SOME EDUCATION

There is something both challenging and daunting in the image of the banks of seats in the Koch Hall lecture room. These were the seats, in fact, where my father sat as a Wittenberg student, when he listened to the same professor I listened to a generation later: Dr. John W. Barker.

And this is the room where, a year or so beyond the taking of this picture, the same Dr. Barker would preside over making a “Shifter” of those, including me, who had been struggling all the spring of ’58 or ’59 to find what in the world “the same time, the same place” was so we could “be there.” (Dr. Barker has left us, of course, but I’m glad to know his Shifters have not.)

I never did have a class with John Ostrom, to my regret, but I did with Herbert Merrill, also in English, who in his gentle way whetted my appetite for the craft of writing and the fascination of words, and with Margaret Ermarth, a sorority sister of my mother’s, one of the Alpha Xi’s now gone from the campus, who in her enthusiastic way unlocked my latent appreciation of the influence of the past on the present and on the future, and helped me be sensitive to the wondrous, sometimes surprising compressions of time that can make the tenses irrelevant.

By and large, we had a good time. Psychology was my field. I needed it for what I thought I wanted to do with my life, but my choice was cemented after I aced Dr. Roland Roselius’ first exam. My grandfather Arnold had taught psychology at Wittenberg, and I was sure his aptitude had come straight down to me.

From Dr. Roselius, who seemed often to be winking conspiratorially at some of the excesses of his discipline, we learned not to be fundamentally, or at least permanently, depressed by our studies of human emotional frailties that otherwise made it seem miraculous that any human mind worked at all properly.

We all laughed with him over in-class interpretations of Rorsach and other ambiguous images that were designed, we were certain, to reveal our most humiliating sexual fantasies. (I was far too clever for that and made something up.)

And we endured sleepy afternoon psych lab sessions in airless, overheated classrooms, when body and brain cried to be put down for a nap.

The picture of Professor Virgil Rahn brings it all back; he could take it no longer either. (Later I learned that he had participated in arduous sleep-deprivation experiments during his own college days; I assumed that since then he had been struggling to catch up.)

It was in one of Dr. Rahn’s lab classes — this was perhaps while he was “catching up” and after we had tired of barking in imitation of Pavlov’s dogs — that we learned the principles of conditioned response by “conditioning” ourselves with electric shocks so powerful that our arms reflexed halfway across the room.

Under those circumstances we advanced quickly, literally in a flash, from plain-vanilla conditioning to massive pre-shock anticipation.

It was only when we pulled the plug on the setup that we realized we’d taken the power straight from the wall socket rather from the “included” transformer. But at least on that day we didn’t need to sleep. And I doubt if any of us have forgotten what conditioning is, or how you get it. We had some fun.

GATHERING PLACES

The Union! Ah, there it is. Well-named, too: the union of life at Wittenberg. Gone now, the old one, but in the late ’50s it nestled up against the back of Myers on the only piece of flat ground there, a piece that looks, today, too small to have held it.

But it was small. Intimate is another word for it. One glance from the inner door would tell you who was there and whether you had friends to sit with or not. We liked it, I think, because it was as comfortable and undemanding as an old dog lying at your feet.

Step inside just for a minute. There’s the afternoon crowd hanging out between classes. And there I am losing a battle for attention to a Robert Frost poem. It was just as well, perhaps, for I seem pleasantly unconcerned; I probably hadn’t worked out what I would say anyway. But the Union wasn’t the only place to meet and eat, of course.

A short walk south to College Avenue would get you to the College Grill, where you could read the latest copy of The Torch, or wait for a date, or not wait for a date, or be glad you at last had some time to yourself away from a currently irksome roommate.

Or you could head to Eifferts. That’s where these guys are, I think. Betas all, probably, including Lynn Gordon and Dave Mattes. I look at this picture of beer-drinking Betas now and feel a small regret. I regret not standing with Lynn and Dave and the others at Eifferts as a Beta brother. (How I did happen to be standing with them, I don’t remember.)

I’d been set up to be a Beta, of course, courtesy of my grandfather Larimer, and I pledged once on nearly my first day as a freshman and then pledged again after a drop-out and some reconsideration.

I didn’t even mind the Monday night pledge meetings, so remindful of drill sergeants trying to brainwash tremulous recruits, and I can still sing part of the Beta song — “Oh pass the loving cup around. Don’t pass a brother by. We still drink from the same canteen at Beta Theta Pi.”

But I had some prickly independence that kept me from giving over even the small part of me I thought they wanted. I guess I wasn’t sure I wanted to share that canteen.

To go Greek or not: It was just one of those many junctions we came to in college, and we made our choices. Roads not taken in exchange for other routes traveled. What I think I might have missed is the society, the shared experiences — and perhaps the continuing contacts — that being a Greek may have provided.

ON THE FIELD

A Saturday in the fall: game day. You remember how it was: crisp-aired and edged with excitement; it was difficult to settle down. The team in the late 1950s was a powerhouse. Bill Edwards was the coach of coaches, and the edginess was not so much from a dread of losing but from anticipating how precise the team’s execution would be this day, how lopsided the victory.

Around noon you saw the changes on the campus. Band uniforms appeared, and you saw the bright-eyed cheerleaders in their short skirts and cozy sweaters. Buses arrived, and well-bred cars, and you noticed older people with the healthy filled-out faces and the look of settled success of returning alumni.

At the Greek houses you saw the groups of actives and pledges spill from house to lawn, balancing pick-up sandwiches from Saturday’s kitchens with cooling coffee, waiting for the unsignaled moment when it was time to drift off toward the stadium.

If you were a player you were there now, taped and uniformed in white and red brilliance. You would be unstoppable.

If you were a bandsman you might also be there already, lofting warm-up notes from a jazzy trumpet toward the stands, a tryout riff from the fight song, bugled sounds contrapuntal to the rasp of snares on rat-a-tat drums, the deep oomp of the sousaphones, the high cry of the clarinets.

And if you were a fan, just arrived, you would look down from above your seats to a field of green alive with uniforms, alive with footballs arcing in effortless stable spirals over the yard lines to be hauled in by sharp-cutting runners with hands that never failed. It was a good way to spend the day.

ON THE MARCH

I was a bandsman. I shall whisper the confession that I played the sousaphone, the marchable brother of the tuba there on the floor. I whisper because the next worse thing than having the name “Harold” (My father’s name; he didn’t like it either) is to have been a sousaphone player.

If the word “geek” had been invented in the late ’50s, it would have been applied to sousaphone players. “Nerds” also, although maybe that word was already around.

We were the guys — the thing was too big for girls to carry, and besides they were too smart — we were the guys out there on the field with letters on our bells, wagging our horns back and forth with every exaggerated step.

It looked flashy, but I think that’s where my first hernia came from. And it was essentially, well, embarrassing.
But the music was fun. Even more fun than the home-game appearances were the road-shows: the away games and the band festivals.

And the freest time of all was on the bus, going or coming. There was the delicious sense of getting out, even if it was only to far-flung Muskingum or Otterbein, wherever in the world they were.

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