“I was born in New York City if that will help you any.”

                                                           …Richard Blaine (Humphrey Bogart), Casablanca

Sunbury, Pennsylvania was not New York City.  It was nowhere.  Nobody famous was from Sunbury.  Local historians might argue it, but take my word:  nobody.  And nothing has happened to blemish that spotless record in the forty three years since the events documented here took place.  But that put me in good company when I started at Juniata College in September 1964.  Juniata was described by one of its presidents as catering to “intelligent bumpkins,” and was so parochial during my tenure that they didn’t bother to put a state after the hometowns under the yearbook pictures of the graduating seniors.  The captions just said Media, Verona, Hooversville, Schwenksville, Aliquippa, and dozens of other small towns and crossroads throughout Pennsylvania.  Yes, there were a scattering of New Jerseys, one Maine, and one Kenya, Africa.  But they just underscored the point:  I was right at home.

But that long-dead president wasn’t kidding about “intelligent.”  When visiting campus in July 1964 to take entrance exams, we were ordered into the bookstore to purchase our summer reading materials:  Henry Adams’ Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres, Dante’s Divine Comedy: Inferno, Machiavelli’s The Prince, and John Henry Cardinal Newman’s Idea of a University.  When I finally got to campus, I was handed a flyer outlining all the events of the three days of freshman orientation.  Right there on Sunday immediately after a reception at the President’s home was a meeting with my freshman advisor to discuss Newman’s book.  The fact that it noted light collations would be served did not help.  At registration on Monday, the first person I ran into was bragging about scoring double eight hundreds on her college boards.  My Sunbury Area Joint Senior High School Advanced College Preparatory curriculum had turned into a joke, and classes hadn’t even started.

My freshman advisor was Assistant Professor of German, Walter J. T. Morris.  He was stiff, aloof, disdainful, painfully condescending to his little group of advisees, and looked just like Adolf Hitler.  His condescension turned to barely concealed disgust when it became obvious that none of us had a clue what John Henry Cardinal Newman was talking about.  The next day at freshman registration, he coldly explained that HE would be teaching my second year German class, NOT Professor Dolnikowski.  More’s the pity because Morris was an unmitigated, unrepentant sadist in his classes, and Dolnikowski was one of Juniata’s truly nice guys.  Without any discussion, I was assigned Chemistry of the Covalent Bond (Rockwell), Calculus of One Variable (Blaisdell), Calculus Recitation (Blaisdell), Great Epochs of World Culture (Barbash), Great Epochs Recitation (Maas), German II (Morris), German Language Lab (Morris), Biblical History (Kaylor), and English Conference (Crosby), for a grand total of 19 credit hours and no life.

In a bizarre show of total ignorance and stupidity, I also went out for cross country.  Oh, because of abject poverty, I was allowed to work off my board in the various dining halls, working every weekday lunch and dinner, one breakfast a week, and several weekend meals a month.  It was an incredible amount of time, but had a couple of advantages:  I didn’t have to dress up for dinner; I got to eat all I wanted; I didn’t have to watch my manners (such as they were); and I got to meet a whole bunch of other poverty-stricken students.

I had to work “early breakfast” the first day of classes.  Luckily, my partner in the Lesher dining hall was Dave McClure, who helped me through the learning curve but who could do nothing about my not having a change of shoes.  I was working “pig” and “load” and “shove,” which meant that I scraped the plates into a gigantic disposal unit the size of the whirlpool downstream of Niagara Falls, then loaded them into racks, and then shoved the loaded racks into the maw of this huge Hobart dishwasher that used 250 °F water for a final “rinse.”  Professor Morris had set this up because he KNEW I hadn’t read The Inferno.  He was making me live the goddamn book in punishment.  As the drudgery wore on, I consoled myself:  at least I didn’t have to talk to Dave in terza rima.

I was mercifully relieved at 7:45 AM and literally ran to my first class:  Covalent.  The steeply tiered classroom was in the ancient Science Building, and by the time I got there, the only seats were in the front row.  The tall, narrow, and unscreened windows were wide open.  We had just gotten past the required book list and the lab assignments when I noticed that dozens of flies were buzzing around my Red Ball jets.  We had had French toast for breakfast, and apparently I had splashed a lot of syrup on my sneakers.  No matter how much I wiggled my feet, the buzzing cloud remained.  First, the hell of the Lesher dining room scullery, now this.  Was there no end to the evil of this place?  Why hadn’t I sat in the back were no one could see me?  Were those titters I was hearing?  When will the class end?  I finally gave up and just let them feed like piranhas in the Amazon.  Across the street a white sign moved gently in the hot September air:  Veritas Liberat 1876.  Right, right.

From this late remove, it’s hard to imagine how conservative most of Pennsylvania was, and my hometown was no exception.  When JFK won the presidency, the Sunbury Daily Item ran a picture of Nixon on the front page under the banner headline “Nixon Loses.”  Prior to that, our minister at the Albright Evangelical United Brethren Church warned the congregation not to vote for Kennedy because the Pope would be running the country if he won.  The Daily Item editor, Harry Haddon, saved his most sardonic wit and rapier pen strokes for skewering youth who didn’t act or look like they were either on their way to or just coming from a Billy Graham revival.  The editorial gem below gives a flavor of how it was growing up in small town American in the early Sixties.

There were people I knew who figuratively murdered Juniata; Will Peters and Phil Eatough come to mind.  For them, Juniata seemed to be a boring prison sentence in which all the classes and assignments were so much busy work that only served to kill time.  I had no time.  With five classes, three recitations, labs, working in the dining halls, and cross country, I quickly went under.  German was a killer.  Morris was working us through Deutches Erste Buch as well as a killer translation schedule that included everything from Nietzsche and Schiller through the entire post-WW II novel Draussen Für Der Tur.  I was up so late trying to translate German, I slept through most of the “Great Epochs…” main lectures in Oller Hall.  We were reading book after book in “Epochs,” while simultaneously wading through the text Arts and Ideas.  When Elmer Maas did his classic lecture on Plato’s Allegory of the Cave in “Epochs” recitation, I could barely stay awake.  Blaisdell had picked one of the true horrors of mathematical literature as his intro textbook:  Volume I of Tom Apostal’s Calculus.  (If you don’t believe this assessment, find the book on Amazon and read the reviews.)  He used his fourth-class recitation to teach Fortran IV and lecture from Polya’s How To Solve It.  I had German coming out of one ear and math oozing out of the other.  In Biblical History, I had failed my first exam by writing a tome on the first question and then running out of time.  I literally got one 100 and four zeroes for a combined score of 20%.  Mrs. Crosby was convinced I was a functional illiterate, belying my editorship of the junior and senior high newspapers in Sunbury and my two high school novels (unpublished).  She assigned more papers.  I was surviving in “Covalent” but only because my first year chemistry text in high school was Sienko & Plane, a p-chem-oriented classic, and my second year chemistry text was the general organics classic Morrison & Boyd.  It was my only bright spot.  By mid-term, I was barely surviving with a 1.80 gpa.

Thanksgiving vacation was a magnanimous two whole days, and I spent it in a state of mental and physical collapse.  At the uptown Rea & Derrick’s, Sunbury’s premier drug store and high school hangout, I brooded in the back booth while high school classmates arrived, just back from colleges and universities and full of stories about crazy professors and hot coeds.  My parents were unhappy.  I would need to finish with a 2.75 to keep my academic scholarship and stay in school.  How and the hell was I going to pull that off?  I was carrying an F in Biblical History and a D in German II.  There was no way I was going to end up like the older high school grads who never went to college and who still hung out Saturday evenings in front of The Iron Skillet on Market Street, reminiscing about big football games from the mid-fifties and wondering where life had gone.  I actually thought of joining the air force.  On Sunday morning, we started back to Juniata in a driving rain.  I had to work both lunch and dinner, so I had exactly one hour and forty five minutes to come up with a game plan.