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