It was Wittenberg College in those good old days, not university, and I think I knew I would go there from the moment I knew what a college looked like.

That would have been shortly after the end of World War II, after the gas rationing ended, when my parents jammed my brother and me into a new and very crowded post-war car and headed west on the old National Road, over the hills and dales of Pennsylvania and West Virginia, back to Springfield.

It had been my parents’ hometown, and Wittenberg had been their school. They were faculty kids. My father’s father had taught psychology and directed the adult education program.

My mother’s father — the reason for this visit — was still presiding as the dean of Hamma Divinity School. Arnolds and Larimers. All their offspring, in fact nearly every relative that I knew or cared about, had been a Wittenberger.

In my little boy’s brain I possibly even assumed that the family owned the school. But I had never seen the place; it existed only as I imagined it from family conversations. Grandfather Larimer lived then in a house up the hill next to Hamma, where Hollenbeck Hall stands today.

It was an overnight slog to get to him from Delaware, full of carsickness and impatience and grinding traffic along the narrow sub-alpine reaches of U.S. 40.

But we arrived to a Springfield alive with the beauties of late spring. I kissed my grandfather’s whiskery cheek and, the next thing I remember, bounded off free as the air to explore the campus. I probably thought it all was just part of his front lawn and therefore “mine.” I do remember the impression: what a nice place!

And it felt comfortable. It was new yet already familiar. There was something flowery and sweet in the air: just the spring, probably. I should have been tired, but I wasn’t. I liked the paths to everywhere. And the trees.

But best of all — when gravity finally worked me to the bottom of the hill — I liked the fountain. I loved the way the pineapple continually spouted, the way the lion below continually spat. I thought it was a show all for me.

But I loved best the low walls on either side. To this boy’s imagination their curving end-stones became mighty steam locomotives pulling long strings of cars.

On most days, I was down there playing engineer, chuffing for the engine, whooping for crossings, calling the “All aboards.” And it was all mine. If there were others, I did not notice, and of me they would have seen only an 8-year-old in his shorts in some amusing play.

From that time on I don’t think there was any doubt that college for me would be Wittenberg. I’d just be going back to the family home. In fact I was so blase about it I nearly forgot about applying; I had supposed it would be automatic, that I would walk out the door of high school and into the door of Wittenberg.

But came the day ... the ellipses skip usual years of haphazard progress and adolescent torment ... when my father posed me at the receiving end of the nagging finger of my mother and took the official “Off to College” photograph.

A scene that, today, we would say was “ripped from life.” She would have been commanding me to keep my room clean, and I would not have been listening. I had arrived. Indeed.

Waiting for me in my fourth-floor Myers room, in addition to my first-ever roommate, Vernon Sponseller, were two “actives” from something called a “fraternity.”

(My father had been in one, but I wasn’t quite sure what they did.) “Betas,” the guys crowding my room said, their hands extended to pull me in, and they let me know that my grandfather Larimer had been a “brother.” There hadn’t even been time to put my suitcase down. I think Sponseller had already pledged; they moved fast.

The following Sunday at Fourth Lutheran I was welcomed as a returning son by old friends of parents and grandparents. In fact it was easy to wonder if I’d ever lived anywhere else.

And when I sat for my first college haircut (at last, free from my father’s barberism!) it was in Willie Funk’s shop next to the old College Drug, and I soon learned he had cut my father’s hair, too. And I would have courses, or at least contacts, with professors who’d been teachers or friends of the family. I felt like a seed fallen on good earth.

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