An American Life Read online

  We were especially angry that Wilson had decided to throw upperclassmen to the wolves without first asking the faculty and students if they had any alternative suggestions for cutting expenses and because we thought he was doing it in an underhanded way—imposing the cuts as a fait accompli while we were away eating our Thanksgiving turkey.

  On the Friday afternoon before Thanksgiving, when students usually began their preholiday exodus, no one left the campus. A student committee was formed to consider the possibility of calling a strike and I was elected to represent freshmen on the committee. That Saturday night, our committee waited while trustees met to ratify the president’s cutbacks.

  When they came out of the meeting, their expressions told us the decision had been made; the ax was going to fall.

  A few moments later, the bell in the college chapel began to ring; the bell-rope was pulled by one of our committeemen. At this signal, students, joined by many of our professors, began to march across the campus toward the chapel, and soon it was filled to overflowing.

  Because I was a freshman and didn’t have the same vested interests in avoiding the faculty cutbacks that upperclassmen did, I was chosen to present our committee’s proposal for a strike.

  I reviewed how the cutbacks threatened not only the diplomas of upperclassmen but the academic reputation of Eureka; I described how the administration had ignored us when we tried to present alternate ideas for saving money and then planned to pull off the coup in secrecy while we were gone from the college.

  Giving that speech—my first—was as exciting as any I ever gave. For the first time in my life, I felt my words reach out and grab an audience, and it was exhilarating. When I’d say something, they’d roar after every sentence, sometimes every word, and after a while, it was as if the audience and I were one. When I called for a vote on the strike, everybody rose to their feet with a thunderous clapping of hands and approved the proposal for a strike by acclamation.

  The strike began when we returned after Thanksgiving. Most students refused to go to class, while studying privately in their rooms; most of our professors went to class, marked the missing students present, and then went home.

  A week after the strike began, the president resigned, the strike ended, and things returned to normal at Eureka College.

  The following summer, I resumed my old lifeguarding job at Lowell Park and at summer’s end decided that I’d tolerated Mac McKinzie’s lack of appreciation for my gridiron skills long enough.

  Most of my savings were gone and I didn’t have enough left for another year at Eureka, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to go back there.

  I don’t think it’s unusual for college students to wonder at the end of their freshman year whether they’d made the right choice of a college and I guess I was going through that process. Then one of those series of small events began that make you wonder about God’s Plan.

  I had a high school chum who worked as rodman for a local surveyor and sometimes their work brought them around Lowell Park; my friend knew I was anxious to save some money and that I was a little unsure about my future, so after the park closed for the season he told me he’d decided to quit his job and suggested I apply for it.

  When the surveyor heard I was interested in the job, he not only gave it to me but offered to get me a college scholarship the following year. He had attended the University of Wisconsin where he’d lettered on the crew team, and he had seen me at the park and knew I did a lot of rowing. He said that after I’d worked for him a year, he’d help get me an athletic scholarship to Wisconsin for the crew team that would take care of most of my expenses. It was an offer too good to refuse. I decided not to go back to Eureka, save a lot of money over the next year, then go to the University of Wisconsin.

  On the eve of Margaret’s return to Eureka, we bid a sad goodbye to each other. The next day when I got up, Dixon was being soaked by a rainstorm, which meant our crew couldn’t work. It was a damp, dreary day and I had nothing to do. I already missed Margaret and I decided to call her before she left. She and her parents were just leaving to take her to Eureka and asked me if I wanted to go along for the drive since I had nothing to do for the day.

  Once I was back on the campus, I was seduced by Eureka all over again. I went to the TKE house and saw all my friends and then looked up Mac McKinzie and was pleasantly surprised he seemed disappointed when I said I’d decided to drop out of school.

  When I told him I was broke and couldn’t afford another year at Eureka, he promptly went to bat for me; within an hour or two, the college had renewed my Needy Student Scholarship covering half my tuition and agreed to defer the balance of the tuition until after I graduated. As a sophomore, I couldn’t get back my old job waiting on tables at the TKE house because that job was reserved for freshmen pledges, but the coach arranged for me to get one of the more pleasant jobs available to a male at Eureka, washing dishes at Lyda’s Wood, the girls’ dormitory.

  There it was, all of a sudden I was back at Eureka again. I’ve often wondered what might have happened to me if it hadn’t been raining that day.

  I picked up the phone and told my mother to send my clothes to me, I was going to stay. Then she gave me some news: After three years of shoveling limestone at the cement plant, Moon had shouted “Uncle” and said he wanted to go to college.

  I went back to the coach and sold him on my brother’s prowess as a football player and, before long, Moon was attending Eureka on a Needy Student Scholarship and holding down my old kitchen job at the TKE house.

  Needless to say, it was quite a kick for me being a sophomore and having my freshman older brother waiting on me at the table.

  5

  A MONTH AFTER MOON’S ARRIVAL at Eureka, the stock market crashed. Looming behind it was the Great Depression. But the enormity of the economic calamity that was about to engulf America wasn’t apparent on our campus yet. As classes resumed that fall, most of my attention was divided between Margaret Cleaver, who had accepted my TKE pin, which was tantamount to engagement, and getting my backside off Mac McKinzie’s bench.

  Despite what I’d interpreted as an eagerness on his part to have me back on the squad, McKinzie relegated me to the fifth string, convincing me that he disliked me as much as ever. He could look at me and make me feel inadequate.

  I resolved to block and tackle as hard as I could during practice to catch his eye, and after several weeks he began to pay me an occasional compliment.

  On a rainy day in mid-season, we were practicing a new play, a wide sweep around my end of the line, and Mac told me the only way the play could work was for the guard—me—to take down the defensive halfback before he could nail our running back. He asked an assistant coach—one of his former teammates who served as an unpaid volunteer—to play the role of defensive halfback while I demonstrated what I was supposed to do on the play.

  We weren’t scrimmaging, just running to where our targets were supposed to be. So I asked Mac: “You don’t want me to really take him out?” Before he could answer, our volunteer coach said, “Sure, come and try to block me.”

  The ball was snapped and I took off. Never before or since did I throw such a block. When I hit our ex officio coach he ascended as if he’d been hurled by a shot-putter and seemed to dangle in midair for several moments before plummeting to the ground. As I returned to the huddle, he limped off the field while Mac tried to suppress a cough. The next Saturday, I was in the starting lineup and averaged all but two minutes of every game for the remainder of the season and the two seasons that followed it. I owe Mac a lot; he didn’t dislike me after all; he just saw some things in an eighteen-year-old kid that needed some correcting.

  On one of our out-of-town trips, the team had to stay overnight in Dixon; Mac said I had to stay at the hotel with the rest of the team and so I went with him to a downtown hotel to help us register. The hotel manager said: “I can take everybody but your two colored boys.”

  “Then, we’ll go someplace
else,” Mac said.

  “No hotel in Dixon is going to take colored boys,” the manager shot back.

  Mac bristled and said all of us would sleep on the bus that night. Then I suggested another solution: “Mac, why don’t you tell those two fellows there isn’t enough room in the hotel for everybody so we’ll have to break up the team; then put me and them in a cab and send us to my house.”

  Mac gave me a funny look; he’d just had a chance to observe firsthand what the people of Dixon thought of blacks, and I’m sure he had his doubts my parents would think much of the idea. “You’re sure you want to do that?” he asked.

  I knew my parents well and said yes. We went to my house and I rang the bell and Nelle came to the door and I told her there wasn’t enough room for the whole team at the hotel. “Well, come on in,” she said, her eyes brightening with a warmth felt by all three of us.

  She was absolutely color blind when it came to racial matters; these fellows were just two of my friends. That was the way she and Jack had always raised my brother and me.

  • • •

  Like a lot of college students, I did a little experimenting in college. My father had always been a two- or three-pack-a-day smoker and my brother started smoking when he was fifteen. I’d never liked cigarettes, but I was impressed by a flurry of ads in those days in which women said, “I like a man who smokes a pipe.” I’d always liked the look of someone smoking a pipe, so I saved up and bought one. But I never inhaled. I just sucked in the smoke, tasted it, and blew it out—and I only did that during the off season, when I wasn’t playing football. I obeyed the training rules.

  Out of curiosity, I also did some brief experimenting with alcohol while I was at college. It was during Prohibition and a lot of movies depicted illicit drinking as “collegiate” and I guess I was curious about the effects of alcohol. One night Moon and I were visiting two fraternity brothers who worked for a doctor and in return received the free use of an apartment; they had a bottle and started passing it around. Even with all the experience I’d had with Jack’s drinking, I didn’t know anything about the effect of highballs; so when the bottle came around to me, I’d take a big drink, as if it was a bottle of soda pop. Well, they soon decided I was so blind drunk that they couldn’t take me back to the fraternity house in my condition. Inside, I thought I was sober. I’d try to say something intelligent but what came out of my mouth would make Moon and my fraternity brothers fall down laughing. They took me out of town and walked me along a country road, one on each side, trying to make me sober. But it didn’t do a lot of good, so they brought me back to the fraternity house and threw me in a shower. They had to smuggle me in, because everyone was in bed asleep. I woke up the next day with a terrible hangover. That was it for me. Although in later years I might have a cocktail before dinner or a glass of wine with dinner, I’d been taught a lesson. I decided if that’s what you get for drinking—a sense of helplessness—I didn’t want any part of it.

  Although my grades were higher than average, my principal academic ambition at Eureka was to maintain the C average I needed to remain eligible for football, swimming, track, and the other school activities I participated in—two years in the student senate, three years as basketball cheerleader, three years as president of the Eureka Boosters Club, two years as yearbook features editor, and, during my last year, student body president and captain and coach of the swim team.

  Despite my preoccupation with extracurricular activities, I’m convinced I got a solid liberal arts education at Eureka, especially in economics. It was a major I chose because I thought, one way or another, I’d end up dealing with dollars, if not at my father’s store, in some other business.

  As 1930 began, the full contours of the Depression were becoming apparent and one of its first casualties was my father’s grandest dream.

  In Dixon, troubles in the farming economy had begun months before the crash and when the full force of the Depression struck, it hit our town like a cyclone: The price of milk dropped to a level so low that it didn’t pay farmers to milk their cows anymore; hundreds of people were out of work; the cement plant slashed its work force, then closed down; one by one, like streetlights flickering off at daybreak, many of the most prestigious stores in Dixon closed.

  One of them was the Fashion Boot Shop.

  In a city where few people could afford a new pair of shoes, Mr. Pitney, his wealth depleted by the crash, had to close my father’s store, and with it Jack’s only chance of ever owning his own store.

  The Depression had such an oppressive effect that it cast a dreary pall over everything. But there was a small beacon of light amid the misery: Like any shared calamity, the Depression brought people closer together in marvelous ways. There was a spirit of warmth and helpfulness and, yes, kindliness abroad in the land that was inspiring to me as we all clung to the belief that, sooner or later, things would get better.

  To make ends meet, my mother got a job as seamstress-clerk at a dress shop for $14 a week and Jack went on the road looking for work; at first they made a little extra income by subletting a portion of our house, but then things got so bad they couldn’t even afford the rent on the house and they had to move to an apartment that was the upstairs of a onetime large home. When Moon and I came home, he slept on the couch and I slept on a cot on the upstairs landing.

  I’ll never forget one Christmas Eve during the Depression.

  We’d never been able to afford a really fancy Christmas, but Jack and Nelle always managed to find a small gift for each other and one for Moon and me. When we couldn’t afford a Christmas tree, Nelle found enough ribbon and crepe paper to decorate a table or make a cardboard fireplace out of a packing box to give our home a festive feeling. I’ll never forget those Christmases when we didn’t have much money but our home radiated with a love and warmth that meant a lot more to me than packages wrapped in colored paper.

  On this particular Christmas Eve, Moon and I were getting ready to go out when a special delivery letter arrived for Jack. His eyes brightened. He’d recently gotten a job as a traveling shoe salesman—no salary, just commission—and thought the letter might contain a Christmas bonus.

  We watched him pull out a sheet of paper from the envelope and waited to hear his good news. “Well, that’s a hell of a Christmas present,” he said bitterly. “I’ve been laid off.”

  After Moon and I returned to Eureka, my mother called me and asked if she could borrow $50. Jack hadn’t been able to find work and she couldn’t pay the grocery bill. I still had some of my summer lifeguard earnings and was happy to send her $50. She asked me not to tell Jack about it and I never did.

  Subsequently, Jack found a job as manager and sole clerk of a chain store shoe outlet near Springfield, two hundred miles from Dixon and Nelle.

  During the football season, our team stayed overnight in Springfield, and Moon and I talked Mac into letting us leave the hotel for a few hours to visit him. We found Jack in a run-down neighborhood at the edge of Springfield. His store was a grim, tiny hole-in-the-wall. Although he’d cleaned it up, there wasn’t much anybody could have done with the store. There were garish orange advertisements promoting cut-rate shoes plastered on the windows, and the sole piece of furniture was a small wooden bench with iron armrests where his customers were fitted.

  When I saw the store I thought of the hours he’d spent when we were boys talking about the grand shoe store he dreamed of opening one day, then remembered the Fashion Boot Shop, the elegant store that, before he lost it, had fulfilled his dream.

  My eyes filled and I looked away, not wanting him to see the tears welling up in my eyes.

  • • •

  Because a lot of Nelle’s great sense of religious faith rubbed off on me, I have always prayed a lot; in those days, I prayed things would get better for our country, for our family, and for Dixon. I even prayed before football games.

  I was the only player on our first string who’d come to Eureka directly from high scho
ol. Most of the other players were more mature and several were quite a bit older than I; after high school, they’d gone into the working world during the Roaring Twenties when jobs were plentiful, then, when the Depression hit, they had entered college rather than sit on their porch, unemployed.

  At a chalk-talk before one game, Mac McKinzie asked the team if any of us prayed.

  I had never faced a kickoff without a prayer. I didn’t pray to win—I didn’t expect God to take sides—but I prayed no one would be injured, we’d all do our best and have no regrets no matter how the game came out.

  But I was afraid to reveal this to my older and more sophisticated teammates. Then, to my amazement, everyone in the room said that they prayed—and to my surprise, they all said they prayed along the same lines that I did.

  That was the last time I was ever reluctant to admit I prayed.

  6

  EARLY IN 1932, with graduation a few months off, I faced the same question that gnaws at all college seniors: What do I do with the rest of my life?

  It’s easy to look back now and say the answer had been inside me for a long time. I suppose it had, but I still couldn’t say aloud, even to myself, that I wanted to be an actor.

  The dream had probably taken root that week of Thanksgiving vacation during my freshman year when we were waiting for the student strike to begin. Margaret’s parents took us to see a touring company’s production of Journey’s End, a tragedy set in World War I that focused on the emotions of a weary, emotionally bruised military officer, Captain Stanhope. I was drawn to the stage that night as if it were a magnet, astonished by the magic of an ordinary man convincing an audience that he was someone else.

  Once again fate intervened—as if God was carrying out His plan with my name on it. Just as a new teacher with a talent for teaching high school students how to act had arrived in Dixon High just as I got there, Eureka had hired a new English professor who had a deep love—and talent—for teaching dramatics. Her name was Ellen Marie Johnson and she treated acting as seriously as B. J. Frazer.