Category: TCU Magazine

The Christmas season never fails to bring with it a heightened sense of place, and places, long known and deeply loved. All my years of growing up were done in Fort Worth and on the TCU campus, and I knew the paths into and out of there like the blue veins that crisscross the back of my hands. A recent study of the mechanics of memory reveals that the images retained most sharply and lastingly are those in which the rememberer is emotionally involved “purely,” with the least amount of intrusive thought from “outside” the experience. Little wonder, then, that my childhood recollections are the brightest and longest, for the involvement was innocent and direct – simple, without the clatter that adult minds are heir to.

Part of the glue that held together my Christmas sense of place was the repetition that built into and onto tradition. There was a security in a sameness, a constancy, that linked one year to another, one holiday season to the next. Downtown, Leonard’s Dept. Store windows were winter wonderlands, with their mechanized displays of Mr. And Mrs. Claus, nodding dolls, tooting trains, and skaters in gay costumes going round and round on their ice mirrors. Salvation Army bell ringers with their black tri-podded pots were at every story entrance. Neighborhoods were kaleidoscopes of twinkling lights. But most of all, the heart of Christmas found its strongest beat in and around my real family and my extended TCU family.

Although we listened to Bing Crosby sing of white Christmases, in Fort Worth, Texas, we rarely had one, and those that came were more ice than snow. No matter the weather, though, each Christmas Eve Mother, Daddy, Grandma Georgie (my mother’s mother who lived with us), my sister Beth, and I loaded the laundry basket with our presents for my father’s assortment of aunts, uncles, and cousins, and headed east from our TCU hill home to the “Poly” section of Fort Worth to spend the evening around Grandmother Hewatt’s huge tree in the living room at 2900 Avenue B. We would sing Christmas carols and, of course, “Over the river and through the woods…” all the way down Forest Park Blvd. To Park Place to Eighth Avenue to Rosedale to Nashville Ave., thence to Avenue B. The way is fixed forever in my memory, and no matter how the street are changed and even renamed, that is the only correct way to that corner of Polytechnic Heights.

I loved going there, for the house was big – two-storied with front and back interior stairways with a common landing that led to the upstairs rooms stuck off here and there. There was, too, my Grandmother’s dressmaker shop out back, where she designed and made fine clothes for fine ladies. If we were lucky, we kids could go “out shop” and see the long table with its five sewing machines which worked off a central switch that, when “thrown,” would start the machines humming via a long belt that ran under the length of the table and turned mysterious wheels there. It was a real-life Willie Wonka factory, with the master switch and its conveyer belt, an old iron-cast wood-burning stove that almost bellowed its warmth, a mysterious button press, fine wools and brocades draped on dress forms, and closets full of costumes Grandmother had made and would rent for special occasions and holidays.

Often, however, we were forbidden entrance to this place of treasures, because Grandmother would be there, putting finishing touches on some handmade blouse or skirt to be hastily wrapped and placed under the tree that evening. She consistently “ran behind,” perhaps out of force of habit, having been widowed at twenty-five with five children under the age of seven, and being plunged into the immediacy of managing all needs for those five.

Inside the main house, the family assemblage spilled over into the dining room, kitchen, hall, and Grandmother’s bedroom right off the kitchen, for we were some thirty in number. The highlight of the evening was the exchange of presents, at least one for each adult, whose names had been drawn from a bowl at the same clan’s Thanksgiving gathering. The smallest children were commissioned to hand out the presents – some having to consult with a grown-up as to the name on the tag. Grandmother Hewatt’s gifts were never labeled, for whatever reason, and a guessing game ensued as to whom they should go, for in her haste she would have forgotten whose gift went in which box under which wrap.

Every year seemed the same and, indeed, we came to expect Grandmother to be running behind, certain cousins to be late, gifts to be unmarked, uncles and aunts to comment on our growth since the last time they had seen us, and the tree to be the “biggest and prettiest one yet!” Christmas at Grandmother Hewatt’s was something we could count on and feel secure in its sameness.

The house at 2900 Avenue B, now registered in Tarrant County Historic Resources Survey, was sold by my aunt several years ago, but I still drive by occasionally to … what? recapture the soul of a family that came together there so long ago and settled a lasting warm cover of love on my heart?

Another tradition that imprinted its ritual on the receptive cells of my memory was the annual delivery of gifts to my father’s and mother’s TCU colleagues. Mom was, I think, the original “do-it-yourselfer” and could and did make “from scratch” nearly everything we ate, wore, and lived among. Her hands fashioned clothes, curtains, and slip covers, while my Grandma Georgie’s expertise with appliqué, crochet, and needlepoint adorned our beds, tables, and walls. At Christmas, we had “lovin’ from the oven” that surpassed superlatives – cookies, candies, cakes, cream puffs, jams, hams, pies, and breads. Much of this bounty would be prepared as Christmas cheer for TCU friends, and Daddy and “the girls” – my sister and I – would make the rounds of those to whom the presents would go. It was a special treat for me to visit in the homes of these people who were then, and are still, important in the shaping of my outlook and attitude. Those Christmas homes occupy special rooms in my memory.

We usually started with the Scotts – Mary Beth and Gayle “Scotty” Scott and her father, then the president of TCU, Dr. E. M. Waits. Scotty was like a big jolly elf to me – a prominent geologist teacher/scholar with a great sense of humanness and joy of living. He was a perfect foil for the bright and witty Mary Beth, who kept all around her laughing at life and, more importantly, at themselves. The more sober “Prexy,” sat quietly, listening to the gay banter with a smile on his lips and a twinkle in his eye.

A totally different sort of atmosphere prevailed at the home of Daddy’s and Scotty’s mentor, Mr. Will Winton, and his gentle wife, Hortense. I can’t recall ever hearing Mr. Winton laugh or even seeing him smile, at Christmas or any other time, but he was kind, and Mrs. Winton was always a cheerful and gracious hostess, so that there was no dampening of our holiday spirit.

The Woodall Hogan household was yet another story. Head of the Chemistry Department and a Tennessee Southerner, Mr. Hogan lived with his two maiden sisters, Elizabeth and Ella D. They greeted us with loud, lively chatter that began as they opened the door, and didn’t end until you drove away, each talking louder and faster as the visit progressed. Their special Southern accents and manners were a fascination to me, and I have many times since set them, in my imagination, in a Tennessee Williams’ play of Southern eccentric gentility, although certainly without the decadence that emanated from that playwright’s pen.

And then there was our own home at 2627 Rogers Road on our TCU hill. Who among us having had a happy childhood does not have sweet recollections about a house we spent that happy childhood in? Ours was a frame house, built not long after the university moved from Waco to Fort Worth in 1910. It was located one-half block from the northern campus border and had been continuously inhabited by faculty until my parents sold the house and lot in 1965 to University Christian Church for their building expansion. The two windows that looked out on the porch that spanned the width of the house were in our living room, and in one of those large windows, at Christmas, our multi-colored tree lights shone each night of the holiday season.

Decorating the tree was a family production. Like most families, we had an assortment of old tried and true ornaments. Among them were a fragile glass Santa, a red-glass coiled horn, and glass birds that clipped onto the branches. These would be given the very best spots, while tinsel “icicles” were placed, not thrown (!), singly and carefully on each branch until the tree dripped with them and sparkled from top to bottom. When all was done, the lights were lit and we had only to admire our handiwork. Even the presents were placed just so around the tree’s base – rearranged each time a new present appeared, to preserve the esthetic balance.

The presents under that tree on Christmas morning are less memorable than the feelings that come back of being folded securely and unconditionally in the arms of a loving family. Most of our gifts were either handmade or second hand. I can remember especially a used bike, my first, that might as well have been made of gold (I was unaware that it wasn’t new until years later). And there was a handmade doll with red-yarn braids and handmade clothes, and an orange-crate doll house with papered walls and furniture made of wooden thread-spools. All of those wonderful things pale in the remembered glow of our family circle enjoying a special time in a special place.

In time, I tried to recapture the feelings I had known for my own children, summoning back some of the same settings and traditions. Whether I succeeded or not, I can’t be sure. That will have to be their story.

©1996 Joan Hewatt Swaim

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Try as I may, I cannot wrest a single Christmastime from the place where the mind collects, cannot find one that is more memorable than another. When I ask memory to speak, there is a coming together of scattered scenes that form composites of the fifty-plus Christmases I have known. The whole forms an unfinished play, the acts of which are an amalgam of stages in my life journey. The first two acts, which spanned my childhood and young motherhood, are done now, finished, the curtain having rung down some time ago, with a natural attrition of main characters, some by dispersal, some by death.

The stage in my Christmas Memories: Act One, is filled with two families – my birth family of father, mother, sibling and a host of relations, and my extended family of TCU folk.

I was born into a large family on my father’s side, all of whom, it seems had stayed close to home. Aunts and uncles and dozens of cousins gathered on Christmas Eve at my Grandmother’s big frame two-story house at 2900 Avenue B in Fort Worth’s Poly neighborhood. The evening was centered around a mammoth tree in the living room where the gifts brought by each, like stones to a pyramid, were piled around the tree, spilling out from it and threatening to take the room. The elders sat or stood in little clusters around the house, visiting, while we young fidgeted in bright-eyed anticipation of the main event, the passing out of gifts, growing more and more restless as we waited on everyone to arrive before commencing.

Christmas Day would find us again in Grandmother’s house, this time for the feast of turkey and dressing, marshmallow-topped sweet potatoes, salads, cakes and pies. The big dining table was set for adults, with card tables close by for the children. I thought then that I would never be old enough to sit with the grown-ups, but now it seems too brief a time to be a child at a child’s place.

The Yuletide celebration on the TCU campus, in those days, was marked with a festive dinner for the students and another for faculty and staff. Both were prepared by my Grandma Georgie’s kitchen staff and served in the school cafeteria. A highlight of the faculty affair was the appearance of Santa Claus, in the person of my father, bringing gifts and gags for all.

Another scene finds my sister, Beth, and me accompanying my father to homes of faculty colleagues, bearing good will greetings from one faculty family to another in the form of gifts, home baked by my mother. We moved from one warm place of welcome to another, lingering a while in each, and somehow, these visits gave a deeper definition to the personalities of these TCU friends, who would become my friends and mentors in time.

The Second Act of my memory’s pageant encompasses those joyous years in a house of my own, with children of my own, reenacting the rituals I had learned in a scene of my own making, with a cast of my own choosing. Parent and grandparent roles had shifted forward a generation, but Christmas still came.

Quietly, but as surely as time goes, we passed into Act Three, the young become older, some older having left the cast forever, and new members just coming aboard, just beginning to learn their parts. And the traditions and old ways we came to count on are still there in this present scene, albeit in new guise. Still there in the giving of tokens to my TCU staff, still there in the goodwill as we gather in another place around another tree, smaller but just as full of light and wonder as that taller one in my Grandmother’s house. Still there as we return once more to a Christmas brightened by the presence of a little child and the glow in that little grandson’s eyes. And still there in the symbolic reminder of the long-ago birth of another Child, far away in a manger under the stars, where shepherds watched, and wisemen came, and gifts of love were given.

©1992 Joan Hewatt Swaim

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As you will read elsewhere in these pages, another university event for alumni was inaugurated this spring. Planned as an annual occasion, Reunion Weekend provides a new venue for class reunions, which traditionally have been held during the fall Homecoming celebration. Now, exes will be given two opportunities during the academic year to come home.

Long before I became a student at TCU, I was well-acquainted with its reunion rites. Fall Homecoming was the only alumni event of the year then, and it caused great stir on the campus and in my home, as well. I can’t remember a Homecoming in those days that our house on Rogers Road wasn’t full to overflowing with my parents’ TCU friends and colleagues, gathered to revisit, recollect, and reclaim their college days.

They would begin to arrive about noon on Saturday, park their cars in our driveway or at curbside, register their presence with us, and take the short walk to the stadium for the afternoon football game, which was almost incidental to the balance of the day. Afterward, there was the sumptious buffet my mother had prepared for them–baked ham, bite-sized cream puffs stuffed with chicken salad, potato salad, Boston-baked beans (a real winner!), relishes, and made-from-scratch hand-fashioned-that-morning Parker House rolls, with apple crisp or chocolate cake to satisfy the sweet-tooth–and more opportunity for revisiting, recollecting, and reclaiming. Not unlike the tail-gate picnics so popular now, those after-the-game gatherings were full of stories and winks and looks and smiles that came from way down inside where we store the special things. We kids–my sister and I–would sit on the floor and listen, encircled with the light and love and laughter of good times and good friends that hung in the air long after all had said their goodbyes and left my mother and daddy with more fond memories to savor until next time. Every year, it was like the reprise of a favorite old song to which everyone had contributed a verse.

After I enrolled in TCU in the early fifties, the magic of Homecoming continued. A theme would be chosen for the celebration and the whole campus seemed to be involved in the preparation for welcoming back and honoring the past. Just after classes began in the fall (which was in mid-September then), various campus groups would begin work on the floats. The floats were built on long flatbed trailers which were to be pulled by truck units down the length of Main and Houston streets in downtown Fort Worth for the Saturday morning Homecoming Parade. During the building stages, the trailers were parked under the west stadium stands for protection, and each fall afternoon and evening leading up to Homecoming, that area of the stadium took on the semblance of an anthill as we busily fashioned our chicken-wire sculptures stuffed with crepe paper.

My freshman year, the theme must have had something to do with fairy tales, for my class created a huge paper pumpkin, in front of which would stand our Cinderella, blond Bobbie Lou Gibson, sceptered and crowned, looking for all the world like a princess in her white ball gown. There was the exhilirating rush of working together to finish that float before the deadline, the panicky reality of having to stabilize such a structure, and the dashing out to yet another five-and-dime in search of more orange crepe. Building a giant pumpkin close to Halloween can present a challenge. The excitement of actually riding in the parade behind the proud high-stepping, strutting TCU Marching Band and winning first prize for our wobbly pumpkin has never left me.

This is all by way of saying that homecomings and comings- home have always been special to me, and until this past year, I never questioned that the idea had anything but strong merit. However, an article in the student newspaper,(a weekly in my day), made me take a closer look at this rite of returning and view it from a different angle. The article, ill-conceived and ill-phrased by student staffer, Greg Weed, carried the title, “Why did you come home, anyway?” Weed held up to ridicule the whole idea of coming back to “places that don’t exist anymore,” derided alumni for their “silly clothing,” (believe me, Greg, black high-topped tennies that girls wear now and thigh warmers under jogging shorts are not too cool to us), and ended by asking us to “look back in your yearbook or write an old college buddy,” but “please stay home.”

At first I was puzzled by such a rude attack on what seems to me a harmless, healthy, happy event, but as what he wrote kept nibbling at my consciousness, I began to be grateful to this immature, nasty little innocent for making me think, making me say why I find the return to earlier haunts and happenings a gratifying experience.

So, indeed, why do we come back? Why aren’t we satisfied to leave and forever after depend on yearbooks and letters and chance encounters with our old college buddies? We know we won’t find things as we left them. We know that little will be the same, cannot be the same. We know the barn burned and that biology is no longer taught in the basement of Clark Hall, that, in fact, the Clark Halls and Goode Halls we knew fell to the wrecking ball long ago, and that the little chapel in a third-floor corner of the old Brite College building has been supplanted by the Carr Chapel across and down University Drive, and that there are Greek societies now where there were none then, and that the trees are taller, the rules looser, and girls wear shorts to class, and going barefoot is okay (Dean Shelburne’s ghost just stirred!). Most of us are even astute enough to know that the past is not something fixed and unalterable. We even know that time will have left its mark on youthful beauties. We know that; so why do we come?

It has to do, I think, with sense of place, as in a French impressionistic landscape. There are no people, no activity in those paintings, but one senses what has happened there; the place is the stage onto which we set and reset our own characters and the action. When we visit the room we lived in, it is not to see it as it was. It is the ambiance remembered that we seek. Around this corner of the east wing were June and Sally, in the corner suite were Molly and Elaine, next door were Tank and Marguerite, and Sara and Mary Sue, and across the hall were crazy Sylvia and her roommate, Joann–our family for that while. If we happen to be accompanied back by those who shared the time remembered, all the better, but the ghosts of those who won’t or can’t return will be there when we come again. Being in the physical place helps us to recapture some of what made our lives good then.

It has to do, I think, with reclamation. The scene revisited, however changed, helps us search out and reclaim what the mind had snared there in the ago. It has to do, I think, not so much with going back in time, but rather going outside of time, arresting it for a moment, in order to get back.

I fervently hope that Greg Weed’s most memorable time at TCU is not, as he puts it, “throwing up in the Tom Brown toilet.” I hope that he will yet experience something of value to take away and stay with him–a sense of belonging, of being a part of the parade, a brief shining moment in a home to which, given the vehicle of homecoming and reunion, he can periodically return and reclaim. Sometimes the best vacation is to the past.

©1992 Joan Hewatt Swaim

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And pluck till time and times are done
   The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun.
                             --W. B. Yeats

Some experts say that July and January are the best months for sky-watching. At those times, they say, the planets are brighter, meteor showers are more visible, and familiar constellations hang higher and longer in the clear air of the darkened heavens. Having been a sometime watcher of the sky for many years, I pinpointed a bright night last July and hauled out the old brass telescope as an aid to searching once again the craters on the face of the full moon and delving into the black spaces around and beyond.

By dumb luck or by providential intervention, our lakeside lot is so situated that the moon rises directly in front, across the cove and above the trees, its round shape shattering and scattering out along the water path that ends at my feet as I sit dangling them off the dock. Occasionally, a duck batallion will cut across the reflection, or the great blue heron that lives farther up the cove will flap, croaking, into the night light. Here, too, we are away from city lights that can diffuse and obscure an otherwise crystalline sky. There couldn’t be a better theatre for the moonrise, this longest running of plays with casting by Mother Nature.

Interest in the moon, planets, and stars began very early in my childhood. Without conditioned air and the lure of television to keep us inside, lulling and dulling our senses by the glow and endless “commern” (my grandmother’s madeup word for undefined noise) coming from that tube, we spent warm evenings outside my home on Rogers Street in Fort Worth, Texas, often on our backs in the grass, picking out the Dippers and, as we had been shown, trying to trace the way from the Big Dipper to the North Star. We gazed up at Scorpio whose poisonous tail twisted low on the southwest horizon, pointed out the hunter, Orion, with his bright, studded belt, and marvelled at the moon in all of its phases.

Often we had a tube of another kind to catch our interest-the brass telescope-that brought the sky bodies in close, the better to observe their wonders. The telescope belonged to Mr. Will Winton, long-time professor of geology at Texas Christian University, where my father was professor of biology. After Mr. Winton’s death, the telescope was passed to my father, who continued to use it, as he had on numerous past occasions, to entertain and instruct his classes in General Science.

As I took the telescope out on this recent July night and began to assemble it, my eyes welled as unbidden memories came of those magic summer nights under magic summer skies with the magician-professor-father leading the way to and beyond the moon, back and beyond the beginning of known time, through and beyond the silences of space to possibilities far, far out and away.

That the telescope came to me after my father’s death seems right. It was an instrument of special fascination in my youth and no less now. On some nights, after the supper dishes were done and Mother and Grandma Georgie were sitting quietly on the front porch that ran the width of our house listening to the soft voices and laughter of other “porchers,” and my sister and I and perhaps a neighbor child or two were in endless pursuit of “lightnin’ bugs,” Daddy would bring out the long wooden box that held the viewing parts of the telescope, erect the wooden spike-legged tripod onto which the cylinder was screwed, and amidst “oh boys” and shy, awe-filled looks, would set about to prepare the stage. I must have been very small when I first looked through the scope’s tunnel, for I remember having to stand on a chair, or Daddy lifting me and holding me on his raised knee to reach the eyepiece.

The natural inclination for a two-eyed human creature when faced with a one-eyed viewing apparatus is to close one eye, squinty-tight, and look with the other. Daddy taught us to view with both eyes open. For a while, I saw two moons, two Jupiters, and two of everything else heavenward until I got the hang of it. Since then I’ve always thought that those who view one-eyed, only see half the picture. What we actually saw through this extraordinary pipe was no more uncommon than that which other casual observers of the night sky see: the moon, Jupiter, Venus, the North Star, the Pleiades, the Milky Way.

What does seem a little less common to me, though, is the way in which we were given to see, the opportunity-although we didn’t realize it then- to be taught not just the physiognomy of the universe and our particular solar system, but also to catch the moonbeams and starshine of other worlds, of other possibilities, and the sheer miracle of it all.

The teacher made the common uncommon; the teacher unshuttered the window through which we saw not only a lighted moon in a darkened sky, but also got some glimpse of why it hung there just so, and from whence came the light; the teacher taught us to perceive the imperceptible movement of the stars; the teacher taught us to see through our eyes with our minds. He couldn’t tell us all he knew-we were too young and couldn’t have grasped it-but he did point the way. He made us look, want to look, for the picture behind the picture behind the picture.

And so still, on full-moon nights, I test the prisms’ strength, adjusting for a little more power, coaxing a little more vision that might unlock the mysteries I know are there. We discovered them, the scope and I, many moons ago, when we were young.

©1992 Joan Hewatt Swaim

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It must be a condition common to our species that having arrived at a certain age we have a tendency to look back down the path we have come and regard “our” time as the best of times, our valleys the greenest, our heroes the noblest. We surely had it right “then,” and the younger generation now experiencing their time in the sun just as surely have it wrong. We shake our heads sadly and say, “In my day, we weren’t allowed to act like that! What is the world coming to?” We ask in agreement with the song about disillusionment and past heroes: “Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio? A nation turns its lonely eyes to you— What’s that you say, Mrs. Robinson? Joltin’ Joe has left and gone away… hey, hey, hey.”

I’m just as guilty as the next in these thoughts. I often am quite sure that we really did have it right then, and everywhere I turn today is disorder, diffidence, or its antithesis, defiance. These feelings are especially acute when, within the microcosm of student life presented by the library in which I work, I witness willful destruction of property, calculated disregard of protective rules, and disdain for any kind of “authority.” Those few who wreak havoc narrow my perception, and I tend to think of them as representative of the whole passel of young people who swarm on the TCU campus nine months of the year.

I’m guilty, too, of thinking the modern world is devoid of heroes, that there really are no more men and women to emulate, and that hero-hunting and discovery have also left and gone away. But just when I am pretty well-convinced that the world, full of benighted heathens, is going to hell in a handbasket, just when I am certain that there are no more nonpareils like the ones I knew, something comes along to remind me that that isn’t so at all. Something comes along to pull me away from such puerile pessimism and restore my faltering faith.

The annual TCU dinner honoring scholarship donors and recipients is one such something. It is an event sponsored by the university each spring, during which those of us contributing to named scholarships have the opportunity to meet the students whose education is partially funded by them. It is a chance, too, for the students to meet their benefactors, thus raising the gift from a cold named number to a value warmed by the giver and the act of giving. The evening’s program usually includes speeches by high-ranking seniors about why they chose TCU, what their experience has been, and what the scholarship they hold has meant to them. Occasionally, there is an address by a donor, as well.

This past spring’s affair was an especially meaningful one for me. It was a night full of recognition of dreams and dreams fulfilled, of worthies past and present. The keynote speaker was Bob Wright, a nephew of L. C. “Pete” Wright, long-time Business Manager of the university and a venerated name in TCU history.

To me, to many, and to Bob and Mary Wright, “Mr. Pete” was a hero, quietly living an exemplary life and quietly spreading his beneficence out over those in need, helping them fulfill dreams of a college education. In honor of this wise and good man, Bob and Mary Wright have endowed a business scholarship.

In attendance at the dinner also were the two young men who held science scholarships established in my father’s name. Keith Louden was twice holder of the Willis G. Hewatt Science Scholarship, made possible with monies donated jointly by my father and Dr. May Owen during their lifetimes, and supported now by my mother. The other student, Bryan Cannon, was a two-time recipient of the Hewatt-Rankin Scholarship, given to TCU by a former student of my father’s, “Tex” Rankin (contemporaries will remember him as “Dub”). Bryan was one of the students to address the assemblage that evening. Both Keith and Bryan, campus leaders as well as scholars, would restore even the most hardened cynic’s faith in the young.

But there too, and by great good fortune seated next to me, was bright and pretty senior honors student, Julie Parker. It was Julie who found the weakened chord of hope in me and strengthened it. It was Julie who reminded me that green valleys of wonder are still sought and found. And it was Julie who assured me that heroes still roam at large in the land, for, as it turned out, she has some. She spoke glowingly of her English professor, Dr. Bob Frye, who takes an inordinate amount of time to instruct and explain, and whose careful attention to her work seems to her extraordinary. She is amazed and inspired by Dr. Jim Corder, who knows how to draw an accurate map of the world — “just free-hand!” — on the blackboard, and impart from his deep well of knowledge where and how, perhaps, we came by the language we use but imperfectly.

As we talked, I was reminded that a college campus abounds with possibilities for heroes, young and old, brash and mild, DiMaggios and “men of letters.” The latter is one of six classes of heroes defined by the nineteenth century writer, Thomas Carlyle, in his On Heroes and Hero Worship. The men and women of letters are heroic because they enlighten, he said. They are “light-fountains,” who just by being near, one stands to profit. And it occurred to me that this was the brand of hero that Julie was speaking of and that I remembered so well — teachers who can make the common uncommon, teachers whose seemingly small and generally unsung acts can lead the way out of the dim glow at the periphery into the bright light at the center.

I recalled those in whose light I had stood. I thought of the host of “best teachers I ever had,” and recognized what Julie was saying. I recalled, especially, a Dr. Paul Wassenich who, smack in the middle of his lecture on comparative religions stopped and exclaimed, “Oh, it’s a wonderful time to be alive and to be able to think!” I remember the light that flashed out with that statement over his young listeners, and I remember wanting to stand and shout, as the anthropologist-essayist Loren Eiseley did when caught up in the moment of throwing stranded, dying starfish back into the life-giving sea, “Yes! That’s it, that’s it!”

Between that spring dinner and this October afternoon, a child called Asher has been born. I hope that what I now suspect to be true will still be true when that little grandson and his generation arrive to the full awareness of their “times.” He will, no doubt, seek heroes, may, in fact, become one. I hope that he will discover light-fountains in whose waters he may wash, just as Julie and I discovered ours. May your way be bright, the hero hunt be bountiful, and the best of times be yours, Asher, my little love.

©1991 Joan Hewatt Swaim

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“When a lady has a piazza, she has a place on which to sit…,” goes the song that Elsa Lanchester sang in an album of tunes she wrote and performed at soirees in the home she shared with actor-husband, Charles Laughton. The rest of the song is naughty and doesn’t pertain to this essay, but the lines give me a launch into my subject which is “a place on which to sit,” and in particular, special places in which to sit.

Built as we are, sitting is a natural adjunct to just about everything we do. It is one of the first things we learn as an infant, which act draws considerable applause and admiration from our kind. In the early years, we have little choice of where to sit; we are told to sit here and told to sit there. But as we grow older, we begin to select special spots and claim them as our own. These are the places where, alone or in small company, we can do what the human species alone can do — reflect and express.

Special places are legion in literature. Cathy and Heathcliff had their Wuthering Heights moor, Thoreau his Walden Pond. Hemingway called his “a clean well-lighted place”; Steinbeck’s rocky grotto in an old harbor was simply “the Place.” For different reasons, all are based on the assumption that everyone needs a “place,” must, in fact, have one for taking stock, for focusing on the pleasures and pains of present or past, for thinking better and “feeling” better.

A human need is met in such places and the TCU campus, with its large transient population, has no doubt provided many over the years. Bryan Wagner, a student in the forties, knew of a white iron bench near the northeast corner of the campus where the Fine Arts building now stands, a way station on the walk back to his girl’s dormitory after a rendezvous at the corner drug, the bench a quiet place where a moment alone could be captured in those campus-bound, car-less days. Just sitting and holding the hand of someone you love can consecrate a spot forever.

Marcella Sherley recalled not long ago that her particular place was on the steps of the original Mary Couts Burnett Library in view of the sunken garden and lily pond below. At nightfall, the pond’s fountains played with color from lamps mounted beneath the surface and invited reverie and, perhaps, romance.

My earliest recollection of choice spots to sit center around my daddy’s or mother’s laps as they read from old books the words I couldn’t yet, the sounds of poets like Will Carleton and James Whitcomb Riley, the more sophisticated Longfellow, Wordsworth, and Whittier, and the mysterious but beautifully onomatopoetic Poe. I later found other “best places,” the very best of which was up in an old black walnut tree that grew just outside our back door. I thought then that the tree towered endlessly and that I had accomplished somewhat of a feat in climbing up, often with book in hand, to the third round of branches. There was a natural seat up there made out of the juxtaposition of two limbs so that I could sit on one and lean back on the other. I thought I was hidden and wouldn’t answer when Mother called, but I’m betting now that my mother knew of my place and, remembering one of her own, understood and let me be.

The tree is long since gone as is the house on Rogers Street. It was sold to the University Christian Church back in the sixties. I noticed not long ago, however, two black walnut trees that shade a portion of the church parking lot not thirty feet from where mine stood. They are, perhaps, progeny.

Another spot I recall that seemed a natural seat for me in my small days was the fireplug at the corner of Rogers and Cantey streets across from the northern boundary of the TCU campus. By design or mistake, it rose unusually high out of the ground, a perfect perching height. I remember running barefoot up to that corner across the hot pavement, then rough ground where the concrete ended, then hot pavement again, to climb atop the faded red plug and wait to catch sight of my daddy coming, with his rhythmic martial stride, home from his lab, or to watch westward toward Alice Carlson Elementary School whence came my sister, Beth, on school days. Unknowingly then, a 1940s view of the TCU campus was indelibly pressed on the fresh parchment of my memory. The fireplug is still there with its new coat of silver paint, but the view has vanished, having been repainted several times since then.

When I was older and attending McLean Junior High School on Forest Park Blvd. where Paschal High now stands, my friend Jean Barrett and I would go for walks around our TCU hill after school. She lived on Cockrell, just south of Berry Street, and after checking in at home, we would meet halfway across the campus and walk west toward the stadium. It was safe, then and in that place, for young girls to roam abroad. And the hill was our home, the campus a natural part of it.

We went to the stadium to climb high up in the east stands to “our” place to sit and sort out just what we were about at 13, comparing perceptions of the world of which we found ourselves a part. We would sit, “hip to haunch,” and ponder the imponderables like God, morality, families, and boys. The athletic offices were located in the west stadium then, which meant that the stadium gate was usually open for cars — and teenaged girls — to pass through. We felt free to walk in with little fear of being strange in a strange place. I knew Dutch and his host of coaches; I knew the maintenance people like Carl Tyler and the grounds superintendent, Mr. Dees, and they knew me. I recall, too, that TCU electrician Phil Fielding and his wife and son, Buck, lived in quarters under the east stands and would simply wave a friendly hello if they saw us. Old black Johnny Greer might be there, too, to wave a greeting to “Miss Joanie” and her friend.

I’m not sure my parents ever knew I went there. Had he known, Daddy would surely have told me not to because we had no “business” there; Mother would have been more concerned for my safety. Come to think of it, she probably knew, but as with the tree, she let me be.

As I pen a portion of this, I am sitting on a teakwood bench in a newly and nicely landscaped area at the closed-off western end of Lowden Street, directly across University Drive from the Memorial Columns that frame the old Ad Building farther to the west. I know, of course, that the building is called Dave Reed Hall now and for long, but today, in this mood, in this place, it is the Ad Building of old with its six-columned front and ivy-covered walls. You can do that in a place, you can fence off a piece of time and hold it yet again. A fountain bubbles here; the shade invites. It is an oasis on a hot August afternoon on a Texas campus, a nice place in which to sit — to collect and recollect.

©1991 Joan Hewatt Swaim

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