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