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In the fall of 49 a fresh-faced, rail-thin 18-year-old from Warsaw, KY, showed up on the doorstep of Transylvania University, ready to show his stuff. He majored in both history and political science, earned the opportunity to spend a term at American University in DC, and was the crafty leadoff hitter for the Pi Kappa Alpha softball team, always a threat to bunt his way on.  Dad loved his Transy days thoroughly and made sure his children knew that as they grew up. He kept in touch with many classmates over the years, served on a reunion committee at least once, and was a faithful donor.

My grandfather Harris had attended TU for two years, 1916-18, but family finances kept him from finishing his education there. No doubt his fond memories played a role when it came time for his only child to go to college; I imagine that’s one reason it felt natural to my father to want the same for Amy and me. Just before my senior year of HS started, Dad and I drove down to Transy to talk with the folks in admissions and take a tour. One thing led to another and before too many months passed, I was ready to commit to being a member of their class of 86. My sister, less pliant than I, chose to carve her own path a year later, accepting a basketball scholarship at Union College in southeastern KY.

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At the end of my senior year in college, the soon-to-be-graduates voted on a number of gag awards to distribute amongst themselves.  I copped two of them: “Most Likely to be Studying on a Friday Night” (false) and “Most Likely to Become a Transy Professor” (perhaps).

There was no open position in the math program at TU when I was on the job market six years later, but one did arise in the spring of 94. I had just moved to a house in Georgetown from an apartment in Lexington in December; nonetheless, I elected to apply, and I was invited for an on-campus interview.

It didn’t go very well. I don’t think I went in overconfident, but I was underprepared.  I gave superficial answers to questions about why I wanted to join the faculty there; my presentation, on a topic from first-semester calculus, provided plenty of evidence that I was still very much a work-in-progress in the classroom. By the end of the day, I knew that I hadn’t earned serious consideration for an offer.

I got over it quickly. That summer I attended a great workshop at Purdue on an innovative approach to an upper-level course I would be teaching in the fall. Its reasonably successful implementation, then and in subsequent years, probably boosted my case for tenure at Georgetown. The following January, I met Martha—perhaps that wouldn’t have happened had I gotten the Transy job.

Dad, on the other hand, took things much harder, holding Transy responsible for the outcome. I attribute much of that to my father’s protective feelings for one of his offspring. But he was also plenty stubborn and a grudge-holder when he wanted to be—over the following year I tried, to little avail, to explain how I just hadn’t merited the offer. He let the matter affect his feelings toward his alma mater. He still went to reunions, but he became much less enthused about staying involved and contributing.

I recognize Dad was an adult possessing full agency for his actions and emotions, but I couldn’t help but feel responsible for his cooled ardor for TU—after all, had I not applied… My father was already plenty bitter about much of the world around him; it seemed like my actions had taken away one of his remaining loves.

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Just about exactly twenty years later, Mom and I sat down in her family room to discuss what kind of charitable donation she might make in honor of Dad’s recent passing. I suggested something to benefit Transy students majoring in the same areas he had studied, and Mom agreed.  Around the same time, an opportunity arose to buy bricks for the renovation of a plaza on the academic side of campus. I purchased one in honor of Dad, one that reads simply “Ira Richard Harris ’53.” It sits just to the right of the base of a big “T” on the north end of the plaza (there’s a “T” and a “U” at both ends).

I suppose these actions were driven in part by my desire to atone for still-lingering guilt, but: a) in the end, Dad’s Transy years were a special period in his life, and b) I have my own dear memories of the place only because of his encouragement that I go there. I’m not trying to pat myself on the back—I just wanted to have all of that honored in some small way.

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Recently I learned of the need to formalize the intentions of the gift made four years ago, and yesterday I went over to Transy to sign the paperwork. Afterward I got a tour of one of their new dorms and also saw the recently-renovated interior of the classroom building adjacent to the plaza. It was an altogether pleasant visit in spite of the cold.

I kept to myself that the next day just happened to be the fifth anniversary of Dad’s death.

Ben came home from school one afternoon with a piece of paper in his hands, gave it to us, and asked, “Can I please do this this year? I have friends that are.” Our eight-year-old had recently started third grade and was brandishing information about an organizational meeting for Cub Scouts to be held soon at the school. This wasn’t the first time, of course—he’d showed interest a year earlier, when we’d chosen to dodge the issue. I had spent some good portion of a year in Cub Scouts, probably when I was a fourth-grader, but I don’t recall any particularly fun or interesting stuff that we did—not enough to want to continue, apparently.  Besides, neither Martha nor I are exactly the outdoorsy type.  But Ben was well aware that the father and son next door to us were heavily involved in Scouting; our son saw the boy, who was four years older, as something akin to a big brother. Whatever Brennen was doing, that’s what Ben wanted.

Fairly close to exactly nine years later, on Monday evening, Ben successfully navigated his Eagle Scout Board of Review, with a little over seven weeks to spare (he had until his 18^th birthday). We’re very pleased for and proud of him. It turned out that he really enjoys camping and not bathing for days on end! But along the way he certainly learned many valuable skills. (As an aside, it’s no surprise that he elected to join Brennen’s Troop when he crossed over from Cub Scouts.)  When we asked him after the meeting Monday about his favorite Scouting memory, he named two: his High Adventure week of sailing in the Florida Keys, and participating in a National Youth Leadership Training Leadership Academy in the DC area (he’s also been on staff at his Council’s NYLT the past three years).

I went camping with Ben twice. The first was for a Scout Centennial Jamboree outside of Louisville in the fall of 10, while he was still a Webelo.  The second came in the summer of 15, on a trip to Muskegon, Michigan. We spent one night on the USS Silversides, a WWII submarine, and another in a local state park. Both were great times; looking back, I can say I wish I had done more of that.

Ben undertook his Eagle project last fall. Its primary focus was cleaning an almost century-old DAR monument near downtown Georgetown, but he also organized a sprucing-up of the area around the monument and replaced the flag on a nearby pole. Later, on a crisp, clear early November morning, there was a rededication and a flag retirement ceremony; members of the DAR and the mayor, among others, were in attendance. From there, just a few merit badges remained. He finished the final one, Family Life, this summer when he completed a landscaping project in our back yard.

At Ben’s Board of Review, the man serving as the chartered organization’s representative to the Troop, who has long ties to the community, gave Ben the photo you see at the top. It’s from the first dedication of the monument, in 1920. That’s quite an incredibly generous gift! The photographer was facing north; directly behind the assembled dignitaries, out of view over a hill, is Royal Spring, the land feature that made Georgetown a desirable spot to settle. There’s now a parking lot for our local electrical utility on the spot where the camera was set up.

It’s dangerous to thank by name the adults who helped guide Ben on this journey—I’m afraid I’ll fail to highlight someone who played a vital role. But I would be remiss if I didn’t specifically mention Ms. Rice for her three years of Cub Scout leadership, Mr. Caldwell, Mr. Maddix, Mr. Morris, and Mr. Baker, who served as Scoutmasters over Ben’s six-plus years in Troop 215, Mr. Rice, Mr. Shaffer, Ms. Homkes, Ms. Fryer, and Mr. Cleland for various Troop roles, Mr. Carruthers for his NYLT mentorship, and Ms. Hanes, for shepherding Ben through the Eagle process (the late Mr. Hanes also had an important part right after Ben crossed over). There were many others who did important work; please know Martha and I are appreciative of all of you. Any oversight in the list above is entirely on me.

We have hundreds of photos of Ben’s Scouting adventure from across the years. I’ll content myself with including just two here.  The first is obviously from Cub Scout days. Martha’s notes say it was taken on a day they went geocaching in Frankfort in the fall of 10. There were a couple other boys in his Pack, but most of the cohort is present here. Three of these pictured wound up staying through to Eagle rank—Ben (in the olive fleece) is the second to finish, but the third will be done very soon.

The second shows our boy working on the monument on the day of his Eagle project (plenty of others were there to pitch in—they’re just not shown in this picture). The view is of the same side you see in the 1920 photo—it’s such a different view! You can see the waterworks now present on the site of the spring behind it.

There will be a celebratory Court of Honor for Ben’s achievement in the coming weeks.  In the meantime, congratulations, son—may you continue to soar, and may what you do with your life be part of the solution.

This post may have limited appeal if you didn’t go to college with me. Consider yourself warned.

A couple of Saturdays ago I went to an alumni event at my undergraduate institution. Entitled “Farewell to Forrer,” it was a chance not only to see old friends and acquaintances but also to bid adieu to what had been the women’s dorm back in my day—it’ll be no more within the next several months, after they strip it down and perform various abatements. In its place will rise an expansive campus center.

Forrer Hall is/was a C-shaped building, with four stories of dorm rooms and a lower/basement level on two of its sides—the high-ceilinged front lobby eats up what would be one level of rooms on, well, the front. Several of the halls were traditionally occupied by members of the four sororities (each group also had a chapter room on the lower level). The campus cafeteria forms the fourth side of the square, and there’s a courtyard in the middle. It had opened in 1958 (which means my era came in the first half of its existence—yikes!).

Transy has done a lot of dorm-building over the last few years. One of the first pieces of that puzzle was to take down Clay-Davis, two men’s dorms that sat at right angles but shared a common lobby. I don’t remember there being a similar event held before their demolition (but who knows if I’m right?)—I would have enjoyed attending that immensely, particularly if I could have toured where the old WTLX studios had been one last time.

I had an overnight visit to Transy during my senior year of high school (my friend Frank also came along), somewhere around November 81. I’d guess my first trips through Forrer happened then, heading across the back circle from Davis to see the academic side, grabbing lunch in the cafeteria. The next time would have been move-in day the following September; I still remember my confusion when one of my new classmates told me that our mailboxes could be found over in “Foy-er” (at least that’s what I thought I heard through his Eastern Kentucky-ish accent).  “The foyer?” I responded.  We got it cleared up and I soon found Box 78 in Forrer’s back lobby.

—

It ordinarily takes me less than thirty minutes to get to Transy from where I live now. Festivities that evening started around 6:30pm, but I was delayed more than a little by a torrential shower on the way. James, Judy, and Suzanne were already on site. After we signed in, I went with James and Judy to take a gander at the now mostly-empty rooms on the first and second floors. Sometime since our graduation, they’d retrofitted them all with air conditioning (insert image here of old man complaining about how easy kids today have it). Judy found a couple of the rooms she’d lived in, though one was still being occupied by a student working on campus over the summer.  The event’s planning committee decorated a few rooms with memorabilia from each of the various decades of the dorm’s life. It was a game effort, but how can one possibly capture the feel of YOUR four years out of a ten-year span in a 12 by 12 space?

Suzanne eventually caught up with us—she’d eaten first—and we all soon headed back downstairs for the rest of us to get our dinner. How long had it been since I’d had a meal in that space? We sat in the “back” part of the cafeteria, a section I didn’t use all that much way back when (except for the spring of my freshman year when the front was closed, while construction of the current campus center was going on). The rest of our remaining time together was spent catching up and reminiscing, with an emphasis on the latter. At one point we walked across Broadway to the academic side of campus, to a courtyard where we sought out the bricks honoring my father and our friend Stacey.

It still surprises me on occasion how simply being in a place can transport one back in time. Several of my friends spent lots of time in the front lobby, so I was there plenty. In January 84, they opened a computer lab in one corner of the lowest level—much of the programming I did over my last five semesters happened there. Transy’s visitation policy in the 80s was maybe a little liberal for its day—curfew was 11pm during the week, 2am on the weekends—so I was upstairs in Forrer from time to time. All those spots, from so long ago, but yet…  For a short while that evening, it felt like I could have been a 20-year-old all over again.

But am I sad that Forrer is coming down? Not really. That time of my life is long gone. I didn’t live there. I’ve seen several (admittedly model) dorm rooms over the last year on college tours—the ones in Forrer are plenty dumpy now, relatively speaking. It’s fine for it to go.

Plus, the new building looks like it will be swell. It’s scheduled to open in about two years. It’s against the odds that Ben will wind up at Transy, but if he does, that’d be the fall of his sophomore year, which was the semester the Young Campus Center opened while I was there.

Well over two hundred alums, spouses, former faculty, and staff attended. I had a great time and appreciate the efforts of the organizers. It’s nice for those of us who live reasonably nearby to get opportunities like that to reconnect.

Not surprisingly, I took pictures that night.  Some of those and a few more short tales are over the flip:

Continue reading “Requiem For A Dormitory”

I’ve been fortunate over the last two-plus weeks to visit with three of the five guys who took part in my wedding (along with their wives). First, I saw Tony and Lisa while the family and I were about to start a short tour of college visits. Last week, I went to a couple of concerts with Greg (Katie went with us to one); I’m hoping to write up reviews in the next ten days or so. And over the weekend, the jumping-off point for this missive, John and Ann came through my neck of the woods.

We’ve had mighty fine weather for late July here in Kentucky the past few days. On Saturday, we met up with John and Ann in Newport, just on the Kentucky side of the Ohio River. We gave the Hofbräuhaus a spin and then walked across the bridge to watch the Reds whip up on the Phillies. Then on Sunday, they drove down to Georgetown and we wound up getting some fine Cuban food in Lexington. It’s been close to a decade since we’ve seen each other, but in so many ways it was just like old times.

As it happens, Sunday was their wedding anniversary, their twenty-eighth. Numbers geek that I am, I have a distinct appreciation for 28^th anniversaries, since that’s how long it takes calendars in the Western World to perform one complete cycle. [Two asides here, at least one of which is pretty nerdish: 1) I have a friend who gave birth to her son on my 28^th birthday, so yes, I can indeed tell you on which day of the week any of his birthdays thus far occurred, just by thinking about my own; 2) I know something else about my 28^th birthday, and I already have given thought to writing about it in roughly eighteen months, for my 56^th birthday.]

So July 29, 1990 was also a Sunday. I recall a few things about that wedding weekend. I stayed in the same hotel with my officemate Paul and his family. The ceremony took place in a beautiful Catholic church in Chicago. John, I, and the rest of the male half of the wedding party almost entered the sanctuary late, but it was all cool in the end. I wished I’d written my toast for the reception beforehand.

And I remember what I listened to on the way back to Urbana that night (it’s Sunday evening as I write this, probably around the same time of day as that journey). As you have no doubt surmised, it was the cassette you see pictured above. Getting it into my hands at that moment was a group effort. That’s not my handwriting. It’s Paul’s. I didn’t have a tape deck then (and wouldn’t until I married), but Paul did, and he was gracious enough to offer to transfer CDs to cassette for me so that I could listen to them in my car. I imagine it was fairly painless for him to do—just pop a disk in, press play and record, and turn the volume to zero so that it wouldn’t disturb his work. I still have around three dozen tapes that he recorded for me in this manner.

They weren’t my CDs, either (shh, don’t tell anyone).  They came with high recommendations from Greg, who had loaned them to me, though I did purchase my own copies later.  Greg and I had started hanging out at the beginning of 90, having met at the bridge club.  There was a lot of overlap in our musical tastes, but since his CD collection was much more expansive than mine, our sharing tended to be one-sided.  The Darling Buds, from England, and the Go-Betweens, from Australia, were probably the first two bands I came to seriously appreciate via Greg. Very different from each other, but both great pop groups.

(The blank cassette was mine.)

Paul had committed those disks to tape only nine days earlier, so I was just gaining familiarity with them. While I certainly didn’t love them like I do now, it wouldn’t shock me if I listened to that tape more than once that night.

It was a transition point in my time at Illinois, at least from a social standpoint. I was now roommate-less, after a little over three years with John. I’d soon move to my one-bedroom apartment on Main St. (We barely squeezed the couch around various corners into the new place. When I moved again a year later, I regret to say that we broke it apart and tossed it out the window.) As it turned out, though, my circle continued to expand. I spent much more time with Greg, Katie, Toby, Karl, and their physics pals. That fall, I got to know new grad-students-in-town Jay and Michelle. And I would play lots of bridge and become better friends with Mark and Chris. Maybe I caught glimpses of the future as I was streaming down I-57 that night, but I strongly suspect I didn’t know for sure. The music definitely helped tamp down any insecurities I might have had.

—

Here’s one song each from Pop Said… and 16 Lovers Lane.  The Buds released several singles in the UK from this album, though the excellent “When It Feels Good” wasn’t one of them.

I think “Quiet Heart” is just plain spectacular. It’s always struck me as a fascinating choice for the second track on the disk; it’s quite an act of confidence to place a ballad in that slot.

Best birthday wishes to my wife and sister-in-law! They get to celebrate a good chunk of their day together this year; at the time of posting, Martha is en route to Black Mountain, NC, where she and Ruth will spend the next few days at a choral workshop.

The above pictures were taken at sixteen months; for those of you who know them, can you tell which is which? Over the last couple of decades, I’ve gotten the chance to play that game on a few dozen photos from their pre-school years–not bragging, but I believe I get it right over 90% of the time (yes, there’s usually a tell). Occasionally I get the question if I have trouble with identifying them now.

Here’s another one, taken at Christmastime 40+ years later. This time, I’ll clue you in: Martha’s on the left, with Ruth on the right.

Hope you both have a wonderful day!