Category: This is TCU

There are any number of nice things about working in the same place to which I was born, in the same neighborhood where I grew up and went to school, and where most of my personal history since has been made, but I think one of the very nicest is seeing old, familiar faces that appear now and then among the more numerous new that come and go, and come and go, almost, it seems, with a tidal rhythm. I think of them — these old familiars — as ballast in my passage, life-lines to the solid anchors of the past. Those who have trod for long the ground I have, watched for long the scenes I have, and gathered for long many of the memories I have, provide stabilizing stuff. When we meet, the old familiars and I, we exchange pleasantries, sometimes a snide remark or two, often a laugh, and on occasion, take time out from present realities to consider the past, pausing to reflect on those things we find worth keeping in the nooks of memory.

I often see English Professor Emeritus Karl Snyder walking across the campus or rummaging around in the library, and it was in this last place that I encountered him one recent day, approaching with a smile. He told me he had just come from a visit to the English Department in Reed Hall. He paused for a moment, then delivered his punch line: “I was told nothing had changed.” He waited for the reaction he suspected would come. Having been long in this place himself and sensitive to change, and knowing that I am a sometimes chronicler of change, he thought I might be incredulous. I didn’t disappoint; I was incredulous. The immediate absurdity inherent in the statement hit home. Standing in a building approaching its eightieth birthday and saying nothing had changed? My word.

It will surprise few that, after Dr. Snyder had gone his way, I began to think about the “no change” remark, and all that it implied. Maybe the remark was intentionally ironic; irony often adopts an attitude of unemotional detachment. Maybe the remark referred to no change since Monday morning or last week or last August, and therefore, the words taken out of context had lost relativity. Could be, too, that the speaker spoke in a more narrow sense, specifically referring to the fact that a course in Shakespeare, which Dr. Snyder is known to have taught, is still taught, although we are no longer sure as to the real identity of the Bard — could be, they say, that Shakespeare was not he of Stratford, but the nobleman, Edward de Vere, in disguise.

Perhaps those with whom he spoke were too young or too new to TCU, so that no long look had had time to form. As humans, we must drag what we have known along with us and fit what we see into the interstices of what we saw. On the other hand, the speakers could have been old familiars themselves, who just don’t give a fig for change-watching and didn’t want to bother with the thought. And, it is also possible that, to some, an acknowledgment of change calls up too close to hand the passing of time and, thus, becomes a reminder of their own mortality, and they will, therefore, refuse to mark it.

With the notable exception of the library, the Reed building alone, has undergone more change than any on the campus. In fact, some who have been this way before and come back, look for its once-familiar columned front, and don’t — can’t find it. Those who have passed this way before can’t climb the vinyl- covered steps without remembrance of the worn-down stone that lies just beneath; can’t enter into the Add-Ran College administrative suite without remembrance of the old auditorium with its wooden floor that echoed every footfall and rear-numbing wooden seats; can’t pass through the central entrance from the outside, without an out-of-habit glance to see if the tiny model planets circling the light-bulb sun are still secure in the solar system display case to the right. I’ll wager there are still those of us who, letting habit rule, start toward Reed instead of Sadler Hall to “check the mail” in the basement post office.

It was in April of 1911 that the cornerstone of what has since been named Reed Hall was laid. As the first Administration Building, it was the center of campus activity until relocation of administrative services to newly-built Sadler Hall in 1961. It was only then that the old Ad Building was renovated and reassigned to classroom and office use, primarily for the Add-Ran College of Arts and Sciences.

Some of us old familiars even remember the days before air-conditioning. Open doors and windows allowed cross-ventilation on hot September days, as well as conduits for sound floating inward, and outward, and along the open corridors. Harkening back to that time, we recall the wonderful old story that provides capsule characterizations of the grande dame of the English Department, Lorraine Sherley, and the no less distinguished, but ever so much less formidable, teacher of English, the soft-spoken Artemisia Bryson. Seems their classrooms were across from one another then, and Miss Sherley’s popular course in Interrelation of the Arts was in progress at the same time as Mrs. Bryson’s freshman section. The day was warm, the doors were open, the students in various attitudes of attentiveness to their respective lessons. What the day’s topic for the freshmen was is lost to the story, but memory is clear about what was being interrelated to what in Miss Sherley’s class. Her subject was Richard Wagner and his artistic contribution to the world of his time. By way of illustration, the class would be treated to a Wagnerian opera.

As the phonograph needle picked up the rich, heavy passages, dramatic choruses, and brass volleys from the record’s grooves, and as the volume mounted and drifted out the door and across the hall, Mrs. Bryson found it increasingly difficult to have herself heard by her students. To close the door, of course, courted suffocation or, at the very least, torpor. Finally, she made bold to step across and ask Miss Sherley if she could turn the sound down “just a little”. (All who knew Lorraine Sherley will immediately recognize how bold a step that was!) To the querulous request came the imperious reply, dripping with outrage, and with a heavy emphasis on the composer’s name pronounced with a “V”: “Turn it down? Artemisia, you don’t turn down Wagner!”

From one perspective, the old Ad Building was a microcosm of what the university has become, harboring in its lifetime not only the English department, but all other humanities, too, and the sciences, music, and art, business, education, “home ec”, all classrooms, the cafeteria, the student lounge, and, very early on, the little library tucked into a two-level space in the southeast corner. Now, it requires twelve separate building complexes to house these same programs and to carry on the work of the school.

One can say, I suppose, with some accuracy, that nothing has changed. Not much, anyway. Nothing except the land, the structure, its use, the people, man’s knowledge, the universe, and time. After all, the English Department has been in the same place for eighty years, and they still teach Shakespeare, don’t they? — or is it De Vere?

©1991 Joan Hewatt Swaim

Comments closed

“Memories can be beautiful, and yet, things too painful to remember, we simply choose to forget.”

The words from the Streisand-sung song kept repeating in my thoughts while I, as everyone else who could draw breath, coped with the reality of war, again in our time. While I, as everyone else, watched and listened to the reports coming from Washington, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia, memories were being pulled up into consciousness from way, way far back, from out of those places in the mind where we stash things and think we forget. The sirens’ wails coming through on the newscasts from Baghdad and Bhahran, the tone in every reporting voice, seemed to jostle loose the fragments of World War II impressions that my child’s memory had stored, impressions that in quieter times I choose to forget.

Although two intervening wars have been fought out in Korea and Vietnam, it is memories of the Second of the World Wars that come back now and suggest deja vu. I was a mere seven, when the United States actually entered that earlier war in December 1941, but for a year or so before that I had become aware that my quiet TCU world was changing in a way I couldn’t, then, comprehend. Talk among my parents and their friends and colleagues seemed to inevitably come around to the “situation in Europe,” or the threat that came from farther east, from the “Land of the Rising Sun,” Japan. Wartime was coming with a frightening intensity we had not known before and in a way we have not experienced since — perhaps until now.

With the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor still a year-and-a-half away, the first United States Armed Forces training activities commenced on the campus. In June, 1940, boys who were enrolled in the government’s Civilian Pilot Training Program (a name that would be changed all too soon to War Pilot Training Program) were taught in TCU physics classes and were transported daily in buses provided by TCU to local fields for flying lessons. In June, 1941, the Engineer Defense Training Program began to give “up-training” for workers in war plants, plants like Fort Worth’s “Bomber Plant,” known to the present generation as General Dynamics. This training included classes in physics, chemistry, fundamental and advanced radio, accounting, and business administration. Again TCU provided classrooms and faculty.

Once America had entered the war, selective service went into effect and students were called to duty without deferment, many in mid-semester, some even in their last senior semester. To counteract the devastating effect this would have on young lives, the TCU faculty announced a “Policy for the War”, which assured that full credit would be given “to any student … called out by draft, for any course in which he has completed as much as half a semester,” and that degrees would be granted “to seniors who lack only a fraction of a semester when called by draft.” A tragic few would receive their degrees posthumously.

A few faculty would leave the campus also, either as reservists or enlistees. Such was the fervor of patriotism that many wanted to “join”, my father among them, but were reasoned, by the administration, into staying and perhaps serving their country with greater value in the classrooms. Faculty families became involved, too, volunteering to help out in recruiting stations located on campus or working in a Red Cross bandage-making room, which was located in Brite College and run almost entirely by faculty wives.

As the war rumbled on, more support for government programs was forthcoming. Beginning in September, 1942, and continuing through January, 1944, Jarvis Hall was made available to the Special Flight Instructors Program (AV-P), which was an experimental effort by the Navy to utilize, as instructors, a number of ensigns who were slightly over age or under physical requirements to make combat pilots. TCU was the first of only six such units in the United States. Other service units quartered in Jarvis during this same time were the Army’s and Navy’s Enlisted Reserve Corps, and a group of men in the Marine Corps, training for pilots.

The most memorable program to come to TCU was that of the Navy V-12, the purpose of which was to train officers for the Navy. Numbering approximately 200 all told with officers and trainees, they were given residence in old Clark Hall that then stood where Sadler Hall is today, while civilian boys were all moved to the other men’s dormitory, Goode Hall, and to the former girls’ residence, Sterling Cottage, both long since gone from the TCU scene. Their numbers and their white Navy uniforms made them conspicuous and, in the words of Dean Hall, they “added color to the entire campus.” The V-12 men took regular college courses, as well as the special technical training preparatory to their line of duty.

Every phase of every-day life seemed to center on the war. We didn’t have television, nor did reporters have satellite telephones and hi-tech video equipment to bring to us “live as-it-happens” sights and sounds of the maddest of madnesses, but we had more than plenty to see and hear through movie newsreels, newspapers, and radios. Immediacy was mercifully lost to those of us who were shakily safe at home. The buffer of time usually stood between us and the event, so that reports were of done deeds — the results were in, the dies all cast, by the time we heard. We saw the horror after it happened, rather than as it happened. No matter how much one wishes to participate, there is a certain solace in conclusions already concluded by forces beyond one’s control.

Urgent requirements for war materials naturally caused shortages in consumer goods, as peacetime industries geared up to produce guns, engines, war planes, and battle ships. To counteract hoarding and to insure fair distribution, the goverment set up a rationing program. “For the duration” of the war, we would become accustomed to using precious coupons for the privilege of purchasing coveted new shoes, meats, butter, sugar, and for the grownups, coffee and gasoline. “For the duration,” we saved everything from lard in large Crisco cans to empty toothpaste tubes to tinfoil gum wrappers that we rolled into fist-sized balls, all to be taken to locations where the recycling process would begin. “For the duration,” we bought United States Savings Bonds, bought and saved war stamps through public school programs, and conserved energy by cutting off lights and heat in rooms not being used. So engrained was this last in my “war” training, that I can hardly leave a room yet, without the warning memory-voice that echoes, “Did you turn out the light?”

New names entered our vocabulary and were used familiarly; we would name our dog, Blitzkrieg, and the baby kittens, Vinegar Joe (after General Stillwell), General MacArthur, Ike, and the little lady kitten, Madame Chiang Kai-Shek. Our songs turned from abstract nonsense and light love to those with more meaningful titles — “Say a Prayer for the Boys Over There,” “I’ll Walk Alone,” “Comin’ In on a Wing and a Prayer.” The “Star-Spangled Banner” was seriously sung, not mindlessly mouthed.

The “duration” lasted forever it seemed, four years in fact, and then, it was over. As the reeling world tried to right itself, students, older now in many ways, were coming back on the “G.I. Bill of Rights,” a plan which gave generous tuition and fees assistance to veterans. Beginning before the November, 1945 Armistice, the number of veterans returning under this plan steadily increased so that by the 1946 Fall semester, a limit had to be placed on enrollment. To provide campus living space for the enlarged male population, barracks from shut-down service units in Brownwood and Camp Bowie were moved in. For a while, athletic teams were so filled with veterans that in 1948, when the freshman basketball team was comprised entirely of players straight out of high school, they were dubbed, because of their comparative youth, Coach “Brannon’s Brats.”

In its one hundred and eighteen years, the university has seen its family through four major conflicts. The Memorial Columns, with their lists of dead heroes, bear witness to two. Please Providence, we won’t have occasion to add another.

©1991 Joan Hewatt Swaim

Comments closed

Little Lindsay Ray is afraid of Super Frog. When he comes too close, up in the stands at basketball games, Lindsay begs her daddy to hide her behind his jacket, so that Super Frog can’t see her and “get” her. Although I personally think Super Frog and his antics are a fine “Frog spirit” touch, I side with Lindsay, too, remembering my small self at her age, and thinking how I surely would have sought cover from the sight of that otherworldly bug-eyed and gape-mouthed Sesame Street monster, which has become the latest version of TCU’s mascot, “the horned frog.” Besides, every child, except perhaps my sister, Beth, has been afraid of something. Johnny Greer, who did yard work for us, and whom Beth used to surprise with snakes pulled out of her pockets, was sure she wasn’t afraid of the ol’ devil himself. But child’s fear is not the subject of this essay. A different kind of fear, less overt, is.

I am afraid that little Lindsay and her generation and, certainly, the generations to come, will not know a horned frog. I don’t mean not know of it in its anthropomorphic fantasy forms like Super Frog and its predecessor, Addie the Fighting Frog, and the various stylized versions one sees on everything from sweats, shirts, shorts, and stationery, to jewelry, mugs, jugs, and cups. I don’t mean not know of it from picture books and museum displays. I mean to really know it “… from childhood up and continuously,” as John Graves puts it, “with [the] flavor [of it] in you,” the kind of knowing that no amount of reading can produce.

I am afraid that those children of our children will not know the feel of that particular soft, but thorny, lump of life that, if you know where to stroke it right between the anterior “horns” located just above the tiny side-set eyes, will become quiet and frozen in your hand, hypnotized, so that you can loosen your grip and observe it for a few minutes as you would a hand-held rock; will not know how to successfully catch one and gently place it in a shoebox to watch and wonder over in its temporary vivarium until Mother says it is time to let it go; will not know the shish of its sudden scudder in the sand; will not even know to look with hope of finding.

When I was growing up on Rogers Road, on this southwest Fort Worth hill, horned frogs were growing here with me. In those days, there were plenty of them from which to get a lasting “flavor.” Endemic to the region, they frequented the neighborhood alleys and vacant lots where tall grasses grew, were found in untouched patches of the college land wooly still with wildflowers and prairie weeds, and we might even have expected to encounter one of the little fellows on the dirt paths that angled in from the campus periphery to and across the concreted walks and the better-kept lawns in front of Old Main, Jarvis, Clark, and Goode Halls. If you knew where and how to look, you could spot one snoozing in the shaded sand, or spy on one at dinnertime, as it hid in the long grasses around a red ant hill or along a red ant trail, selecting its victual victims like Browning’s Caliban, letting twenty pass, then striking the twenty-first, “… loving not, hating not, just choosing so.”

My most active memories are of an even closer view of the Texas horned lizard, genus Phrynosoma species cornutum, for such is the TCU horned “frog.” Because of its broad back and belly that give it the appearance of a toad, it was named thus by early naturalists, and thus it has stuck. My father’s early graduate- student interest in the species continued into my childhood years, and I recall especially the backyard pen Daddy built to keep his captives in to study their feeding habits. He offered them ants from an inverted collecting bottle equipped with a glass tube. As the ants “escaped” from the bottle down the tube, the diminutive dragons waiting at the tube’s mouth would seize upon them and swallow them down, legs, head, tail, and stinger. I imagined them licking their lips and smiling at their gratis banquet.

Horned frogs could be found all around, and even in, our house, undergoing various stages of scientific observation. My mother tells about a particular confrontation between our iceman and a horned frog that had been placed in the ice compartment of our wooden ice box. Daddy had put him there temporarily to slow his metabolism for an experiment. From the kitchen, Mother heard the deliveryman enter the rear porch where the ice box was kept,open the upper door to the ice storage, and then — nothing.

Curious as to the silence, she entered the porch area to see the man stock still and apparently speechless, staring at the small beast, just as stock still and speechless, staring back at him from atop the remains of a melting ice block. He vowed he had seen a lot of funny things in his time, but nothing quite like that. I guess it was not the usual kind of provision one kept on ice.

How TCU and the local lizard became connected is by now a familiar story. Addison Clark, Jr., the son of one of the founding Clark brothers of TCU, has been credited with its choice as the school’s symbol in 1896, when the university was located in Waco. That year, he promoted the inauguration of a student yearbook, which was to be called The Horned Frog, and which saw its first edition in 1898. The name was picked, so the story goes, because of the abundance of the reptile in the Waco vicinity. It was not until the school had moved to Fort Worth and had established sports programs that the frog became the official mascot of its athletic teams. Had the athletic teams come first, we might have been the TCU Rattlesnakes or some such dangerous prairie dweller, rather than the benign little lizard.

Almost a hundred years have passed since we favored the horned frog with adoption. The way things are going, it won’t take another hundred to obliterate it. In another hundred, we will not only have taken its name and form for symbol, but we will have also deprived it, if ever so gradually, of its land,and poisoned its food. Red ant hills and their stinging inhabitants are not a desirable part of urban life, and so, must go.

On a planetary scale, I suppose, the passing of a single Texas species of an insignificant lizard is of pallid importance to the need of man for habitation and cultivation. In spite of that rationale, I can’t help fearing for the little Lindsay Rays and wishing for their time, a sure ’nuff, live horned frog to know, instead of some stuffed dinosaur relic of a biodiversified world that has forever passed.

©1990 Joan Hewatt Swaim

Comments closed

In close proximity to most old college campuses is (or was) a small business strip known as “The Drag,” so-called, as nearly as I can determine, because of its similarity to what one dictionary defines as the main street of a small American town. Built in the days before campus student unions and university stores, the Drag provided not only drug and dry goods to the campus and the neighboring communities, but more importantly, places for friends to meet and to generally “hang out.”

Situated at the south edge of the campus, TCU’s Drag occupies half of the east side of the 3000 block of South University Drive. (I see that I still use present tense, although my guess is that the Drag is moving inexorably into the past.) Most who attended TCU and went on to spend their lives elsewhere remember that particular block in no more than four- or five-year spans, those being the years that they spent as undergraduates. Today, as I walk along what remains of TCU’s Drag, I feel the air heavy with association that reaches back beyond fifty years. Almost palpable, it is still so full of all that has passed from it.

Once this summer, I sat on the east side of the Bailey Building, which stands on the west campus across University Drive from the Drag, and tried to remember just where everything was when I first knew it, my mind painting a sort of historical mural, with what is present in the foreground and forms of images past filling in the background. Far back and faint in that background is a short row of shops that run a quarter way down the block. On the northernmost corner stands the TCU Drug Store, and next to it is Rilda Smith’s Portrait Studio, and then Mr. Sampley’s TCU Cleaners.

Recall becomes jumbled here. I think I know the names of the other shops, but placement eludes my memory’s brush. An old annual picture taken in the forties helps to sketch in the alignment: the TCU Beauty Shop next to the cleaners, then the TCU Shoe Shop, the TCU Barber Shop, Blackburn’s Five and Dime, and last in the row, TCU Plumbing.

This was a time when shop doors stood open in the hot Texas summer, and overhead fans moved the unconditioned air about, and flyswatters stood at the ready. Some, as did the TCU Drug Store, had screen doors, and Blackburn’s had friendly bells that jangled when the door opened so as to alert proprietors to the presence of customers. In cold weather, heaters that hung far back and from the ceiling provided warmth. In the here and now, all doors are closed against whatever weather and only occasionally does one encounter a flying critter inside.

The people who tended the shops in that long ago and whose faces are just visible in the distant scene were, for the most part, friendly. I recall especially the TCU Barber Shop’s Dudley Peacock, who performed his tonsorial artistry on the menfolk and who, one day when I was twelve, pulled my long, thin red hair back, worked it into a single braid, cut it for the first time in my memory, and handed the severed bunch to my mother for safekeeping or keepsaking or, as it turned out, for both. His jovial banter kept the experience — my rite of passage — from being a painful one for the still-shy pre-teen who sat so silently while he cut.

As I sat across from the drag on that summer day in 1990, scenes appeared that reached farther back and were fainter still, back beyond my own memory. Flickers flashed from another’s past giving a momentary glimpse inside the Drug where an old Victrola plays and a young highschool girl named Elizabeth dances the Charleston with a young college boy named Arthur while another young college boy, Willis, looks on and decides then and there he will have that girl to wed, and did. Dancing was forbidden on the campus, but Mr. Rogers at the Drug liked the kids and allowed it, sometimes. And as I sat, I thought I could hear the streetcar clacking down the University Drive tracks toward the Drag which was the end-of-the-line from town, the trolley loaded with student celebrants returning from the Central Christian Church downtown where a TCU basketball team had triumphed. Legend has it that the students would rock the car so hard that the conductor had to stop several times along the way out to the campus to allow it to settle and to keep its wheels from jumping the track.

Sometime in the forties, the original line of Drag shops was extended south almost to the corner of Berry St. This was when the TCU Theatre was built, the popular Spudnut Shop was opened, Dave Bloxom’s Pool Hall teemed with players and kibitzers, and Mary Evelyn’s and the University Men’s Shop became classy places to buy classy clothes.

For those of us who went to TCU in those days and in the early fifties, the Drag included the Colonial Cafeteria across University to the west, then turned east on Berry and continued down a couple of blocks past the Zip, the Hi-Hat Lounge, the Rathskeller, Owen’s Drug Store, El Chico’s Mexican Restaurant, Carshon’s Delicatessen, and Schotta’s Cafe and Cake Shop. Most of these places are gone altogether now and some are in new places away from the Drag toward better accomodations with more traffic. The buildings that housed Dave’s place, the Spudnut Shop, and Mary Evelyn’s were torn down to be replaced by the ultimate replacer, a parking lot.

The Drag is not so popular and, thus, not so populated as it once was. Convenience of goods and eats in the Student Center and the mobility of today’s students have contributed to the decline of business there. A car, now, is part and parcel of going off to college and there are few who do not have ready conveyance to the local malls and strip shopping centers that offer “more and better.”

What fills the present is short to tell. The old Drug building is being remodeled (for yet another time) from a night spot called the Klymaxxx! into the ready-to-wear Sweat Shop. The TCU Cleaners doggedly holds its old place between the newcomer modelling agency and Jon’s Grille, next to which are the Greek House restaurant, Flash photo shop, and some vacant places with “For Lease” signs in the windows. Of all these I like Jon’s Grille the best. Its interior spans what was the beauty shop, the shoe shop, and Dud’s barber shop; its ceiling tiles, windows, and floors, still speak of the past — and the folk are friendly.

The saddest aspect of all that remain is that of the TCU Theatre, a silent ghost, silently waiting for its time to end, doors shut and boarded up, as if to lock inside the memories of Saturday matinees when neighborhood kids filled front row seats and followed the latest episode of western serials and watched the cartoon antics of Popeye, Roadrunner, and Daffy Duck; as if to hide away the secrets of Saturday nights when young couples sought out its most remote balcony seats; as if to block the view of a patriotic public who cheered the Allied victors and hissed the Axis villains as they watched the world at war brought to horrible life in those pre-TV days of the RKO newsreels.

On that summer day in 1990 as I sat sketching this mural, the past seemed closer than the present. And as I watched, I got the notion that the buildings were watching too, looking back at me, marking my aging as I am marking theirs, as if we are both gnomons, measuring the shadows that we cast on the mural, recording our time on this TCU hill.

©1990 Joan Hewatt Swaim

Comments closed

Do you ever look around and discover that something has changed from the way you remember it, and you can’t pinpoint when or why, can’t remember the moments or the shifts and shadings that signaled the change, but there it is, definitely different than before? I experience this often now, which could have two things to say about me: that I have traveled far enough from my youth so that observable change has had time to take place, or that I have simply not been observing through all these years.

Some changes that occur are camera-snapped by my mind and retained with sure recall, but these are mostly events that happen in a short space of time, have a near-term effect, and usually elicit an emotional response. For instance, I can, with little effort, come up with the year, possibly the month, that the old wooden field house burned to the ground, in one night altering forever the visual aspect of that part of my TCU campus, leaving only a memory in its place. In like fashion, I can recall the time when the expansion and extension of Berry Street threatened to, and finally did, erase Miss Lorraine Sherley’s beloved house and garden on Wabash Ave., triggering a strongly stated opposition from that formidable lady and causing a stir the likes of which the city officials probably had never encountered and from which they likely never recovered. I can readily seize on that eventful kind of change. It is harder to get a handle on the gradual, sneaky type that has no discernible beginning and that leaves few clues.

The “break” — in the sense of intermission, time out, King’s X — has recently caught my attention as something that has undergone considerable change since my early years at TCU, and I can’t locate where along the way that happened. I can’t even recall that, back then, we used the term “break” for the few holidays we were allotted around Thanksgiving, Christmas, Easter and, for those of us who attended summer school, July 4th. Now there is a short break midway the Fall semester, a long month’s break between semesters at Christmas, and a week’s break in the Spring, which only occasionally coincides with the Good Friday holiday before Easter. My son tells me this was so during his student years in the seventies. When did it change? I have been here; how could I not have noticed?

As I write this, TCU is in the Spring Break week, an annual holiday that, if one is to believe the hoopla and hype, has become an internationally observed funtime celebration for college students. It is not possible to be around college life today and not be aware of the SPRING BREAK. Travel agents and travel clubs, airlines, hotels, fashion merchants, ski outfitters, and tanning parlors have found a lucrative market in this holiday of holidays, and they do not miss a minute milking it. By mid-January the TCU campus newspaper, the Skiff, is full of tantalizing advertisements, beckoning students to beach paradises from the Carolinas to Cancun and to ski resorts in Colorado and New Mexico. Colorful brochures entice “breakers” to tropical shores or snowy slopes, where they can have unlimited fun, fun, fun.

Travel Service International, Inc., publishes a tabloid called “Spring Break News” that shows pictures of sunbathers and party-goers on crowded South Padre Island beaches and in Cancun hotel pools, with such irresistible text as: “One Breaker admitted that some members of her college group last year started partying around 10:00 AM everyday and never slept! At night, she and her friends frequented … a nightclub with dancing, new wave music, a great ocean view and a bar.” In one of the come-ons for selecting a Mexican location for the Great Break, the University Beach Club declares it has the “wildest party marathon” with “$10-all-you-can-drink parties!” The Campus Beach Club travel service dangles this carrot, “… don’t forget that the drinking age in Mexico is 18,” but follows with the reassurance that “since most people do not have cars, there is rarely a drinking/driving problem.”

On the same page in the “Spring Break News,” this time in regard to the safety of flights, the Campus Beach Club proclaims they believe in “the value of safe travel for their student clients and peace of mind for parents.” Thank goodness for that. I thought the parents entered the picture only at the toll gate.

When I think back to the pauses in my college year routines, I wonder at the apparent lack of FUN we must have had. Our use of time off must appear bland and boring to today’s student in the light of today’s doings. Of course, the academic calendar was different then, so that our scheduled holidays were of shorter duration. There were two days at Thanksgiving and possibly a week to ten days at Christmas. Both of these periods included days that were traditionally spent with family, and so, in our innocence and ignorance, we did. Christmas gave us the greatest number of days, but because the fall semester ended in mid-January, that time away from the classroom was usually spent at home, starting and/or finishing term papers and studying for final exams. The spring brought a four-day respite–Friday through Monday–surrounding Easter Sunday. Even if our parents had had the means and could have been persuaded to pay the way, we wouldn’t have had much time for frolicking in the sand or snow before returning to class schedules.

But lest you think we were totally deprived, some professors did arrange biology and geology fieldtrips at Eastertide that took us as far as Oklahoma, New Mexico, and even to the beaches of South Texas! Although it is true we were chaperoned by professor and sometimes spouse, and our accomodations were inexpensive motels equipped with cook-in facilities, and true too, that we were allowed no all night, or even late night, carousing and unlimited drink, I don’t recall feeling inhibited or deprived. I even think we had “fun.” The beaches we walked on Padre and Mustang Islands were all but devoid of human life, but we somehow found solace and satisfaction in the rhythm of waves spilling up on a clean beach occasioned by skittering ghost crabs and curious sandpipers. We might even have found it good.

It seems to me that the whole concept of “break” has been reordered over the years. Time and locus and method are all different now. Somewhere along the way, longer time-outs became desirable and resort sorties became the vogue. Parents appear to have become more prosperous and permissive and, if you take what is written in the paper as so, you can see that a good time is not to be had without tripping, trysting, and tippling.

If we have progressed (?) this far from 1950 to 1990, where might the college student of 2010 be headed on break — for Christmas in Spain, skinny-dipping in the Mediterranean, or maybe all-night moveable feasts criss-crossing the Continent? And maybe in yet another score of years, will there be months’-long trips to the moon for crater parties?

Meanwhile, in the timeless words of one poet, “time isn’t off, it’s always on, and I must hurry before it’s gone.”

©1990 Joan Hewatt Swaim

Comments closed

For more than two years I have had the little black ringbinder in among the debris that litters my desk. From time to time it gets shuffled from one pigeonhole to another, and from time to time I open it to refresh my memory on what is written there. From time to time I ask myself why it is kept at all, much less kept in view, not stashed away somewhere, as old documents and mementos inevitably are, when having lost their moment and fresh perfume.

On a simple level, I suppose, I can answer why I keep the notebook. It belonged to “Prexy”, Dr. E. M. Waits, President of Texas Christian University from 1916 to 1941. He was one of that group of TCU people who were so much a part of my childhood and young adulthood in Fort Worth. He was, further, the beloved father of Mary Beth, friend and teacher, who had a profound influence on my life. In addition, it was entrusted to me by the late Dr. Leo Hendricks, member of the Geology faculty from 1946-1972, for safekeeping and to give “interested attention.” I cared about those people, I still do, and am thus reluctant to just push aside something that was of them. That much seems simple.

Further reasons lie deeper and are tangled up in other lives, a sense of history and authentication of the past, and something about human endeavor and the human spirit and what is important in the advancement thereof.

The notebook contains evidence of a story but briefly told, almost as an anecdote, in the written histories of TCU. The accounts, as written by Dean Colby Hall and Dean Jerome Moore, tell of a time in the mid-1930s, when a TCU President went a-begging — “tramping the streets of Fort Worth,” as Dean Hall phrases it — to secure funds to meet the faculty payroll. TCU had not been exempt from the financial distress that gripped the nation following the New York Stock Exchange crash of 1929. At TCU, “the income from the Burnett Trust [acquired in 1924] began a steady decline,” Hall tells us, and from 1931, continuing through 1933, faculty salaries had received a net reduction of 43%.

In spite of several fund-raising campaigns, indebtedness grew, and the school, already having reduced its faculty with unwanted but necessary dismissals, faced even sharper cuts for lack of salary funds. Then, in 1934, and again in 1935, $10,000 advances on the Burnett Trust promised slight salary increases — on condition that the University match the advance amounts. Prexy accepted the challenge of soliciting and matching those monies; the notebook lists the people who, in 1935, answered his call; a crumbling adding machine tape attached to a page with a rusted straight pin attests to the success of his mission.

The notebook entries are placed under the general heading, “Pledges to the T.C.U. Salary Relief Program,” and list pledgor, time of pledge, amount pledged, and the date and amount paid. The names of eighty-eight businesses and individuals, typed and handwritten on the pages of the book, are a roll call of the citizenry and establishments that defined the Fort Worth community in which I was nurtured, and many of those names are yet familiar in the Fort Worth of today.

Represented among the pledges ranging from $25.00 to $500.00, are names indelibly printed in Fort Worth annals — Kay Kimbell, the “Waggoner boys,” C. L. and Arch Rowan, “Coca Cola” Brown, and C. A. Lupton, and the merchandise leaders, W. C. Stripling, Monnig Dry Goods, The Fair, Washer Bros., and Gans Co. The North Side packing-houses of Swift and Armour made contributions, as did such diverse businesses as the Star Telegram, Ben E. Keith Produce Company, Stafford-Lowden Printing, Texas Electric, Baird’s Bakery, Renfro’s Drug Company, Trinity Life Insurance, and the Crystal Pure Ice Co. The candy manufacturers, Pangburn’s and King’s, are there with their support, along with Harveson & Cole Funeral Directors, and several cleaning establishments, among them Sampley’s TCU Cleaners and Berry Bros. & Donaho, these last having a foot in both the TCU camp and the Fort Worth community, themselves TCU graduates and long-time supporters of the TCU athletic program. Other names ring familiar bells, but their Fort Worth connections are lost to me — among them C. D. Reimers, Y. Q. McCammon, a “Miss Peak,” George McCamey.

The little book tells an important story. It chronicles a time, perhaps a crucial turning point in the past of our TCU, that called on qualities in the human spirit that raise us up and allow us to contribute to the continuance of our kind as a whole.

It tells of a college administrator addressing a need and of a townspeople responding to that need, pitching in to help preserve the prairie school that was struggling to survive. It tells of an academic and a townspeople who had the vision to know that such institutions must survive. And the little book also teaches the humbling lesson that we do not spring full-blown in the midst of a full-blown milieu, that something went on before we arrived, that important human work preceded us and has brought us to the present, and, with our continuing care, we may pass it more able into the future.

But there is more in the book’s yellowed leaves, for sandwiched in among the pages of Prexy’s Relief Fund listings are handwritten passages from which the spirit and vision of the man who carried the notebook emerges, a man but lightly sketched in my memory as an elderly gentleman, who seemed always kind and gentle. One of the passages refers to Cyrano de Bergerac’s advice to the Comte de Guiche to read Cervantes’ chapter on windmills, that “if you fight, they may throw you down in the mire, or up among the stars.” There follows a list of planets and major stars and their distances from our Earth.

In his letter explaining how he came to possess the notebook, Dr. Hendricks surmised these jottings were notes for what probably was a sermon. Prexy was a minister in the Disciples faith at the time of his TCU appointment and, in his chapel speeches and Sunday sermons, he was known to quote liberally from his extensive reading and to punctuate his message with analogy and parable.

Perhaps that is the case, but I like to think otherwise. I like to think that perhaps the passage is purposely tied in to the theme of the whole, that perhaps, pausing in his quest, Prexy took a moment to write down the analogy as a part of his sales pitch that TCU, with a little boost, could catch the upward swing of the turning windmill arms and be thrust on its way to the stars. Looking back down the distance from now to then, I like to think his efforts may not have been in vain.

©1990 Joan Hewatt Swaim

Comments closed

It had been thirty-six years since I had walked into Foster Hall on the TCU campus. Thirty-six years is a long time and in anyone’s reckoning much can happen. In thirty-six years, a person can grow up a lot, can pass from one generation to the next older one, can raise a family, find a piece of work, learn much, and know the need to learn much more. It had been thirty-six years, and I don’t know what took me so long.

It was not lack of opportunity that had kept me away. I’ve been here, just across the street for twelve of those thirty-six years, and close by for nearly every year of the balance. I have walked by the dormitory and around it, following familiar concrete paths under taller trees than I remember, have looked up at the third-floor windows that were “mine” and out of which I could just see the roof of my home halfway down Rogers Road. I have lingered in front of the porch where we long ago lingered coming home from a date, and I’ve marveled at the great number of parking spaces that are always filled. Sally Marie Tull was the only girl I knew who had a car in ’52.

I’ve taken special notice of the pull-down fire escape situated on the southeast corner wall, the same one that Peggy and I dared, out of fear, to climb to a third-floor window where friends let us in. The coeds of today would surely laugh, as I do now, at the reason for our fear. We were in shorts, you see, without suitable cover-up, without even the tennis rackets that would have justified our brief attire. We had been a hair after 6:00 p.m. getting back to the dorm, the back door was already locked, and we would surely have been caught wearing the strictly forbidden shorts had we gone around to the front, where maybe Miss Shelburne, or worse, Mrs. Minnie Harrison, was on guard.

I had passed by, noted these things, but had not entered the place that had been my home in the fall and spring of 1952-53. I could come and go as I pleased then, of course within the rules of the house. I guess I didn’t enter all these intervening years because it was someone else’s home now. I didn’t know the rules anymore. I would be a stranger, perhaps unwelcome.

The catalyst came in the form of young Carrie Robinson, a TCU sophomore who helps me in my job at the library. Now, in 1989, Carrie lives in Foster Hall. We talked, I about then, she about now. Could anyone just walk in and look around, I asked. Were the back and side doors locked at 6:00 p.m. still? Were there still lounges on the first and second floors, where we had entertained family and friends, where there were pianos one could play if the mood struck, where we had gathered for Frogette meetings and evening devotionals? Was the sun deck still there, where we were allowed (with Mrs. Minnie Harrison watching) to witness attempted panty raids. Was there still a dorm “mother”, who kept you straight, who looked out for you and saw to the well-being of both body and mind, who kept you out of serious mischief and harm? Is there a Miss Shelburne, Mrs. Harrison, or Miss McLendon, still? …a Mrs. Fahrner, Mrs. Ball, or Dr. Huber? It seemed some things were different, and some weren’t. I had finally come to want to know, and so I went to see.

As I mounted the porch steps, all seemed the same, except perhaps the spring in my step. In thirty-six years, that can surely change. Even the old green metal glider–the only piece of furniture then, the only piece now–was in its familiar place to one side of the front entrance. But as I ran my hand over the stone balustrade that borders the porch, I felt something rough and unfamiliar. Graffiti! — rudely scratched inscriptions covered the balustrade and even decorated the stone sides of the front doorway. Barely discernible to the eye, “Lori and Brad” were enclosed in a heart, another heart surrounded “I luv u 4 ever”, and hundreds of initials were bound together with a plus sign, some with dates — all a part of the stone now, an engraved record of Foster’s residents, their friends, and lovers. I vaguely wondered how many of the human ties documented in the stone had remained tied. I looked for signs I could recognize, initials I had known, but the earliest date I found was 1969, long after our time. And then I understood that I probably wouldn’t find any of my contemporaries so noted, wouldn’t find “Betty loves Bill” or JH + JRS. We wouldn’t have dared note our passing in such manner. What if Miss Shelburne, or worse, Mrs. Minnie Harrison, had caught us? To be sure, they would have been watching.

Miss Elizabeth Shelburne had been Dean of Women from as far back as I could remember — Dean Moore’s chronicle of TCU says from 1937-1961. My mother remembers Miss Sadie Beckham before that; my children and today’s children know of Elizabeth Proffer, Dean of Students, Miss Shelburne’s protege and the TCU students’ longtime guardian and advocate.

In Miss Shelburne’s employ were several matrons who actually lived in the girls’ dorms, one to each floor. When I arrived to take up residence at Foster, Mrs. Minnie Harrison was keeping the second floor occupants in line, and German professor, Dr. Irene Huber, was attempting the same on the third floor. Miss Shelburne lived on the first floor in two rooms off the foyer, and although she held court during the day-time in her office in the Ad Building, she was a presence to be wary of at night in Foster, as some of us would discover. Now, on the outside looking in, and from the perspective of those thirty-six years, I wonder that any of those ladies would take the job, with its potential for a mother’s worries multiplied a hundred times over.

Carrie tells me there are no “mothers” to manage her Foster home or to monitor her comings and goings, no checking out or checking in. Upperclass student residence assistants, “RAs”, are “on duty” now–girls taking care of girls. The world and college life changed some while I wasn’t looking. I guess today’s wiser coed needs less care, or maybe swifter communication and ready transportation keep mom and home closer than they could have been in my time.

Having entered Foster at last, I was to find little materially different. Rooms, community restrooms, ironing rooms, and lounges are still in the same place. Air-conditioning, carpeted halls, lounge decor, tacked-up wall signs and notices, and a beach-scene mural painted on the brick walls of the sun deck bespeak a more modern time. Although wall jacks still testify to their earlier existence, hall telephones once used in common by residents, are gone now in favor of private room phones.

A slight change in lifestyle is in evidence, too. Beside each door that opens onto the floors, a poster reminds that Foster Visitation Hours are 1 p.m. – 12 a.m. Sunday through Thursday, 1 p.m. – 2 a.m. Friday and Saturday. Clipboards with guest sign-up sheets hang close by with the warning that “males must be escorted at all times.” I felt Miss Shelburne, and worse, Mrs. Minnie Harrison, looking on with disapproval. In my time, no male was allowed beyond the downstairs parlor at any time; residents were to be in their own rooms, and quiet, by 10:00 p.m. Three infractions and you could be “campused,” not allowed for one whole humiliating week to be out after six or to leave the campus at all.

I feel less alien and somewhat reassured since my talk with Carrie and my visit back home to Foster. Much had moved in thirty-six years, but much had stayed still, and thirty-six years are not as far back now as I had thought they were.

©1989 Joan Hewatt Swaim

Comments closed

It’s taken me a long time to speak of my father. Oh, I know he has appeared briefly in one sketch or another–in this description of his lab, in that story of a church, in a piece about a wildflower field, and in still another scene as Santa Claus. He’s been there, but I have not really told of him. I’m not sure I can now. I can’t seem to fit him on my page. There is that limitation when we try to define our heroes; no single word suits, no page holds heroic dimensions.

If I were allowed only one chance to use only one word to describe him and get it right, I would have to choose “teacher.” Most who read this will remember him within that definition–teacher, professor, mentor–standing at the front of the classroom, darkly handsome, describing with words and cigarette-stained hands such scientific phenomena as oogenesis, epiboly, the particular alignment of the dogfish’s vertebrae, the cat’s comparative anatomy, the pulsing swim of coelenterates, the chambers of the ancient nautilus, and the perdurable twisting ladder of the code-bearing helix that ultimately defines us all.

Some will see him yet at the sea’s edge in swim trunks and battered tennis shoes, holding a precious Upogebia delicately in his thick hands, describing to a spellbound group of sunburned, briny students the little burrowing crab’s unique contribution to the world of marine invertebrates. Or maybe the memory comes of him standing midstream on the rocky bottom of Mary’s Creek, leading his disciples in a search for the myriad forms of insect larvae to which that Trinity tributary played host, or pulling a plankton net through the still pond waters of Fort Worth’s Botanical Gardens, seeking unseen hydra, amoebas, and other minute forms to be discovered only with a microscope’s enhanced eye.

His classrooms were many, his subject vast–life in all its forms, its habitats, and its manifestations. Although his primary responsibility at TCU was preparing young people to enter the healing professions, marine invertebrate biology was his particular love, and he headed for a coastline at every opportunity, usually with an entourage of family, a few students, or sometimes whole classes. Like the Pied Piper of Hamelin Town, the tune he played gathered followers, and he led them along the beach, into mud flats, aboard shrimping boats, and onto the channel jetties, where he climbed among the riprap, revealing the secret places where chitons cling and sea urchins dwell, and where the sea anemone waves its soft tentacle-arms. He could and would hold court anywhere–even a handball court where, with a characteristic grin, he taught much younger, more athletic challengers that youth and arrogance were no substitutes for experience and proficiency.

He was not an “easy” teacher, nor was he an inflexible perfectionist, but when you left his tutelage, if nothing else, you had learned to at least strive toward precision. And if the class were Comparative Anatomy and you passed, you might have a reasonable chance of getting through Mr. Hogan’s Organic Chemistry, too. It was a catch-phrase of the time that pre-meds making it to their senior year had passed through “Hogan, Hewatt, and Hell.” He was a strict disciplinarian in the home and the classroom, firm but never harsh. He was always encouraging, but not falsely so, and the hopes of many pre-med aspirants were dashed, no doubt, when he told them that they would be wise to choose another profession, that his recommendation was required to advance further and, based on their performance, he could not give it.

Although his was an unmistakably scientific mind, requiring analysis and proof–he called it the “corpus delicti”–from his own children as well as his students before making positive observations or categorical statements, there was also a sensibility that put some things beyond explanation, and often he would simply say, again with that grin, “That’s the nature of the beast” and let it go at that.

It wasn’t so much what he taught, as how he taught.

Through his own enthusiasm to know, he made others want to know. Through his own wondering, we were taught to wonder. By his own example, he led others to inquire, to examine, and to sense.

As a little girl sitting in his lap, I learned the sounds of our language and the rhythms and visions poets could make with them, as he read “Annabel Lee,” “The Raven,” “The Highwayman,” “Gunga Din,” and the English-authored Texas poem, his favorite, “Lasca.” He often used poetry in his classes to illustrate his teachings. Who among his former students of Invertebrate Zoology has forgotten his reading of Oliver Wendell Holmes’ ode to the ship of pearl, “The Chambered Nautilus”? With the aid of a wonderful brass telescope, he could pluck magic out of a still summer night and hand it in the form of the moon, the planets, and the stars, to a group of rapt neighborhood children, who thought, like I, that my daddy knew a lot about most things, and just about all there was to know on the subject of worlds beyond the one on which we stood.

Sometimes as I walk on the campus, I am aware of how much I miss his presence here; sometimes someone else’s gait or particular manner will throw me out of the present back into the past of that same place, and I all but speak before I realize it’s now, not then, it’s you, not him. Sometimes when I enter the Winton-Scott science building where he had an office, the familiar smells that permeate the walls of science buildings everywhere prompt a momentary anticipation of seeing him still there, adjusting the air pressure in a saline tank, laying out a round-robin test on the black-topped laboratory tables, or moving among his proteges in an anatomy class, patiently telling, showing, instructing, often cajoling, often laughing. And sometimes as the memories return, I smile and laugh at the good that was mine, and then I cry, because I want it back. He was one of those individuals, rare now it seems, whose clear vision focuses ours, whose wisdom we want to tap, and who ought to be allowed to stay around longer to help us think.

Had I been lover, wife, colleague, friend, I might have been more critical of the flaws (they were only eccentricities) that he had, given that he was, after all, one of us. But there is an insurmountable distance, when the relationship is right, between father and daughter, made of hero-worship, respect, awe, a tentative idolatry on the daughter’s part, and a desire, the obligation to be the hero on the father’s part that precludes a peer-like regard. The daughter is forever in the posture of looking up and the father of looking down, seldom across. The father teaches, the daughter learns, and if the daughter is lucky, she has a hero to look up to and such a teacher as mine.

©1989 Joan Hewatt Swaim

Comments closed

One of the benefits of being a daily part of TCU life is the opportunity to attend the public programs, speeches, and lectures sponsored by the campus community during the school year.

I have always been drawn to a fair amount of these events, and I particularly like the large convocations that are held in Ed Landreth Auditorium, one in the Fall and another usually in the Spring on Honors Day. I like the convocations because they call together in one place the varied components of our university’s heart–its people. I like the air of formality and erudition, with robed and hooded faculty and administrators passing in procession, the group assembled rising as they pass in recognition of the collective high calling such processionals represent. I like the ceremony of academe; it reminds me of a past and present, in which I was, and am still, privileged to take part.

This past September, Dr. James I. Cash, Professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Business and newly-appointed member to the TCU Board of Trustees, was invited to speak at the Fall Convocation which traditionally marks the opening of the academic year. I went with a little more than casual interest to hear Dr. Cash, for he and I participated in some of the same instances of TCU history, and I claim, therefore, some small stake in what he has to say.

A slightly older, slightly more portly James Cash than I had known, began his address by chronicling the year, 1968, a year in the fall of which he would become a senior math student. That year, he recalled, had begun on a high note the night of March 2 in Waco’s Heart o’ Texas Coliseum, when TCU beat Baylor for the Southwest Conference Basketball Championship. James was the starting center on that team, playing under TCU’s new head coach, Johnny Swaim. As James told of that night, I fleetingly wondered if anyone else in that day’s audience remembered, the way James and I did, the particular flavor of that Waco victory, and why it might be appropriate to place its memory in the serious context of his speech. As the memories of that season and that night came bounding back into my consciousness, I found it hard to concentrate on the point that James was moving on to in his speech–that although his year had started out so bright, it soon became a dark, despairing one with the assassinations of Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, and the rioting that erupted in the nation’s cities and on its university campuses; and how there might have been no better time and no better place for him than at TCU, where he was afforded a protected opportunity, in the midst of a world seemingly gone mad, to think, to work, to hope, and to achieve.

Later, the memories that James evoked sent me hunting for the yellowed newspaper clippings and Linda Kaye glossies of the 1967-68 Southwest Conference Basketball season I knew we had kept. They weren’t hard to resurrect from bureau drawers and closets–mementos of one’s successes seem never far away.

With little surprise, the first thing I discovered in reading those twenty-year-old news accounts, is that they tell only a portion of the tale. They deal with the names, facts, and figures, which are short to relate:

“The date: March 2, 1968 The place: Heart o’ Texas Coliseum, Waco The contestants: TCU and Baylor; TCU tied with Texas and Baylor for first place The team: James Cash, Jerry Chambers, Tommy Gowan, Jeff Harp, Randy Kerth, Mickey McCarty, Robert Nees, Mike Sechrist, Carey Sloan, Bill Swanson, Tom Swift, and Rick Wittenbraker; Head Coach Johnny Swaim, Assistant Coach Hal Ratcliff, Trainer Les Bradley, Manager Rick Hosea. The score: TCU 72 – Baylor 65 The clincher: Arkansas beat Texas the same night to thrust TCU alone to the top Season record: won 14, lost 10 SWC record: won 9, lost 5”

What I could read in the news was that the Frogs, that year, were picked to finish no better than third in a field of eight Southwest Conference teams. I read the names of the players and the box scores of the games. I followed the way to the championship from a victorious pre-season tournament in Storrs, Connecticut down through out-and-in league play to the late-season wins over Conference co-leaders A & M, Texas, and then, Baylor, and past that Waco finale to the NCAA playoffs in Kansas, where, after miraculously outscoring a taller Kansas State team, TCU finally found the end of their season when Houston and its “Big E,” Elvin Hayes, predictably sent us packing.

What the reports don’t say, what the news is not able to tell about, has to do with what makes its all relevant. Between the lines of the reporters’ words, there is so much to be said. To give flesh to the impressions of events that endure and subsequently inform us, we need more than names, facts, and figures. Reflective recollections are needed to give significance to the human experience.

It should be told, therefore, of the strong commitment and steady resolve of an unusual group of intelligent young men, who combined their ability, strength, and character into a cohesive, unselfish whole. And there should be mention of the coach who helped them maintain that delicate balance, who was not just leader, but wise instructor and faithful counselor, as well, who spent sleepless nights, figuring with the Xs and Os, how to best the opposition with the resources at hand, and how to get those resources to respond beyond the call; who told them they had a chance if they tried, and they believed him; who told them they were winners, and they believed him.

It needs to be said that we were not alone in the effort. The news reports can’t tell about the Clinkscales and Lowrances and scores of other friends who were always for you and always there to revel with you in triumph and equally there to lighten the burden of defeat. They don’t tell about a friend like Bruce Boswell, who drove to Waco a few days before the final game, bought all the tickets they had left, came back to the Brown-Lupton Student Center and sold them all to the first takers, ensuring that the Frogs would have vital fan support on a foreign court.

And what of the giddy group that drove back from Waco that night full of themselves and their good fortune–the same group of coach, wife, and children, who sometime still laugh in the night, remembering the coup? Hindsight tells me it wasn’t the triumph over Baylor that alone set us to giggling, nor was it the outright championship we had won. We were heady with the occasion, the chance that had been ours to work an opportunity into success in spite of predictions against us, the same kind of opportunity that an older, wiser James Cash would reflect on in the fall of 1988. We had been given an opportunity, we had worked honestly and hard with it, and we had won. I’m not sure you can beat that.

If you weren’t there that year, that season, that night, you should have been. It was a good time to be at TCU.

©1989 Joan Hewatt Swaim

Comments closed

There was a TCU homecoming this fall in September, before the one you think might be the subject of this piece. Homecomings are usually specific in one’s mind to high schools, colleges, and universities, and take us back to a temporary “home” that, because of the amount of time spent there and the impressions made, mark us for better or for worse, forever. In a broader sense, however, a homecoming is a coming again to any vital center of familiar conditions and past associations, and a church can serve as well in that context as any other place. So it was to the church on the northwest corner of University Drive and Cantey that I found myself coming home.

It was just by chance that I knew of the Homecoming Sunday at University Christian Church. Granville Walker, Minister from 1943 until his retirement in 1973, was to return to the pulpit to conduct the service and bring the message. Being an inactive church member and not on the mailing list, I heard of it through my mother, who was called by Rosalyn Woodfin, who knew of our long association with UCC and TCU, and who, finding our names among the unfaithful, either thought we should or could be interested. And so we were, and so we went, Mother, Johnny, and I, to hear Granville again in “his house.” And I am beholden to Rosie. Since I grew up in both, it is difficult for me to separate University Christian Church from Texas Christian University.

Although no longer officially bound to the university–neither one operating under the auspices of the other–I still think of that particular church as a part of the mission of TCU and, indeed, a physical part of the campus, its red-tiled roof and cream-painted brick exterior blending with the tones of campus architecture. Too, many of the people in the church family seemed always to be the same as in the campus family.

In actual fact, the two were born and grew up in mutuality. In the long-ago of 1873 at Thorp Spring, the infant AddRan College, which in its maturity is called Texas Christian University, was “adopted and endorsed” by delegates of Christian Churches in Texas, and Chapel services were a part of the student’s daily routine. As the school grew, so grew the school’s “church,” so that by 1900, now situated in Waco, the college catalog proclaimed that “…there is under the supervision and control of the University, an organized Christian Church, which worships in the Chapel every Lord’s Day.”

In 1911, after the school’s final move to Fort Worth, precipitated by that fire in Waco that destroyed all but the human spirit, an organized church and Sunday School were established by TCU students, faculty, and residents of the university area. Colby D. Hall, who played so many important roles in the university’s administration, was its first pastor. There is evidence that the ministers of UCC were on the TCU payroll at least through Walter Jennings, who resigned as minister in 1922.

All during this time, the membership had no meeting place of its own; Sunday services were held in campus buildings. Finally, in 1933, on land donated by TCU, a modest structure was built that, with considerable subsequent expansions, has been home to the congregation ever since. Perry Gresham was the first to preach from the new pulpit.

By a happy coincidence of time and circumstance, Granville Walker became the fifth minister to serve the Church. On leave from his duties on the TCU faculty, he returned in 1943 to accept the ministry that would last through the next thirty years.

I remember well the first Sunday that Granville preached as UCC’s resident minister. I recall the guarded anticipation and apprehension in my house, especially on the part of my grandmother, who had come to think, along with many others in the congregation, that noone, however educated and eloquent, could ever replace Dr. Perry Gresham in that role. She went to church that morning to take her measure of the young pretender and could come up with only “He’s too skinny” with which to fault him. It didn’t take him and his wife, Erline, very long to become the non-pareils of our church world.

Guided by my father’s and mother’s regard, Granville was an early hero to me. I recognized that he was someone I might at least consider as a worthy when I grew older and was able to think about and choose among such things for myself. Many early idols crumble on mature inspection; Granville hasn’t shown a crack yet.

Homecomings can be risky, but not totally impossible, as American author, Thomas Wolfe, averred. Expectations taken too high can fall to wretched disappointment, ending in a sadness that makes you wish you had left well-enough alone. Not so this September Sunday.

It was like walking back into those thirty years that we so recently left behind. The church was much the same with its warm interior of red brick and stained oak, studded beamed ceiling and windows through which the light comes modulated by the human art of glass staining. The litany was so much the same that I could anticipate its course through the hour without effort, rising on cue and singing the “Gloria Patri” and “Doxology” as if I had only been away for the span of time from one Sabbath to the next.

True, some faces were missing–Mary Beth and Scotty, Betty and Willard and Paul Ridings, Jerome Moore, Don Ver Duin, Lloyd Burns, the Colby Halls, the D. Ray Lindleys, the M. E. Sadlers with their daughter and my friend, Ann, the Herbert Mundhenkes, “Uncle” Thurman Morgan — and Daddy wasn’t there, standing tall among the deacons as they waited at the end of the pews for the communion plates to make their way among the worshippers — winking as he caught my eye.

And I missed the choir director, Arthur Faguy-Cote, and Q’Zella Oliver Jeffus at the organ. Remembering the vibrato that “Faguy,” a voice teacher at TCU, achieved in the Easter hymn, “O’er all the way, green palms and blos-soms gay …,” brought a secret smile to my lips. And Mel Dacus’ large voice and Bita May Hall’s quieter one were in the assemblage rather than among those of the choir.

But Granville was there in the pulpit, and Erline was there at the lectern, his Reader this hour, his companion in life. And after the first few words, he had us again in the thrall of his calm intelligent reasoning, sprinkled o’er with a humor that keeps one from taking oneself too seriously, the importance of his physical place in the pulpit giving way to a genuine humility that never reached the assumption that because he was the herdsman who had the flock, he was more important than they.

In the “Foreword” to Granville’s book, Go Placidly Amid the Noise and Haste, Kenneth Teegarden writes of the “forceful impact of [Granville’s] intimate and compelling speaking style.” Dean Colby Hall, in his chronicle of TCU, speaks of Granville’s “superb and unique ability as a pulpiteer.” But perhaps Jeddie McFarland, a cafeteria employee with whom it was my pleasure to work for three years in TCU’s Faculty Center, said it best: “If I knew Reverend Walker would speak over me, I wouldn’t mind passin’.”

With all due respect to Mr. Wolfe, I don’t believe that you can’t go home again. I can and I have and I will again. And each time I do, I expect I will find many of the same bright windows through which the light shines modulated now by the human art of reflection.

©1988 Joan Hewatt Swaim

Comments closed