingkos, grew them
inside monasteries a thousand years ago, until English botanists took the seeds back and spread the
nearly-extinct tree again around the globe. In homage to those Buddhist monks, the gingko leaves are
sometimes called “the fingernails of Buddha”. The carpets they form upon falling remind us of yellow
Buddhist robes we used to see in National Geographic.
Gingkos are the stuff of Japanese legends. In the 1600’s, tea-master Sen Sotan planted a ginkgo
outside in Konnichian. When fire raged through Kyoto many years later, Konnichian was not burned.
Supposedly, snow atop the gingko, melted by the flames, wet the roof and saved the tea house. Each
late November, tea ceremony students gather at Konnichian to eat sweets made of powered fruits from
the tree that saved the house. The tea cup bears the gingko leaf symbol in tribute. In more recent times,
it is said that one of the very few surviving plant forms at Hiroshima after the atomic blast was the
gingko. A monster of a gingko on the Vicksburg Battlefield must have survived the siege there.
Old gingkos line New York’s Fifth Avenue. They are resistant to urban smog and diseases.
Being old, they are of the rare female fruit-bearing type, the cones of which smell awful upon falling
and decaying. In China, this fruit is roasted and eaten like nuts, or made into powders, pastes, and
medicines. In America, gingko products are a health–food fad now.
Most American ornamental gingkos, unlike New York’s, are males, grown from winter
transplanted cuttings, well-watered, and often getting a hundred feet tall, but without fruit.
The first gingko tree I recall towered at the rear of the 1831 administration building of the
Kentucky college I attended. That old descendant of prehistoric ancestors, or its cousins scattered
hither and yon, reminds me of the history, the poetry, and the appreciation of other cultures and faiths
towards which higher education led me and my classmates. But, also, by its sheer endurance, beauty,
constancy, and certitude, that tree reminds me of youthful promises made, ambitions charted, and
determination laid when the future stretched unencumbered, straight, and wide as far as we could see.
If you gaze long enough at a gingko tree, you can feel yourself in touch with both creation and infinity.
It takes us back to the very beginning of life and points us forward to unending horizons while its
magic November carpet beckons us to ride both back and forward, a long air-born current from history
to hope.
BBeennddiinngg tthhee TTwwiigg:: PPaaggeess ffrroomm tthhee JJoouurrnnaall ooff aa PPiillggrriimm PPaarreenntt // 9999
January 5, 1998
PRIDE TAKES A DIVE
Each New Year seems on the surface to start afresh, offering a clean slate to us upon which to
scribble resolutions and achievements for the next twelve months.
The truth, of course, is that no New Year starts in a vacuum. Only the foolish are unaware of
the history—both immediate and cumulative--behind an imaginary “new beginning” point such as
New Year or birthdays or inaugurations. Grasping history is not only pertinent to what comes after it.
It is also fun to study in and of itself. Curiosity drives us to explore what happened, after it has
happened, and to become more knowing because of that exploration.
But history offers us even more than relevancy for the future and fun for the present. It is both
causal and metaphorical.
The “causal” aspect of history is that episodes of history often have hidden and ongoing
“effects” for which an episode appears as the “cause” of those unforeseen effects.
A good friend, a corporate executive, has become entranced by World War I. Business trips to
Europe throw him into contact with monuments and cemeteries from that war. Everywhere he finds
evidence that World War I, about which most of us know little, was the significant historical event of
the 20th Century, “causing” unforeseen realignments of nations and trade which led to World War II
and to subsequent wars, to Depression, and to social and economic consequences we only now, eighty
years later, begin to understand.
Political scientists Robert Dahl and Charles Lindblom would have called this an example of
“incrementalism”. If one pushes a pillow on one end, it fluffs up at the other. A single era of history
has incremental consequences that cannot be foretold.
My friend thinks that World War I was pivotal for most major changes that followed in this
century. Other events and trends deserve consideration for that title of this century’s most significant
event--escalated technology, growth of cities, transportation and communications revolutions,
transition from farming to industrialization, totalitarianism, or explosion of population, with people
now numbered in the billions crowding more and more upon a globe of diminishing resources. Almost
any event is a cause of effects, as historian Hegel clearly discerned.
History is also “metaphorical”. It serves us through symbols. One can find in history all sorts of
illustrations for speechmaking and for life-living. Custer’s Last Stand, Pickett’s Charge, Donner Party
cannibalism, meeting of trains to make a nationwide railway, Valley Forge, Pearl Harbor, the
Manhattan Project, Hiroshima, Dien Ben Phu—the list of metaphors from history is endless.
My personal favorite metaphor from history for some event as symbol for the 20th Century is
the sinking of the Titanic in April 1912. Here was a manmade device that was heralded as the most
advanced machinery ever, considered unsinkable--but which sank anyway. The Titanic’s sinking had
to have been a humbling experience for mankind and for modernism. The San Francisco earthquake
was far more devastating, but it was not manmade.
The Titanic had “Crafted in pride by human beings” stamped all over it. The metaphoric
symbolism of Titanic for subsequent history has been a warning that best-laid plans of men (if not of
mice) usually go astray. History cautions us not to claim infallibility. Our human-ness, history clearly
shows, is as often a detriment as it is an asset. Our alleged superiority, which we assume because we
can think and invent and speak (unlike plants, minerals, and other animals), is often a figment of our
imagination. We write and believe our own press releases too easily.
The Titanic catastrophe sobers us, just as do exploded space capsules, leaking atomic energy
plants, or computers that can’t handle dates beyond 1999. We are warned by human-infected history
not to make too much of our achievements lest our claims come back to haunt us. We are also warned
by such history to try to get things right the first time, instead of by trial-and-error. And we are also
warned that small achievements—such as rearing our children well--may have better consequences for
us than large-scale efforts to wipe out cancer, poverty, and war in some major one-year swoop.
BBeennddiinngg tthhee TTwwiigg:: PPaaggeess ffrroomm tthhee JJoouurrnnaall ooff aa PPiillggrriimm PPaarreenntt // 110000
January 19, 1998
LEARNING IN FERTILE RURAL SOIL
A decade or more ago, I attended a dinner in the old library of Georgetown University. It was a
gathering of educators to form a “Campus Compact” organization to promote volunteer services in
American higher education.
Surrounded on three sides by two-story shelves of old books, illuminated by beautiful and old
stained-glass windows on the fourth side, some 200 educators was divided into round tables of eight
persons each. With no place cards, we sat wherever we wished.
By chance, I happened to sit by Dr. Hugh Gloster, the president of Morehouse College in
Atlanta. He was an articulate dinner companion and the charismatic center of attention at our table.
In the course of dinner conversation, he spoke of a special event that took place in a town he
identified as only a few miles north of his own old hometown. The small community had honored six
former residents, all of them college presidents, during its annual festival, Dr. Gloster reported.
My ears perked up as he praised the town for what it had done and as he marveled that such a
sizeable group of educators came from one small rural southern place.
.Five of the six honorees had been Dr. Mordecai Johnson, the very distinguished former
president of Howard University, Dr. Thomas Dunbar Jarrett, president of Atlanta University (now
Clark Atlanta University), Dr. C. C. Humphreys and Dr. John Richardson, both presidents of Memphis
State University (now the University of Memphis), and Dr. Joe Morgan, president of Austin Peay
University.
What Dr. Gloster did not know, as he rhapsodized, was that I had been the sixth person
honored, being then chancellor of the University of Tennessee at Martin. What excited me most in
hearing a description of an event I had attended from someone who did not know that, was in
discovering that President Hugh Gloster was from some west Tennessee town near my own hometown
of Paris.
When he had finished his remarks to our table, I asked from whence in Tennessee he hailed. It
turned out he was from Brownsville in Haywood County, some 80 miles southeast of Paris towards
Memphis, a town I knew a bit about from having had grandparents and the families of aunts and uncles
there.
Two points he was making in his table talk were 1) that the rural South had produced quite a
few educators, some of them quite distinguished, and 2) it was good of Paris, TN, to recognize its share
of that achievement.
A third less explicit point was that he sort of wished his own hometown had given him some
recognition as ours had, but he dismissed the lack of Brownsville recognition with the old phrase, “a
prophet is without honor in his own country”.
We had a grand time establishing old west Tennessee ties, and I was particularly impressed that
I had now met three very important African-American university presidents from my own neck of the
woods—Mordecai Johnson, Thomas D. Jarrett, and Hugh Gloster.
That conversation years ago came to mind this week as I read My Life and An Era: The
Autobiography of Buck Colbert Franklin, memoirs of a black Oklahoma lawyer edited by his famous
historian son, John Hope Franklin, and his grandson, Smithsonian Institution program officer John
Whittington Franklin.
Buck Colvert Franklin was reared in Indian Territory, came east to go to college at Roger
Williams University in Nashville and Atlanta Baptist College (the predecessor of Morehouse
University) in Atlanta. In Nashville he met his future bride, Mollie Parker, who left college and went
home to Ged, TN, to teach school.
Folks there usually call the place Ged’s, rather than Ged, and pronounce it GADE’s. Ged is a
rural crossroads about ten miles out from Brownsville, near Hugh Gloster’s stamping ground.
BBeennddiinngg tthhee TTwwiigg:: PPaaggeess ffrroomm tthhee JJoouurrnnaall ooff aa PPiillggrriimm PPaarreenntt // 110011
So Haywood County, TN, has not only produced a distinguished university president in Dr.
Gloster, but also produced the mother of Dr. John Hope Franklin, perhaps the most important and most
decorated black historian of this century and now, very late in his career, frequently in the news as
national chairman of the Advisory Board on the President’s Initiative on Race.
Haywood County’s previous racial recognition consisted of being publicized negatively as the
site of Tent City in the civil rights movement era. Producing and sharing with America both a president
of Morehouse University and the mother of one of America’s best-known historians is a pretty positive
achievement, worthy of note and praise.
BBeennddiinngg tthhee TTwwiigg:: PPaaggeess ffrroomm tthhee JJoouurrnnaall ooff aa PPiillggrriimm PPaarreenntt // 110022
March 2, 1998
THE PAST ISN’T DEAD; IT ISN’T EVEN PAST
Tony Horwitz, a war zone reporter for the Wall Street Journal who has won a Pulitzer Prize,
lives in Virginia, and is Jewish.
His great-grandfather came to America after the Civil War, in 1882 and took an immediate
interest in the Civil War. One of his first purchases was a Civil War sketches book, which Tony
Horwitz recalls as his first memory of Civil War history. Tony’s father, a medical doctor, read to Tony
from his own ten-volume history of the war. Tony especially liked Matthew Brady photos. In the 3rd
grade he painted a mural of the War’s chief events that covered stairwell and attic before he ran out of
space in 1863.
Growing up, his interests shifted. He went to Duke and into journalism, reported on wars
abroad for ten years, came home, and settled in Virginia with an Australian wife. There he found that
most people have forgotten important history, but that southerners remember the War vividly and
passionately. The Ken Burns television series helped, as did the “Gettysburg” movie.
Horwitz’s interest in this peculiarity quickened when a group of authentic reenactors came by.
Calling themselves “hard-corers”, they took authenticity deadly seriously, and their clothes, food,
language, and treks showed it. Chief among them was an Ohioan-moved-South named Robert Lee
Hodge, head of the Southern Guards. On a whim, Horwitz accepted an invitation to a drill on a
Virginia farm. Starved, footsore, frozen, and itching, Horwitz was hooked, and set out to visit the
entire Civil War battle front.
It took two years, and once he was embarked, the itinerary almost dictated itself. Heading to
Charleston to see Fort Sumter and the War’s first battle, Horwitz pulled off in Salisbury, NC, and
would up spending a week there, where he found welcome in the UDC, Sons of the Confederacy, and
Children of the Confederacy. In Charleston, he encountered more memorable characters, and then
pressed on to Columbia, where legislators were debating the Confederate flag flying. Hearing about a
shooting of a rebel-flag-waving white by blacks in Guthrie, KY, he headed west, and then almost got
killed by a redneck in a bar on the Tennessee side of the Kentucky line. He spent some time in Guthrie
and Elkton, KY, the county seat, visited Jefferson Davis’s monument, and continued to find engaging,
talkative people in strange places.
Horwitz met Klansmen, Southern Heritage members, museum guides, African-American
common folk, truckers, reenactors, retirees, and housewives. In between jaunts, calls from Rob Hodge
would call him back east for another “hard core” trek, to Gettysburg and Antietam and elsewhere-once racing from site to site to see how many could be crammed into a weekend in a “wargasm”.
Horwitz visited Forts Henry and Dobnelson, Shiloh, Vicksburg, dozens of skirmish sites,
Atlanta, the Shenandoah, Montgomery, Selma, Richmond, Petersburg, Chancellorsville, Cold Harbor,
Tara, Andersonville, and many more. Talking to rich and poor, black and white, old and young,
educated and illiterate, executive and farmer, it was obvious to Horwitz that the Civil War, as symbol
of individualism versus government, racial mastery over racial conflict, old South over new South,
memory over present, family over displaced and mobile citizens, land over travel, and other themes, is
alive and kicking all over the South.
Southern war consciousness is formalized in monuments, museums, and chamber of commerce
publications, religionized in organizations, rituals, robes and period costumes, socialized in beer pubs
and restaurants, study clubs and reeenactment units, mythologized in school curricula and in family
narratives, and regionalized in many northerners, some as residents and some as visitors, lured by the
agrarian, repressed, nostalgic, ideological simplification of the grassroots Southern Way network.
Horwitz sifted through this madcap experience and sorted his best notes into a memorable
book, Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War. Its bright green jacket
adorned with a photo of a scowling Rob Hodge makes you think it is a comic novel. It is not.
BBeennddiinngg tthhee TTwwiigg:: PPaaggeess ffrroomm tthhee JJoouurrnnaall ooff aa PPiillggrriimm PPaarreenntt // 110033
Secondary funny scenes dot this travelogue, but a somber and almost frightening primary
message slices through: the Union the War was fought to preserve simply hasn’t materialized; people
are more divided, disoriented, and scared than ever; and separatism of education, class, gender, and
race is ablaze and spreading like destructive Sherman fire throughout our region and beyond.
We have been where Horwitz visited, know the people he has met, eaten where he sat, enjoyed
the ironies of southern life he does--and pondered the meaning of it all, as he has. But the experience
has never been more connected or clear than he makes it in this impressive synthesized odyssey of a
book.
Warning: Confederates in the Attic can be read in a single day, and probably will be since it is
impossible to put aside once into it, but it’ll keep you awake for many nights afterward. It is a
Halloween haunting horror story dredged from the cemeteries of our continuing Civil War and from
our own troubled psyches. It ought to be another Pulitzer for Horwitz.
BBeennddiinngg tthhee TTwwiigg:: PPaaggeess ffrroomm tthhee JJoouurrnnaall ooff aa PPiillggrriimm PPaarreenntt // 110044
March 23, 1998
GRASPING FINGERS: THE DEVIL’S WORKSHOP
There’s a big connection between education and career success. With factories moving abroad,
employment is concentrated in services-rendered careers, most of which require greater critical
thinking and technological skills.
Enrollments in colleges and high school graduation rates increase, because each level earns
more than twice what the next level down earns. The American economy is a consumer economy.
“Success” usually is measured by income: that is, by the ability to buy the goods that keep the
economy prospering. Educated workers are economically more successful than semi-educated and
uneducated workers.
The anxiety to pass and to get credentialed for success in the workplace often leads to
undesirable consequences. In some school systems, professors and teachers are so pressured by their
students for good grades that they bend their standards, giving higher grades. The average grade today
is close to a B , where a C was formerly seen as “average”. Grade-inflation hurts the reputations of the
teacher, the school, and of the whole learning enterprise.
Grade-pressures from students also lead to cheating. In surveys studied by Arthur Levine and
Jeannette S. Cureton from 1969, 1976, and 1993, eight percent of the students reported that they feel
they must cheat to get ahead, and 20 percent of the student deans surveyed reported that cheating was
on the rise. More troublesome to Levine and Cureton, in When Hope and fear Collide: A Portrait of
Today’s College Student, was the realization that many students do not know what “plagiarism” is or
that copying information from magazines, encyclopedias, or computer searches of library information
banks for essays and reports is a form of cheating. More and more book reports, themes, and research
papers are being taken straight from someone else’s work and passed off as the student’s own work.
This is afar more serious problem now than in the old days of “term-paper files” in the frat houses.
Not only are students cheating themselves when they cheat, but they are also cheating their
classmates. In classes still graded on curves, as most are, the best work gets the highest grades.
Students who do their own work are penalized if rewards go to cheaters.
Over-worked teachers cannot be expected to check every essay or footnote against the
mountains of information available in the libraries. They do spot-checks and occasionally nab an
offender, and most schools and colleges still inflict severe penalties for cheating. The examples made
help curb some of the student temptations, but more often they lead to more sophisticated hair-splitting
subterfuges: changing lead and closing paragraphs, creating deliberate typing errors or wordsubstitutions, and claims that the articles were paraphrased rather than copied.
One positive response to increased cheating has been the growth of Honor Codes at all levels of
education. Beginning in kindergarten (and with luck, in home and church even before then), students
are drilled over and over again in principles of honor and honesty. In many places, students are
required to write out a statement that “this work was written entirely by me, and I have not cheated or
plagiarized in it” and then must sign the statement.
The Honor Code system is not fool-proof. Cheaters will cheat, and liars lie, on vows taken (as
court testimony and divorce rates show) as easily as on copying some one else’s work. But where
Honor Codes have been in place for years and reinforced by the students themselves as much as by
academic authorities, they succeed in breeding and bestowing higher moral standards.
When Sam Houston died, the ring his mother gave him in his youth had to be cut to remove it
from his finger. When they took it off, they found engraved on the inside the single word, “HONOR”.
The Honor Ring idea is better than the practice of some gangsters and some religions of cutting
off fingers of those who “dishonor” them.
Today’s parents and teachers can have a great impact on the whole world by encircling the
typing and writing fingers of each successive class bent onsucceeding with the concepts of honor and
honesty.
BBeennddiinngg tthhee TTwwiigg:: PPaaggeess ffrroomm tthhee JJoouurrnnaall ooff aa PPiillggrriimm PPaarreenntt // 110055
April 13, 1998
POWER OUTAGE IN THE TROPHY ROOMS
In an age where many folks can name twenty Heisman Trophy, Super Bowl, Master’s, or
Academy Award winners chronologically and backwards, recognitions for non-athletic and nonentertainment achievements pass unnoticed in the night.
On the Trivial Pursuit boards of the nation, sports and entertainment categories of questions are
far more answerable than those on science, arts, or history. Nobel and Pulitzer Prize winners may
garner a sentence somewhere on the back page of the New York Times. But how many can you name?
High school debate and academic bowl teams practice and compete just as fiercely as do
football teams, marching bands, and cheerleaders, but no one notices.
Fortunately, most high schools still do select and announce the class valedictorian, proclaiming
as the No. 1 student of the class the one with the highest grade-point-average. But usually so many
other trophies and awards are passed out at commencements that the valedictorian award is slighted.
There is no hallway trophy case for National Honor Society or Beta Club Honor Students like there is
for cross-country runners or wrestlers.
The closest thing intellectually that colleges have to parallel the sports page weekly rankings of
football and basketball teams is the U. S. News & World Report annual rankings of colleges.
At a recent interview for a scholarship that would pay $20,000 to a year to the winner, a tennis
player with a very high SAT score handed in a high school transcript with a B average for four years of
study. Asked why there was such a gap between his ability and his performance, he laughed and said
he had been hearing that same question from his parents for several years. Looking back as an aging
high school senior, he said, if he had known that grades would affect his chances for college
scholarships, or for law school admission or employment after college, maybe he would have studied.
Able to make B’s by being glib, he had never had to use his mind.
“A mind is a terrible thing to waste?” Thinking is a terrible thing not to celebrate.
The most prestigious academic honor in the United States was for many years election into Phi
Beta Kappa, established at William & Mary in 1776, cherished by Yale and Harvard in the early years.
Recipients usually rank in the tiptops of their colleges in grades and in leadership. Only 255 college
campuses are allowed to award Phi Beta Kappa membership. Expensive oil paintings in art galleries,
corporate executive suites, and exclusive eating clubs of New York and Washington show vested
gentlemen in which the center focus of the painting is a Phi Beta Key on a gold chain across their
stomachs. Only 450,000 people in America have Phi Beta Kappa keys.
Used to be that no one offered this coveted and scarce award ever turned it down. Nowadays
even that has changed. The newsletter of Phi Beta Kappa now publishes the names of the campus
chapters in which all elected members accepted the award. Intended as a salute, the list is short. Phi
Beta Kappa faces an eclipse. Students don’t know about academic rigor, don’t care to practice it, and
don’t know about honors they could get for it.
The great hope of American education, which is available to everyone, was that it would
elevate the minds of the American citizens, enough so that everyone could be as involved in the life of
the Republic as were Hamilton, Franklin, Adams, Jefferson, and Madison in the Founding. Involved
enough so, too, that everyone in America could be as well educated as the privileged few in Europe
and Asian countries.
Education was to be the way that America raised the life and thought of the frontier nation and
prevented Democracy from sinking to some low, homogenized, minimum of common-denominator
mediocrity. If the nation was to avoid rule by aristocracy or kings, it had to be ruled by all the people,
but the people could rule only if they were educated. Democracy requires good education to work well
and to survive. Good education, in turn, education requires public celebration. The Life of the Mind
has become so private it may be extinct and no one has told us yet. Access to education is a terrible
thing to waste.
BBeennddiinngg tthhee TTwwiigg:: PPaaggeess ffrroomm tthhee JJoouurrnnaall ooff aa PPiillggrriimm PPaarreenntt // 110066
June 1, 1998
THE REAL OLD SOUTH--THE FACTS OF FICTION
Writing about southern life as it used to be, even when the author is factually accurate, is risky
business. The risk is that, in describing African-American or female people from a past era, one will be
judged by contemporary standards of political correctness. Sensitivities are easily bruised, and offense
is easily taken.
Concerns of this type may have preyed upon author James Kilgo, Wofford alumnus and awardwinning essayist-author of two nonfiction books, Deep Enough for Ivorybills and Inheritance of
Horses, when he was writing his first novel, but it didn’t deter him from describing things—race and
gender included-- accurately, as they were.
Kilgo’s family hails from the Low Country of South Carolina. It has been there for over two
centuries, and has endured war, pestilence, family scandal, austerity, prosperity, and all sorts of
apocalyptic events, even General Sherman. Kilgo has written a novel that captures clearly and
accurately what life was like among old intermarrying families on Deep South family farms. Set in
1918, his Daughter of My People is based a bit upon people and skeletons in Kilgo’s family history.
South Carolinians who know the Kilgo family well are having fun trying to match up real-life
people with the fictional characters in the book. For example, the sensible Jim Creighton, a professor
of classics at Wofford College, may be based on the Rev. John C. Kilgo who was an alumnus of
Wofford who became president of Trinity College and secured the Duke endowment to change it into
Duke University, before becoming a Methodist bishop.
But matching history with fiction in Daughter of My People is only an interesting diversion,
limited to those who know the family. The book stands on its own literary merits. It has already been
selected as a Book of the Month Club Alternate Selection, and despite being published by a university
press (Georgia) instead of a commercial marketer, sales are booming.
Kilgo’s novel deserves the attention it is getting. It is well-structured, the characters are welldrawn, the plot (a balanced mixture of a love story, a regional story, a history tidbit, and a murder
mystery) is engrossing, and the descriptive narrative is superb.
Two brothers, enmeshed in two South Carolina farm families who have coexisted and
intermarried for decades, dominate an extended family of whites and blacks that have always shared
space and fortunes.
One brother, Hart Bonner, a likeable rural mail carrier, falls in love with a mulatto cousin,
Jennie Grant, and they meet daily at the mailbox in the mornings and at her cabin in the evenings. The
affair is generally known, but never discussed within the family, and its thorniest problems come from
redneck outsiders. Then a second brother, Tison Bonner, ostensibly charged with being the overseer of
family affairs, begins spying on the woman. A loner and ruffian by nature, he finds himself late in life
sexually attracted to his brother’s mistress. The alienation that rises between the two brothers grows
into animosities and agitations, and ends in deaths and family disarray.
What makes the story particularly exciting is not so much the plot as the painting of the social
and physical context in which the story unfolds. Kilgo’s strength as an experienced descriptive essayist
comes to the forefront in passages that capture as well as any writer ever has the details of country life.
Kilgo’s familiarity with horses is so clear that we follow harnessings and feedings as if we are
farmers ourselves. We smell the barn. We taste the dust. The same writing skill is true of descriptions
of food, or of household furnishings, or of clothes--and especially of the hunting scenes. The
swampland deer hunt is as good as anything in Faulkner’s hunting stories. Even Kilgo’s descriptions of
narrow country roads and early vintage automobiles are right on target.
The book tells a story of some interest, but it is as well a reproduction of the sociology and
physiology of the early 20th century. Set in 1918, with World War I almost over, it shows how
removed rural southern life was from mainstream affairs, how dark nights were, how inventive and
self-sufficient families were, and how important kinship and caste were. It is true South
BBeennddiinngg tthhee TTwwiigg:: PPaaggeess ffrroomm tthhee JJoouurrnnaall ooff aa PPiillggrriimm PPaarreenntt // 110077
In subject matter, the novel could have disintegrated into a sensational potboiler of the
Mandingo order. Mercifully, Kilgo shows taste and tact. The love story is very real, none of the
outcomes are entirely predictable, and the air is brilliantly sullen, sweaty, and moss-laden, alleviated
by flashes of southern humor and by a cast of distinctive and idiosyntric characters, strongly sketched
people of varying habits each with his or her own baggage of lifetime shaping influences. And in
choice of language for all that, this book is unexcelled.
BBeennddiinngg tthhee TTwwiigg:: PPaaggeess ffrroomm tthhee JJoouurrnnaall ooff aa PPiillggrriimm PPaarreenntt // 110088
August 11, 1998
THE LIST THAT SHOWS AMERICA LISTING
In the nine days from July 20th through 29th, the New York Times web-site book forum had 622
opinions about the Modern Library list of one hundred best novels published in English in the 20th
century.
Hardly any one agrees with the list selected by novelists A. S. Byatt, William Styron, and Gore
Vidal, historians Daniel Boorstin, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Edmund Morris, and John Richardson,
novelist/historian Shelby Foote, Carnegie Corporation head Vartan Gregorian, and Modern Library
board chairman Christopher Cerf. The dominance of white male elderly historians is conspicuous.
Some dissenters question what is meant by “best”—historical importance, number of copies
sold, familiarity of title, frequency of use in classrooms, years in print? (US News & World Report
annually triggers similar controversies by publishing lists of the “best colleges and universities”
without clear agreements on what is the definition of “best”.)
Some dissenters question why certain authors or books are included (e.g., Max Beerbohm,
Arthur Koestler, Erskine Caldwell, or V. S. Naipaul).
Some dissenters question why certain authors or books are ignored (e.g., Eudora Welty,
Flannery O’Connor, John Irving, Thomas Pynchon, Ayn Rand, Mary McCarthy, Gone With the Wind,
To Kill a Mockingbird, Absalom, Absalom, Look Homeward Angel, A Confederacy of Dunces.)
Some dissenters agree with the choice of writers or works, but disagree with the rankings (e.g.,
James Dickey #42 above Ernest Hemingway #45, and so many D. H. Lawrence, Henry James, and
Joseph Conrad choices).
A few dissenters, misreading the category, want to include Mark Twain, Herman Melville,
Charles Dickens, and Stephen Crane, all associated more with the 19th century than with the 20th.
Maybe that century’s novelists were better than this century’s.
Quite a few dissenters feel the absence of non-American and non-English writers published in
English (especially South American writers and Australian Patrick White) is bad, as is the shortage of
women writers and African-American writers.
Unaddressed in the forum opinions is the correlation between Book of the Month Club
selections over the years and the list. On the surface, it seems suspiciously to be a close link. Certainly
the correlation between the list and the number of books (59 of the 100) printed by Modern Library
gives pause for thought.
Some 100 students from the Radcliff Publishing Course made their own list, and it contains
more contemporary novels, more women writers, and more African-American works than does the
Modern Library list.
One group of opinions distresses me more than the others. A number of the opinion-expressers
in the forum count the number of books on the list they had read. A couple boast of having read 70 or
more, but most express chagrin that they have read only 10 or 15 of them.
While it is certainly no barometer of American literacy, the fact that so many literate people in
the forum sampling have not read most of these novels tells us something about how fiction-in-print
has declined as serious entertainment while movies, motoring, television, NASCAR, and Disneyworld
have prospered. If the reader audience for fiction has dwindled, it is likely that the number of
publishing writers has declined as well.
The relegation of fiction to a tiny corner of American life by the public and publishers of books
is a frightening development. What kind of society are we creating that has such little time for or
interest in good books? If the average American reads less than one novel a year—likely by Danielle
Steele or John Grisham—what dire fate awaits the world of letters (and the world itself) in the 21st
century? Does our listing show us sinking?
BBeennddiinngg tthhee TTwwiigg:: PPaaggeess ffrroomm tthhee JJoouurrnnaall ooff aa PPiillggrriimm PPaarreenntt // 110099
September 22, 1998
A GOOD PLACE TO BE
A letter asks, “Since you are at Wooford College, in South Carolina, will you tell us more about
it?” Gladly. First off, it is WOFF-ord, not WOOF-ord!
Wofford is 144 years old, one of under 200 American colleges still existing from pre-Civil War
days, with links to the Methodist Church since its beginning in 1854 from a $100,000 bequest from
Rev. Benjamin Wofford. His money built Main Building and four faculty homes which still stand, and
another now gone.
Wofford is on its original and enlarged site, 140 acres north of Spartanburg’s downtown, at the
juncture on Interstates 26 and 85, and near Interstates 40 and 77, twenty minutes from Appalachia
foothills and four hours from the Atlantic beaches. BMW, Michelin, and Milliken are major area
industries.
Wofford was all-male until the early 1970’s and was the first South Carolina campus to
integrate racially in the 1960’s. Today it has an enrollment of 1,100, drawn from all over the nation
and some foreign countries, with a 52-48 male-female ratio, and 11 percent are minority students. In
1995 and 1997, one percent of the students, 21 in all, wrote novels in the college’s acclaimed Creative
Writing program. Eighty percent of the students volunteer in local service activities. A fifth graduate
with double-majors. Wofford leads the nation in percent of students studying abroad for credit—a fifth
of the students annually.
Ninety-five percent of the Wofford faculty have terminal degrees. They are grouped into 23
departments and programs which operate a 4-1-4 (Fall -January Interim Month-Spring) calendar.
Interim Term is innovative, students and faculty alike studying outside their academic fields.
Liberal arts and undergraduate in focus, Wofford is one of 162 prestigious Carnegia
Baccalaureate-I colleges national colleges, and is one of only five private colleges (with Davidson,
Duke, Wake Forest, and Furman) in either North or South Carolina with chapters of the elite Phi Beta
Kappa honor society.
US News ranked Wofford first in the nation in efficiency and in the top 80 national liberal arts
colleges; Money Magazine called it one of the nation’s 150 “best college buys”; the Princeton Review
cited it as one of 20 campuses where students were “most happy”, and Newsweek hailed it as one of the
nation’s “Seven Buried Treasures”
Wofford gave Vanderbilt its famous chancellor, James H. Kirkland, and Duke its founding
presidents, John Carlisle Kilgo and William Preston Few, and has produced over forty other college
presidents, a Medal of Honor winner, five Rhodes Scholars, fifteen generals and admirals, five Truman
Scholars, three Goldwater Scholars, two U. S. Senators, four Governors, NCAA Football Coach of the
Year Fisher DeBerry, ten Methodist bishops, “Father of American Radiology” Eugene Pendergrass,
and orthopedic surgery pioneer Austin T. Moore. The National Beta Club was founded here by
Wofford graduates.
Wofford students’ average SAT score is 1170, and half of them were in the 10% of their high
school classes. Nearly half of each year’s graduates go on for advanced study. Medicine, dentistry,
law, teaching, ministry, journalism, non-profits, business, and liberal arts doctoral programs claim
most graduates.
Wofford is one of the smallest colleges in the nation to have an NCAA Division I athletic
program and an NCAA Division IAA football program. 27.7% of the students are athletes. Wofford
ranked 8th in the nation in percentage of Division I athletes graduating (90.2%). Its athletic facilities are
summer camp for the NFL’s Carolina Panthers--owned by Wofford alumnus Jerry Richardson.
Enough was left from the Ben Wofford bequest to create an endowment by the Civil War of
about $87,000, lost in 1864 when trustees invested it in Confederate war bonds. Wofford still has those
unredeemed bonds, but its current endowment is a thousand times greater-- $87 million as of this past
summer. Gifts to the college from 1983 to 1997 totaled $100 million.. Most of the gifts have endowed
scholarships and faculty chairs or built new facilities.
BBeennddiinngg tthhee TTwwiigg:: PPaaggeess ffrroomm tthhee JJoouurrnnaall ooff aa PPiillggrriimm PPaarreenntt // 111100
Wofford is one of fewer than 70 colleges honored with buildings given by the F. W. Olin Foundation,
and its $5.9 million Olin classroom-high tech building (1992) is the hub for a campus-wide fiber-optics
network to be dedicated next February. A new science building and a new student residence hall are
underway, fifty acres of property were added recently, as were a new physical fitness center, a new
soccer stadium and a new football stadium, and multiple intramural and practice fields, and a
comprehensive central campus landscaping program is nearly complete. Wofford is fully accredited by
the Southern Association, which two Wofford educators helped found a century ago.
BBeennddiinngg tthhee TTwwiigg:: PPaaggeess ffrroomm tthhee JJoouurrnnaall ooff aa PPiillggrriimm PPaarreenntt // 111111
September 29, 1998
UNSUNG HERO OF THE OLD FRONTIER
In my small pantheon of educational heroes are some professors and administrators under
whom I have served, plus big-name figures such as Charles W. Eliot of Harvard, Robert Hutchins at
Chicago, and John Dewey.
At the top of my list is a college president that most folks never heard of. Horace Holley from
1818 to 1827 was president of Transylvania University in Lexington, Kentucky.
When Yale-educated Horace Holley left the Hollis Street South End Church in Boston to
become president of tiny little Transylvania out on the frontier, he was only 37 years old. Kentucky
had been a state 26 years, and Lexington had been in existence 43 years.
Transylvania had been chartered by Virginia in 1780, but had not gotten underway until 1787,
and its history over the next few decades was one of ups and downs with few students, often bogged
down by political battles for control between Presbyterians on one hand and non-sectarian civic leaders
such as Henry Clay on the other. With Holley’s election as president, the nonsectarian Clay faction had
won temporary management of the fledgling college.
It was incredible to find a college that far west, in territory which some residents still
remembered Daniel Boone. Yet, trade routes and primitive roads had made Lexington, for the moment,
the star of the west, and Horace Holley made it the Athens of the West. Cincinnati, Nashville, and
Louisville would speedily grow to rival it, but for a time, it was the western crossroads of trade and the
center of education and culture.
From 1802 to 1818, Transylvania had granted degrees to only 22 students. In the next nine
years, under Holley, it conferred over 600 degrees on 558 students. Enrollment when Holley got
there—already inflated over previous years by news of his coming—was 110 students, taught by fewer
professors than the fingers of a hand and in a one-year curriculum. Three years later its 282 students
rivaled Yale’s 319, Harvard’s 286, Union’s 264, Dartmouth’s 222, and Princeton’s 150. By 1826,
there were 418 students from 14 mostly-southern states, and a four-year program.
Holley fleshed out the embryonic medical department he inherited and created a medical
college second in reputation only to the University of Pennsylvania. He operated a law school in
which Henry Clay sometimes taught and which had as faculty the famous Jesse Bledsoe and William
T. Barry, both Kentucky U.S. Senators. John J. Crittenden studied law there and went on to become a
U.S. Senator and Kentucky governor. All three of the famous Blairs—Francis Preston and sons
Montgomery and Frank—studied law there. In the undergraduate college, students in Holley’s years
included such future leaders as Albert Sidney Johnston and Jefferson Davis.
In the years that Jefferson Davis was in Washington as Secretary of War or U.S. Senator from
Mississippi, 17 of his Transylvania classmates were in either the U.S. House of Representatives or the
U. S. Senate. Among the Senators were Iowa’s George W. Jones, Indiana’s Edward A. Hannegan,
Louisiana’s S. W. Downs, Kentucky’s Joseph Underwood, and Missouri’s David Rice Atchison (who
served as President for a Day, when Zachary Taylor refused to be inaugurated on a Sunday).
Holley’s wife, Mary Austin, was the sister of Stephen F. Austin, famous in Texas. Holley
himself was befriended by ex-President John Adams and by Harvard’s famous Edward Everett, and
other eastern luminaries. He played host to President Monroe and to the Marquis de Lafayette who
made a famous tour of America in 1825-26.
In the end, the Presbyterians attacking Holley made allies with the Baptists and with anti-Clay
Jacksonian Democrats, accused Holley and the college of promoting an aristocratic philosophy, and
succeeded in forcing his resignation in 1827. He went to Louisiana to head a college there, and died at
sea from yellow fever a few months after leaving Kentucky. But in his nine years in Boone’s bluegrass
wilderness, Horace Holley planted seeds of knowledge that would set the educational standard and the
pace for the whole South and Midwest. He was a peerless pioneer who left a big footprint where he
trod.
BBeennddiinngg tthhee TTwwiigg:: PPaaggeess ffrroomm tthhee JJoouurrnnaall ooff aa PPiillggrriimm PPaarreenntt // 111122
October 5, 1998
THERE NEVER BLOOMS SO RED THE ROSE
The irony of the Southern Festival of Books, which just celebrated its tenth anniversary with its
three-day gathering in Nashville, is obvious to all of the thousands who attend it.
In the shadow of the Tennessee State Capitol, designed by the talented architect William
Strickland, the Southern Festival of Books annually pitches an encampment of tents on the expansive
War Memorial Plaza, and overflows into the Senate Chamber, War Memorial Building, and other state
buildings for lectures and readings by famous authors.
The irony is that a book festival occupies space dedicated to commemorating war. This is space
dotted by statues and ringed by lists of dead Tennesseans. Before it was a Memorial, this space from
1862 to 1865 was occupied by federal armies that came into Nashville upon the heels of their victories
at Forts Henry and Donelson. A books festival in a war memorial--it is a fitting paradox, testimony that
perhaps, after all, the pen is indeed mightier than the sword, or that the purposes of war are to make
peace and to elevate learning and the human estate.
Staged in perfect fall weather, this year’s Festival offered the crowds some 232 authors and
panelists--lecturing, conversing, and signing autographs. Among them the most recognizable names
included white-trash fiction writer Dorothy Allison, prize-winning Edward Ball fresh from his slave
family work, Kentuckian Wendell Berry, crime novelist-reporter Jerry Bledsoe, versatile writertelevision producer Stephen J. Cannell, biographer Bruce Clayton, novelists Lee Smith and her writer
husband Hal Crowther, Georgia’s Jane Daugharty, the pseudonymic Ellen Douglas (Josephine
Haxton), North Carolinian Clyde Edgerton, multi-talented John Egerton, Oprah-choice Kaye Gibbons,
the intriguing neo-Confederacy chronicler Tony Horwitz, prolific late-bloomer Robert Inman, Terry
Kay, essayist-turned-novelist James Kilgo, Jill McCorkle, Sharyn McCrumb, Jay McInerney, and
Robert Penn Warren Lecture speaker and novelist Elizabeth Spencer.
Sheerly by chance, I sat at the banquet with Jimmy Faulkner, nephew of William Faulkner,
who regaled us with his opinions (“commercial” and “inappropriate”) about the controversial new
Faulkner sculpture on the Oxford, MS, court square, and with recollections of his “Cuddin Will”.
Jimmy Faulkner’s late father, John, wrote My Brother, Bill, which the new Hill Street Press has
reprinted with Jimmy’s foreword.
C-Span 2 viewers got some idea of the impressive Festival by watching interviews from the
Crowne Plaza Hotel with the tent city of book publisher booths across the street in the background.
University presses of Tennessee, Kentucky, Louisiana State, Vanderbilt, and Georgia were
especially well-represented. So, too, were premiere presses such as Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill,
Harcourt Brace, Henry Holt, John F. Blair, Penguin Putnam, Avon, and Random House. Several small
presses, including religious presses, had booths. One exciting new booth was from Historic Rugby, the
preserved Victorian English settlement in east Tennessee, staffed by director Barbara Stagg. Two of
the South’s best magazines, The Oxford American and Brightleaf, exhibited their wares well. Food
booths and music performances and poetry readings rounded out the enticing festival fare.
I ate a hotdog and sipped a lemonade while seated on a granite ledge in front of the Viet Nam
list of Tennesseans who died for us. I sat in front of the names beginning in the letter “C”. One of
them, Vandiver L. Childs, had been a high school classmate. I sat with Buster’s ghost and listened to
high school students read their poems from a stage next to bronze statues of three Viet Nam soldiers. I
thought of the Fugitive Poets of the 1920’s, also from Nashville, some of whom wrote odes to the
Confederate dead. I could see the columns of the memorial’s colonnade rising above me to my right,
and behind them I knew were lists of World War I dead Tennesseans, celebrated long ago by another
poet with a poem about poppies growing in Flanders Field, row on row.
What better tribute at the physical center of a state’s government and at a massive memorial to
the war dead than to find reading and writing, books and the human mind and spirit, thriving in the
freedom the sacrificed lives bought us?
BBeennddiinngg tthhee TTwwiigg:: PPaaggeess ffrroomm tthhee JJoouurrnnaall ooff aa PPiillggrriimm PPaarreenntt // 111133
October 19, 1998
HAPPY 90TH: WELCOME HOME, WOODWARD
Friday the 13th usually may be considered an unlucky day, but this Friday, November 13, 1998,
marks the 90th birthday of the South’s greatest historian, C. Vann Woodward. The South was lucky to
have produced him.
The birthday coincides with the annual meeting of the Southern Historical Association, a
congregation of several hundred scholars who live in Woodward’s shadow and in debt to him. They
will gather after the meeting’s opening session in Birmingham to celebrate Woodward with music
provided by the Heritage Jazz Band and a menu of fried green tomatoes on biscuits, sweet potato
praline squares, Mississippi mud brownies, and other appropriate dishes.
Woodward, long-time professor at Yale, has never lost his southern bearings. They have been
the source of his books—among them, The Strange Career of Jim Crow, Origins of the New South,
1877-1913, The Burden of Southern History, Reunion and Reaction:The Compromise of 1877 and the
End of Reconstruction, and Tom Watson: Agrarian Rebel. They have shaped collaborations such as
The National Experience: A History of the United States, and they have influenced his choices of
works to edit such as George Fitzhugh’s Cannibals All!, The Private Mary Chestnut, volumes 1 and 2
of Oxford History of the United States, Lewis Harvie Blair’s A Southern Prophecy, and Whitelaw
Reid’s After the War: A Tour of Southern States, 1865-1866.
We can count 21 books Woodward wrote, co-authored, or edited, 117 published articles and
addresses, and 204 published book reviews over the three-quarters of a century of his academic career.
If we counted his footnotes, he would astound us by how much he has read as by how much he has
written.
Not bad for a man who set out to make a career in English literature with aspirations to be a
novelist but who later turned to history. His writings are marked as much by the power of his prose as
they are by the revelations from his facts and research. He was fortunate early on to have inspiring
teachers and challenging friends, and later to have influential colleagues and mentors.
Woodward came out of less-than-affluent circumstances in rural Arkansas. Surrounded by
southern relatives who revered both books and Methodism, his first two years of college were at tiny
Henderson-Brown College (then Methodist, now state-run). At the end of his freshman year, he
worked his way to Europe on a boat and hitchhiked over Europe, including excursions into the new
USSR. His last two years of college were spent at Emory in Atlanta. Both places gave him ample
opportunity to flex his intellectual muscles.
He was influenced in Atlanta by his friends like Rupert Vance, who would also make a striking
career at Chapel Hill, and by black scholar J. Sanders Redding, as well as the writing style of novelist
Thomas Wolfe. He was an instructor at Georgia Tech, spent a year at Columbia in New York, tried his
hand in political science, returned to Europe as Hitler’s star was rising, was in and out at Emory’s
Oxford campus, discovered Erskine Caldwell, worked for the WPA, and gradually turned to history (at
age 26), attracted at first to studies of southern demagogues such as Tom Heflin, Huey Long, Tom
Watson, Ben Tillman, and James Vardaman. Chapel Hill’s famed Howard Odum got him a grant for
graduate study at UNC, then in its glory years as the South’s best graduate studies center and the
pacesetter for the southern intellectual Renaissance.
Ph.D. in hand and wife in tow, Woodward moved on to the University of Florida, published his
Tom Watson dissertation, got started on his Origins of the South project, moved to the University of
Virginia, then to California’s Scripps College, did intelligence work for the Navy in World War II, and
in 1946 moved to Johns Hopkins and, in 1960, to Yale, from which he retired in 1978.
Woodward’s life settled into a mold of teaching, research, and publishing, with interruptions to
receive accolades and awards, but marked always by unsettling and provocative work that prompted
controversy and reassessment among historians and laymen alike whenever a new and often
BBeennddiinngg tthhee TTwwiigg:: PPaaggeess ffrroomm tthhee JJoouurrnnaall ooff aa PPiillggrriimm PPaarreenntt // 111144
unorthodox Woodward idea became public. At Yale, he and Robert Penn Warren teamed up to give
that venerable university a southern accent he cherished and needed.
Woodward’s uncanny sense for the uncommon in the commonplace made him the revered
senior figure he is. No one has influenced the South’s self-examination and America’s perceptions of
the South as much as Woodward. He has earned the right to the happiest of 90th birthdays.
BBeennddiinngg tthhee TTwwiigg:: PPaaggeess ffrroomm tthhee JJoouurrnnaall ooff aa PPiillggrriimm PPaarreenntt // 111155
October 26, 1998
TRANSFIXED AND TRANSFIGURED IN TRANSIT
To predict when the mountain leaves are most beautiful, don’t bother with Farmer’s Almanac.
Look for the day of the Alabama-Tennessee football game.
On Saturday, October 24, my wife and I set out through mountain leaf country. We had heard
of two little Episcopal mission churches northeast of us, in Glendale Springs and West Jefferson, just
east of Boone, NC, which hold original frescoes. Fresco painting is a rare art form, usually associated
with Italy and the Renaissance. Finding it in modern-day America seemed worth a trip.
Sure enough, the frescoes are there, in the Church of the Holy Trinity in Glendale Springs and
in St. Mary’s in West Jefferson.
The two little untended chapels have wooden-walled sanctuaries and vestibules and lovely
stained glass windows, and the sanctuaries are dominated by frescoes behind their altars. Their
frescoes were done sometime in the late 1970’s and 1980 by Ben Long, a Statesville, NC, native.
St. Mary’s altar piece is a realistic Christ upon the cross, imposed upon a more ethereal Christ
behind the cross, the historical Jesus and the transfigured Christ, the transfigurer of mankind. To left
and right of the massive fresco, smaller ones of a pregnant Mary (the Mary of great expectations) and a
proclaiming John the Baptist, both portenders of Christ, point to the center Christ.
The Church of the Holy Trinity has as its imposing altar piece an unusual Last Supper. One
counts in it more figures there the customary Jesus and his twelve disciples. Long was wise not to
duplicate better-known works. This one grows upon the viewer the longer it is studied. The religious
symbols mix well with the western Carolina mountaineer faces of the subjects.
Our original aim had been to see the frescoes. They were reward enough for the long drive over
winding two-lane roads. But an unexpected additional blessing turned our traveling into a religious
pilgrimage.
We chose to go there by way of the Blue Ridge Parkway. Betsy, my wife, had not been on it at
all, I think, but I had traveled it twice before, once back in 1950 with my parents and again in 1985
returning from a trip to Virginia. I recalled it as being very windy, very slow, and very tiring.
It is all those—but far, far more.
The Blue Ridge Parkway nestles along 469 miles of the crest of the Blue Ridge Mountains,
linking the Great Smoky and Shenandoah National Parks. Asheville, NC, and Roanoke, VA, are the
two largest cities on the route. We followed it from its southwestern end northeasterly to milepost 259.
Opened in April 1939, there is virtually nothing commercial about it—no billboards and no
concession stands. It does have several rest stops, camping grounds, picnic areas, four lodges, and
many pull-off overlooks. No one exceeds its 45 MPH speed limit, and we drove 200 miles without
seeing a single police vehicle. To get food or gas, one has to leave the parkway completely.
We were unprepared for what we saw. Fall was in the air at a pleasant 55 degrees Fahrenheit,
and the sun shown brightly. We climbed and climbed and climbed, and the curves were frequent. (The
scriptures are half-wrong: the Way is narrow, but not “straight”; grace comes in harrowing curves.)
Each curve brought a new panorama of vistas forcing us to look down into bottomless chasms and
across miles of valleys sparkling with occasional lakes and rivers to multi-sided mountains flaming
with yellows and reds and browns and greens.
We had seen fall colors before—six years in sight of eastern Kentucky mountains, six in
western Connecticut, three in east Tennessee, sixteen just at the southern tip of the Smokies. None
prepared us for the Blue Ridge epiphany.
The scenery was spectacular, and we mourned all the unfortunate people cooped up in football
stadiums or at Disney World or in front of television sets that special sunlit day. God revealed Himself
in nature on an October Saturday, and while thousands of people were with us on the Blue Ridge,
millions were not, although the Blue Ridge Parkway draws 17 million visitors a year. Even many of
BBeennddiinngg tthhee TTwwiigg:: PPaaggeess ffrroomm tthhee JJoouurrnnaall ooff aa PPiillggrriimm PPaarreenntt // 111166
those who have seen it may not have been there on a fall day when God appears so conspicuously in
his fall raiment. We felt ourselves among the Elect.
The frescoes at journey’s end were spectacular in their own right, but after four hours of
nature’s mosaic of fall leaves filling mountains and lining arboretum aisles of highway, even the fine
art and stained glass windows seemed diminished in grandeur. The manmade could not compete with
the God-made.
Shadows were falling when we turned back. Like the Magi who visited Bethlehem, we wisely elected
to return home “by another way”, but in the evening dusk and darkness, the memory of what we had
seen left us, like Mary, to put what we had seen inside our hearts and to ponder it in wonder and awe.
BBeennddiinngg tthhee TTwwiigg:: PPaaggeess ffrroomm tthhee JJoouurrnnaall ooff aa PPiillggrriimm PPaarreenntt // 111177
November 30, 1998
THE SELLING OF DIXIE
In graduate school in New Haven, CT, in the early 1960’s, our limited income led us to wander
antique shops and shows for cheap entertainment. We were often dismayed when dealers announced
new shipments of pieces from the South. It seemed sinful for southern relics to be sold in alien New
England.
History has been the South’s best crop. Regional history is important elsewhere—as in New
England and the West—but no region in America has extracted, packaged, and sold its history as
thoroughly as the South.
The Southern Historical Association held its annual meeting in Birmingham this year—the first
time since the first annual meeting in 1935. Some 1,500 historians, a record crowd, converged and
convened in the Civic Center.
Many of the major southern historian authors came. C. Vann Woodward was there to celebrate
th
his 90 birthday and visit old friends, but there were also James McPherson, Gary Gallagher, Bertram
Wyatt-Brown, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, George Tindall, Phillip Shaw Paludan, Mark Neely, John
Barry, Dan T. Carter, Walter Edgar, James I. Robertson, Eric Foner, Drew Gilpin Faust, Charles
Reagan Wilson, Anne Firor Scott, Catherine Clinton, and Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, and dozens of other
stars from the southern sky. Book stalls of their works filled an arena, rivaling the annual Southern
Book Festival in Nashville.
Papers were read and critiqued on every imaginable crevice in southern soil—papers on
lynching and rape, on race and honor, on war and disease, on children and business, on politics and
religion, on biographies and battles, on love and gender, on litigation and libraries, on weather and
crops.
Time was when “southern history” was thought of mostly as Douglas Southall Freeman’s
volumes on Marse Lee and some state history texts that traced governors and constitutional
conventions and legislative acts. All of that has changed. Southern history expanded into a rainbow of
fields and became interesting. Where and when that happened is hard to decide.
No doubt the Civil War Centennial (1961-65) had some effect. No doubt, too, AfricanAmerican studies, women’s studies, and urban studies have developed as prolific sub-fields of history
since the 1960’s: a residual benefit of the Civil Rights Movement has been the rediscovery of the
neglected South.
That rediscovery coincided with the expansion of southern higher education. Thirty years ago,
the major boom in southern higher education began. Prior to that, except for Vanderbilt and Chapel
Hill, southerners trekked North for graduate school. A shift to expanding universities began in the
1960’s that continues today. Scores of colleges became universities, and sleepy state and private
universities increased their academic offerings exponentially. No “decent” university is without a
graduate program in history, and southern history is an essential element in those programs.
Speakers at the SHA came from campuses such as East Tennessee State, Middle Tennessee
State, Georgia, West Georgia, Missouri, UNC Wilmington, Florida, North Florida, West Florida, South
Florida, Alabama, Alabama-Birmingham, Alabama-Huntsville, Georgia State, Emory, and Tulane.
And southern history hasn’t stayed South. Speakers came from universities in England, as well
as Amherst, Ohio State, Penn State, Northwestern, Indiana, East Illinois, Yale, Illinois, Boston, and
Brandeis.
There are more papers and books about southern history getting printed than there are southern
pine trees being harvested and sold at market. The pulpwood paper industry is being kept alive by
southern history publications.
The cynical view of this astounding southern history industry is that it is prompted and
sustained by the “publish or perish” requirements of several hundred universities. Reading papers at
BBeennddiinngg tthhee TTwwiigg:: PPaaggeess ffrroomm tthhee JJoouurrnnaall ooff aa PPiillggrriimm PPaarreenntt // 111188
scholarly conventions ranks second only to publishing as a condition of employment at most
universities.
A more sanguine view, one we prefer, is that southern history is very interesting stuff. In fact,
it is far more interesting than southern life today. The study of the past has much more to offer our
minds and spirits than do fast food, fast cars, fast-forward television, and the fast pace of modern
southern living.
Historians have eyes for both “the big picture” and the minutia that most of us fail to see or to
contemplate. Sharing their discoveries with us has become a business into which we enjoy buying.
Behind our hoarded and passed-down silverware and marble-top tables is a region full of stories,
paradoxes, myths, villains and heroes—sagas to be savored. Historians make it available to us.
BBeennddiinngg tthhee TTwwiigg:: PPaaggeess ffrroomm tthhee JJoouurrnnaall ooff aa PPiillggrriimm PPaarreenntt // 111199
August 25, 1978
A FEW WORDS II
(Commencement, The University of Tennessee, Knoxville)
The first Commencement was “In the Beginning”–
Heavens, earth, day, night, sky, water, lands and seas,
Planets, stars, birds, fish, animals, plants and trees,
PLUS Adam and Eve!
God spoke at that one. He said: Not Bad!
Through microscope and telescope you’ve studied His whole creation.
Without any heart you could take it apart. But are you good at restoration?
If you do dissect it, can you resurrect it?
Maker of promises, which can you keep?
Sower of dreams, what will you reap?
Hoarder of tomorrows, will you sell them cheap?
Bearer of sheepskin, will you become a sheep?
Are you a robot programm’d for close encounters in our Earth-Star’s wars?
Or a Frankenstein creature stitch’d from snitch’d scraps, nothing your own?
Be neither! Be neither automaton nor monster.
Be a mortal touch’d by immortality.
Be a Not Bad! human touch’d by humanity.
Open our gifts:
Our food-for-thought upon which you’ve dined,
Our insights into a world gone blind,
Our worn hardback History of Manunkind,
Our real rev’rence for the Life of the Mind
(Plus some old wounds we fail’d to bind,
A few loose ends we couldn’t wind,
A Holy Grail we hope you find).
Out of schedules that caus’d your pain,
Out of beds where you’ve seldom lain,
Out of labs in which you’ve searched,
Out of tests through which you’ve lurched,
Out of books into which you’ve peeked,
Out of classes through which you’ve squeak’d.
Line up, as we call you out: march on up–and haul on out!
BBeennddiinngg tthhee TTwwiigg:: PPaaggeess ffrroomm tthhee JJoouurrnnaall ooff aa PPiillggrriimm PPaarreenntt // 112200
About the Author . . .
Larry Thomas McGehee has been vice president and occasional professor of
religion at Wofford College in Spartanburg, S.C., since 1982.
Born in Paris, Tenn., in 1936, and educated in public schools there, he earned a
B.A. in English literature at Transylvania College, Lexington, Ky. As a Danforth
Fellow for six years of graduate studies, he received B.D., M.A., and Ph.D.
degrees in religious studies from Yale University.
After graduate school, he was executive vice president and vice president for academic affairs and
associate professor of American studies at the University of Alabama, returning to west Tennessee as
chancellor of the University of Tennessee at Martin for eight years and then to east Tennessee as
special assistant for the humanities and arts to the president of the University of Tennessee system and
lecturer in religious studies at UT Knoxville. He has served on the boards of the university presses of
both Alabama and Tennessee and on the state humanities committees for both Tennessee and South
Carolina, as well as on the board of curators at Transylvania and the board of higher education of the
Christian Church (Disciples). In 1978, Change Magazine and the American Council on Education
selected him one of “100 Emerging Leaders in Higher Education”.
McGehee’s weekly opinion column, Southern Seen, appears in over a hundred small newspapers in
eight southern states, and his weekly reviews of current books by southerners or about the South are
featured in 63 newspapers. This book is a selection from the 1,100+ columns he has written since
1982, plus two commencement addresses (including his 250-word 1972 address reprinted in TIME).
Themes of this sampler are education, children, parents, and community, and the intended audiences
are prospective college students considering liberal arts colleges and parents of such aspirants.
McGehee has been married since 1961 to the former Elizabeth (Betsy) Boden of Louisville, Ky., a
Transylvania history major and former teacher. They have two magna cum laude daughters. Elizabeth
(Liz), a newspaper copy editor chief in Winston-Salem, N.C., received her B. A. and the Elisabeth
Oesterlein outstanding student award from Salem College in N.C. in 1987 and a master’s in history
from William & Mary in 1989. Margaret (Molly), a history major, is a 1997 Phi Beta Kappa graduate
of Davidson College who, after a year as a Rotary Fellow in Nice, France, is enrolled in the Southern
Studies master’s program at the University of Mississippi.