“A situation later assumes meanings that it did not have at the time,

and you write them into it in retrospect and fool yourself.”

                                                           …A.J. Liebling, Mollie and Other War Pieces

I’m treading on thin ice, here.  The immediate events of that fateful night and the rest of the week leading up to our departure are hazy at best.  I must rely on a high school diary given to me as a Christmas present in 1963, the title page of which bears the inscription:

“This book cost only $0.90 and was bought by my goddamn brother for me, the owner (of the book, that is):  Chuck Lytle”

For some reason now lost to time, I never wrote in the thing until very late the following summer.  After enduring the humiliation of an unrequited puppy love (with a seventh grader, for God’s sake) and the embarrassment of getting caught in a drunken driving melee and getting my name plastered, along with the daily hospital admission log and the egg and hog price report, on the front page of The Sunbury Daily Item, things finally settled down as my high school friends started one by one to leave for college in far off places.  I guess after all of that I finally had time to sit on the front porch, prop my feet up on the East Malta Dairy milk box, and write.  The very first entry, for September 8, 1964 inauspiciously reads:

“Started to get ready for college by amassing junk…”

Perhaps more portentous was the entry for the day we drove to Juniata (Saturday, September 19^th):

“Rainy, miserable, goddamn day…”

At the risk of self-indulgence, I think it may be useful to quote small bits through that first semester from hell.  Non-Juniatians will just have to bear with me.  My goal, here, is to paint a picture of surviving through the almost terminal shock of those months and to not fool myself by falling into the trap Northwest writer Don James used to describe as the evil triad of “sentimentality, digression, and the wrong word.”

To help you understand the Juniata-Speak, Epochs refers to a class required of all incoming Freshmen:  Great Epochs of World Culture.  It met Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at 9 AM in Oller Hall (campus auditorium) and was taught by Steve Barbash, head and sole member of the art department.  There were also small discussion sessions scheduled in the early afternoon throughout the week.  Elmer Maas led mine both semesters.  Through the 1964-65 academic year, we studied three periods:  Classical Greece, Medieval Europe (Romanesque and Gothic), and the Italian (Florentine) Renaissance.  This was beyond doubt the best general course I had at Juniata, and my performance in it during this first semester bordered on criminal.  Convocation refers to the required quasi-religious service that met Wednesdays at 10 AM, also in Oller Hall.  You were only allowed two “cuts” per year, or you stood in peril of being dismissed from school.

Working in the dining hall was an enormous time commitment.  Upperclassman Andy Unger calculated that we all, waiters, waitresses, and scullery crew, worked for about 27¢ an hour.  I believe him.  My first dinner was on the Sunday night of freshman orientation:

“It was awfully awkward and kinda funny.  These waitresses are going to take some getting-used-to.”

Less than a week later (Thursday, September 24^th), I had this brilliant insight:

“I’ve finally figured out that if I don’t mess around during the day and do [school] work, I can get to bed earlier at night…Having a good time except for classes.”

German II and calculus turned out to be killers.  They consumed yet another enormous amount of time, and I found myself staying up past midnight most nights.  Because I didn’t eat breakfast (a physiological necessity that didn’t dawn on me for some time), I would quickly run out of gas just as the first class of the day was ending around 9 AM.  Thus the following sad litany:

“Barely made it through Calc.  Fell asleep in Bib. History…”  Tuesday, 9/29.

“Slept through Epochs and Convocation…”   Wednesday, 10/7.

“Slept through Epochs…”  Friday, 10/9.

Then, a miracle occurred:

“Finally stayed awake in Epochs…”  Monday, 10/19.

But it took exactly two days to fall back into evil ways:

“Slept in Epochs and Convocation…”  Wednesday, 10/21.

My reading and studying were so chaotic, I lost track of what was going on around me.  From the same entry:

“Worked all afternoon and all night.  Missed a good play, too.  (Circle In The Square’s Desire Under the Elms)…”

Another sad, prophetic insight:

“Slept through Epochs again.  I think I’d better change my ways…”  Friday, 10/23.

And yet another:

            “Epochs is beginning to worry me.  I haven’t taken any notes and have slept during all the classes…”  Wednesday, 11/4.

I somehow survived to Thanksgiving and then managed to stumble through the orgy of tests and papers between then and Christmas.  My final examinations started Monday, January 18, 1965 and ended in a three hour calculus self-flagellation on Tuesday morning, January 26^th.  My father picked up what was left of me after dinner that night and deposited the remains at our house in Sunbury.  Semester break lasted seven whole days, but that included a Tuesday travel day.  It was the first break since starting college that didn’t have the horror of due dates imminent on returning to campus.

The first day of classes saw a new me:

“Got up at 7 and went to breakfast…”  Wednesday, 2/3.

There are no admissions of cutting or sleeping through classes.  And entries start to appear that later would have tremendous significance:  nothing much, just little snippets, like:

“Went and heard our new resident poet, Galway Kinnell, read selections from his works.  Very stimulating evening…”  Thursday, 2/11.

“Lit Forms is absolutely fascinating…”  Friday, 2/12.

“Lit Forms” was Don Hope’s Introduction to Literary Forms, my very first English course at Juniata and one of the most influential higher education classes I’ve ever taken.  (And that’s saying something because that includes four years at Juniata, two years at Purdue University, and five years at Portland State University.)  I do admit that I got carried away on occasion:

“Lit Forms was absolutely fabulous!  I never enjoyed a single lecture as much as this one!  Tremendous; absolutely fantastic…Mr. Hope is a fantastic lecturer.  I can do nothing but rave about him.  Absolutely incredible class!  God, what am I doing in Chem??”  Monday, 2/15.

The subject of the lecture is unfortunately lost to posterity.  However, I should note that the following year while taking another course from Don Hope, Prose Forms, I taught myself to print extremely fast, and I was able to write down entire lectures verbatim.  I found myself playing stenographer to Hope’s lectures on The Victorian Abyss, The Unspoken/Unwritten Thomas Hardy, The Erudition of Bret Hart, Hemingway’s Wars, The Faith of Gerard Manley Hopkins, and other musings equaled perhaps only by the essays of John Berryman.  Others in the class thought I was insane.  I knew differently and felt at the time I was chasing with my ball point something ephemeral and incredibly sublime.  Don Hope passed away many years ago, but my transcriptions somehow survived the great “Barrel Burn and Dump Toss” of March 1970, and I have them today.

But more to the point, what was I doing “in Chem?”  I had been the editor of my junior and senior high newspapers.  My best friend Larry Bassett and I had privately published a book of poems in high school.  By the time I graduated, I had written dozens of short stories and two juvenile novels.  (Okay, is there any other kind when you’re 16 years old?)  I was a persistent writer of letters to the editor of the Sunbury Daily Item.  More than anything else, I had wanted to attend the Columbia School of Journalism.  So what happened?  In a word: Sputnik.

In the early Sixties, the guys in white coats carrying slide rules were going to rule the world.  All you had to do was watch any Werner Von Braun narrated Tomorrow Land episode of the Walt Disney program.  Although I loved reading and writing, I unfortunately also did very well in math and science.  Never mind that both subjects bored me.  And there was that persistent challenge that had followed me all the way through high school:  “What and the hell are you going to do with that to make a living?”  And because of the “Rocket Boys,” everyone knew the answer:  science.  So I got suckered into being a chemistry major.  The problem was that Sunbury Area Joint Senior High School didn’t have a Don Hope.  Or an Elmer Maas or Steve Barbash.  (To be fair, we did have Dr. Emerson Derr, who taught Problems of Democracy and who managed to get us mildly interested in Will and Ariel Durant and the Federalist/Anti-Federalist debates.  But by the time I had him my senior year, he had already mentally retired and seemed content to run the roller coaster at Rolling Green Park during the summer months, sitting — I swear this is true — in a rocking chair with a lap robe over his knees, reading some obscure tome and working the life-and-death huge brake and pulley lock levers at the base of the big hill of the “Twister” almost as an afterthought.)  So the arguments to major in some sort of science won out.

My new-found study habits were beginning to pay off:

“Got a 91 on my math test…”  Saturday, 2/20.

My enthusiasm for Don Hope’s class started carrying over into other subjects:

“Read Lit. Forms this afternoon.  Studied German, Covalent, and Epochs this evening…Read some real cool poetry tonight…”  Sunday, 2/21.

And I started quoting bits from his lectures:

 “…this is a love poem.  But somehow I believe somebody may have meant it.”  Friday, 2/26.

Again, all context for this naked and rather awkward statement is lost, so I must plead for leniency and ask the reader to trust my excitement at the time.  This same excitement also seemed to bend my extracurricular activities onto a new path:

“Finished Raise High The Roof Beam, Carpenters today…”  Saturday, 2/27.

I also started quoting bits of poems covered in class and continued devoting Sundays to studying:

“Worked on Epochs all afternoon.  Cool jazz on the record player.  A fantastic afternoon spent thinking deeply on the problem of self-knowledge…Studied German, Lit. Forms, and Vector [math] tonight.  Worked constantly…”  Sunday, 2/28.

At this late remove, I have no idea what “deep” thoughts may have come to me on that day.  But Don Hope’s class had obviously sent me spinning off in a direction far removed from panty raids and late night runs to Top’s Diner out on Route 22:

“Started reading Paul Valéry tonight…really cool stuff…”  Monday, 3/1.

As Jean Sheppard observed, life has a way of attacking just at those high moments when everything is going better than you ever imagined:

“Professor Frankenhauser [sic] came by this evening about my essay in the Lit. Magazine.  It had some bad words, so I have to re-write 3 paragraphs so it can stay in.  Hell’s bells…”  Thursday, 3/4.

The literati immediately closed ranks and went to the barricades:

            “Dale Evans came over this evening and talked about my Lit. Mag. contribution…”  Friday, 3/5.

But then came the meeting I described at the end of Chapter II.  Figure III-1 is the page from my diary written late at night on the following Monday, March 8^th.  I don’t mention my run-in with Fred Bailey nor my walk up to Gary Rowe’s room in North dorm.  After John burst into my room, we returned to Gary’s room and found it packed with people, some of whom I didn’t know.  Everybody was talking at once, and a couple of people thought the whole idea was stupid.   I remember Bud Colflesh, who was on the staff of Kvasir, as being particularly negative.  Then someone got the idea to call Elmer Maas and Bob Faus (Minister to Students and instructor in Religion) and Don Hope.  A bunch of us ran downstairs and tried to cram into the phone booth at the south end of the first floor so we could pass around the receiver, which was on this ridiculously short cord.  By the time someone remembered that I was there, Don Hope was on the line.  I’m not sure at that point he even knew that I was in one of his classes.  In an uncharacteristic moment of hubris, I blurted out a passage from Alan Paton’s Cry, The Beloved Country.  I remember Don trying to calm me down, all the time probably wondering and simultaneously regretting what he and the others (mentioned in the diary page in Figure III-2) had unleashed.  But there was no stopping any of us.  To a one we had this vision of marching off to the civil rights battle lines like good Christian soldiers.  Don mumbled something about reading William Faulkner’s World War One short stories, and the receiver was grabbed out of my hands.

We finally returned to Gary’s room and talked for hours.  People kept coming in and out as the word spread about what was happening.  Sadly, at this late date, I can remember nothing of the many conversations and arguments.

The foreboding in the sentence beginning “Consequences are very grave…” came true the very next day when a white Northern minister, James Reeb, was beaten near to death in Selma.  He died two days later.  Figure III-3 below weaves between the two stories:  the rapidly accelerating events on campus and my personal battle over my juvenile essay submitted to Kvasir.  Watching either the Huntley-Brinkley report on NBC or Walter Cronkite on the CBS network became nightly, post-dining-hall rituals, so most of the participants were well aware of the deadly drama unfolding in Alabama.  Thus my notes from the evening news.  Altruism was also giving way to reality:  “Many people deserting, sobering up.”  Granted, that was an odd way to put it.  But that’s how many of us felt:  deserted by the faithful.  I don’t remember who was “taking names,” but I do remember meeting one-on-one with Galway Kinnell because he was using the very first nylon tip pen (“Flair”) I had ever seen.  I have no recollection of what we discussed.  Others will also have to fill in the blank on the evening meeting given over to the “Admin.’s stand.”

Things were getting out of control, and it was fairly easy to slip back into old ways.  I cut my first classes of the semester on Wednesday.  And both days had time given over to the Kvasir problem.  After yet another meeting with the literary magazine staff on Tuesday, I simply write “Will not rewrite article for Lit. Mag.”  This became formal the very next day:  “Told Frankhauser [sic] about decision on lit. piece.”

Coming on top of the whole civil rights mess, the administration decided to fight the battle with the highest chance of catastrophic PR failure and dropped their opposition to literary magazine vulgarity to concentrate on keeping the JC-civil rights connection out of the papers.  (Who and the hell read Kvasir, anyway??)  Poor Dick Frankhouser didn’t have a chance.  After making vague insinuations about future reprisals, he just sort of faded away, and the essay was printed as written.  To this day, I don’t know in what capacity Dick Frankhouser was acting.  In both the 1965 and 1966 Kvasirs, no faculty advisor is listed (although the staff acted as if it was Don Hope), and I don’t remember any faculty attending editorial or production meetings.  His picture appears again in the 1966 Alfarata, and then he’s gone.

However, the effect on me of all of this happening at once was almost cataclysmic.  One week I’m just another nameless freshman overwhelmed by it all.  Then I’m in this group seriously preparing for civil rights demonstrations in the South and simultaneously being courted and defended by the arty elite of the campus.  People actually knew who I was.  Chemistry professors were inquiring about all the ruckus.  I just let myself be carried along with the tide, hoping I’d figure it all out once things slowed down.  As you will see, just the opposite happened.

The entries for Thursday and Friday are shown in Figure III-7.  It was obviously getting harder and harder to concentrate on classes, assignments, and studying.  And just when things had been going so well.  The first sentence for Thursday is the giveaway:  “Lab was all shot to hell.”  I have always been good with my hands (in seventh grade, some sort of half-baked national test we had to take concluded I would make a good carpenter), and lab work was always incredibly easy for me.  The evening news reporting the death of Reverend Reeb cast a pall over all the excitement.  But the momentum was relentless.  I’m even resigned to redoing my botched lab the morning we were scheduled to leave for Selma!  The only memories I have of the Friday meeting was Assistant Professor of Education Sara Clemson, who had driven down from Penn State, pleading with students to understand the very serious danger into which they were going.  Her daughter Pam was among those planning on going, and at that moment, she had two sons in jail in the deep South because of their civil rights activities.

The final, pre-trip entry was actually written after I had returned to campus.  Note that I actually attended all my Saturday AM classes and got out just in time to leave for the rally down at the court house prior to driving off to Alabama.  Given my shoddy performance during the first semester, my new dedication apparently knew no bounds.  However, I evidently decided to make up that botched lab some other Saturday.  From here on, the story shifts to journal entries I made in a spiral-bound class notebook.  The story of the trip is taken up in Chapter IV.