“Like this cup,” Nan-in said, “you are full of your own opinions and speculations.

How can I show you Zen unless you first empty your cup?”

                                                           …Paul Reps, Zen Flesh Zen Bones

I had a lot of emptying to do that first semester at Juniata.  Although I had more or less lived at the John R. Kaufmann, Jr. Public Library in Sunbury, my reading tended to Leonard Cottrell’s The Mountains of Pharaoh and Major Donald E. Keyhoe’s The Flying Saucer Conspiracy.  (Some altruism did creep in.  During the summer of 1962, I unsuccessfully tried to teach myself classical Greek.)  Here I was, wading through the Viking Press Portable Plato trying to get the skinny on justice, truth, and beauty while simultaneously discovering that Polya was telling me I didn’t know how to solve anything.  And who the hell was this depressing Nietzsche guy, who was undecipherable in any language?

My political thoughts (when I had them) were a bizarre concoction of my father’s interpretation of Roosevelt New Deal liberalism and William J. Lederer’s A Nation of Sheep.  I had a subscription to Time and felt I was about as on top of things as anyone would want to be.  Luckily, sophomore John Garrett lived right next door, and in long discussions steered me away from a jigsaw puzzle parochialism to a world view approaching that of Woody Guthrie seasoned with a dash of W. E. DuBois.  He started loaning me his weekly copies of The New Republic and The Nation and brought over an album called The Times They Are A-Changing by somebody called Bob Dylan.  Fellow dining hall grunt and Pittsburgh native Fred Bailey added tutorials in jazz.  Soon, my Zenith Cobra-Arm^® portable record player was spinning Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, and Ornette Coleman instead of my own lp’s of Glenn Miller and Leroy Anderson.

It was John who organized an anti-Goldwater sign campaign on campus.  There were some pretty good ones, too.  John was particularly proud of his “Gold For The Rich – Water For The Poor” and “Barry G. And World War III.”  I felt I had hit a personal best with my “Cast Your Vote For Barry Here” taped to the dorm bathroom wall with a big arrow pointing down to a commode.  In October, Goldwater’s campaign train (yes, they still did that sort of thing back then) stopped in Huntingdon, and John organized a contingent to go down to the station and picket.  Local host Congressman Orville Snare gave us the finger from the observation platform.  Janet Kaufmann was waving John’s
“Barry G…” sign, and a couple of local vets thought she was advocating for World War III.  We made the Altoona TV evening news.  So life could be good, sometimes.  Now, if I could only keep from flunking out.

I resolved to put the hammer down during the three weeks leading up to Christmas vacation.  I already knew what was in store:  hour exams in chemistry, calculus, and Biblical history, an impossible paper in Great Epochs, and an impossible translation in German.  It didn’t help that on the first night back on campus I ran into someone who told me that sophomore biology major and fellow Sunbury native Phil Jenkins had quit and was not returning.  He simply couldn’t take the stress.  I took it as an omen and decided that this was the way Caesar must have felt back in that long-ago March.

I abandoned my dorm room and lived at the library.  I actually found time to read from supplementary texts.  I worked through extra problems.  I stayed awake in classes.  And through it all I worked “elevators up” with Ken MacFadden every single lunch and dinner in the Oneida dining hall, early shift breakfast with Dave McClure every Tuesday morning, and the usual weekend cafeteria meals.  I refused to quit cross country, and finished up the season at an away meet at St. Francis.  I refused to accept the closing record of 2 – 7, Juniata’s first losing cross country season EVER, as any kind of omen, even though I got a nasty plantar wart on the ball of my right foot as my personal reward.  I stared down the auguries in bitter defiance.

I managed A’s in chemistry, Biblical history, and Great Epochs.  I pulled down a B^– in calculus and a C⁺ in German.  The latter actually made me dizzy with incomprehension.  But Juniata being Juniata, I went home for Christmas with THREE assignments.  You see, the semester didn’t end until mid-January.  (Juniata did NOT participate in spring break, which was thought to be an excuse for off-campus immorality that would somehow reflect back on the college.)  So here was another excuse to pile on even more work.  Setting due dates for papers in the middle of the first week of January was really sick.  But then, just about every prof also scheduled hour tests during the same two weeks.  So the semester wound down in an orgy of blood-letting and self-flagellation.  And then there were finals: taken in the big gym en masse over a solid week, and each was three hours long for every single subject, no exceptions.

I have only one clear memory of that first ever semester break: receiving my grades at home in Sunbury.  There was no saving German II, but that D was offset by an A in Biblical History.  (A true instance of “cursed-to-first” as the ball fans love to say. I was kind of a favorite of Earl Kaylor’s for the rest of my tenure at Juniata, and I still have the two, post-F hour exams with their A⁺⁺⁺’s marked in red at the top.)  I was disappointed in getting only a B in chemistry and was resigned to the C in calculus.  The B in Great Epochs reflected my total inattention to the class for the first ten weeks of the semester.  Barbash and Maas deserved better.  Your final grade point average was arrived at by multiplying the numerical equivalent of each grade (F=0 to A=4) by the corresponding course credit hours, adding everything up, and then dividing by the total credit hours.  It was complicated, but the registrar’s office kindly did the math for you, and there it was at the bottom of the small form:  2.765, exactly 0.015 greater than the minimum needed to retain my academic scholarship!  At home, I began a series of almost nightly visits with my high school friends Larry Bassett and Jay Stoler to The Colonial Tavern in Natalie, way up above Mt. Carmel in the Western Middle anthracite coal field of Pennsylvania.  Everything Juniata (except lettering in cross country) was forgotten.  We drank Furman & Schmidt and Steigmeier drafts, gorged on free pretzels, chips, and pickled eggs, and played darts and shuffleboard, shutting out the will ‘o the wisps and ghosts of old mine falls that still haunted the Appalachian night. 

At registration late in the first semester, I had made a decision that would have significant impact on my academic and campus life.  I had to find something to replace Biblical History.  Choices were limited because freshmen picked last, and many popular courses would be full or there’d be scheduling conflicts with classes you HAD to take.  There was also this requirement to take distribution courses in either a 2:2 or 1:3 grouping by department within each of your two, non-major schools, which for me were Humanities and Social Sciences.  I figured I take Barbash’s Art History first and then three English courses for my Humanities requirement.  The problem was that it wasn’t available, and the only lower division English class I could fit into my schedule was Don Hope’s Introduction To Literary Forms.  Hope was relatively new to Juniata and had a reputation as a tough grader and esoteric lecturer who expected a high degree of intelligence in his students.  Several upperclassmen told me to take ANYTHING else, especially if I was worried about my gpa.  But a few others praised him and said his lectures were incredible.  Besides, John Garrett had already signed up for the same course.

The last half of January and all of February went better than I expected.  I submitted some old high school poems and essays to Kvasir, the college literary magazine.  Then Gallway Kinnell showed up on campus as that year’s Artist In Residence.  His introduction to the campus was an evening poetry reading in the Lesher dorm first floor lounge, mc’d by Don Hope.  He arrived late and disheveled by the stormy weather.  He had on muddy shoes and a rumpled, ill-fitting jacket.  His hands were gnarled and looked too big.  He launched right into The River, and at each blue word, Dean Morley Mays shrunk further back into his chair.  The students were beyond delighted.  This was Juniata, where we still had compulsory chapel and where students who got married were immediately expelled, the assumption being that anyone who got married HAD to get married and thus had committed the sin of fornication.  I was star-struck, and my view of Kinnell mimicked the image of Richard Burton playing the drunk Welsh poet in Terry Southern’s Candy.

In a fit of madness, Kvasir editor Dale Evans decided that one of my high school essays was worthy of putting in the magazine.  I was stunned.  He gave it a new title, re-arranged some words, and added it to the accepted pile.  But there was a problem.  Although Don Hope was the titular faculty advisor, an instructor in the Spanish Department, Richard Frankhouser, had somehow been given censorship authority over all submissions.  Word came back through official channels that there was a problem with my essay:  it contained a number of potty words that were determined to be totally unsuitable for a Juniata College publication.  A hasty meeting was convened of the Kvasir editorial staff.  I was included, and together we unanimously decided to fight.  I was paid a personal visit by Frankhouser, who intimated that dark things might happen to my financial aid package if I didn’t acquiesce.  The college certainly knew where to hit you the hardest.  Dale Evans, Diz Kuhn, Wylie Gregg, and the whole Kvasir crew turned the “censorship affair” (as it later became known) into the latest cause célèbre.  Overnight, I was transformed from out-of-it, chem major geekus to persecuted poet whose “art” was being strangled by a puritanical administration.  The arty crowd kept up a steady chant of the doom of creativity, such as it was, at JC.  A showdown was inevitable, but who would “blink” first?

Then it happened.

On Monday March 8, 1965, I was returning to my dorm room in the dark after working dinner when Fred Bailey ran up behind me and said that sophomore Gary Rowe had been looking for me.  Gary and I had become friends because we were both railfans and both collected stamps, and his roommate Phil Jones worked alongside me and Ken MacFadden in the dining hall.  Fred told me that some students had decided to answer Martin Luther King’s plea for people throughout the country to flood Selma, Alabama and bear witness to what was happening.  I had watched a TV news special hosted by Walter Cronkite on Sunday evening, so I knew about the melee that had occurred on the Edmund Pettis bridge just outside of Selma.  This was serious stuff, they were killing people down there.  I took the path to the left and went up the slight hill to North dorm and Gary’s second floor room.  The door was locked, but someone had written a message all down the door in black marker (a serious offence; defacing or purposely damaging college property were grounds for immediate expulsion):

Gary,

Kinnell and Maas meeting to plan trip to Selma.  Professor Hope has called twice.  Harriet Richardson has details.  Need to know who will go.  Call Maas as soon as you can…3:30 PM

I stood there in the empty hallway and read the message two, three times.  I had no idea where Gary was, and I certainly was not familiar enough with any JC professor to just call them up.  I hung around for a while and then left.  I had just gotten back to my room in Sherwood when John Garrett burst in and asked if I wanted to go to Selma, Alabama.  Just like that.