Sept. 2, 2014

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A veteran, 19 years old, battle scarred by a tough 10-month tour of duty with the U. S. Navy-in fact I was so tough in the fall of '47 that I begged to differ with Charley Gelbert, the freshman football coach. When he tried to cut me I told him that he could not tell if a guy could play football after one day in sweats. I guess he figured he could do more to me if I stayed. He was right, as I became the bottom of the eternal practice pile. I never played in a game, and I sat sadly on the bench, crowned by my size 8 brown leather helmet. Actually that was pretty funny. I have a huge head. In those days they were just coming out with the fancy white plastic helmets, but I guess they hadn't developed a die for a size larger than 7 1/2.
Fortunately, Lafayette had been a real power in bygone days and once before they'd had a mammoth-domed titan. Only those were the days of leather: brown leather helmets. Everyone knew I never played. They could sit in the stands and see that brown helmet beside the white ones on the heads of the scrubs on the bench. How I longed for the obscurity of a white helmet. The first part of the season wasn't too bad until I was taken into the brotherhood of a fraternity. From that time on my helmet was bombarded by my alleged brothers with spitballs, wads of gum, and small stones (only seniors could throw stones). I didn't dare turn around for fear I'd be blinded. The frosh went undefeated that year, and I always felt, if not me, my helmet should have been awarded a letter.
Then two jolting things happened at the end of the year. I began to develop a social consciousness, and I met Linda. I was turned upside down and then crossed, and then turned upside down again.
The social consciousness part you can blame on three dear and enlightened teachers: Ed Brown, George Winston, and Al Gendebien. They opened up my head like a can of worms and-mixing a metaphor-chopped me up like spaghetti until I was throbbing in a million directions at once. I became a communist, a nihilist, an atheist, a socialist, and every pretty girl I met I told I'd be president of an advertising agency and die of a heart attack at 45 (it never worked). Every pretty girl, but Linda, that is, and she wasn't very pretty. I thought she was beautiful.
I met Ed Brown when I took Greek and Roman history, rather than the required Presbyterianism. I learned the joyous news that there were God(s) not just one God, and every day that I found that I could breathe I thanked one or another of them. I could double, triple, quadruple my thanks to God, and in every place that I looked I found another.
"Holy Smoke, smell the beautiful day, beat your chest - you're alive - lucky boy!"
I wrote a short story, "The Girl from Maine," because of George Winston. He put a pencil in my hand and told me I could write, and I believed him-poetry, prose, essays. I probably would have been a writer 20 years sooner if he hadn't left at the end of that year. "Comment would be superfluous," he wrote on the back of the story. He gave me the means of expressing a thousand mixed and joyful emotions in trite and balanced lines. I gratefully received the first of scores of rejection slips and when George left, blowhard Henry Malcolm, head of the English department, destroyed my fragile confidence in two years. "Trite," "mixed metaphor," "lousy rhyme," "broken meter."
In the course Modern European History, I found Al Gendebien, a man of Austrian decent who said, "The guilt of the murder of six million Jews must be placed on the head of the entire German people."
I came to the realize something that I hadn't grown up with-that people hated other people. I deeply resented that someone could impose on my individuality by imposing on that of another human being. How could I ever be me if it was not at least possible for everyone else to be themselves? The basic infringement on freedom by people hating other people was at once a paradox and a contradiction. It made me very angry inside. These superb teachers each gave an important ingredient: a classic reverence, a righteous anger, a method of expression. And they all gave me love.
Then I met Linda. She had a Buick convertible and liked to drink Schlitz and dance. She loved fraternity parties and had just graduated from college. She was the probation officer of the juvenile court, and we fell in love with each other-click.
The spring was coming on and in our own awakening a whole world was awakening with us. We danced, held hands, and drove for hours through a darkened countryside. We went to the Circlon, the Interfraternity Ball, and listened to Sidney Bechet at Jimmy Ryan's on 52nd Street in New York. I wrote her bad sonnets that heralded a spring that could never match the one we were in.
When I was waxing lyrical my anger returned. I thought maybe having those guys throw rocks at my brown helmet, lost in a sea of white helmets, was a clue to something on which I'd been trying to put a handle. Linda's court had them—black, white, brown, yellow-and most of them living in a part of Easton that was called "ghetto."
I did a very sensible thing. I started a boys club. I selected 10 of the most incorrigible boys and bought them model airplanes. We shot pool, kicked the can, played stickball. I loved these kids and, from the time the program started until the end of the college year, the juvenile court never heard from a single one of them again.
At the outset each of the terrible 10 was assigned a housefather from the fraternity. Word got around fast and by Commencement we were dealing with nearly 100 boys three days a week.
Spring football practice began, and old "size 8" was at it again, each day with half a dozen boys to cheer his efforts. I even got a shiny new, white, size 8 helmet. Charley Jenkins, the new coach, was a good man, and he was able to indulge what little ability I had. I performed for my boys, and every day when we walked home from practice I was Bronko Nagurski, an all American, the captain of the team. I loved those boys, and they loved me. I almost became a good football player because of them. And maybe it was better that way, because I am sure that it did them more good than it was doing me.
The boys were all doing well and as Commencement approached I became greatly concerned with what could be done with them. The value of our work had been clearly established, and I was afraid the boys would be back in trouble again. Finally I was able to connect with the Junior Chamber of Commerce. Together we established the Easton Boys Club, which from that date tended the needs of literally thousands of boys over a 30-year period.
A young doctor named Peter Betts had come to town. My decline and fall with Linda began. I was a lousy catch anyway. Oh, there were several other good reasons too I suppose. Like religion. She was one thing, and I didn't know what the hell I was. Like places of origin; I came from way off, Boston.
A storm was gathering, the wind sent swirls of dust and dirty papers across the streets. The trees along the hill bent slightly to escape the unexpected onslaughts. The first faint light of dawn became depressed by clouds whose leaden impact could only delay the coming day. The rain swooped down. Daylight was full when I got to my room, drenched. I sat down at my desk and wrote:
A storm-and night has come too soon,
Green goes ghastly grey,
A wet eclipse, rumbling, roaring down,
With thousands of winds to smack
The cheek of day, and harshly kiss the sun away;
Kicking then at trees, which bend to feel their shins.
The world looks down;
Suppressed and stalled beneath unfolding sheets of rain.
Harvey W. Russ '51
English
Retired, President, Harvey W. Associates; currently writing and painting
Bluffton, S.C.