Daring Not to Dive

March 23, 2017

By Michael A. Calvert

I saw Gunga Din in the mirror as I passed through the living room. A tan, shirtless ten year old with a shaggy turban returning from battle. My turban was a shirt wrapped around a scalp wound. The front fender of my bicycle had cut into the top of my head after I flew over the handlebars. Dad would shake his head and say it was probably not a good idea to ride down a two-story, rough graded dirt pile at a construction site. My head no longer hurt much, and I was relieved  to make it home on my bike.

“What in the world!” Mom said as I stepped into the kitchen. “Is that blood in your hair? And on that shirt?”

“Maybe it’ll come out in the wash. I fell off my bike,” I replied with a quick shrug, opening the refrigerator door. “I’m dying of thirst.” Soon Mom was slowly unwrapping my blood soaked turban. I winced and grunted as she pulled the fabric from the dried blood forming over the wound.

“This gash is deep. It’s a wonder you didn’t bleed to death. You may need stitches,” she said as she washed the blood from my hair. “Were you riding on those ski jump ramps you and Bernie make?”

“No. I just hit something and went over the handlebars. I’ll be OK. No stitches needed. My hair will hide the scar,” I said with as much nonchalance as I could muster, recalling Mom’s concern about a scar on my sister’s thigh when she sat on the scissors.

“Hold this on your head.” Mom said as she handed me an improvised icepack, ice cubes wrapped around a dishtowel. Mrs. Jordan’s car is in her driveway. She’ll take us to Dr. Schrieber’s.”

Before she returned with Mrs. Jordan jangling her car keys, I confirmed that the bleeding had stopped and made another plea to forgo the stitches. I argued it was unnecessary as I masked my fear of a needle stitching my scalp the way Mom darned socks. In an hour, I was carefully combing my black hair over the beige bandage in an attempt to hide my stitches.

That evening Dad interrogated me like Perry Mason until I admitted that my fall occurred when I rode down the steep side of a big dirt pile at a construction site located beyond my boundary. When he pressed me on why I did such a stupid thing, I could only respond that Mike dared me and Bernie double-dared me. I studied the pattern on our linoleum floor as I responded with acceptance to Dad’s rhetorical questions about jumping off cliffs if everyone else did and using my head next time my friends did something stupid. I escaped by holding my hand to my bandage and saying I needed to rest.

I stared at the ceiling in my shadowy room and recalled the dares and double-dares that began on the playground. Kids chanting, “Jump off the swing. Stand on the swing seat. Swing as high as the crossbar and make the chains go slack.”

“Dare you to stand on the whirling merry-go-round. Double dare you to walk across the top of the monkey bars. Are you chicken? Cluck, cluck, cluck, Michael’s a chicken. Michael’s a chicken,” they continued in sing-song taunts.

When I was a little older, Bernie, Ronnie, and my buddies tramped through our wilderness—the woods between our subdivision and Alum Creek. We challenged each other to walk over small streams on dead tree trunks instead of hopping from stone to stone across the ankle-deep water not far below and scramble up the muddy bank.

With arms extended, we slowly put one foot in front of another like tight rope walkers under a circus tent. The worst logs were smooth, silvery gray, and narrow. Our buddies already safely on the other side, offered advice: “Walk faster,” and  “Don’t look down.”  They also hurled taunts and threats. “Losing your nerve?” or “You’re going to get wet.” These low crossings were training grounds for bigger challenges.

The high banks of Alum Creek were topped with large trees that slanted toward the light above the creek. Vines as thick as a boy’s upper arm stretched to the treetops where they were entwined with small upper branches. Two of us hung on the vine to test the strength of the entanglements in the treetops. If the vine didn’t pull free, we’d try a short ride.

Gradually, we extended the arc of each swing until we were flying over the creek banks and the water itself. With a running start, we propelled ourselves in arcs high above the creek and imitated Johnny Wiesmueller’s long, modulated cries of Tarzan though our wails were a couple of octaves higher than his. We all understood that taking a turn was not optional. No dares or shaming required. Everyone had to soar high into the air above the creek.

Beginning in the sixth grade, we played on St. Gabriel’s football and baseball teams and in pick-up games on asphalt basketball courts in our neighborhood. We played whatever sport was in season and closely followed our teams in the newspapers and on TV—Ohio State, Notre Dame, the Browns, the Indians, or the Reds. Anyone who uttered a good word about Michigan’s teams, the Dodgers, or the Yankees was hooted into silence. All the guys wore jeans and T-shirts and combed their hair alike. Everyone listened to the disc jockeys on WCOL and rated the chances new songs would go to the top of the Billboard Chart. We discovered the girls at St. Gabriel were more attractive in skirts and sweaters than the school uniforms of loose blue jumpers and white blouses.

As we grew taller (catching up with the girls in our class) and our voices became deeper, Joey, Dick, Ronnie, and I often marched in a phalanx to the playground, the Dairy Queen, Lynn’s Drugs, and  Boni Pizza. I wondered if neighbors thought we were a gang of juvenile delinquents. Joey was usually in the lead, and I was by his side. We all enjoyed this demonstration of our  friendship, stepping beyond the circle of our families.

In the eighth grade, our last year at St. Gabriel, Joey declared his choice for high school by wearing a green and gold Aquinas football jersey passed down by an older cousin. Several Catholic and public schools were available.  Most of my buddies followed Joey’s lead, and I planned to join them at Aquinas where would continue to be buddies.

After the Christmas holidays, Sister Miriam, my teacher and principal, told me I was “St. Charles material” and strongly advised me to take the entrance exam. I was flattered by her high regard  and said I would think about it, but I questioned her assessment of my abilities. I cringed at the thought of failing the exam or later flunking out of St. Charles—and I wouldn’t know a soul there. It was a prep school for rich guys planning to go off to college and join a fraternity. If I went to college, I would be a commuter student, maybe in night school, at OSU. Yet I hated to disappoint Sister Miriam, so I didn’t respond for a few days.

I knew it would be my decision. When I mentioned Sister Miriam’s recommendation at dinner, Dad and Mom affirmed that St. Charles and Aquinas were both good schools. I noted the tuition was higher at St. Charles. My younger sister Kathy opined that neither of the all-boys schools would be much fun. Mom said not to worry about money, and girls could be a distraction. Dad added with a grin that the girls at St. Mary’s of the Springs liked to distract St. Charles boys.

As I lay awake that night, I decided to tell Sister I would take the test, but I could make sure I didn’t pass. Then I would be on my way to Aquinas.

“Wonderful! I’m sure you’ll pass with flying colors. I’m so pleased,” she gushed. I nodded feigning enthusiasm.

Outside the office, I realized I had dug my hole deeper. I couldn’t disappoint Sister by failing the entrance exam. I still yearned to go to Aquinas with Joey and the other guys but, I truly didn’t want to fail the test. I began to fantasize about scoring well or even posting the top score. If I went to St. Charles, I could see my neighborhood buddies after school and on the weekends. I was surprised at this idea’s allure. Soon I was eager to go to St. Charles. This could be a turning point for me, a fork in the road that would change my life.

The week of the test, I learned that I was accepted by St. Charles without taking the exam based on my grades and Sister’s recommendation. I basked in the congratulations. Sister Miriam, Dad, Mom, Grandmother and other relatives celebrated a bright future for me. My future was brighter, yet I dreaded telling Joey and the guys.

“Good for you. You’ve studied hard and you deserve it,” was Joey said. Dick seconded him, of course. I emitted an involuntary sigh. Still one of the guys. Since the first grade, I had worried that I would be shunned for my good grades and embarrassing compliments from teachers. Now I needed to double down and be everyone’s buddy.

My first opportunity to help Joey, Dick, and Ronnie came in the spring. I introduced to the caddy master at the country club and assured him that I had trained them well. On Saturdays and Sundays, we hitchhiked home together with a few dollars in our pockets from caddying and treated girls to pizza and Cokes at Bona’s.

As captain of the Safety Patrol, I received a package of free tickets for OSU’s intra-squad football game at the end of spring practice. The seats were in the end zone bleachers, but they were in the 80,000-seat Ohio Stadium. A couple of boys on the Safety Patrol couldn’t go, so I slipped the extras to Dick and Ronnie. It was their first time inside the famous horseshoe stadium.

The Columbus Dispatch inspired an expedition to Eckel’s Lake near Delaware, twenty-five miles north of Columbus. Photos of athletes flying over the water on rings like circus performers looked like fun with a bit of danger. Joey, Ronnie, Dick, Bernie, Mike, Johnny, and I chose a day and gathered on Mock Road with rolled towels, a sack lunch, and our swimming trunks. We paired off, stood beside the road, and stuck out our thumbs. The last pair arrived at the lake just before noon. Inside we ate our sandwiches and appraised the equipment.

The small, spring-fed lake nestled between steep hills was a gymnasium over water. People were swinging from one ring to another to travel across the lake. From a platform on the hillside, athletes grasped the two flying rings and launched themselves on an arc far over the lake, let go, and did somersaults before knifing into the water. Towering above the rings was 16-foot diving platform that appeared to be two or three times as high as the 10-foot board at our neighborhood pool. We decided to eat our sandwiches and observe the stunts on display before attempting the traveling rings, the flying rings, and the diving platform.

Several rounds of rock, paper, and scissors decided who would go first on the rings and the high dive, but we all solemnly pledged to take a turn. I was first on the flying rings, but thankful to be last on the high dive. Dick led on the traveling rings, and Ronnie was first on the diving board. I released from the rings too soon, splatted painfully onto the surface of the water, and glowed lobster red for a while. Dick clumsily fell into the lake stretching for the second ring.

Ronnie surprised us by walking to the end of the diving board, crouching, and falling headlong to the water. He surfaced complaining about his sore head with profanity which prompted a whistle and an eviction threat from the lifeguard. Everyone had mustered the courage to take his turn. Johnny reached the other side on the traveling rings, and Bernie managed an awkward flip from the flying rings. The other guys kept their hands together when they dove to avoid Ronnie’s fate.

I climbed the long ladder to the diving platform staring intently at the rungs in front of me. I repeatedly assured  myself, “I can do this. I will dive. I’ve got to dive. All the others did it…”  Dad’s words about jumping off cliffs if everyone else did flashed through my mind. When I stepped onto the platform, I gasped aloud. The lake was so far below that Ronnie, Dick , and the others were tiny children with upturned faces. They were chanting, “Dive. Dive….” I  stepped up onto to the board that bent slightly with my weight. I looked over the trees on the hillsides around the lake and felt a strong breeze at this height. I risked a glance at the water so far below. “You gotta dive! You gotta dive! You gotta…” yelled my buddies.

I took slow, deliberate steps to the end of the board that bounced a little with each step. Alone at the end of the lively plank, I looked toward the distant horizon beneath the bright sky, and said, “I don’t gotta do it. I don’t gotta do anything. Screw ‘em. I’m going to St. Charles. I’m going my own way.”

I calmly launched myself into the void and dropped feet first to the surface. I heard booing before I my feet smacked the water.  The soles of my feet still stung as I climbed to the dock, but I smiled and shrugged at my buddies as they jeered and hooted.

Ronnie encouraged me to try again to dive. I calmly shook my head. I did not need to redeem myself.

Once and Again a Fan

June 18, 2016

By Michael A. Calvert

Howard “Hopalong” Cassidy took the hand off, burst through the right side of the line, cut back to the left, evaded two tacklers, reversed field again, and crossed Indiana’s goal line for his third touchdown of the game. Everyone in Ohio Stadium was on their feet cheering and clapping. I stood on my seat to see over the adults just as Hopalong crossed the goal line and trotted back to the bench where all his teammates engulfed him and l tried to pat him on the back at once.

Uncle Bill, a graduate student in speech therapy, brought me to the game. I was eleven. It was the first college game I saw. In 1954, television had not arrived in my living room. I listened to many play-by-play radio broadcasts of OSU games, but seeing the Buckeyes play was a high point of my young life. Hopalong, a future Heisman Trophy winner, was my hero. I knew his statistics on yards per carry, touchdowns, pass receptions, and every other record the Columbus Dispatch compiled and printed. I had always been an Ohio State fan and I expected to be one forever.

Uncle Bill and I walked to the stadium from the apartment across from the campus where he lived with Grandmother. He pointed out the vintage buildings and the subjects taught in each. Hagerty Hall was for business, Mansfield Hall for botany, and Brown Hall for architecture (where I would study city planning ten years later). I glanced at each and nodded, but I was thinking about the game. Ohio State was favored. I hoped I was not a jinx.

Bells rang out from the bell tower at Orton Hall, a rough stone structure that housed the geology school. A carillon played the Ohio State anthem “Carmen Ohio.” I heard this lugubrious music on the radio after football games. Uncle Bill sang the last few bars that accompany the slow, drawn out pronunciation of Ohio in his deep baritone, “O-HI-O.”

These buildings faced the Oval, a four-block long expanse of grass crisscrossed by a maze of concrete walkways. Uncle Bill said a new walkway was paved when students wore down the grass with shortcuts—much better than “Keep Off the Grass” signs and fences he assured me. He pointed out the huge Thompson Library and the seated bronze statue of former university president, William Oxley Thompson, with his bald pate made shiny by thousands of students rubbing it for luck as they passed, especially during finals.

More students and alumni joined us as we got closer to the stadium. “You could be one of these students on the Oval in a few years,” he said to me. “You could get student tickets for all the home games.”

“I wouldn’t miss a game! Maybe I could go to OSU games in Michigan, Indiana, and Illinois,” I said.

Then he spotted University Hall and told me it was the oldest building on campus. This red brick, Victorian clocktower flanked by four-story wings that housed the entire university in 1870. I stared at it, nodding again.

We turned a corner and saw the massive Ohio Stadium, towering gray concrete arches forming a horseshoe around the field. The American and Ohio flags and Big Ten pennants flew from the many flagpoles above the “shoe.” Approaching on foot, the stadium impressed even more than driving past on nearby streets.

“This dome at the entrance was modeled on Rome’s Pantheon. The stadium was built in 1922 for 70,000 spectators. At the time, no one thought it would ever fill up. Now every game is sold out,” said Uncle Bill as we entered beneath an archway on the side and began climbing wide concrete inclines with hundreds of fans to reach our seats. I stopped to take in the view when we emerged into the sunlight high above the field, emerald green with yard lines precisely chalked and the end zones dyed red. Uncle Bill said “You know that’s scarlet not red, Michael. OSU’s colors are scarlet and gray.”

Gradually people in bright sweaters and jackets, mostly scarlet (not red, I reminded myself) filled in the remaining empty seats. Pennants and pompons waved. The band, in their blue uniforms and hats topped with scarlet plumes, played the OSU fight song. “Fight the team across the field…” I sang along in a low voice to show Uncle Bill I knew the words. Afterwards cheerleaders raised their megaphones and repeatedly called out “O-H-I-O, Round on the ends, High in the middle, O-HI-O.”

“There’s the card section. Each student holds up a colored panel to spell out cheers. Up on top is the press box,” said Uncle Bill. I was gaping and wide-eyed at the entire spectacle. As we stood for the national anthem, smoke tickled my nose. Two men behind us were puffing on newly lit cigars.

Grandmother had scored autographs from linemen Jim Parker and Aurelius Thomas, players who lived in the dorm where she worked. I found their numbers in the program and followed them them instead of the ballcarrier for several plays.

The Buckeyes scored first and never trailed. Cassidy made several long runs, deftly sidestepping and swerving around defenders. We bought peanuts in a paper bag from a vendor with a tray supported by a strap around his neck. I was not ready to see the teams leave the field at halftime, but the rousing music led by the director conducting atop a ladder at midfield soon held my attention. Then they marched in formation, dispersed, merged, and formed images on the field. I was fascinated.

“Watch this closely, Michael,” said Uncle Bill as the band members began marching in single file playing music with a steady, hypnotic beat. Clapping and foot stomping accompanied the band. The drum major led them in forming a large oval as if following a giant pen. They continued and scripted a lower case “h”, then an “i” and finally an “o.” Applause grew as the tuba player broke away from the other players, escorted by the drum major, both high-stepping to dot the “i.” His horn flashed in the sun as he bowed. Ohio ! When the band members tipped their hats in unison, the crowd thundered their appreciation.

When Ohio State lined up to kickoff, Uncle Bill said, “Tad Weed, our kicker is not much bigger than you. Only one hundred and forty pounds. He hasn’t missed an extra point all season.” I nodded and imagined that I was about to dent the football with the toe of my high-topped cleats and launch it far down the field. For weeks afterwards (well, maybe days), I practiced kicking a football over the swing set in our back yard. I planned to request Tad’s number on my scarlet and gray jersey.

The Bucks increased their lead in the third quarter with Cassidy’s long run, and OSU’s coach emptied the bench by the end of the game. Even the third string scored on the hapless Hoosiers. Everyone around us cheered for every additional touchdown. My throat was sore and my hands stung from clapping. Finally the clock wound down to zero and we joined a happy throng stutter-stepping down the wide inclines and emerging onto the campus.

“Poor Indiana,” said Uncle Bill as we strolled back across the campus. “I can’t remember the last time they beat Ohio State. I almost feel sorry for them.”

I felt no mercy. I was triumphant. “The Buckeyes are just too strong for them. Maybe they ought to stick to tiddlywinks,” I said laughing jubilantly.

“You know who Ohio State is afraid to play?” asked Uncle Bill with a sideways glance. When I didn’t respond, he exclaimed, “Notre Dame! Not since the 1935 game when the Fighting Irish scored three touchdowns in the fourth quarter to win 18-13.It was called the Game of the Century.”

“Notre Dame is my second favorite team. I’m glad Ohio State won’t play them,” I said. Uncle Bill took me to a couple of more games before he graduated, but they are not etched in my memory like my first visit to Ohio Stadium.

I continued to be an avid Buckeye fan as a young boy and a teenager. Every day I read articles on the sports page about OSU football: the game summaries on Sunday, detailed questions about play calling and substitutions early in the week, forecasts about the next opponent, and carefully qualified predictions as game day approached.

I did not go to games after Uncle Bill graduated and married. I watched televised games and listened to radio broadcasts when I could. Caddying and, later, work at the grocery store occupied my Saturday afternoons, yet I remained a loyal Buckeye fan.

After graduating from high school, I did not begin classes at OSU until winter quarter. Once again Ohio State beat Michigan to clinch the Big Ten title and was invited to play in the Rose Bowl, football’s premier contest of the season. Along with all the other Buckeye fans, I looked forward to the game on New Year’s Day.

The huge banner headline was a shocker! “FACULTY NIXES ROSE BOWL”. Fans responded with cries of “Impossible, unbelievable, preposterous!” The faculty senate had decided that football was overemphasized and Ohio State was becoming known as a “football factory” instead of an institution of higher learning. Students marched to the Faculty Club, broke some windows, and built a bonfire in the intersection in front of the university gates. The traffic light sputtered and sparked when the flames engulfed it.

The ensuing debate consumed the city and state for weeks. Beefy players lamented the loss of their dream of a lifetime. Alumni wrote letters of protest and some cancelled donations. Pipe-smoking professors bloviated about the ethos of the academy and the pre-eminence of scholarship and education at a university. Newspapers and television covered little else. Most people I knew supported the team. I nodded when my neighborhood friends ranted about the faculty’s decision. Arguments divided families, preoccupied co-workers, and tested friendships. The faculty remained firm and Alabama played in the Rose Bowl in place of Ohio State.

I was to begin classes the day after the Rose Bowl. I knew many people who delayed enrolling repeatedly and never began college. I was relieved not be one of them. The value of the college education I was pursuing was confirmed by the professors’ vaunted statements. Privately I embraced their lofty ideals about the life of the mind.

My first class was History Survey 101 in the venerable University Hall. The professor met my expectations. His shapeless tweed coat with elbow patches hung loosely from his shoulder as he fervently promised to give us a tour of the ancient and medieval world that provided the foundation for the Enlightenment and western civilization.

Afterwards the student next to me grumbled about all the required reading in the syllabus. We continued our conversation on the Oval and had coffee at the Student Union. Jeremy Schwartz was from Long Island. His girlfriend, Diane Meyers, joined us. After introducing ourselves, Jeremy said that the Rose Bowl controversy mystified them. They chose Ohio State for its academic reputation not its football ranking. The faculty made the right decision in their view. I did not disagree with them, and tried to explain how everyone in Ohio was obsessed with football. As I sloshed through the snow that winter, I gravitated toward students in the Arts College with an interest in the concepts and ideas put forth by our professors. Between classes, I studied in the Music Room at the Student Union where classical music muted conversations.

During my undergraduate years, I continued to read the sports page and take pride in OSU’s national ranking, but it was a guilty pleasure that I did not share with my campus friends. Our conversations were about books and current events. Kennedy’s Peace Corps, sit-ins at lunch counters in the South, and confrontations with Khrushchev crowded out unwelcome comments about Buckeye football.

In graduate school, my dozen classmates were from California, Georgia, Missouri, and other parts of the country. I was the only OSU graduate. Several classmates were football fans and eager to see the Buckeyes play at Ohio Stadium. We purchased season tickets, and I led them to the first game on a warm September day. We traversed the Oval where Uncle Bill and I had walked a decade earlier. I pointed out some of the academic buildings bordering the Oval. The carillon at Orton Hall struck the hour. I proudly reported that more than 81,000 fans would be cheering for the home team that day.

We stepped into the stands and saw the verdant field bathed in sunshine, the mostly scarlet-clad crowd, and the flags and pennant stirring in the breeze. The eleven year-old fan was back. I was transported to the day when Hopalong Cassidy amazed me with his down field running. The band played the fight song and I remembered the words. The cheerleaders elicited great roars from the crowd. As we stood for the national anthem, the sweet aroma of cigars wafted to me. I screamed and yelled as the Buckeyes scored, grew misty when the tuba player dotted the “i” at halftime, and sang Carmen Ohio aloud afterwards. It was good to, once again, be a Buckeye fan.

The End
To view Script Ohio by the “Best Damn Band in the Land” : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rPNnIFH6_RU

“I told you to turn out the light ten minutes ago.” Mom said from the bottom of the stairs. ”I’m waiting, Michael.” I reluctantly twisted the switch on the light above my bed, and was enveloped in total darkness until my pupils adjusted.

“Good night, honey,” she said in an almost apologetic tone. She often fell asleep sitting on the couch with a book on her lap, usually one of Bruce Catton’s thick paperbacks on the Civil War.

When I was confident that she was back on the couch, I groped under my bed for the flashlight, positioned it on my shoulder, pulled the blankets over my head, pushed the button, and scooched down until the beam illuminated my book. It was surely not a text book, probably an adventure story about pirates or cowboys.

We were among the last in our neighborhood to have a television. Missing Howdy Doody made me feel deprived then, but without flickering gray images on the screen until I was twelve, I was accustomed to curling up with books. I had experienced the bittersweet disappointment that accompanies finishing a good book.

Wrapped in brown paper and tied with twine, Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn arrived the week before Christmas when I was in the fifth grade. The New Mexico return address signaled it was from Uncle Edward and Aunt Laura. Dad told me that I would laugh when I read about Tom painting a fence. I read it first and enjoyed all Tom and Huck’s mischief. Huck’s adventures on the Mississippi inspired my friend Ronnie and me to launch wood rafts buoyed by inner tubes on nearby Alum Creek. Our short journeys in a stream with water seldom over our heads were uneventful compared to Huck’s troubles on the wide and deep Mississippi. These books began a lifetime of reading. I have rarely been without a book since then.

Comic books never obsessed me like they did so many of my friends. Only the Blackhawk comics captured my imagination and my dimes. Seven bold pilots of different nationalities, veterans of WW II, vanquished a series of villains bent on world domination. I find myself thinking of their camaraderie when chauvinistic nationalists seize opportunities to oppress other countries. Where are the Blackhawks? I wonder.

I found a dozen of Dad’s Tom Swift books in a box in the attic. Tom Swift and his Motor Cycle, Tom Swift and his Electric Rifle, Tom Swift and his Photo Telephone and several more brown books from the early decades of the twentieth century. I devoured them on long winter evenings. Sometimes I couldn’t leave Tom at moments of great peril and read on under the blankets. Rover Boys on the River and Rover Boys in the Mountain were next. Sketches showed the boys in knickers, argyle socks, and caps in the twenties, but they had grand adventures. I relished turning the pages Dad had turned as a boy.

I watched the mailbox every week for the Saturday Evening Post. I took a moment to appreciate the Norman Rockwell paintings of Americana on the cover and paged through the cartoons when each issue arrived much as I do now with the New Yorker. In the winter, the hot air floor register was a good place to sit and read C. S. Forester’s stories about Captain Horatio Hornblower, master of a British warship in the age of sail. Although I was unaware of their literary reputations, I may have read stories by Fitzgerald, Steinbeck, Faulkner, and Vonnegut who were regular contributors.

Sister Miriam, my 6th, 7th, and 8th grade teacher, assigned Jack London’s short story “To Build a Fire.” My buddies and I had tromped around in the woods near our subdivision after wet snows. I understood the challenge of starting a fire when everything is wet and dripping. I was with the man in the wilderness as he struck his last match, nursed a tiny flame on a twig, and relieved when a teepee of small sticks began to burn. I gasped when a handful snow, thick and wet, fell off a pine bough and snuffed out the small, smoking fire. Surely he won’t die, I thought, but he did. He did not live happily ever after, the outcome in children’s books. Sister sent me to the library for London’s Call of the Wild and White Fang. Another book that caught my attention was Jules Verne’s “To the Center of the Earth,” an early science fiction adventure.

Sister read us some “tall tales” told around campfires in frontier days. She warned us that these stretched the truth. In one, a grizzled, old guy said, “Pecos Pete, the best bronco breaker in the West, rode every wild horse cowboys captured and took to him. The only time he ever got thrown was when he tried to ride a tornado in Oklahoma.” He chuckled and added, “It was too much for even old Pete.”

An old timer said, “It was so cold in the Rockies one winter that the snow turned blue—bright blue,” he insisted. Another cowboy said, “The Arizona desert gets so hot that chickens lay hard boiled eggs.”

We knew that these were not true. Our catechism said it is a sin to bear false witness. A classmate said, “Those stories were lies, and lies are sins”. Sister didn’t challenge the catechism, but suggested that a tall tale might be fun to tell and hear around a fireplace on the trail. Everyone of us knew tall tales weren’t exactly true. In fact, they might be greatly exaggerated or even made up, but it would be fun. Someone else around the fireplace might invent a better tall tale. She said it’s all right to stretch the truth a little to have fun. Then she asked us to write a tall tale. We had a license to lie. This made our homework a bit daring and even fun.

At St. Charles, English classes included grammar, composition, fiction and poetry. We spent the better part of one year dissecting Vanity Fair, a thick Victorian novel that centered on the ambitious Becky Sharp, her rich friend Amelia Sedley, and their romantic fortunes. A social satire set in England in the previous century did not stir the passions of young teenage boys. We slogged through the year, but most of us were not inspired to read more of William Makepeace Thackeray’s novels.

Father Duffy’s choice of The Caine Mutiny, a novel of love and war, had much greater appeal. We were boys in the decade after World War II. Our fathers, uncles, and neighbors rose to the challenge and triumphed over the goose-stepping Germans in Europe and the fanatical Japanese in the South Pacific. We watched heroes in uniform like Audie Murphy and Sergeant York in movies with stirring soundtracks. Our president was the victorious commander, often referred to as General Eisenhower.

Father introduced us to layers of meaning, symbolism, and grand themes in literature. I was surprised to learn that the pudgy, soft protagonist represented the country at the outset of the World War II, and that the slovenly Captain DeVries’ name intentionally rhymed with debris. The intellectual pressed into service was less admirable than the stolid, flawed naval veteran who thanklessly protected the country during peacetime. Father Duffy was determined to teach us that war stories were more than tales of derring do. He opened the door to additional levels of nuance and significance.

At Ohio State, I took an upper level course in Shakespeare, largely because it fit my work schedule at the Union Department Store. The Assistant Professor overflowed with enthusiasm as we read several plays and I drank it in great gulps. That summer I was delighted to see a performance of “Mid-Summer Night’s Dream” at Antioch College in nearby Yellow Springs, Ohio. Many years later I was thrilled to be in the audience at “Much Ado About Nothing” in the reconstructed Globe Theatre in London.

Over the years I read steadily when the press of family and work permitted. I plowed through most of Will and Ariel Durant’s volumes on history, art, and culture, and chose books on history and biography.

When I moved to Birmingham in 1982, I became a charter member of a book club led by Alan Perlis, the former Head of the English Department at UAB. Alan had five children and chose to sell real estate to support his family. He organized two or three book clubs to continue his love affair with literature. He gave lectures on the assigned book and led lively discussions. Our club has delved into more than 300 books ranging from Southern female authors one year to German post-war angst in another. We read classics like George Elliot’s Middlemarch and contemporary stories like The Goldfinch. Alan passed away last year, but our members still read and discuss. As Fitzgerald said, “so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
My reading has moved from paperbacks and hefty hardcover books to an electronic reader—much to my wife’s relief. No longer do I plead to keep the light on my side of the bed lit “for just a little longer.” Reading the screen, tilted thoughtfully away from my wife, occasionally reminds me of reading under the blankets with the flashlight so many years ago.