THE CAMPUS

What was there about Wittenberg in the ’50s? Nothing much different from today, in truth. The same essential core of buildings. Oh, maybe the circle of them around the drive was a little more self-containing then.

Perhaps there was less a need to stray from it. Our diversions were closer at hand, and there weren’t so many cars then to whisk us to far fields.

Consider old Myers Hall. There it sat, as now, in the center of it all, the old-timer, the original. I lived my four years there, with never a thought of moving.

To live somewhere else would have distorted the experience of Wittenberg. We dragged out of it for eight o’clocks, came back to hide through chapel, crashed there briefly after lunch to read our mail, left it reluctantly for sleepy afternoon labs, returned anxious with hunger to change for dinner, and drew it safely around us as we studied through long nights of distant shouts and door slams.

Best of all, just out the back door, in a building that might have been barracks for World War II aviators, was the Student Union. We could always find life there and barely had to dress for it.

One early year at Wittenberg I was given a camera, and as I began my roamings with it I turned first to the campus.

Myers appears as a safe haven in many views: through bleak winter trees on a dank, windless afternoon, with its promise of warmth from clanking radiators; with pillars aglow like a kind of hilltop sentinel to guide us back in the evening when we were done with the day.

And I took a picture of young kids climbing toward Myers that reminded me of my first comfortable days on campus, when I trundled back up the hill to my grandfather’s house after playing “railroad” with the fountain.

And there was Recitation Hall, which had a name then that still described its function (well, maybe we didn’t recite, but our professors did), and it had that dramatic tower I tended to find everywhere I looked.

Old Reci then creaked daily under the onslaught of students dashing up or down shoe-hollowed stairs, swinging for the next flight on heavy hand-polished newel posts.

It housed some administration functions even then, down in the basement, I remember, but mostly it was a hall of learning where we encountered history and languages and the art of writing and, if we were serious in purpose, actually walked away with some knowledge of those things.

Religion was there, too, both in the classroom and, as late as 1955, in the chapel there — that chapel to which we freshmen were utterly faithful right up to the moment we compared notes and learned that no one was really counting our beanied heads after all. One of the first college braveries. Cutting chapel!

Throughout the years since I left Wittenberg in 1959, I’ve carried in my head like one of those irradicable musical phrases you can’t stop humming, the dictum that fame is nothing, only the deed counts.

I thought the advice had its point even then, but lately it has risen to a new level of meaning and comfort, perhaps as I realize it may be a little too late in the game for fame after all and, maybe, here’s the reason I was never all that concerned about it in the first place.

“DIE TAT IST ALLES, NICHTS DER RUHM.” How strange to see it again, and not to have overlooked it then, the small bronze plaque in the cracked walkway outside Carnegie Hall that gave birth to a long-lived memory.

In the ’50s, as now, the beauty of the campus was as much in the trees as buildings, if not more, and sometimes in the spring I found myself wondrously doing the un-collegiate thing of arising before daybreak, voluntarily and without alarm, and going out among them.

DORM LIFE

Late Sunday sun glares off Myers’ terrazzo, painful to look into. Though it is spring, the furnace is still running, still pumping heat into the sunlit corridor. But it doesn’t matter; there’s no one here this afternoon anyway but the few guilty enough to study, or those too heat struck and drowsy, or lonely, to rise from their naps.

Down at the other end of the hall the payphone rings. There’s only one for the whole dorm (I think I remember — Fairfax 2-0545) or maybe it was all of one per floor.

There were no room phones then, and the system was that whoever was most annoyed by its incessant ringing, or who was the best good citizen, or who was awaiting word from a girlfriend, or news of a financial bailout from home, would answer it.

Then would come the shout down the hall — “Arnold! Telephone!” We seldom heard the page, of course, not with the hi-fi playing the latest West Coast jazz or that still-new rock ’n’ roll (that our parents thought would bring the end of the civilized world — and maybe they were right). But if we were lucky, the door would rattle, and we’d get the message personally.

If we were lucky, the phone booth — can you remember a phone in a booth? — would not have been cheesed-up. For a while there, perhaps all of twice, the gag was to dose the booth with limburger, which soon if not immediately provided a smell like the worst intestinal problem ever suffered times ten.

We’d stick it under the seat and wait for temperature to do its trick. It worked better than we hoped. But it also worked on our hands carrying it back from the store, and in the car of whoever was dumb enough to give us and our cargo a lift. And when the smell escaped the phone booth, as it could only do, it took refuge in the hall we all used. So once, or twice, was enough.

Now here comes the silhouette that was my roommate for two years: Itsuo Umezaki. Itsuo was a world-class smoker. That was his only vice. Well, no, there was another — drinking Cokes.

It’s a shameful thing to say now, now that we know beyond question smoking’s terrible cost, but back then I could see the humor in Itsuo’s morning ritual.

He seemed to sleep the night through completely under-blanket; at least there was nothing to see of him in the morning but blanket. But then the alarm would sound, and the blanket would move, and soon from it would emerge an arm.

And the arm would writhe this way and that, like an octopus’ tentacle, until it contacted, first, the pack of cigarettes and, second, the lighter. Then back it would go, under-blanket, and soon smoke would begin to leak around the pillow.

After a bit the arm would come out again, this time to graze for the six-ounce bottle of warm Coke. Thus Itsuo began his days.

Itsuo and I were exemplary in all the truly important ways but one: we were lousy housekeepers. We were worse than lousy housekeepers: we didn’t do housekeeping.

The only time we were housekeepers was at the end of the spring semester, when we were forced to do something with the mess in order to go home.

Here’s one memorable Saturday morning, the hour decent but still far too early for college-types. After ten, certainly. A knock at the door, rattling it in its metal frame.

I swing off the top bunk, noting on my way to the floor the mound of blue blanket on the lower one that means Itsuo is still sleeping. If I’m lucky my feet land on bare floor, not the semester’s jetsam.

Another knock. I’m at the door now, angry at this breach of Saturday morning dorm etiquette. And how can Itsuo just lie there? I open the door, and not far from the end of my nose stands Clarence Stoughton, president of Wittenberg College.

Two young visitors here to behold the quality of dorm accommodations at Wittenberg — I comprehend this in a flash — stand beyond his shoulder.

His instantly paled face tells me that President Stoughton has in that same flash already peered past my reflexive body shield to the unholy mess within.

Similar shocks are visible on the two visitors gaping in disbelief behind him. And now I’m wondering if I’m as naked as I feel. President Stoughton was another of my many Wittenberg friends-of-family.

His silence now seems endless. “Ah, Dave,” he pronounces with sad finality, “I can see you’re not ready for visitors.” He apologizes and I apologize. (I really do!)

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