Monday, May 19, 2008
Old college buildings home to memories
Ben Beagle
The aging, semi-hysterical retired reporter rides shotgun with the greatest station wagon driver of them all down the rocky road of life. Mondays and Wednesdays, steady as she goes.
Recent columns
My brother-in-law Ed is driving me around Salem and suddenly I see this accumulation of buildings that look rather like Xanadu must have, and I don't immediately realize that this is the campus of Roanoke College.
Whoa. There's a massive building where the tennis courts used to be -- where my Yankee roommate and I used to give a bad name to the game.
And somewhere in the vicinity there used to be a shack that was the fraternity house of Lambda Kappa Psi -- a local outfit that took 20-year-old veterans of World War II as pledges and other persons who hadn't been offered pledges; say to Kappa Alpha or Sigma Chi.
And I know that somewhere in this startling, handsome campus there must be the remains, or the memory, of an English classroom as it was circa 1949.
Shakespeare and smoke
It was on the top floor of what was then called the Lab Theater and it was ruled by Charles Dawson. Anyone who was claustrophobic probably would have been a little uncomfortable up there.
Dawson had much of the English gentleman about him. He wore tweeds and he smoked a pipe fueled by this odd tobacco that came in a tin and had to be crumbled before being tamped carefully into the bowl. He could recite anything Shakespeare ever wrote -- quickly, like a gunfighter's draw.
You could smoke in class then, and some us would get a diagnosis of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease decades later and regret all those Lucky Strikes we inhaled.
I know there are other buildings I once knew, now rimmed by the grand new structures.
There is the old chemistry building where Prof. Andrew "Buck" Murphy gave tests containing the formula BaNa2, for banana.
He announced these test by roaring, "Buck Murphy rides again."
Byron worse than a bark
There is the same administration building in which the Rev. James Rikard taught religion on the third floor, a man plagued by a dog named Yetta that often followed him to school and barked below the classroom.
When this occurred, Rikard would pull up the heavy antique window with vigor and shout: "Yetta, you fool, go home." Yetta ceased barking.
Here also Dr. Charles Bartlett taught English lit in an elegant style, and if you couldn't give him a fair interpretation of what old Lord Byron was talking about in the poem at issue, you were in big trouble, pal.
He was of the old school. He could destroy you with a stare. But I kind of liked him.
Well, enough of this.
Can anyone remember where the Apartment Camps and the cold pitchers of beer were?
