DISTINCTION WITHOUT PRETENSION

INTRODUCTION

[S]o there ain’t nothing more to write
about, and I am rotten glad of it, because
if I’d a knowed what a trouble it was to
make a book I wouldn’t a tackled it, and
ain’t a-going to no more.

Huck Finn

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Exiting Interstate 94 at Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, I steered my 1600-cc Goldwing into the Pilot Truck Stop. When traveling by motorcycle on venerable trips across our USA, it is my practice to take a break after every two-hour stretch. I had discovered during my solo sojourns atop a two-wheeled vehicle that life is a routine and placid continuum interrupted periodically by people and events that disturb or augment the sameness of one’s days.

It was during this road trip in late June 1999 that I scribbled the first of scores of reminiscences about friends and foes, and of adventures both sublime and ridiculous, in the journal that I filled during my peregrinations. After saturating three such diaries with accounts of episodes humorous and grave, inane and weighty, routine and shocking, it struck me that the great majority of my stories and anecdotes had some confluence with my alma mater. 

That so many of my recollections emerged from days at Indiana Central College-Indiana Central University-University of Indianapolis* should not have surprised me. After all, I had spent more than a third of my fifty-four years as either a student or an administrator on the lilliputian campus at 1400 East Hanna Avenue in Indianapolis, Indiana.

Two bookend events—the assassination of President John Kennedy on November 23, 1963, and 9/11/01, that awful day when fanatical terrorists attacked the Pentagon and destroyed the twin towers of New York City’s World Trade Center with three flying bombs—roughly marked my intimate association with the college in University Heights. ICC-ICU-U of I has been a central theme running through my life. If Sam Clemens were me, Indiana Central would be his Mississippi River.

No single event or memory inspired me to organize the etchings of my mind into this manuscript. While by his own account, Professor Marvin Henricks’s From Parochialism To Community was “a word painting to catch the essence of the experience” at Indiana Central, the modus operandi for me was more like that of when you were a kid in summer, lying on your back on the grass with friends and saying things like, “That cloud reminds me of a … ,” and writing it down.

I was part of, or an eyewitness to, most of the events described in this book. Historical and anecdotal accounts of events that I did not personally observe were derived from many sources. I especially

drew upon a rich body of conversations through the years with an untold number of friends, colleagues, and acquaintances. Many of these tales are owned by others and deserve telling. On these accounts I am at the mercy of the veracity of those who have shared with me. And everyone acquainted with Leo Miller, for example, knows he never let facts get in the way of a good yarn.

I do seem to have an exceptional recall. Why I remember our first telephone number (4-5-2-W) in Martinsville, which my parents taught me in 1950, I cannot say. In writing this account, I didn’t have to look up the fielding average (.956) of the 1964 Greyhound baseball team of which I was a member. Thirty-nine years ago we were, statistically at least, the third-best defensive team in the nation. Dad’s beer of choice when I was a preteen was Falls City, brewed in Louisville, Kentucky. I haven’t seen that label in decades.

Despite my proclivity to call up vivid portraits of past events, as one ages, some facts become fuzzy. In writing my accounts of the life and people at the college, I’ve taken the advice of no less a poetic icon than Emily Dickinson, who said, “Tell the truth/But tell it slant.”

The original title of the college chartered in 1902 was Indiana Central University. In 1921, after a ruling by the Indiana State Board of Education, the board of trustees began to use “Indiana Central College” as the name of the school, despite the fact that the college’s legal title remained Indiana Central University. In 1976, the title Indiana Central University was restored. Finally, in 1986, President Gene Sease and the board changed the institution’s legal name to the “University of Indianapolis.”

That’s what you get in this book: my “slant.” The contents of the tract are told from my viewpoint, which automatically limits, and perhaps, distorts, the information. It is through my personal prism that you will view the Indiana Central that I came to know and love.

So if you find in this book something you consider apocryphal (a decorative word I learned in Fred Hill’s Old Testament class), consider that it may be. As American humorist Irvin Cobb said, “A good storyteller is a person who has a good memory and hopes other people haven’t.” And it is well known that two persons witnessing the same incident may render vastly different versions of the occurrence. Winston Churchill described one political foe not as a liar but as one who suffered from a case of “terminological inexactitude.”

A school, like any social organization, is ultimately defined by its people. Writing in the Chicago Tribune, historian Janet Ginsburg commented that, “History inevitably comes down to the stories of individuals and moments that ma