The two memoir-writing classes I lead in person are both starting up again this week after a month-long break. I don’t give writing prompts during breaks, but I encourage writers to write about whatever they’d like and read it at the first class of the new six-week session. Mel Washburn came back with this fast-paced, impressionistic vignette about college life in the early 60s and generously offered to let me share it here with you Safe & Sound blog readers.
Back to School
by Mel Washburn
Early in September 1963, I travelled 340 miles from my family home in Kentucky to northern Indiana.
In Kentucky, I had worked all summer – three hot and humid months – as a laborer for the City Department of Streets and Sewers – shovels, hot tar and jack hammers. I sweated like a pig
When I got to Indiana, the weather was cool. The leaves on the trees were changing color. The air was dry and fresh. It smelled like Autumn, and I loved it.
I was eighteen years old, a college sophomore, a fraternity member, a competent Bridge player, and adept at throwing a frisbee. I was in a good place, with good people. In the year ahead, I would learn new things, have new thoughts, and work on becoming the grown-up I was meant to be.
The evening of the first Monday of that school year, I sat down on the couch in my room and began to read the Shakespeare play we’d been assigned by Professor Baker, who was known to give surprise quizzes early in the semester, just to keep us on our toes. Sometime around midnight I fell asleep over my book. When I woke up the next morning, I had sniffles and a sore throat. Nothing serious, but it took the thrill out of Autumn.
Six days a week, I went to class, then to the library to study, then to the frat house for dinner and cards. As a sophomore, it was my duty to harass the fraternity’s first-year pledges, and I did so, with unbecoming zeal. I also wrote and directed our fraternity’s scatological entry in the Blue Night sketch competition.
In the months to come, President Kennedy would be assassinated, and I would drive all night with some buddies to attend his funeral. My hometown girlfriend would write that she was in love with someone else, and I would lose several nights’ sleep over it. President Johnson would declare a war on poverty and sign the Civil Rights Act. The Beatles would appear on Ed Sullivan.
At the end of the school year I went home to another summer of working on the streets and sewers. I also searched, unsuccessfully, for a new girlfriend. That summer, three civil rights workers were murdered in Mississippi, and Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin resolution. I got a letter from my fraternity brother, Dave Kendall, which he had written in pencil on a sheet of toilet paper. He was in a small town in Mississippi, working to register Black people to vote, and the sheriff had locked him up in jail.
In September 1964 I returned to college for my Junior year. Dave Kendall was back, safe and sound, from Mississippi. The air was cool; the leaves were changing color and it smelled like Autumn. But I wasn’t thrilled. People like Kendall were doing important things, while I was just a school boy who played bridge and could read Latin. It didn’t seem like enough.
Terrific piece. The letter on toilet paper from jail is a powerful moment in the narrator’s growing consciousness. Thanks for the read!
Beautiful piece! Thank you for sharing.
Great coming of age story. And a conscience-raising moment. Thank you for sharing.
Those were the days when I especially longed to be and do something relevant. So I got my head beat up when the police rioted at the ‘ 68 convention. I thought business school graduates were part of the money grubbing system, etc. Eventually, I became an educator. That did satisfy my desire to be relevant. Did your awareness result in your focusing your life in a different way? Thanks for sharing.
Thanks for all your comments. during my junior year, several members of my fraternity learned that our national fraternity (Kappa Sigma) had a policy against pledging black people (and maybe Jews). Many of us (about 20 out of about 50) felt our chapter should withdraw from the national. We held meetings every night for a week, but we couldn’t convince the majority to withdraw, so the dissenters all resigned and moved out of the house. The next Spring, several of us went to a massive anti-war protest in DC (Joan Baez sang). later on, Pam and I worked as staffers for the 1972 McGovern campaign. We also were house parents for two years in a halfway house for developmentally challenged young men. For ten years after that I was a firefighter/paramedic and for part of that time Pam was a police officer. When we got to be 40, we gave up public service, went back to school and became white-collar workers: lawyer (me) and personnel director (Pam). Hands down, the best jobs we ever had were as staff on the McGovern campaign, followed by cop and firefighter.
And all you blog readers will be happy to know that the “Pam” Mel refers to in his comment here is the lovely woman he met after his high school girlfriend dumped him. Mel & Pam have been married for decades now, a perfect pair: she’s as wonderful as he is!
To Mel Washburn,
From one Mel to another, I was late in reading this most awesome reflection of a time that is etched in my brain. I am two years younger than you, but everything described resonates with me. This was pre-Vietnam, but it is no less important than what the Civil Rights movement was about. Yes, McGovern and Joan Baez had our ears and hearts, but we knew that there was something more important that we had do. I won’t go into my own experience other than to say that, as a budding artist, I was naive and befuddled by the fact that no one seemed to understand what our generation was protesting. Thank you for writing it down so beautifully.
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