The Second Phase of My Involvement in CASL Administration: Twilight Musing Autobiography (Part 23)

A key decision I had to make early in my year as acting dean was whether to be a candidate for a regular 3-year term as dean. After discussing the matter with friends and praying about it (though I suspect not sufficiently), I decided that the College would be best served by my not being a candidate, thereby lending more credibility to my being an honest and impartial broker between competing departmental objectives. I wanted the year to achieve the healing of animosities and distrust of administration within the College. My motives were good, I think, but I’m not sure my judgment was sound, especially in view of the person who was selected for the job after a nationwide search.

Joachim (“Kim”) Bruhn was a portly, friendly man who generally made a good first impression. However, within a few months his jolly “Hello, I’m Kim Bruhn, and I’m new here” began to wear thin, and his handling of the job proved less than satisfactory. One staff member observed that his personality and character were “a mile wide and an inch deep.” He had grand ideas about where the College should go and how it should get there, but he was terrible when it came to details. And on top of that, he had very flexible standards of telling the truth. He relied heavily on his staff to handle details, and so he was not always immediately and responsibly aware of exactly where the College’s finances stood nor what was the state of day-to-day operations. All of this meant that often I found myself being asked to explain or defend policies and decisions that I either lacked information on (because he had failed to tell me) or felt were on shaky ground.

I oversaw the College’s dealings with campus service units, such as Admissions and Registration and Records, and in doing so I was able to trade on relationships I had built during my year as Acting Dean. They trusted me, but they were sometimes puzzled by the difference in what they heard from Dean Bruhn and what they heard from me. Faculty in general did not hold Kim in high regard, and my close association with him tarnished my character with them sometimes. All these frustrations led to my deciding to resign as Associate Dean after serving two years.

When I informed Provost Eugene Arden, my friend and mentor over the years, he asked me out to lunch and made a strong pitch for me to stay on for another year. He argued that I was among the top 10% of people he had observed over the years in my aptitude for administration and that if I toughed it out I would have a good potential for an administrative career. I think perhaps he was already seeing that Kim Bruhn would not be approved for a second term as Dean, and that I was in a good position to succeed him. On the other hand, if I resigned (whatever my reasons), it would be a blot on my record and a hindrance to my being chosen for future administrative jobs. However, I was not willing to endure another year of working with Kim Bruhn and felt morally obligated to resign in order to disassociate myself from his dishonesty. In retrospect, that may have been an exercise of poor judgment. I think I was more concerned with my reputation than with whether the Lord wanted me persevere or give up.

In December of 1975, a disrupting event happened in Module 8 that turned out to have personal consequences for me. Early one morning, I received a call that a fire had broken out in our set of modules. (The sage comment of the Fire Warden when he assessed it was, “It appears to have been either an accident or arson.”) When I arrived on campus, I found that there had been considerable damage in Module 8, especially in a room where most of my campus library was stored. Later in the day, Laquita and I were dismayed at how many books were scorched and water-logged. We had to leave things in place until the insurance people had reviewed the scene in order to process the school’s claim for damage compensation. A good proportion of my books had to be written off for any remaining market value. We finally received our part of the school insurance settlement and were ready to move the books home to do whatever repairs we could. The year before this, we had bought a house in an attractive neighborhood about ten minutes away from the campus. We didn’t quite have the required down payment (1/3 of the cost in those days), so we swung a short-term bank loan for the balance and closed the deal. In August of 1974, we moved into 9 Adams lane in Dearborn, where we lived for the next 44 years. It was here that we moved the damaged books, storing them in the basement while we salvaged what we could, which turned out to be a majority of them.

Then, someone suggested we look into our homeowners’ insurance policy to see if there might be some recompense from them for the damaged books. We filed a claim, and wonder of wonders, we received a check for almost exactly the amount of our short-term loan! That incident has been a standard story in our history of incidents illustrating the Lord’s special provision in times of need. In addition, the great increase in my base salary during my years in administration had incremental effects in subsequent years, and the final result was a very healthy retirement package that even now is supplying the bulk of our retirement income. God’s supply of our financial resources over the years has kept us from being in debt except for one short term mortgage. That is one tangible result of my year as Acting Dean.

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Dr. Elton Higgs was a faculty member in the English department of the University of Michigan-Dearborn from 1965-2001. Having retired from UM-D as Prof. of English in 2001, he now lives with his wife in Jackson, MI. He has published scholarly articles on Chaucer, Langland, the Pearl Poet, Shakespeare, and Milton. Recently, Dr. Higgs has self-published a collection of his poetry called Probing Eyes: Poems of a Lifetime, 1959-2019, as well as a book inspired by The Screwtape Letters, called The Ichabod Letters, available as an e-book from Moral Apologetics. (Ed.: Dr. Higgs was the most important mentor during undergrad for the creator of this website, and his influence was inestimable.

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Dean for a Year: Twilight Musing Autobiography (Part 22)

Toward the end of my sabbatical year in England, I received a spate of phone calls from back home at UM-Dearborn.  The first was from Dennis Papazian, chair of the Division of Arts, Sciences, & Letters, whom I had served as his associate chair.  He informed me that a cabal of faculty were at work seeking to prevent him from continuing in his position as head of the unit for a year while a search was conducted for a Dean of the College of Arts, Sciences and Letters (CASL).  The renaming of the position from Division Chair to Dean, would be part of the reorganization of the academic units through a new set of bylaws, a kind of constitution for the governance of the campus.  Dennis was pleading with me not to accept a coming offer to take the post of Acting Dean for the next academic year.  The second call came from two colleagues who were leading the “rebellion” against Dennis, urging me to accept the offer when it came from the Chancellor.  They described the alleged offenses of Dennis as Chair and described the wide support they had found (generated?) for deposing Dennis and appointing me.  The third call came from the Chancellor, who detailed the generous terms of the appointment and said he was acting on a petition for my appointment from a number of faculty in liberal arts.

All of this was very heady stuff for a still young mid-grade faculty member.  Laquita and I talked it over, and I called the Chancellor back and accepted.  We flew back home with mixed delight and apprehension for the task that lay ahead.  With just about everybody except Dennis Papazian, I was the golden-haired boy (though I didn’t have much hair of any color left by that time), and I’m afraid I didn’t approach the job with any great humility.  As soon as I could after I arrived back at campus, I went to see the Provost (chief academic officer) of the campus, Eugene Arden, who was a mentor and advocate for me throughout the rest of his years at UM-D.  His administrative assistant, Elnora Ford, greeted me warmly, and I was announced and ushered into the Provost’s office for my first interview with him.  He was a New York Jew who had the brash and often acerbic wit that one associates with New Yorkers.  He could be very gentle and helpful toward those he thought deserved it, but bitingly dismissive of those he thought were being dishonest or manipulative.  (Later, he described a group of dissident faculty members who called themselves the “Committee of Concerned Faculty,“ as the “Committee of Disturbed Faculty.”)  He warned me of the politics that had been the source of my being appointed, and he assigned me an associate dean from the Social Sciences Dept. to “balance the ticket,” so to speak.

Dennis Papazian very much wanted to talk to me, so I went to his office on the first day or two after I returned.  He complained bitterly of how he had been treated and blamed primarily Claude Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth, two of my colleagues in English and, in the future, my next-door neighbors.  He said they spearheaded the campaign to depose him, and that the power they showed did not bode well for the future.  On that matter, he proved to be right, as I would discover to my great distress.  But for the moment, he was primarily wanting to convey his feeling that, after having been trained by him to do administrative work and being his close associate, I turned on him and was willing to accept the Acting Dean appointment without any regard to loyalty that I owed him.  In my naivete, I had not even thought about that aspect of the offer, especially since I rather agreed with his critics that he was a wheeler-dealer who sometimes cut corners ethically.  Unfortunately, my relationship with Dennis remained strained for many years after that.

I went to get settled into my office in the extemporized quarters for CASL administration, one of several “temporary” modular units (actually some of them stayed around for 10 to 15 years).  The Dean’s office was located in the corner of Module 8, which also housed the College secretaries and associate administrators, including the administrative secretary, Fern Ledford, and the financial assistant, Joe Rath.  Don Proctor, my associate dean, also had an office there.  Since he was also chairman of the Social Sciences Dept., his Module 8 office was secondary.  Fern Ledford kept my calendar and took my calls, so I worked quite closely with her; and Joe Rath made sure that I was aware of the state of College accounts and knew of any inappropriate expenditures.

As Dean, I chaired the Administrative Council (department chairs) and the Executive Committee (elected representatives from each department responsible for setting academic policy for the College).  We met on a regular basis so that we would be mutually informed of what was going on in the departments and could make decisions appropriate to each body.  There had been much tension during the past year among these groups because of the movement to oust Dennis Papazian from his position, so my first job was to assure my colleagues that I would deal openly, transparently, and honestly with them, to the best of my ability.  In the discussion of starting the search for a permanent dean, I had to make the decision of whether I would be a candidate.  I declined to do so, lest my candidacy taint my ability to carry out disinterestedly my job as Acting Dean.  Although I made the decision from good motives, as things turned out, I think the College might have been better off had I elected to run, since the man who was appointed, Kim Bruhn, was not a happy choice and was replaced after only one term.

I think that in general people wanted me to succeed in restoring some harmony to College administration.  I was able during the year to convince people that I wanted to deal with them straightforwardly.  Early in my year’s tenure, I was able to carry out a deal with the Natural Science Dept. to purchase a key piece of equipment that they needed by implementing a creative way of financing the transaction and getting it approved by the Provost.  That was an indication that I was broadly supportive of all departments, not just Humanities, and that I was sympathetic to the special (and expensive) equipment needs of the sciences.  I also established a good working relationship with the other Colleges and the academic support units, such as Admissions, Registration and Records, and staff members in the Chancellor’s office.

I learned a lot that year that laid the foundation for further administrative duties, but I never held the top spot again.  At the end of the year the Provost asked me to stay on as Associate Dean of the College to provide continuity and to be able to use my administrative talents to help the College to function smoothly.  UM-D was still growing at the time, and CASL needed to be guided to absorb that growth without sacrificing either good order or quality of programs.  The next installment will cover my two years as Associate Dean.

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Dr. Elton Higgs was a faculty member in the English department of the University of Michigan-Dearborn from 1965-2001. Having retired from UM-D as Prof. of English in 2001, he now lives with his wife in Jackson, MI. He has published scholarly articles on Chaucer, Langland, the Pearl Poet, Shakespeare, and Milton.  Recently, Dr. Higgs has self-published a collection of his poetry called Probing Eyes: Poems of a Lifetime, 1959-2019, as well as a book inspired by The Screwtape Letters, called The Ichabod Letters, available as an e-book from Moral Apologetics. (Ed.: Dr. Higgs was the most important mentor during undergrad for the creator of this website, and his influence was inestimable.

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My Thrilling First Sabbatical Leave Abroad (2) (Part 21)

Our trip into Scotland was a good launch to the year for us. It paved the way for us to take subsequent family trips and for touring around with guests from the U.S. We hosted our friends Wendell and Joyce Bean and their daughter, Melanie, who was about Liann’s age, and with them, we rented a van and visited the Cotswolds, Wales, and northwest England. It was in Chester that we discovered one morning that in the confusion of our departure we had left behind our little Cynthia at the B&B. We quickly corrected our mistake, and Cynthia was quite calm when we arrived, having been plied with cookies by the proprietress while she waited. Crossing the English Channel by ferry, we hit the high spots in Paris and Amsterdam, as well as visiting Cologne and its magnificent cathedral. Unfortunately, our most vivid memory of the visit to Cologne was an incident where Joyce got locked into a toilet booth because she didn’t have the correct coin for paying the attendant. The woman was quite insistent that Joyce would not be released until she paid properly! Finally, someone came in and resolved the matter, and Joyce was released.

We also had the pleasure of being visited by Sel and Helen Sutterfield, who were “uncle” and “aunt” to our children, who were quite comfortable with them and readily engaged in conversation with them. One morning Helen came down for breakfast in one of her usual tasteful ensembles, and Liann told her,”Aunt Helen, you look very “smaht” this morning,” using both an English term of description and its British pronunciation. With the Sutterfields we concentrated on points of interest in London and the south of England, including notable sites in Essex, such as the great house of Audley End and the ancient log church in Greensted.

One of the Essex sites that touched our hearts was the old church of St. Peter’s-on-the-Wall, at Bradwell-on-Sea. It was out in a lonely field on the North Sea and had been restored and re-consecrated, after being used many years as a barn. Built in 654 by St. Cedd, early evangelist to the East Saxons, it was impressive, even in its austerity. Praying there, we felt the power of the centuries of prayers that had been offered there. It was constructed of materials remaining from a Roman fort on that site. In contrast nearby was a WWII concrete bunker, one of many that had been built for coastal defense. At the other end of the spectrum was the famous Canterbury Cathedral, ecclesiastical home of the Archbishop of Canterbury, the clerical head of the Church of England. The beauty and glory of the ancient cathedrals never ceased to amaze us. It is also the destination of the group of pilgrims in Geoffrey Chaucer’s medieval poem, The Canterbury Tales, making it especially meaningful to me as a teacher of literature. The town walls still stand, forming part of the walls around the Cathedral Close, the private grounds belonging to the Cathedral.

Back in Upminster, we settled into our routine. The girls were quickly oriented to their school. It was only a short distance away from our house, and they went back and forth on their own, even coming home for lunch. They did well academically, and Cynthia, being only four when she started, got a head start from where she would have been in the U. S. The headmistress, Mrs. Pullam, was a traditional British school administrator and believed in developing character in her students, as well as intellectual skills. The boys wore short pants all the year around, whatever the weather. When one of the mothers asked Mrs. Pullam about their abbreviated garments in very cold weather, she replied, “It toughens them up!” One of our early memories of Cynthia’s marching to the beat of her own drum arose from her being late coming home from school one day. We went looking for her, and we found her poring over a trail of ants on the sidewalk. She was always interested in bugs, and she saw no reason that she should not just follow where her curiosity led.

Laquita spent a lot of time that year reading books, including a good deal of the local history of Upminster and the Borough of Havering, which was the political and geographical area of which Upminster was a part. We went on walks to see sights she identified through her reading, such as the old Cranham parish church associated with James Oglethorpe, principal founder of the State of Georgia. Right in the center of Upminister was the old parish church of St. Lawrence’s, known for its “high church” liturgy. Because of its use of incense and the ringing of a bell with the Eucharist, Evangelicals laughingly referred to them as “smells and bells.” We visited both the grounds and the inside of the church and found the usual reflections of distinguished parishioners of the past who were buried there. The most prosperous of the members were able to set brass images of themselves and their families into the floor of the church to mark where they were buried. One of Laquita’s interests during the year was doing brass rubbings that were made by stretching a strong sheet of black or white paper over a brass gravestone and rubbing a special wax, called a “heel ball,” across the paper to create an image of it. We have a number of these framed on our house walls, and she gave several of them to people as special gifts. It was fairly easy to gain access to the brasses back then, but it has become increasingly difficult to get permission for this activity, and most churches now charge for it. Laquita and I took several excursions by bus to visit small, very old parish churches that had brasses she wanted to rub.

The customs of daily living in those days still reflected “old England,” since it took the country many years to recover from the privations of World War II. Shopping for food was a challenge, since refrigerators were small and it was necessary to go down to the row of shops serving the community every day or two. One would go to the butcher for meat, to the greengrocer for fresh fruits and vegetables, to the chemist (pharmacist, drug store) for medicines and sundry items, and to the small grocer for other food items. There was also a hardware store, a shoe shop, and a laundromat, which we visited regularly. The shopper was to bring her own shopping cart or bags to hold all the items. One had to go into the town of Upminster to find a grocery of any size, and nothing like our modern supermarkets. By the time we returned there to live again in 1980, refrigerators were bigger and supermarkets had begun to spring up. Milk was delivered to most homes every morning, so that was a help. One day early in our stay, Laquita heard a horse-drawn cart coming down the street with a man ringing his bell and shouting something, so she went out to meet him with 50 pence in hand and asked for a cabbage, thinking he was selling vegetables. He replied, “Oh, no luv, Oi’m the rag and bone man,” meaning he collected junk to sell. No doubt he had a chuckle about that strange American woman.

Across from the shops was the local bank, Nat West, or National Westminster. Tellers generally knew their customers, nearly all of whom lived in the neighborhood. We opened an account, and before long we were visited by the bank manager, Mr. Chambers, a man of 60 or so who was part of the country club set and later in the year treated me to lunch in the exclusive country club dining room. I was of course a complete neophyte in the financial customs and had to learn to write checks and deposit slips in the British manner. The tellers were amused at my accent and my lack of common knowledge about British customs. We have maintained our Nat West account all these years, but, alas, the Cranham Branch closed a number of years ago, and our relationship with the downtown Upminster Branch was never as personal as the one in Cranham.

Every so often we would catch bus number 248 in Cranham and go to downtown Upminister to shop for groceries and other items. The “anchor store” for Upminster was Roomes’ Department Store, which was very large and occupied two buildings across the street from each other. Among the other shops we liked was a little bookstore called Swan’s. It was delightfully cluttered and had a wide variety of books, new and used. One of the most lasting of our purchases there were children’s story tapes that we listened to with our children for two generations. Rachel still has some of them. We also bought travel books there and maps. Number 248 could also take us to Romford, the old Essex market town. Market day there brought hundreds of farmers, clothes merchants, craft and jewelry sellers, fast food stalls, and other people hawking all sorts of wares. It was a marvelous sight and we usually brought home something useful or interesting.

When we could arrange for after-school care for the children, Laquita and I spent days in London, especially in the traditional financial district called the City, or the “Square Mile,” with its ancient Roman walls and beautiful churches built by Sir Christopher Wren after the Great Fire of London in 1666. The best-known structures in the City, of course, are the Tower of London and St. Paul’s Cathedral, the crown of Wren churches. It was delightful to be there in the winter time, since there were few tourists and one could walk even in the British Museum without crowds. We were not much into shopping, but we did go to the famous Harrod’s Department Store, with its amazing artistic display of fish and confections. Toward the end of our stay, we went to a big china shop in London called Lawley’s and bought a set of Royal Doulton china in the Valley Green pattern. It has been our special set of dishes for guests and family festive occasions. We had it shipped, and it was an exciting final touch to our trip when the china arrived at our house a few weeks after we got home. What a year it was!

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Dr. Elton Higgs was a faculty member in the English department of the University of Michigan-Dearborn from 1965-2001. Having retired from UM-D as Prof. of English in 2001, he now lives with his wife in Jackson, MI. He has published scholarly articles on Chaucer, Langland, the Pearl Poet, Shakespeare, and Milton.  Recently, Dr. Higgs has self-published a collection of his poetry called Probing Eyes: Poems of a Lifetime, 1959-2019, as well as a book inspired by The Screwtape Letters, called The Ichabod Letters, available as an e-book from Moral Apologetics. (Ed.: Dr. Higgs was the most important mentor during undergrad for the creator of this website, and his influence was inestimable.

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My Thrilling First Sabbatical Leave Abroad (1) (Part 20)

In August of 1972, my family (my wife and I and two little girls, 4 and 5 years old) took off on our first transatlantic flight, bound for England to spend a year in academic research and travel.  We were still young and adventurous enough to launch out into a new world with only the barest of ideas about how to manage it.  We had been put in touch with a faculty member at King’s College in London, Prof. Ronald Waldron, a published scholar in Middle English language and literature.  Having reserved a room in a small bed and breakfast hotel in London next to Paddington Station (the Ty-Mellon it was called), we stayed there a week while we searched in the classified newspaper ads for a place to live.  However, having been cautioned not to go to bed immediately on arrival, we took some time to orient ourselves to the city through a tourist bus ride that pointed out all the major sites of interest.  Having been up for 18 hours or so, we went to bed around 8 p.m. London time and slept well.  Very soon after we arrived, we phoned Professor Waldron (with whom we were quickly on a first name basis), and he invited us for tea at his house (a light supper, not just something to drink).   He gave us instructions on how to get to a train station near his home in Essex, where he met us with his car and drove us to his home.  It was a delightful experience with Ron and his wife Mary and their three children.  We became good friends, and whenever we went back to England for subsequent sabbaticals or just visits, we always tried to spend some time with them.  Mary died several years ago, but we are still in touch with Ron.

We finally settled on a house for rent in a “bedroom suburb” of London called Upminster, about a 45-minute train trip from central London, or, as it was often identified, the last stop on the District Line of the London Underground system.  I’m sure God engineered that place for us, since it set us up to find a church in that community and to make some long-lasting friendships that have enriched our lives even to this day.  At that point, Laquita and I still wanted to maintain our relationship to the Churches of Christ, but the only one at all accessible to us (we had no car that year) was a small church in central London.  We tried going there several Sundays, but public transportation was unreliable on Sundays, which were often used by the railway system to make repairs.  Consequently, we started searching in the Upminster community for a church we could walk to.  We tried attending a nearby Baptist church, thinking it would be closer to our traditional ties, but that didn’t click for us, so we visited the local Anglican church, and we were warmly welcomed there and decided to continue with them.  The church was called St. Luke’s in Cranham, which was the name of the old village that been incorporated into the larger town of Upminister.  On our first or second visit we were invited home to Sunday lunch with a young couple named Terry and Val Thorpe, and that was the beginning of one of those rich friendships that have lasted to this day.

We soon realized that this congregation was not in the mainstream of the Church of England, but was part of a minority of conservative evangelicals within the C. of E.  The Vicar at the time was John Simon, who had been converted by evangelical preaching in the business area of London and had dropped his banking career to become a clergyman.  He brought to St. Luke’s an informal style of worship, often leading the singing with his accordion rather than the organ, reflecting the evangelical move away from adherence exclusively to the formal (and often lifeless) Anglican liturgy.  How interesting that God brought us into fellowship with a conservative congregation that was to enrich us for many years to come

Our neighbors on Helford Way were warm and welcoming.  The Stiff family next door were agents for our landlord, a sea captain working out of Beirut, Lebanon.  Roy and Elsie had us for tea on the day we looked at the house and for meals several times after that.  The neighbors on the other side of us were also hospitable, an older couple, John and Martha Morris and their teen-age son, Peter, who was deaf.  Martha was a Scotswoman who had met and married John when they were in their 30s.  They were both great talkers and regaled us with stories of their WW II experiences.  The Stiffs also had teen-age children, two daughters, who did some baby-sitting for us. They were greatly amused by our girls’ pronunciation of “bear,” with the American “r,” in contrast to the English “bayah.”  Helford Way was a cul-de-sac, so it didn’t have a lot of traffic, and it was a safe place for Liann and Cynthia to play.  We were within easy walking distance of the primary school (or “infant school,” as the English called it) that they attended.  Liann was a first grader, and Cynthia was in kindergarten.  They enjoyed attending there, and they soon picked up perfect English accents, of which we became aware one day when Liann asked us for a drink of “wotah.”

Soon after moving into our house, we launched out to take a road trip to Scotland, since September is usually still good weather for touring.  We were rather bold in deciding to drive and stay at bed and breakfast (B&B) places rather than taking a guided tour of some sort.  Learning to drive on the “wrong” side of the road took some major adjustment, but apart from a fender-bender accident on one of their roundabouts (traffic circles) at the beginning, we did all right, and when we went back in subsequent years, we thought nothing about driving ourselves around on English roads.  Doing so gave us a great deal more flexibility, and before the year was out, we were able to drive even in downtown London.  Laquita arranged in advance the B&Bs we stayed at, often in the country.  These enabled us to meet British people as we ate breakfast together and sometimes sat together in the parlor in the evenings.

Some of the roads, especially in the mountains, were quite narrow and a bit scary.  I did most of the driving, and Laquita was rather white-knuckled as she looked over the edge down into the valley.  Moreover, not all of these roads had railings!  However, driving on these country roads supplied some spectacular views.  At one point in the highlands of Scotland we pulled off to the side and looked out over a mist-covered lake (or “loch”) and heard a bagpiper playing on the other side.  It was beautiful, but a bit eerie, too, as the sound at that distance had a kind of ghostly echo.  We also visited cities in Scotland, most memorably Edinburgh and Stirling, both of which had famous Castles.  One evening we questioned an old man at a B&B where we were staying as to the location of Loch Ness, which we knew to be nearby.  He took his pipe out of his mouth and pointed, saying, “The Loch-ch-ch (the ch sound seemed drawn out forever) is doon that wey.”  We did make it to Loch Ness, but no monster sightings.

When we got back to Upminster, we settled into a routine of taking the kids to school, attending to household and business chores, and getting me settled in as a “visiting scholar” at the University of London, King’s College, where Ron Waldron was a professor.  Those credentials formed the basis for me to be registered at the British Museum, where I wanted to do some research in medieval studies, and more specifically, I wanted to be able to work in the famous British Library.  Ron helped me get registered in and oriented to all of the places where a scholar in Middle English might want to spend some time, including the Senate House Library, which served all of the colleges of the University of London,  and especially the manuscript reading room of the British Library.  In addition, he introduced me to several of his colleagues in the King’s College English Department, including the Head of Department.  Again, they were all very warm and welcoming. 

I felt quite privileged to be allowed into the manuscript room at the British Library, which housed many original and unique ancient manuscripts.  People could use only pencils to take notes, and I had to order any specific manuscript by its catalogue number.  That meant that I had to know exactly what I wanted to see—no browsing on the shelves!  I was given a numbered place at a table, and the manuscripts I had ordered were delivered to me at that spot.  I had two kinds of research I was doing that year.  First, I wanted to see unpublished manuscripts relating to the literary figure Piers the Plowman, from which one of the dream-works I analyzed in my doctoral dissertation took its name.  Secondly, Ron Waldron arranged for me to be assigned the examination and description of a section of documents in the British Library to be included in the Index of Middle English Prose, a major project to catalogue all of the M.E. prose manuscripts as yet unpublished.  I needed to get some instruction in paleography (reading documents hand-written in early styles), so I audited some of the classes offered to users of University of London libraries, aided by textbooks in paleography.

I met often with Ron for lunch, sometimes in his office, sometimes in a pub, for chats about our work and about English life in academe and the nature of English society and culture.  We formed a close personal friendship that year, and I owed him much for getting me established in my research.

More next time about our travel and excursion experiences during that year.

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Dr. Elton Higgs was a faculty member in the English department of the University of Michigan-Dearborn from 1965-2001. Having retired from UM-D as Prof. of English in 2001, he now lives with his wife in Jackson, MI. He has published scholarly articles on Chaucer, Langland, the Pearl Poet, Shakespeare, and Milton.  Recently, Dr. Higgs has self-published a collection of his poetry called Probing Eyes: Poems of a Lifetime, 1959-2019, as well as a book inspired by The Screwtape Letters, called The Ichabod Letters, available as an e-book from Moral Apologetics. (Ed.: Dr. Higgs was the most important mentor during undergrad for the creator of this website, and his influence was inestimable.

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Campus Expansion and Sabbatical Plans (Part 19)

The first freshman class was admitted to UM-Dearborn in the fall of 1971, twelve years after the establishment of the campus in 1959 as a junior and senior (or “upper-division”) college.  It signaled radical changes In the campus, from a new general education curriculum, to new faculty to teach the new courses, to provision of new physical facilities to house the expanded class offerings.  There had to be expanded and new administrative structures, too, and, as I commented before, that opened fresh opportunities for me. 

My place in the Division of Literature, Science, and the Arts was made official by my being designated as Administrative Assistant to the Chairman of LS&A.  I had heavy responsibility in revising the Campus Catalogue to include descriptions of the new courses and general education requirements being instituted.  I also continued to be the coordinator of student advising and handler of academic petitions from students requesting recognition of transfer courses or an exception to the academic rules.

 I was still working under Dennis Papazian, and that occasioned some tensions as I tried to follow his directions, but also to deal straightforwardly and honestly with those with whom my work brought me into contact.  I remember one time when Dennis asked me to put together some statistics and to present them to the Division Executive Committee.  The purpose was to further some objective of Dennis’s in the allocation of resources.  Some of the Discipline Chairs smelled the hidden agenda, and I had to share the attack that accused both of us with playing fast and loose with the data.   Nevertheless, I generally got along with people and managed to stay fairly free of political maneuvering.

It was during this period that the term of the Humanities Discipline Chair, Sidney Warschausky, ended and the Discipline had to select a new Chair.  The two declared candidates were both close friends, Myron Simon, who had helped Laquita and me get a place to live when we first came, and Larry Berkove.  Again, I was naïve in not realizing that Myron was very emotionally invested in winning the position, and I made my decision based on Larry’s campaigning harder than Myron.  In reality, Myron felt that his services were undervalued, and he was so crushed at not winning that within a year he accepted another position at one of the University of California campuses.  I regret to this day not voting for Myron.

I was scheduled to take my first sabbatical leave in the academic year 1972-73, and I was persuaded, primarily by my colleague in English, Larry Berkove, to take the entire year at half pay, rather than only one term at full pay.  Moreover, Laquita and I decided to make it a really special adventure by spending the year in England, where I would do research and we would travel.  That was a life-transforming experience for the whole family, and toward the end of it came a call that also changed the course of my academic career.  While we were planning for this sabbatical, the campus was engaged in revising its Bylaws, resulting in the creation of a new administrative structure, with more conventional academic units and sub-units.  The Divisions of Liberal Arts, Engineering, and Business Administration were to become Colleges, each headed by a Dean, with Departments, each headed by a Chairperson.  This new structure was to begin with the fall term of 1973, and these changes set the stage for a dramatic transatlantic call from the Chancellor of UM-Dearborn, Pat Goodall, inviting me to serve as Acting Dean of LS&A when I returned from my sabbatical.  More of this development, and of our year abroad in the next chapter.

Before I end this chapter, I need to describe another big change that took place during this period in our church life.   Dr. Joseph Jones decided somewhere around 1967-68 to accept an offer to become Dean of Michigan Christian College, located in the town of Rochester, MI about 40 miles north of Detroit.  This move left the pulpit of the Northwest Church of Christ vacant, and it coincided with the return from Finland of a missionary supported by the congregation, Eddie Dunn.  Eddie was asked to become the congregation’s preaching minister, and he accepted.  Laquita and I had already become friends with Eddie and his wife Carole through meeting with them when they were on furlough and through Laquita’s correspondence with them.  The relationship deepened when he became the preacher.  Only six weeks after he assumed the position, he testified that he had had a special experience of the outpouring of the Holy Spirit, resulting in his being empowered “speak in tongues,” which is one of the New Testament’s gifts of the Spirit.  The elders of the church and some members of the church found this disturbing and unacceptable, and Eddie was asked to resign.  He did so, but this abrupt change left him without any means of support.  We felt his dismissal was unjustified and unfeeling, but the position of Churches of Christ at that time was that the miraculous gifts of the Spirit ceased with the death of the last Apostle, and that any claim that they were still possible was false doctrine.  Several other people in the congregation wanted to know more about Eddie’s experience, and a group of us began meeting each week in private homes.  When the elders found out about these meetings, they accused the group of trying to foment division in the church.  The result of their opposition was to cause the group to cease going to services at the church and to identify as a “house church.”  I resigned my position as a deacon, and thus our ties with the Northwest Church of Christ were severed.  We visited around to find a new congregation to identify with, but at the time we went on sabbatical, we had not made a decision on where to settle.

Consequently, when we left for our sabbatical year in England, we were no longer identified with the church fellowship in which we had grown up, and the way was opened for us to make a connection with the church we attended in England, St. Luke’s Anglican Church, a conservative congregation that supplied us with friends and experiences that helped us redefine ourselves as Christians.

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Dr. Elton Higgs was a faculty member in the English department of the University of Michigan-Dearborn from 1965-2001. Having retired from UM-D as Prof. of English in 2001, he now lives with his wife in Jackson, MI. He has published scholarly articles on Chaucer, Langland, the Pearl Poet, Shakespeare, and Milton.  Recently, Dr. Higgs has self-published a collection of his poetry called Probing Eyes: Poems of a Lifetime, 1959-2019, as well as a book inspired by The Screwtape Letters, called The Ichabod Letters, available as an e-book from Moral Apologetics. (Ed.: Dr. Higgs was the most important mentor during undergrad for the creator of this website, and his influence was inestimable.

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Growing Our Family and Our Cultural Outlook In Dearborn and Detroit (Part 18)

As I structured and refined my courses at UM-Dearborn and prepared for campus expansion, Laquita and I were expanding our family and becoming involved with race relations and inner-city ministry as well.  Our acquaintance with Bob and Nancy was cultivated anew with our move to Dearborn.  When we were with them socially, they introduced us to some of their Black friends, whom we then invited to our house for a meal.  I don’t remember their full names, but one was a physician named Tony. It was summertime when he and his wife came to dinner, and his arrival must have attracted the attention of our all-white neighbors.  He had a flashy convertible that was not thoroughly muffled.  No one said anything to us, but some of them probably kept an eye on the activities of that socially liberal professor who lived in the flat on the corner. That was the first time Laquita and I had been socially with Black people, and it was an education for us.   

In addition, we learned of the primarily Black Conant Gardens Church of Christ in Detroit that had a ministry in the inner city.   This work eventually morphed into a child care and community support center called The House of the Carpenter, modeled after a similar program in Boston, MA.  This work in Detroit was overseen by a white minister employed by the Conant Gardens Church, Maurice Haynes and his wife Clare.  We became very good friends with them and they taught us much about the workings of the inner city.  Laquita and I volunteered to help staff the HOC and went downtown once or twice a week to visit and help out as we could.  I became a member of the Board of Directors and became a part of a group of four men who regularly met with a group of boys from the neighborhood, playing games with them and trying to model healthy male behavior to them. 

With all of that going on, as well as my heavy involvement with my faculty job, we still proceeded with our plan to build a family, and we pursued the adoption of another child, this time saying that we would consider one with a handicap, a decision that turned out to radically change our lives.  We were informed by the adoption agency that a child was available who had been difficult to place because her maternal grandmother had Huntington’s Disease (or HD), and therefore the baby was 25% at risk to inherit the disease, since it was genetically transmitted.  Were the mother of the baby later to develop the disease, the child would then be 50% at risk.  We knew nothing about the disease, but what we read about it in our research was scary, because it involved not only physical disablement, but mental impairment as well.  Nevertheless, after praying about it and asking friends to do so as well, we were left with a strong conviction that God wanted us to accept this challenge.  So in late 1967, we took into our home our second little girl, Cynthia Lynette, aged 9 months.

It was not until 13 years later that we learned Cynthia’s biological mother had developed HD; that meant that the odds were significantly increased that Cynthia had the mutated gene that caused the disease to be manifest.  But there were significant problems with Cynthia in those early months that were quite unrelated to her being at risk for HD.  She had already bonded with her foster mother, and therefore Laquita had a very difficult time establishing a maternal relationship with her.  After a few weeks, Cynthia began to respond more to me than to Laquita, and that was deeply hurtful to Laquita, since she was the one spending the most time with her.  Adding to the difficulties was my heavy involvement with and commitments to being a church deacon, a member of the Board at HOC, mentoring the group of boys from that neighborhood, and doing my job at the University.  All of this engendered the worst conflict between me and Laquita that we have ever experienced.  The bottom line was that I needed to spend more time at home.

One episode during this period has become a favorite with our children—funny now, not so funny at the time.  One Wednesday night during the winter I had attended Bible class at church with Rachel, while Laquita stayed at home with Cynthia, who was sick.  This was the first season of the original Star Trek TV program, which aired on Wednesday nights, and I was hooked on it.  This particular night I came in a couple of minutes before 8 p.m., which was the scheduled time for the program.  Eagerly anticipating watching the program, I rushed in and threw my coat, hat and gloves on a chair, dumped Rachel with her winter boots and coat and hat still on, and rushed in to turn on the TV.  I must have at least said hi to Laquita, but she had been all day with two little girls, one of them sick, and was ready for some relief; watching Star Trek was not on her agenda.  A few minutes after I had settled down to watch, a glove came flying into the room.  She asserts that she was not throwing the glove at me, but the fact is, it came into the room with some force behind it.  Startled and puzzled, I switched off the TV and went in to her to examine the situation more closely, which she was more than happy to help me do.  She was finally able to get through to me the impression made by my coming in with hardly a greeting and making a beeline for the TV, evidently expecting her to take care of hanging up both my and Rachel’s winter gear.  I don’t remember any more details of the incident that night, but it resulted in my reassessing my priorities and being at least slightly more available at home.

At the beginning of my second year at UM-D, we were offered the chance to live in one of three cottages which were down the road from Fair Lane, the former mansion of Henry Ford and part of the land donated by the Ford Foundation for the building of the Dearborn Campus.  It was a deal not to be passed up, since the house was right on the campus and the rent was reasonable.  The three cottages were originally built to accommodate three of the Ford family’s major employees, the butler, the gardener, and the chauffeur.  During our stay, the other two cottages were occupied by the Dean of Engineering, Robert Cairns, and the Head Librarian, Edward Wall.  The Cairns family were replaced by a Chinese professor of management and his family, Yumin Chou.  We were good friends with both families, and the Wall and Chou children were close playmates with our two girls.  We stayed there for seven years, including a sabbatical year in which we sublet the house and came back to it for one more year.  It was great to have a 3 or 4 minute walk to my campus office.

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Dr. Elton Higgs was a faculty member in the English department of the University of Michigan-Dearborn from 1965-2001. Having retired from UM-D as Prof. of English in 2001, he now lives with his wife in Jackson, MI. He has published scholarly articles on Chaucer, Langland, the Pearl Poet, Shakespeare, and Milton.  Recently, Dr. Higgs has self-published a collection of his poetry called Probing Eyes: Poems of a Lifetime, 1959-2019, as well as a book inspired by The Screwtape Letters, called The Ichabod Letters, available as an e-book from Moral Apologetics. (Ed.: Dr. Higgs was the most important mentor during undergrad for the creator of this website, and his influence was inestimable.)

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More from this series…

The Pre-Expansion Years at UM-Dearborn, 1965-1971 (Part 17)

After a few months of settling into our new home in Dearborn, we turned our attention to what we had determined would be a priority as we began my working career: we applied to receive an adoptive child.  Having gone through fertility tests back in Pittsburgh, and being told that I had a low probability of fathering a child, we agreed that we did not want to remain childless and would adopt as soon as it was practicable.  We decided to proceed with the Childrens’ Aid Society in Detroit.  In those days a lot of babies were still being given up for adoption, and it was fairly easy to become adoptive parents.  Accordingly, in the spring of 1966 we were called to come see a baby girl, only six weeks old.  We saw her and immediately agreed that this was the one for us, and within a short time the necessary approvals were signed and we brought her home with us.  We of course had much to learn, but an empty place in our lives had been filled, and we rejoiced in nurturing a new life and seeing the rapid development from delicate, completely dependent infant into a little girl with her own personality.  Laquita, especially, threw herself into motherhood, and, as one of the elders at our church commented, she blossomed and glowed.  Little Liann Kathleen was walking by nine months old, and it was startling to see this tiny little girl toddling around like an animated doll.

Meanwhile, back at the campus, I was going through another kind of growth phase, as I plunged into a completely new set of literature and language courses, not only in the medieval era which was my specialty, but in linguistics and comprehensive Surveys of British Literature.   The total student population was only about 600 when I first arrived, so classes were small, ranging from fewer than ten to maybe 15-20.  Since there were so few faculty and the administrative structure was still developing, faculty members were called on to perform duties that later became the responsibility of professional administrative staff, such as advising students and keeping academic records.  We were even called on to go out recruiting with the director of admissions and registration at the campus, so it’s not surprising that I became the advisor and academic record keeper for the English Discipline, a job that quickly grew into my being in charge of academic petitions for the whole of Literature, Science, and the Arts.  This job led to my being recruited later by the Chairman of LS&A to coordinate the building of a curriculum to accommodate freshmen and sophomores when the U. of M. Regents decided to expand UM-Dearborn into a four-year campus.  The first freshmen did not come until the fall of 1971, but the decision was made in 1969, and the campus had two years to prepare for implementing the expansion.

When I first came to the campus, a professor of political science named John Dempsey was Chairman of LS&A.  Sometime toward the end of my first year there, he stepped down to run for a state political office, and a chemistry professor named David Emerson became Acting Division Chairman.  Through some political maneuvering that I later became aware of, an ambitious professor of Russian named Dennis Papazian became Division Chair.  Dennis saw in me some promise of usefulness as an assistant administrator, and he asked me to be his chief assistant in constructing the new freshman-sophomore curriculum in liberal arts.  Of course, the specific content of courses in each discipline was determined by the faculty in each area of study, but an overall structure was needed to define the combination of general education and disciplinary courses required for the bachelor’s degrees (bachelor of arts and bachelor of science).  Dennis set me the task of looking through academic catalogues at other institutions to see what their requirements were.  I supplied him with my research results, and we worked together to formulate academic requirement proposals to the governing faculty of the Division and the Executive Committee of the campus.  In addition to preparing the academic program, the campus also had to provide new laboratory facilities and classroom spaces.

To facilitate the keeping of academic records, we relied increasingly on use of the mainframe computer on the Ann Arbor campus, and I was initiated into this technical world by a chemistry professor who had a special interest in computers, Alan Emery.  He taught me how to use punch cards to enter and maintain academic records, and so early in my academic career I was exposed to the practical basics of computer use, though I was not taught the arcane languages of computer programming.  I remember carrying packs of punch cards over to the card reader managed by Al Emery, and he would try to convince me of the potential of computer usage.  He eventually was recruited to work with the center for computer operations in Ann Arbor, and our campus was deprived of the creator of its computer operations.  UM-Dearborn eventually formed an Office of Computer Operations of its own.

Dennis Papazian took me under his wing as a protégé in administrative operations.  He saw me (accurately) as innocent of the subtleties of academic politics, in which he delighted.  One day, only half-jokingly, he told me that his objective was to “corrupt” me, so that I would be disabused of my naïve view of the world and be able to function realistically in a world defined by the exercise of power.  I resisted this relativistic Machiavellian approach, but I was still useful to him in seeing to details of his office that required accuracy and efficiency.  This was the beginning of a relationship with him that was troublesome for many years to come.  I imagine he regretted training me well enough that I was eventually chosen to replace him.  But more of that later.

I made some decisions during this period that turned out to be more significant than I thought at the time.  One arose from receiving an offer from a Dutch press to publish my doctoral dissertation, but with a sizeable subsidy as a part of the deal.   Moreover, the intent was apparently to publish the dissertation as it was, without editorial review.  It therefore looked to me like merely a solicitation from a vanity press that would not be taken seriously by my colleagues as a peer-reviewed publication, so I turned them down.  However, I learned later that about the same time a dissertation that covered some of the same areas treated by mine was published by this press and that the publication contributed to the author’s professional advancement.

Two other decisions sprang from recruitment offers.  Back when I was about to fly to UM-Dearborn for my on-campus interview, I was approached by my alma mater, Abilene Christian College, to come back there, and I turned them down because I thought going back would cut off my opportunities to test my mettle in a broader professional community.  The second offer was a year or two later and was from Pepperdine University in Los Angeles, California, an institution associated with the Church of Christ, the denomination I had grown up in and still adhered to.  At the time Pepperdine was in the process of building a new campus in the suburbs of Los Angeles and moving its home base out of the inner city and into its posh new campus.  I was flattered by their taking the initiative and trying to recruit me, but I was troubled by their move, as it seemed to me, to flee their original neighborhood for a more comfortable setting.  And so, in my idealism, I turned them down.  In the two cases of recruitment, our lives would have been completely different had I accepted either offer.

I spent my first years at UM-Dearborn happily, enjoying my colleagues and the students and the opportunity to get involved in minor administrative duties.  I had come at what turned out to be an ideal time for the exercise of my particular skills.  Since I was not a great research scholar in my academic field, my administrative contributions were my strong suit when I came up for promotion, and though I managed to produce a few published papers in my first five years, that would not have been sufficient to secure my promotion to associate professor with tenure.  At another, more traditional institution, I might not have made the cut.  As it was, I achieved tenure and was able to serve the campus for 36 years, with several kinds of temporary administrative appointments along the way. 

I began my career there when the campus was poised for a crucial development in its history.  During the mid and late 60s, the campus did not fulfill the hopes of its founders, that is, that many students would decide to transfer from area community colleges and that the campus, focused on the internship programs in engineering and business, would capture the attention of industrial metropolitan Detroit and that the campus would enjoy success like that of General Motors Institute.  Unfortunately, the large numbers of students did not come, and UM-Dearborn in 1969 still had an enrollment of only some eight or nine hundred students.  The campus was faced with the alternatives of either folding or expanding.  Happily for me, it expanded, and I was there on the ground floor.

The next installment will deal with the huge effects of the expansion of the campus to four years and my involvement in that process.

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Dr. Elton Higgs was a faculty member in the English department of the University of Michigan-Dearborn from 1965-2001. Having retired from UM-D as Prof. of English in 2001, he now lives with his wife in Jackson, MI. He has published scholarly articles on Chaucer, Langland, the Pearl Poet, Shakespeare, and Milton.  Recently, Dr. Higgs has self-published a collection of his poetry called Probing Eyes: Poems of a Lifetime, 1959-2019, as well as a book inspired by The Screwtape Letters, called The Ichabod Letters, available as an e-book from Moral Apologetics. (Ed.: Dr. Higgs was the most important mentor during undergrad for the creator of this website, and his influence was inestimable.)

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More from this series:

Arrival at UM-Dearborn, Summer 1965 (Part 16)

After I signed my first-year contract with the University of Michigan-Dearborn (or rather the U. of M., Dearborn Center at the time), I was offered the chance to teach a summer course, and I gladly accepted, since the pay was quite good for summer teaching.  The term was for August and September, and the class was small, so it was a good way for me to be introduced to the curriculum and to become acquainted with the campus and my colleagues before the beginning of the fall term in early October.   The campus was on quarters of three months each at the time, but with the beginning of the next term in January of 1966, the campus went to trimesters of four months each.

We stayed our first few days with Bob and Nancy Mossman, with whom we had formed a close friendship back at Pitt.  They lived in an apartment in Taylor, not far from Dearborn.  Nancy gave us the grand tour of the City of Dearborn in her brand-new Ford Mustang convertible, which was then new on the market, at the beginning of a long period of popularity.  We were received at the Dearborn Campus by Prof. Myron Simon, who encouraged us to live in Dearborn, since many of the faculty chose to live in Ann Arbor, a matter which galled Myron because that made it difficult to schedule faculty meetings.  We were amenable to his direction, since we had no reason to live in Ann Arbor and make the long commute of 35 miles each way.  We found a flat in an attractive neighborhood in East Dearborn, owned by an elderly Polish couple, who lived on the ground floor of the house.  They rather adopted us and were continually offering food and advice.  Mr. Lelek’s wife could speak only a few words of English, but she was very warm toward us.  The apartment was unfurnished, so we had to go buy some basic, mostly used furniture.  Myron lived with his family not far away, so he and I often rode together to the campus.

I had three colleagues in English, all of whom were Jewish.  We joked about my being the token Gentile, but we were all good friends.  In fact, they would sometimes consult me on literary references to the New Testament, with which they were not very familiar.  Sydney Warschausky, was a specialist in 20th century English literature,  Myron Simon was also in modern literature and English education, and Larry Berkove was in American literature.  English was part of the Discipline of Humanities in the Division of Literature, Science, and the Arts, one of three academic Divisions of the campus, along with Engineering and Business Administration.  The Discipline of Humanities also housed faculty members in philosophy, linguistics, art history, and foreign language.  The other Disciplines (administrative units) in the Division of Literature, Science, and the Arts were Science and Mathematics, Education, and Social and Behavioral Science.

The campus was very small when I joined the faculty, and we were all housed in the same building, se there was a pleasant intermingling of faculty from all disciplines; we often ate our sack lunches together in the faculty lunchroom—humanities, science, engineering, and business faculty cross-pollinated each other.  There was a Faculty Women’s Club that also got us together socially, fostering our cross-disciplinary comeradery. Unfortunately, as the campus grew and we added young faculty who were more wedded to the disciplines they were trained in, we separated physically and psychologically.  Nevertheless, the seeds of interdisciplinary objectives did bear significant, if short-lived fruit in the form of a Core Curriculum when we expanded to a four-year program and the creation of a Division of Interdisciplinary Studies.

Once again, we established some rich and long-lasting friendships in those first years: Roger Verhey in mathematics and his wife Norma, David Emerson in chemistry and his wife Shirley, Emmanuel Hertzler (biology) and his wife Myrtle, Sydney Warschausky and Larry Berkove in English and their wives Lorraine and Gail, respectively.  Roger and I became prayer partners, meeting in our offices for lunch.  He was my closest friend and chief support among the faculty.  The Emersons and we were socially active with each other because they, like us, lived in Dearborn.  Larry Berkove was single during our first years at UM-Dearborn Campus, and we often had him to meals at our house.  When he met and married Gail, we were among the first to know about the engagement, and we were invited  to their Jewish wedding in Chicago.  When their children began to be born, we were invited to the bris (circumcision) of their first son.

As has been the case wherever we have lived, we had another close circle of friends in the church we attended, in this case the Northwest Church of Christ in Detroit, not far from where we lived in Dearborn.  Our closest friends there were the minister and his wife, Dr. Joseph and Geneva Jones.  Joe had come to the minister’s job from Oklahoma Christian College, where he was a dean.  Being very interested in Christian higher education, he quickly established a connection with Michigan Christian College in Rochester, MI, and taught classes there.  At the same time he was pursuing degrees in counseling and doing a significant amount of counseling for the church.  He and I became fast friends and often had lunch together to talk about theology and life in general.  The Joneses and we were often in each other’s homes.  We were also taken under the wings of some older couples whose hospitality and companionship we greatly enjoyed.

As soon as we had settled into our home and my job, we began to explore the possibility of adopting a child.  We registered with the Children’s Aid Society in Detroit, and by the end of my first academic year at UM-Dearborn, we had taken into our home a six-week old baby girl, whom we named Liann Kathleen.  She is still a beautiful daughter and a great support in our old age.

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Dr. Elton Higgs was a faculty member in the English department of the University of Michigan-Dearborn from 1965-2001. Having retired from UM-D as Prof. of English in 2001, he now lives with his wife in Jackson, MI. He has published scholarly articles on Chaucer, Langland, the Pearl Poet, Shakespeare, and Milton.  Recently, Dr. Higgs has self-published a collection of his poetry called Probing Eyes: Poems of a Lifetime, 1959-2019, as well as a book inspired by The Screwtape Letters, called The Ichabod Letters, available as an e-book from Moral Apologetics. (Ed.: Dr. Higgs was the most important mentor during undergrad for the creator of this website, and his influence was inestimable.)

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More from this series:

On to Finish the Ph.D at Pitt (Part 15)

As we got started in our new life at Pitt, Laquita decided to find a job other than teaching, so she applied to the University and was given the job of Chemistry Department Librarian.  She quickly learned the principles on which the library worked and settled in to keeping the books and journals organized and aiding users when they were not finding what they were looking for.  She had a basic knowledge of chemistry and had no trouble in familiarizing herself with the nomenclature of chemistry research.  Laquita also decided to do some graduate work herself and enrolled in the master’s degree program in English, which she was able to finish by the time I had completed my work three years later.

The center of our social life was the church we attended, the Fifth and Beechwood Church of Christ.  There we engaged not only in three worship and study meetings per week (Sunday morning and evening and Wednesday evening), we also were frequently invited to dinner by the middle-aged and elderly couples.  Several of these had Southern backgrounds and their hospitality and good cooking reflected that culture.  There was also frequent fellowship between the graduate students, some of whom we are still in touch with.  Our closest friends were Wendell and Joyce Bean.  Wendell was employed by Westinghouse Corporation as a research engineer, and Joyce was enrolled in the child development program at Pitt, where she had some contact with the famous Fred Rogers of the Mr. Rogers television show.  Another couple that both the Beans and we were close to was Bennie and Neda Riley.  Bennie was a graduate student in physics at Carnegie-Mellon University, and Neda worked with an accounting firm.  The fourth couple of this group was Gene and Susie Couch.  Gene was in the graduate program in physics at Pitt, and Susie was the consummate homemaker, staying at home and taking care of their little girl.  It was through the Couches that we met Keith and Wendy Ratliffe; Keith was also in the physics program at Pitt.  Keith was not a believer, but we were with them regularly because they were a part of our opera group.

Our best university friends were Bob and Nancy Mossman.  I have already mentioned Bob’s new-found atheism, which was a constant matter of discussion and banter between us. They both came from California and had ebullient personalities.  Bob was ambitious for success, and it was indicative of his independent personality that when he went job hunting after finishing his Ph.D., he didn’t go for a conventional academic position, but instead interviewed with business firms, persuading them that his broader liberal arts perspective and his writing skills, along with a strong personality, equipped him well to be hired into an executive training program.  He was therefore successful in landing a job with Ford Motor Company in Dearborn, MI.  Consequently, when I got my first job with the University of Michigan-Dearborn, the Mossmans introduced us to the town.

While we were in Pittsburgh, Bob and Nancy became involved in the civil rights activities of the Black church where Nancy had started attending.  That aspect of their lives didn’t spill over much into our interaction as couples until we continued our friendship when we moved to Dearborn.  There we met and socialized with several of their Black friends, but in Pittsburgh we had only their reports of these social interactions.

Apart from church gatherings, our richest social activity was our opera group.  Each year the Metropolitan Opera came to Pittsburgh on tour, and a group of four couples, some from church (the Beans and us) and some from the University (the Ratliffes and the Mossmans), bought season tickets and attended the operas together, enhanced by having dinner beforehand.  It was Laquita’s and my first exposure to opera, and we learned to love it.

As I got into my second year at Pitt and my third year of graduate work, I began to focus on what the subject of my dissertation would be.  I wrote a term paper that year on the poems of Geoffrey Chaucer which were cast in the form of a dream, and that spurred me to consider other dream poems of the same period, the last third of the 14th century.  Accordingly, the topic of my dissertation was, “The Dream as a Literary Framework in Works of Chaucer, Langland, and the Pearl Poet.”  The thesis idea was that the dreamer/narrator in each of the poems analyzed is a much more individualized personality than in most previous dream works and comes to enlightenment about some matter of importance in the process of experiencing his dream.  My dissertation topic was approved by the graduate study committee and my dissertation committee was appointed.  My dissertation director, Dr. Alan Markman, would chair the committee and comment on my drafts at various stages. 

During my second year at Pitt I was awarded a teaching fellowship, and that provided my first experience of college teaching.  Along with most graduate teaching assistants in English, I was given classes of freshman composition.  Apart from a basic syllabus for the course, I was given no guidance or instruction; it was merely assumed that I would learn by experience.  I don’t remember much about the details of my composition classes, but I was certainly much better able to grade essays at the end of my year than I had been before, and I was given at least that much practical preparation for teaching English classes when I was employed full time after I graduated with my Ph.D.  During my fourth year of graduate work—my third at Pitt—I was given only a tuition scholarship.  My faithful wife kept us eating during my Ph.D. work with her job at the Chemistry Library.  She also continued her own graduate work toward a master’s degree in English.

Some of the graduate courses I took left more of an impression on me than others.  I have already mentioned Old English, which was very difficult, but which ushered me into learning to read Middle English, the language of Chaucer and the other poets whose works were the subject of my dissertation.  I also took a course in the history of the English language and taught the course myself during my first few years as a full-time college teacher.  The subject of linguistics was burgeoning during my graduate years, so an introduction to the subject had recently become a required course in the graduate English program.  The new textbooks in the subject took a radically non-traditional view of the norms of grammar, contending that grammatical “rules” were not fixed standards, but were defined by popular usage, which changes with time.  I was not enamored by the course, but it introduced me to principles of language that I needed to understand in the pursuit of my professional career.  Another memorable course was an undergraduate course in classical literature, which I was allowed to audit.  It introduced me to Sophocles and Plato and other non-English authors of which I needed to have read at least some.

Another course that I found difficult but needed to be introduced to was in Literary Criticism and Theory.  I found (and still find) the language of this field of study often abstract and full of jargon.  But it did acquaint me with schools of criticism and the reigning ideas about literature in different historical periods.  More to my taste were the courses I took in Shakespeare and major authors of the 18th and 19th centuries.

Finally, in outlining our Pittsburgh experiences, I need to tell about the three places where we lived.  Our first was a third-floor, one-bedroom apartment with an open area for kitchen, dining table, and sitting room.  There were several other apartments with tenants on the first and second floors.  The chief advantage of this place was that it was in walking distance of the Pitt campus.  There were tensions, however, between us and the young women who had an apartment right below us on the second floor.  They were fond of parties with loud music, which kept us awake.  We inadvertently became acquainted with the singing of Johnny Mathes because these ladies played his music so loud that the whole apartment complex was able to hear it.  Our first request for them to turn down the volume was met somewhat politely, but thereafter they were not receptive to our pleas.  Another noise source was the trash truck that came around at about 5 a.m. every morning to service a restaurant across the alley from us.  I don’t remember whether we got ear plugs or just got used to it, but I do remember being irritated and frustrated by these disturbances.  It was another welcome to urban living.

Our second home arose from a proposal by our landlord, Dr. Beroes, an engineering professor at Pitt, to live in his family’s house, a couple of blocks away from our apartment, while they were away on sabbatical leave for several months.  I think we still had to pay some rent, but the purpose of the arrangement was to occupy the house so that it would not be vulnerable to theft or vandalism.  We were given an upstairs bedroom and had access to the kitchen for meal preparation.  It seemed to offer a welcome respite from sharing a house with irritating fellow-tenants, but there was a major glitch when Mrs. Beroes decided to come home after only a month or two away.  She was not easy to live with and turned out to be an inveterate liar.  We finally looked for and found an attractive flat in a working-class suburb named Wilkinsburg, where we spent the final year of our time in Pittsburgh. 

This was an interesting place to live.  Our landlady was a lively elderly Irish woman with whom we had a fair amount of conversation.  She was a bit mischievous, flirting with me and commenting on my “nice legs” and bantering with another of her tenants, an Englishman to whom she referred as “John Bull.”   We had to commute to Pitt, but there was a trolley that went close to our house, and I used that to get to the campus, whereas Laquita took our car, since she had a daily job to get to.  There was a service station across the street from us, so it was convenient to get the car serviced.

After spending a year researching and writing my doctoral dissertation, I completed it and applied for jobs, which at the time were fairly plentiful.  After interviewing with several institutions at the national meeting of the Modern Language Association, and being asked for a second interview, the best offer I received was from the University of Michigan-Dearborn (U. of M., Dearborn Campus at the time).  It had been established only six years before as an upper-division campus, oriented mainly to the professional programs in engineering and business administration.  The second interview on campus went well, and I began my 36-year career at UM-Dearborn in the summer term, 1965.

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Dr. Elton Higgs was a faculty member in the English department of the University of Michigan-Dearborn from 1965-2001. Having retired from UM-D as Prof. of English in 2001, he now lives with his wife in Jackson, MI. He has published scholarly articles on Chaucer, Langland, the Pearl Poet, Shakespeare, and Milton.  Recently, Dr. Higgs has self-published a collection of his poetry called Probing Eyes: Poems of a Lifetime, 1959-2019, as well as a book inspired by The Screwtape Letters, called The Ichabod Letters, available as an e-book from Moral Apologetics. (Ed.: Dr. Higgs was the most important mentor during undergrad for the creator of this website, and his influence was inestimable.)

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The Cathedral of Learning and Lasting Friends: Pittsburgh, PA (Part 14)

In the summer of 1962, we set out once again to advance my graduate program, headed for the University of Pittsburgh (known informally as “Pitt”) and a second year of fellowship-supported graduate work.  We arrived on a sunny day and drove directly to the house of some friends we knew from A.C.C., Gene and Susie Couch.  Gene was in physics and went directly to Pitt after he graduated with me from A.C.C. in 1961.  They lived in a section of town known as Squirrel Hill, which some of you may recognize as the Jewish neighborhood where the terrible synagogue shooting took place in 2018.  We stayed a few nights with them while we looked for a place to live, and we found one in a big house that had been split up into apartments.  Parking for our car, though, had to be on the street.  This was the first time we had encountered the big city problem of cramped streets and dealing with houses built before there were many cars to be parked.  Rental spaces were at a premium, and we had an early run-in with another resident in our house who let us know indignantly when I left our car behind the house after washing it that she had paid for that spot and would thank us not to usurp it again. Happily for us, we could walk to the University and could leave our car parked on the street, although not always close to our house.

Early in our stay in Pittsburgh, we met people who were to become long-term— in some instances lifelong—friends.  Some were fellow members of the church we attended, the 5th and Beechwood Church of Christ, and others were fellow graduate students.  Among the lifelong friends were Wendell and Joyce Bean and Ben and Neda Riley at church and Bob and Nancy Mossman from the graduate school.  Others we were close to when we were in Pittsburgh and were in touch with for many years afterward were the Couches from church and Keith and Wendy Ratliffe from Pitt, whom we came to know through the Couches; Keith was in the physics program along with Gene.  Ben Riley was also in physics, but he attended another major university in Pittsburgh, Carnegie-Mellon.  Apart from church social functions, the most significant group activity we engaged in during our stay in Pittsburgh was going to the Metropolitan Opera when it came on tour to Pittsburgh.  This group consisted of the Higgses, the Beans, the Ratliffes, and the Mossmans.  It was Laquita’s and my first exposure to classical opera, and it was one of the most lasting cultural experiences of our lives.  We heard live such stars as Birgit Nillson and Richard Tucker, and we have never forgotten it.

After getting settled in, I went to the University’s main building, a 37-story skyscraper built in a Gothic style which led to its being called the Cathedral of Learning.  It was several miles from downtown Pittsburgh and a whole neighborhood had built up around it.  I went to the English Department area on one of the upper floors to meet with my advisor, Dr. Alan Markman, a medievalist.  He was a pipe-smoking U.S. Marine veteran who often referred to his military experience.  We were not temperamentally matched, and he turned out to be rather gruff in his assessment of my work.  He trashed the first major paper I turned in to him and complained that it took him over two hours to get through it and make his comments.  His note on the front of the paper said something about its being one of the worst graduate papers he had ever read, flawed as it was by infelicitous phrasing, errors in usage, poor scholarship, and pretentious frippery.  I was absolutely crushed, of course, but I went carefully over his remarks and in my next paper tried to avoid the kinds of mistakes he had pointed out.  It was a real shock treatment, but it made me a better writer.  Actually, I think it was already on his agenda before he received the paper to take me down a peg or two, because he commented at some point that my being a hot-shot undergraduate at Abilene Christian College didn’t mean that I was anything special as a graduate student.

One of the first basic classes in Pitt’s graduate English program was a two-semester course in Old English, that is, the language in which Beowulf, the earliest English classic, was written.  It was equivalent to learning a foreign language, since Old English is a linguistic cousin of modern German.  We had to learn the basic grammar and vocabulary of the language, and upon completing that we were assigned a certain section of Beowulf to translate for each class period.  Three classmates and I decided to split up the assignments between us to make the task easier.  We would meet together in a study area between classes and share with each other the translation of the section we had done.  It was not a total avoidance of responsibility for the assignments, for we had to be ready to translate in class, but it did give us something of an advantage over the rest of the class, and one of them squealed on us to Dr. Markman.  One day, he called the four of us in and gave us a busy-work assignment in bibliography in the library, so we got our come-uppance.  This joint endeavor nevertheless established a friendship between us that lasted through our graduate years.  One of the group was Bob Mossman, who remains a special friend to this day.  The other two were Joyce Measures and Tom Calhoun, both of whom were interesting personalities.  We called ourselves a comitatus, which is the Old English word for warrior group.

Bob Mossman and I struck up our friendship because our initial conversation revealed that until recently he had been intending to go into Christian ministry.  He did his undergraduate work at Whitworth College in eastern Washington, a small Christian liberal arts college.  He was from California and was very much a part of that culture, so it was a bit anomalous that he should have become a zealous convert in his youth to evangelical Christianity.  He was very active in student leadership at Whitworth, but toward the end of his work there, there was some kind of breakdown in personal relationships that embittered him and turned him away from Christian life.  When I met him at Pitt, he said that he just couldn’t see himself limited by Christian ministry, which he described pithily as, “patting little old ladies on the head.”  So he turned from divinity to English literature.  He was interested in my Christian background and commitment, and we soon were engaging in debates about matters of faith.  He had become a thoroughgoing atheist and considered my faith to be naïve and uninformed.  Nevertheless, we became fast friends, and Laquita and I soon began getting together socially with him and his wife, Nancy, who, though chagrined at Bob’s forsaking the faith, nevertheless supported him in his new career plans.  Our association continued for many years, until the two of them were divorced.  We are still in touch with Bob a few times a year and have kept up with each other’s lives.

The other two members of our comitatus were also unconcerned with religion, but they were curious enough about my Christian practice that they and Bob were persuaded to accept my invitation to attend church with Laquita and me.  I don’t remember precisely the conversation that ensued from that visit, but they were struck by our a capella singing and felt welcomed by the group.  Their curiosity satisfied, none of them were interested in returning.  Joyce and I had a little falling out because I teased her one time about smoking more because it looked fashionable than because she really liked it.  She sat me down in private and told me something of her dysfunctional background as a way of correcting what she thought was my superficial understanding of her.  I was suitably chastened, but I was never close to her.  Tom had done his undergraduate work at Princeton and was very much a man of the world and a part of urbane New York culture.  He was an enthusiastic recontour and regaled us with tales of his boozing days at Princeton.

There is much more to tell of our days in Pittsburgh, including Laquita’s job and academic work, our life with the church, our other residences, and memorable classes and professors.

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Dr. Elton Higgs was a faculty member in the English department of the University of Michigan-Dearborn from 1965-2001. Having retired from UM-D as Prof. of English in 2001, he now lives with his wife and adult daughter in Jackson, MI.. He has published scholarly articles on Chaucer, Langland, the Pearl Poet, Shakespeare, and Milton. His self-published Collected Poems is online at Lulu.com. He also published a couple dozen short articles in religious journals. Recently, Dr. Higgs has published some of his poetry and a book inspired by The Screwtape Letters, The Icahbod Letters. (Ed.: Dr. Higgs was the most important mentor during undergrad for the creator of this website, and his influence was inestimable; it's thrilling to welcome this dear friend onboard.)

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Beginning the Graduate School Adventure (Part 13)

In the summer of 1961, A.C.C bachelor’s degrees in hand, Laquita and I packed our few worldly goods and launched on the trek to Seattle, Washington and the University of Washington.  We saved money by camping out in a tiny tent that we had bought back in Abilene.  Things went fairly well with our outdoor life, except that our first night was up in the Rockies at about 11,000 ft., and we had no sleeping bags and slept on cots, which insured a good circulation of frigid air above and below us.  Our blankets didn’t offer much protection, and we got up early after a miserable night and built a fire to get warm.  Another time it was raining, and we didn’t know how to prevent water from coming into the tent, so that wasn’t a very comfortable night either.  Then there was the remote campground where there were bears roaming around.  One of them came prowling at our campsite, sniffing around our tent while we were having evening prayer; that quickly added another dimension to our prayer!  He finally went over to our picnic table and knocked off our sturdy metal ice chest.  It broke open and the bear found some cheese to eat and went off.  We had a permanent dent in the ice chest, but it was still quite functional.  Oh well, it made for good stories afterward—and camping out did save us motel bills.  Good thing we were young, so we could rebound from these mishaps in roughing it.  We did some further camping afterward, but we were never fond of it.

We made immediate contact with Laquita’s brother, Lester Alexander, and his wife, Doris upon arriving in the Seattle area.  They lived in Renton, a suburb of Seattle, where they owned and operated an auction house.  They sold everything from household items to antiques, and every Saturday night drew a crowd to the auction, where my brother-in-law, assisted by Doris as manager and cashier and one or two others to transfer the items for sale to and from the stage, engaged in the traditional sing-song patter of the auctioneer, unintelligible except for the beginning “Whattamabidnow?” and “Sold! to number 44.”  He was good at it, and the auction was earning them a living at the time.  We enjoyed browsing around the auction warehouse when we visited them.  We had to be careful during the auction, however, since Lester was always quick to end the bids if he saw we were interested in an item.  One time, he thought I wanted a lawn mower and hollered “Sold!” when I scratched my ear.  He didn’t make us pay for it and it went back on auction the next week.

We found a place to live in the upstairs apartment of a widowed missionary, Mrs. Edmunds, who had spent many years in China, of which she shared many of her experiences.  She was a somewhat quirky lady, though, and we occasionally got crossways with her.  She let us keep our car in her vacant garage, which was a convenience, but next to the driveway was a bush that brushed against the car when I was driving into the garage.  I asked her if I could trim the annoying bush, to which she agreed.  But it turned out that she and I were thinking of different bushes, and I proceeded to trim a bush that she had been carefully cultivating.  She saw me out the window and opened it to yell at me to stop, accompanied by a glare that would have melted steel.  She confessed that her Christian charity was sorely tested by my blunder.  Another time, she informed me that my dropping my shoes on the floor above her when I took them off at night was very irritating, so I learned to set them down gently.  She was kind at heart, though, and it was a well-kept accommodation.

Living in a large northern city and attending a big state university were a culture shock, both in Seattle and, later, Pittsburgh.  I was not used to being regarded as something of a Southern hick, who really wasn’t much acquainted with the sophisticated setting of an urban (and urbane) academic institution.  In addition, some people smirked at my wearing my Christianity on my sleeve by sporting a big “Abilene Christian College” decal on my briefcase.  I had rather ineffective debates with one of my professors, Dr. Jacob Korg, who taught Victorian literature and the novel.  He tried to enlighten me about the deficiencies of Christian Scripture, pointing out that Jesus endorsed perpetual poverty for some people when He said, “The poor you have always with you.”  That greatly offended his socialist philosophy.

The great bright spot in that year was my friendship with Dr. David Fowler, who was my graduate advisor.  He was a respected textual scholar in medieval literature, particularly of the works of the Pearl Poet and the writer of Piers Plowman, both of which were subjects of my doctoral dissertation a few years later.  Dr. Fowler was a true Christian gentleman.  My first meeting with him was in an elevator on the way to a gathering of Woodrow Wilson scholars held before we had been introduced to any of the faculty.  I asked him if he was one of the graduate students, and he politely said, no, he was a member of the faculty.  I hope he was flattered that I misjudged his age.

I was very sorry to leave the University of Washington at the end of the year, but, although the University was given a certain amount of money for each Wilson Fellow who attended, they were not required to spend it to support those Fellows.  I was offered only minimal student aid for my second year, perhaps because I compiled only a 3.5 GPA for my first year, rather than a perfect 4.0.  However, I didn’t put all my eggs in one basket and applied for other sources of student aid.  I hit the jackpot when the University of Pittsburgh offered me one of its Mellon fellowships with about the same benefits as the Wilson Fellowship, a full ride with tuition and living stipend.  When I went in to see the director of student aid about what had happened, he told me I could have had a teaching fellowship if I had stayed, and  that my degree at Pitt would not be as prestigious as one from U. of Washington.  He might have been right, but it seemed a bit arrogant of him to tell me so, in a tone of voice that said, “If you don’t have the good sense to know how good we are, we’re better off without you.”

For our second semester at U. of Washington, we were offered a six-month tenancy house-sitting for one of Laquita’s fellow teachers at the elementary school where she was employed.  Since we weren’t on a lease arrangement with Mrs. Edmunds, we took the offer.  The house was in a very good neighborhood and had a view out its front picture window of Mt. Rainier and the Cascades range when the weather was clear; that was a magnificent sight!  That was the best housing deal we had during our whole academic experience.

Another significant experience during this year was Seattle’s being the site of the 1963 Word’s Fair, for which the still-famous Space Needle was built.  It was in the spring, and several relatives and friends availed themselves of our spacious house as a place to stay when they came up to the Fair.  We ourselves attended a few times, the only time in our lives when we were on the grounds of a World’s Fair.  As is usually the case for such events, it was huge, spectacular, and memorable.

We had two pleasant excursions that I remember from that year.  One was a boat trip up the Skagit Valley, conducted by a local utility company to view its hydroelectric generating facilities.  The setting was breathtaking, and the information on the production and transmission of electric power very educational.  The other trip was up into the mountains of Mt. Rainier National Park to camp out and do some trekking on the trails.  That, too, offered tremendous views and experiences of nature.  I think it was on this trip that a bear broke into our metal ice chest, left out on the picnic table, to find something to eat.  He put a dent into the chest, but didn’t do further damage, since the lid latch came loose and he got whatever he wanted to eat.  We used that dented old ice chest for many years after that, and it several times occasioned a good story about the source of the dent.

We had a very satisfying church experience while we were in Seattle.  We attended a Church of Christ downtown, and we made some rich friendships, although we didn’t maintain them long after we moved to Pittsburgh.  We participated in a choral group conducted by Dick Still, and we spent some social time with him and his wife, Betty.  Her middle name began with a “B,” and they liked to joke about her being “Betty B. Still.”  I taught some adult Sunday School classes.  The preacher J. C. Hartsell, was young and dynamic and delivered meaty sermons, and I had some good conversations with him when we met occasionally for lunch. Interestingly, we made acquaintance with a student from Seattle Pacific College, which was associated with the Free Methodist Church; later, in Michigan, we twice were members of a Free Methodist Church, and our daughter Liann married into a Free Methodist family.

We finished our year in Seattle, packed up our 1950 Plymouth, and headed to Pittsburgh in the summer of 1963, via a visit to relatives in Texas.  Ahead of us was an entirely different kind of city from Seattle, gritty, industrial, and still soot-stained from its days as the steel capital of the nation.  But our three years there was also rich in friendships and cultural experience, as well as being the site of my major doctoral work.

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Dr. Elton Higgs was a faculty member in the English department of the University of Michigan-Dearborn from 1965-2001. Having retired from UM-D as Prof. of English in 2001, he now lives with his wife and adult daughter in Jackson, MI.. He has published scholarly articles on Chaucer, Langland, the Pearl Poet, Shakespeare, and Milton. His self-published Collected Poems is online at Lulu.com. He also published a couple dozen short articles in religious journals. (Ed.: Dr. Higgs was the most important mentor during undergrad for the creator of this website, and his influence was inestimable; it's thrilling to welcome this dear friend onboard.)

More Undergraduate and Early Marriage Experiences (Part 12)

After the wedding and a brief honeymoon, Laquita and I returned to the A.C.C. campus to continue our undergraduate work, the middle of her junior year and my sophomore year.  Our first residence was the “married barracks,” old military buildings divided into apartments for married people.  Its advantages were that it was cheap and right on campus, so we didn’t need transportation.  It was, as you might imagine, very Spartan accommodations, with male and female bathrooms in each hallway and rough wooden floors.  There were basic kitchen appliances so we could cook, after a fashion, but we continued to take our regular meals in the cafeteria.

Happily, we were able to move at the end of the spring term to a tiny house across the street from the campus.  It had perhaps 600 square feet, divided into a bedroom/sitting area, a kitchenette, and a bathroom.  But it was still reasonable rent, and it was private!  We have fond memories of that little house.   Even though it backed on to an alley, it had grass and flowers in the front, being the back yard of a larger house on the front of the lot.  The flowers were daylilies, and they bloomed profusely.  We had a pleasant neighbor in another little house across from us, a widow lady named Mrs. McClintock.  And down the alley a few blocks lived Laquita’s sister, Grace, and her husband Farrell Hogg.  That supplied us with a place to do our laundry and have a meal from time to time.

Laquita continued to work in the cafeteria, even working extra hours serving at banquets there.  I continued my work on the maintenance crew, graduating to operating the big mowers during the spring and summer.  She continued in the elementary education major, and I definitely settled into the English program, taking the sophomore surveys of English literature under various teachers and having more contact with Dr. James Culp, who took over as head of the English department during that year.  He became my mentor and close friend during the last two years of my baccalaureate program.  I had no more classes from the elderly Mrs. Retta Scott Garrett, but Dr. Culp recommended me to her as someone who could do gardening work for her.  Particularly when she was away during the summer, I would make sure that the house was all right and that her garden was watered, her grass cut, and her hedges trimmed.  The skill I gained in hedge trimming has been very useful in taking care of the yards of houses Laquita and I owned later.  Strangely enough, learning to trim hedges has been helpful in trimming my beard when it gets bushy; start boldly with big swaths and then fine tune the straggly spots.

I took time to engage in a few extra-curricular activities, such as assisting with a night-time talk show on the campus radio station and joining the Pickwickian Club, a group of people who liked to do creative writing.  I also participated in a group of men who sponsored talks on biblical subjects and then discussed them.  Both Laquita and I would very much have liked to sing in the Acapella Chorus, but neither of us had the time for regular rehearsals and frequent performances.

I enjoyed my class work, especially as I got into my junior year and took advanced literature courses, along with electives in philosophy of religion and second-and third-year courses in New Testament Greek.  I took several advanced courses with Dr. Culp, and in my senior year he asked me to be his office assistant.  It was the best job I had on campus, since it allowed me to study when office duties were slow and to strengthen what turned out to be a lifelong relationship with Dr. Culp and his wife.  They often had some of his students over for dinner, and we were several times on that guest list.  Such occasions also provided the opportunity for some of the English majors to get to know each other.

In Laquita’s senior year she had to do her practice teaching, and that meant we needed a car.  My uncle Lester was aware we were looking, and he gave us the best car-buying tip we ever had, resulting in our buying our first car, a black 1950 Plymouth sedan, 10 years old but with low mileage and in perfect shape.  It was the archtypical old lady who had had it in her garage and rarely used it.  That car served us through graduate school and into the first year of my job at UM-Dearborn, a period of six years with trips to Seattle and Pittsburgh.

My senior year was a very successful one.  I graduated (barely) summa cum laude and received the Dean’s Award for the person judged to have taken the best advantage of his opportunities at A. C. C.  I also won a Woodrow Wilson Graduate Fellowship to receive full tuition and living expenses at a graduate school of my choice for a year.  Back then, colleges were growing and there was a market for Ph.D.s in English.  I chose to attend the University of Washington in Seattle (which happened to be where Laquita’s brother and his family lived), and we moved up there in the summer of 1961.  Thus began my four years of graduate study, one at the University of Washington and three at the University of Pittsburgh.

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 Dr. Elton Higgs was a faculty member in the English department of the University of Michigan-Dearborn from 1965-2001. Having retired from UM-D as Prof. of English in 2001, he now lives with his wife and adult daughter in Jackson, MI.. He has published scholarly articles on Chaucer, Langland, the Pearl Poet, Shakespeare, and Milton. His self-published Collected Poems is online at Lulu.com. He also published a couple dozen short articles in religious journals. (Ed.: Dr. Higgs was the most important mentor during undergrad for the creator of this website, and his influence was inestimable; it's thrilling to welcome this dear friend onboard.)

The Next Step in College and Courtship: Marriage! Twilight Musings Autobiography (Part 11)

          After the short-lived summer harvest job, I made the rash decision, driven by passionate love, to make my way to Laquita’s home in Burnet, TX, where she had returned to take up her job with the town’s downtown drugstore.  She was what was known back then as a “soda jerk,” a term that had nothing to do with the worker’s character, but rather originated from the jerking action required to operate the big handle controlling the output of carbonated water required to produce the fizz for various drinks.  This was a job that required some social grace to interact with customers and the skill to mix the elements of an ice cream soda or a cherry coke in the proper proportions.  None of the premixed drinks one gets now from the fast food places!  I hitch-hiked from Abilene to Burnet (about 180 miles), my longest trip of that sort and the last time I ever did it. 

I surprised Laquita in the drugstore while she was at work, a surprise that had a negative tinge for her because I had grown a mustache during the first part of the summer.  I had no idea what I was going to do after I got there, so I stayed a couple of nights with Laquita’s family before finding a room to rent there in town.  Laquita’s father, whom I called Mr. Alec, liked me because I got up early one morning and went with him on his rounds tending his chickens and his garden.  He was a simple, pleasant man, a hard worker who had a job with the City of Burnet on the maintenance crew.  He invited me to have meals with the family, and would even have been all right with my staying with them, but it would not have been proper (nor even wise, I think), for me to have done that, in view of my romantic interest in Laquita.  Laquita’s mom (whom I called “Mom A” liked me, too, and was gracious to me, but I think she would have been more comfortable with me being back in Abilene.

Mr. Alec was able to get me a job with the city maintenance crew, where the tasks consisted most often of cleaning the street drainage gutters (“curbs and gutters, gutters and curbs” Mr. Alec would say) and unloading sacks of lime at the water purification plant.  This last chore always left me itching at the end of the day, as the lime dust would get under my clothes and irritate the skin.  Mr. Alec liked to tell stories, so I got to know him better as we worked together.  He was not a church-going man at that point (he underwent a conversion later), and in fact (I found out later), he used his Sunday mornings to engage in illegal cock-fighting, using game-cocks that he kept apart from the other chickens at the back of the family property.  I was informed later by his grandsons, who were also living with their grandparents at the time, that he had a fairly profitable business breeding and selling game-cocks.

Our last project before the job ended was working in an open field just out of town which was going to become the town’s airport.  We were assigned the task of clearing away the biggest rocks so that the runway could be built.  It felt a little bit like being on a prison chain-gang, but I’m glad to report that there were no shackles or ball-and-chain. 

Of course, I went to church with the family at the local downtown Church of Christ, where the Alexanders (especially Mom A) were active members of the congregation.  I was welcomed there and enjoyed getting to know the people, who accepted me quickly because of my association with Laquita and her family.  Laquita’s oldest brother, Marion, was the father of the five boys living with the grandparents, and he would visit on weekends, usually going to church on Sunday also.  He was a very lively and charming fellow, but he loved to tease Laquita and me about our relationship.  He was a good salesman and he was able to pay for the boys staying at his parents’ house.  It was rather chaotic at times, since the boys ranged in age from teenagers to the little boy Paul, who was only about five or six at the time. Marion’s wife was mentally ill and was unable to care for the boys.  Marion was a very responsible father, and he spent time and money to engage in activities with the boys, like playing “rounders” with a softball and bat in the vacant lot across the street from the Burnet house and going fishing on one of the local lakes.  Laquita and I sometimes went along on these excursions.

I don’t remember many details of the time Laquita and I spent together that summer.  There certainly wasn’t much chance for private time at her home.  Our companionship was mainly going to church together and hanging around her house at meal times. Both she and I were working all day during the week. There was one occasion, however, that I remember our going for a walk along a dry creek bed that ran right by her house (it had water in it only when it rained).  We got to a sort of secluded spot with some trees around, and I made bold to initiate our first kiss--at least it’s the first one I remember, late as it came in our courtship.  It was rather tentative and shy, but a very meaningful development in our relationship.  I was not a sophisticated courtier!

One of the memorable experiences during this period was my reading for the first time C. S. Lewis’s classic work, Mere Christianity.  I don’t remember how I had gotten a copy, but, as with many other people, it changed my thinking in basic ways.  Never had I read such a cogent but simple argument for the existence of a God who is the source of all moral principles.  I had now a philosophical foundation for the faith I had so far accepted as a given.  My boss on the maintenance crew was a thoroughgoing sceptic and a rather profane man, and he rejected my faith as a mindless illusion.  He was an enthusiast for geological research and had amassed a collection of fossils that he was eager to show me to bolster his argument that the geological record and the theory of evolution explained the origins of life, leaving no room for religious fantasies.  God must have protected me from his influence, for my new perspective from C. S. Lewis overshadowed his arguments.

When I arrived back at A.C.C. in the fall of 1958, I teamed up with three other guys to live in a little bachelor apartment about a five-minute walk away from the campus.  My companions in this enterprise were my two Bible-selling buddies, Fred Selby and Carl Reed, along with a college cafeteria worker named Claude Crawford.  Our landlady was named Mrs. Pettigrew, or as she was affectionately called, “Momma Pet.”  This certainly beat living in the barracks, and it was a good healthy walk back and forth to campus.

Laquita was back in her dormitory, and since both our living places were off limits to the opposite sex, we had to hang out in the library and go to church together three times a week.  We attended, as did many students, the Graham St. Church of Christ, which sent a bus to the campus to transport the students.  The preacher was a dynamic faculty member named Carl Spain.  We learned a lot from him about deeper Christian thinking and behavior.  He paved the way for a shift by the Churches of Christ to a more Spirit-filled understanding of Christian living, and he emphasized the doctrine of grace, which to that point had not been at the forefront of Church of Christ thinking.  I was glad to have had some personal contact with Dr. Spain when I led singing for one of his Gospel Meetings at the Stamford church I attended.

I was not a happy camper that term.  I was greatly desiring to get married, now that we were committed to it.  Laquita (and her mother), however, wanted to wait until she had graduated, or was at least within a year away from it.  But in my immaturity, extended celibacy was pretty low on my list of desired disciplines.  I was selfishly impatient, so I rashly decided to use the “nuclear option”: “Marry me now or that’s it.”  She knew it was a dumb thing to say, but somehow she swallowed her pride and good judgment and gave in, so we scheduled a December wedding.  She has said many times since then, “I knew God had brought us together, even if you were being silly.”  If she have been then the more gently assertive woman she became later, she might have said, “O.K. buddy, I’ll give you a chance to forget you said that, and we’ll talk again tomorrow.”  But she gave in to my stupidity, and the Lord prevented any bad results from my blunder.  Definitely not one of my better moments, though.

Somehow we managed to arrange for the wedding and a little reception at Laquita’s home afterward.  I had to borrow money from my uncle in order to fund my part in the occasion, and I borrowed my friend Fred’s car.  The only honeymoon facility I could afford was a lakeside summer camp with a cabin available at off-season rates.  However, our happy few days there transformed it into a memorable spot, the beginning of our long and greatly blessed life together.  I’m so glad she (and the Lord) didn’t allow me to throw her away.

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Dr. Elton Higgs was a faculty member in the English department of the University of Michigan-Dearborn from 1965-2001. Having retired from UM-D as Prof. of English in 2001, he now lives with his wife and adult daughter in Jackson, MI.. He has published scholarly articles on Chaucer, Langland, the Pearl Poet, Shakespeare, and Milton. His self-published Collected Poems is online at Lulu.com. He also published a couple dozen short articles in religious journals. (Ed.: Dr. Higgs was the most important mentor during undergrad for the creator of this website, and his influence was inestimable; it's thrilling to welcome this dear friend onboard.)

Matriculation at Abilene Christian College (1957): Twilight Musings Autobiography (Part 10)

As a teenager growing up in a premillennial Church of Christ, I had assumed that I would go to the college associated with that group of churches, Kentucky Bible College in Winchester, KY.  But by the time I had been away from that milieu for over two years, there seemed no reason to go so far away, and I enrolled in the fall of 1957 at Abilene Christian College, which was affiliated with the mainline Churches of Christ that rejected premillennialism.  That doctrinal issue no longer seemed central to my faith, and though I couldn’t subscribe to the hardline rejection of it by mainline Churches of Christ, I felt that A.C.C. would meet my educational needs.  Over the four years that I spent there, my vocational plans evolved from thinking I would be a Bible or Religious Education major, to preparing to be a high school English teacher, and finally to plans to attend graduate school and become a college teacher of English.

          As I mentioned in the preceding installment of this autobiography, I went a few weeks early to Abilene to find a job.  Actually, I had two jobs for a while, my truck-driving job with the College maintenance department and work at a drugstore soda fountain across the street from the College.  Although the drugstore job lasted only a few weeks, until I was fully involved in classes, it had one very memorable moment.  My boss on the job was a young man who had worked there a while.  I was mostly a cleanup employee, so it was predictable that in my first week I was called on to do the dirtiest job associated with the fountain: cleaning out the grease trap.  A lot of goop-filled water went through the clean-up sink, where we washed the glasses and other utensils used to operate the fountain.  Every week or two the grease trap had to be cleaned to avoid a blocked drain.  The cleaning involved taking the trap apart, scooping out the accumulated goop, wiping it clean, and putting it back together—a thoroughly nasty job.  I did it the best I could the first time I was asked, and my boss seemed satisfied.  A week or ten days later, he asked me to do it again, but this time he gave me a bit of worldly wisdom before I got started: “You know,” he said confidentially, “If you’re asked to do a dirty job and do it well, you’ll probably get asked to do it again.”  That stuck with me and I have several times been reminded of it when I was confronted with the call to deal with messes much more consequential, if less literally dirty.  There is some ambiguity in the recognition one receives for doing a good job; performing well will often get you into even dirtier jobs.

          Back in 1957, the campus housing at A.C.C. still included some WWII era barracks which were as spartan for the students as they were for the soldiers.  My friend Fred Selby and I had our first-year lodgings there, along with Fred’s brother, David, who was coming back to school in spite of suffering from a form of leukemia that had made his life difficult.  I remember seeing him experiencing a cold sweat one time in his room.  He was unable to finish the term and had to go into a cancer hospital.  Unfortunately, he died before the academic year was over.  Fred and I were best buddies, and I went home with him several times during that year, which enabled me more easily to visit my folks in Rule, which was only ten miles away from Fred’s home.  That was fine with Fred, because he was sweet for a while on my niece, Linda, even though she was still in high school and her mother did not encourage the romance. 

          My campus job with the maintenance department had me often driving their old dump truck to take loads of refuse to the land fill a few miles away.  There I first encountered the smell of perpetually burning garbage, an unforgettable stench both acrid and heavy.  The truck was a challenge to drive, and there was much grinding of gears before I mastered the coordination of stick shift and clutch.  When I was not driving, there was plenty of grounds grooming and weed hoeing to do.  There was an outside maintenance crew of about four or five guys, and an inside crew rather larger who tended the dormitories and other buildings.  When it was raining or there was insufficient outside work to be done, the outside guys would be drafted into painting, or changing mattresses, or sweeping halls.  I preferred the outside work and the chatting time it supplied between the guys as we plied our hoes and rakes.  We were paid 60 cents an hour for our work, and I worked about 20 hours a week, in addition to carrying a full-time academic load.

          I received two pieces of special news during my first weeks of class.  As I was going through orientation and registration, I was called over to the table of the English Department head and told that my placement exam entitled me to be enrolled in the honors composition class taught by a venerable elderly lady called Mrs. Garrett.  Later on, I came to have very close relationships with both Mrs. Garrett and the Department Head, Dr. James Culp.  I received the second news a bit later when I was called out of class to hear that my father had died.  The funeral was held in Rule, but his body was brought to an Abilene cemetery for interment.  After attending these events, I returned to campus and took up classes again.

 Mrs. Garrett’s special class allowed and encouraged creativity in writing and featured a great deal of her reading aloud.  It was there that I first encountered the pleasure of listening to an expressive reader.  Freshman English elicited some memorable writing assignments, including a research paper on the circumpolar constellations, which fostered a lifelong interest in astronomy, even though I never took a class in the subject.  Mrs. Garrett’s class undergirded my decision in my sophomore year to major in English, rather than Bible or religious education.

          Much as I enjoyed my classes in my freshman year, my academic program was not the most significant part of my experience that year.  I had a few short infatuations with female classmates in the fall term, but they all faded away when, toward the end of November or the first part of December, I met the girl who within a year or so had become my wife.  Laquita Alexander was a cutie who smiled at everybody across her cafeteria line, but I thought she had special eyes for me; I certainly had special eyes for her, so it was natural that one day when we met on the stairs as we changed classes, we introduced ourselves to one another.  Shortly after that, one day after I had finished my meal, I strolled back to the line to see if she was free, and she was, and I asked her for our first date, going to the Tuesday Night Devotional on the steps of the Administration Building.  We both liked to sing, and that mutual interest was made evident as we sang the hymns that formed the major part of the devotional time.  After that, we spent most of our free hours together, going to church mostly and studying together in the library.  However, she had (and still has) more common sense than I did and thought that hand-holding interfered with study.  I was so amazed that she wanted to be with me that I was willing to concede to her priorities.

          By Christmas time, we were “going steady,” and I gave her my high school class ring to wear around her neck.  We saw each other as frequently as we could, but her time was more limited than mine, since she worked as much as her boss in the cafeteria would let her, usually 40-50 hours per week in addition to her classes.  She got up at 5:30 a.m. in order to work at breakfast time.  She was not happy that I made 60 cents an hour on the maintenance crew, while she made only 50 cents an hour in the cafeteria.  She had accumulated some savings from her work during her high school years, but she lived in continual fear that she would not make enough to pay her school costs each term.  She managed to pay her bills and not to incur any debt during her bachelor’s work.  In fact, her love for me was abundantly manifest when she agreed to use her hard-earned savings to pay part of my bill one semester.  She has taught me over the years how to be more thrifty, and she says that I have moved her toward being a more generous giver.

          However, I did get some breaks through scholarships.  I was amazed when one day I was called to the ACC vice-president’s office and he told me that I had been selected to receive a $500 award from the Texas Club of  New York.  That was as big to me as receiving a full fellowship during the years of my graduate work.

          Although I had laid aside my plans for a Bible major, I was still interested in biblical studies, so I eagerly engaged in the required general courses such as Survey of the Old and New Testaments.  One of my Bible teachers that year was a man named J. P. Lewis.  His approach to teaching the Bible was to encourage close attention to the text, reinforced by tests that offered multiple choice and fill in the blanks.  This kind of feedback was right up my alley, and I aced most of the tests he gave.  As I remember, he didn’t have much by way of deeper interpretation or application, but I didn’t fault him for that, letting my success in mechanically mastering the text outweigh any shortcomings he had.  I took two terms from him, and one day I encountered him in the barber shop (back in the days when I still had hair to be cut) and mentioned that I would like to sign up with him for still another course in my sophomore year.  He rather dryly responded that it would perhaps be better for me to go on another teacher who would have a different perspective to offer.  Maybe he was tired of having a smug know-it-all in his class, but his put-off was heeded, and I had other Bible teachers my sophomore year. 

          During the second semester of my freshman year, I was preoccupied with hanging out with Laquita, and Fred, my roommate, was sadly absorbed with the final hospitalization and death of his brother David.  So we didn’t see much of each other. that term.  That summer (1958), Fred and I were closely associated once again when he obtained a job for me working with him harvesting wheat and other grains, moving north as the grain ripened.  Our boss was a man named Joe Vosek, with whom Fred had worked before.  That was quite a different experience from anything I had done before.  My job was driving the truck that collected the harvested grain, driving alongside the harvester as it deposited the grain down a chute into the truck.  I then took the load to a grain elevator and came back for more.  It was a hot, dusty job, and everybody was filthy at the end of the day.  Joe rented motel rooms for the crew when we got away from his home territory, and we conked out there after we had eaten. 

I’m afraid that my driving was not always satisfactory to Joe.  One time in particular I turned back into the field from the highway and made a wide swing for the turn.  Unfortunately, someone was behind me who was already passing me because I had signaled the turn, and he almost ran into me.  Evidently he knew Joe and complained to him about my driving.  Later I heard an irate Joe yelling to someone, “He’d better learn to drive that truck, or I’ll take him off of it!”  I don’t remember whether he spoke to me about the incident, but I knew I was on probation.  As it turned out, we were engaged in harvesting for only a few weeks, having to stop because of weather, whether rain or drought I don’t remember.   That precipitated my significant decision to hitchhike down to the town where Laquita lived, Burnet, TX.  More about the results of that move in the next installment.

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Dr. Elton Higgs was a faculty member in the English department of the University of Michigan-Dearborn from 1965-2001. Having retired from UM-D as Prof. of English in 2001, he now lives with his wife and adult daughter in Jackson, MI.. He has published scholarly articles on Chaucer, Langland, the Pearl Poet, Shakespeare, and Milton. His self-published Collected Poems is online at Lulu.com. He also published a couple dozen short articles in religious journals. (Ed.: Dr. Higgs was the most important mentor during undergrad for the creator of this website, and his influence was inestimable; it's thrilling to welcome this dear friend onboard.)

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My Summer of (Attempted) Bible-selling: Twilight Musings Autobiography (Part 9)

My Summer of (Attempted) Bible-selling: Twilight Musings Autobiography (Part 9)

Elton Higgs

In June, 1957, I said my good-byes to the family, packed up my suitcase, and, with my soon-to-be roommate, Fred Selby, piled into the car of our Bible-selling recruiter, Carl Reed, to make the trip to sales school in Nashville, TN, home of the Southwestern Bible Company.  My summer’s experience was not as financially productive as I had hoped, and there were challenging difficulties along the way.  Consequently, I came to see and accept some of my weaknesses and vulnerabilities, learned how to cope with unexpected difficult circumstances, and made discoveries that turned out to be helpful in years to come—and in the process produced some good personal anecdotes. 

In that era, the Southwestern Company had hundreds, maybe thousands of young men of college age selling for them in a kind of pyramid system.  That is, a portion of the profits for each salesman accrued to those who recruited them, and so on up the line.  In this way, young men who had several crews reporting to them could do quite well.  I recruited nobody and was not myself recruited to return the next summer.

After sales school (conducted by a slick super-salesman who later was indicted for some questionable business dealings), Fred and I were assigned to the town of Mt. Vernon, OH.  We found room and board in a residential house that had three rooms for rent, the other two occupied by elderly gentlemen with whom Fred and I had conversation from time to time.  We set out immediately to get town and county maps with which to plan our sales activities and checked in with the local authorities, which was protocol for all Southwest salesmen.  We were very disappointed to find that there was a restriction on door-to-door selling in the city limits of Mt. Vernon, so we were forced to sell in the outskirts of town or to hitch-hike to nearby towns without sales restrictions to pursue our enterprise.  We both did a lot of walking that summer.

We established ourselves with a local Church of Christ and were well received there as we attended each Sunday morning and sometimes went to week-night activities.  I remember being allowed to lead singing a few times and participating in Bible classes.  It was in one of the week-night activities that I first engaged in bowling, and I had beginner’s luck by throwing a couple of successive strikes, a feat I have repeated only rarely and don’t remember ever exceeding. 

Meanwhile, on the sales front, I tried some of the techniques we were taught at sales school.  Get the name of the first person who will talk to you on a street and use that name when you approach the next-door neighbor.  “Mrs. Jones, I’ve just been talking to your neighbor Mrs. Brown, about reading the Bible, and I’d like to share with you also how some books I have will make your Bible study richer.”  Or walk up to a door, and if somebody answers, say, “What beautiful flowers you have, how do you make them so healthy?”  If you manage to get inside and actually show some books, say, “This comes two colors; which one do you prefer?  Good, now let’s look at leather covers and hardbacks.  Which of those do you prefer?”  If they look the least bit interested, get out your order book and begin writing.  “Do you prefer paying cash today, or writing a check?  What delivery date is best for you?”  I rarely closed a sale this way, but I thought I had to try.

A few weeks into my stay in Mt. Vernon, I came down with mumps and had to stay in for almost two weeks, so that put a big kink in my income for the summer.  During this confinement, I was regaled by the two older guys in the rooming house with stories of grotesque swellings in adults who had mumps, and in more intimate places than the jaws.  My case, I am happy to say, was unremarkable.  I don’t really remember how I spent that time, but  since we didn’t have a TV, I assume I did a lot of reading.  It was probably on this occasion that I read some Jehovah’s Witnesses material that I came across, in which I first encountered their argument that Jesus was created by God (“the firstborn of all creation”) and was not the eternal, co-existent  Son of God.  Some of the resistance of people to talk to anyone who came to their door arose from their having been visited frequently and rather insistently by Jehovah’s Witnesses. 

I truly enjoyed meeting people, when they would let me in the house, and later, when the books I sold had to be delivered by others because I had been called home to be with my dying father, the recipients seemed truly concerned at not seeing me again.  Sometimes I would talk to people in stores and on the street just to get a feel for what a town was like.  I usually took a sack lunch along with me, but I needed to go to a store for something to drink and a little dessert treat; as I sat outside and ate, I would observe people going past.  I remember specifically sitting outside a store across from Gambier College in Gambier, OH, and eating my Twinkies while I watched the students going in and out.  I never went through the gates myself.

Other than the mumps, the summer was very healthy for me, because I walked miles on country roads, where the houses were up to a mile apart.  That was actually pleasant, since it was quiet and punctuated only by birdsong and the occasional passing car.  The residents were a bit more laid back and less suspicious than town folk.  I don’t think I was a very threatening sight with my little brown sample case, walking in from the dusty road.

My summer of selling Bibles and aids to Bible studies (I still have and use my Nave’s Topical Bible) came to an early end when I received a call from my sister-in-law in Rule, TX, that my father was dying and that I had better come back home to see him.  I had to ride the bus, since I didn’t have enough money to take the train, and it took me a couple of days to make the trip, sleeping on the bus.  Though my father was very frail, he actually lived until I had to go to the campus of the school I had decided to attend for my college education, Abilene Christian College (now Abilene Christian University), about 60 miles from Rule.  I was able to find two part-time jobs during the last few weeks before classes began, one with the College maintenance department ground crew driving a dump truck, for which I was qualified by still having the commercial license attained when I drove the school bus back in Rule.  My other job was working the soda fountain in a drug store across the street from the campus.

I remember very well receiving a piece of mail that put the official end to my summer of Bible-selling: I got a check from the Southwest Company for $220, my net profit from my summer’s work in Ohio.  Not a very remarkable reward for all my efforts, but it was better than being in debt to the Company.  In spite of my small earnings in this job, I have often harked back to the good experience I gained, and my knowledge of sales techniques has enabled me to ward off more than one salesman who knocked at my own door; but if they were young and nervous, I was gentle in my rejection.

I got news that my father had died during the week of Freshman Orientation at A.C.C.  I went back to Rule for the funeral and a period of mourning with the family, and my leaving home after that marked the beginning of my academic career.  Fred Selby and I continued rooming together in an old army barrack that served as the poor boys’ dormitory at A.C.C.  I will be describing my college experiences in my next installment of Autobiographical Musings.

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Dr. Elton Higgs was a faculty member in the English department of the University of Michigan-Dearborn from 1965-2001. Having retired from UM-D as Prof. of English in 2001, he now lives with his wife and adult daughter in Jackson, MI.. He has published scholarly articles on Chaucer, Langland, the Pearl Poet, Shakespeare, and Milton. His self-published Collected Poems is online at Lulu.com. He also published a couple dozen short articles in religious journals. (Ed.: Dr. Higgs was the most important mentor during undergrad for the creator of this website, and his influence was inestimable; it's thrilling to welcome this dear friend onboard.)

My Short Career as a Radio Announcer: Twilight Musings Autobiography (Part 8)

My Short Career as a Radio Announcer: Twilight Musings Autobiography

Elton Higgs

          The year between my graduation from high school (May, 1956) and my matriculation a year later at Abilene Christian College was a meaningful transition from living at home to establishing my independence and my responsibility for making my own living.  I had a full-time job during that year with a small radio station in Stamford, TX as announcer, disc jockey, engineer, and house cleaner.  I learned a lot on this job, and it developed vocal skills that have been valuable to me all my life.  It came to an end, however, in May of 1957 to leave a possible career in radio and spend the summer selling Bibles in Ohio.  In the terms of the table game Careers, I made minimal cash as a salesman and gained no fame during that summer, but I garnered a lot of experience cards.

          My opportunity at the radio station came because of my sister-in-law Lucille’s contacts with the owner of the station, David Ratliff, a state senator, probably because she had placed some ads on his station for the jewelry and appliance store that she and my brother, Otho, owned.  Shortly after my graduation, she asked me, “Would you like to work at a radio station?”  I said “Sure,” and she arranged for me to go to Stamford and try out.  The manager and sole employee of station KDWT, Phil Keener, had me read a script, and he offered me the job on the spot, on a trial basis.  With the promise of a steady income, I rented a room at the house of an elderly couple who were members of the Church of Christ in Stamford, where I had already attended several times, and I quickly made it my new home congregation.  I was allowed to take the family car, a big, old Packard, since my father had developed lung cancer and was no longer able to get about. 

          Phil Keener sold ads for the station during the times I was operating it.  I don’t remember that I had a consistent schedule, but at one time or another I worked all times of the day, from opening (must have been 6 or 7 a.m.) to the end of the day (perhaps 7 or 8 p.m.).  I also had to work some Saturdays and Sundays.  I had to learn the basics of turning on the broadcasting equipment, manipulating the controls, and closing down at the end of the day.  We were connected to the ABC radio network, and sometimes I would have to switch from home broadcasting to the network, mainly for national newscasts.  Phil would write out the log and I would do what was called for.  We played popular music from records that were sent to us as promotion discs.  I had an hour of music each day (punctuated by commercials) on a program that I called “Cactus Caravan.”  It consisted of all kinds of music, from country and western to folk and pop songs.  I remember liking and playing songs by the Everly Brothers, among others.

          My “patter” between songs almost got me fired one time.  As I finished one of these interludes, the phone rang and it was the owner, Senator Ratliffe.  He was not pleased, and all he said was, “Higgs, more music and less talk,” but that was enough to curb my personal contributions to the program.  Another mistake was even more serious.  It took place one evening when daylight saving time had just come into play, and unfortunately for me, it was also during a political campaign.  At 6 p.m., we usually had a network program, but this evening a special ad was to be run, and I had to decide whether to run the network program at the regular time and delay the ad, or give priority to the ad.  I had not been told that the ad was a political promotion and that it had been advertised to be heard at the scheduled time.  I opted for the regularly scheduled network program, much to the dismay of Mr. Ratliffe and the people who had purchased the ad time.  As soon as the ad failed to be heard at the scheduled time, Mr. Ratliffe called quite upset.  He said, “You know, if I can’t satisfy the angry customer, I’ll have to fire you.”  He settled the matter with the customer by offering to run the ad several times, along with announcements to promote it.  I suspect the ad-taker got more listeners that way than he would have originally, but my job was on the line.  I survived and made it up with Mr. Ratliffe.  When I came to the end of my employment with him, he tried to persuade me not to go on to something else, but to continue in a radio career.

          My tenure at the radio station was during the time of the Cold War and the notoriety of Sen. Joseph McCarthy, whose anti-communist Senate hearings terrorized anybody who had had the slightest association with the Communist Party.  I was a political neophyte and understood little of what was in the news those days, but I remember one of commentator Paul Harvey’s newscasts during my stint at KDWT (he came on at noon every day) in which he spoke warmly of Sen. McCarthy.  I think it must have been occasioned by McCarthy’s death in 1957, a few years after he had been censured by his Senate colleagues for his unethical conduct.  I don’t remember the details of Harvey’s comments, but I remember the gist of it was that in spite of his conduct he was a patriot.  Harvey was a political and social conservative, so it’s not surprising that he should have sympathized with anti-communism in general, but he was generally not strongly partisan in his comments, rather concentrating on human interest items in the news.  So it didn’t occur to me until some years later, when I became more aware of the political currents in the news, to question why Harvey felt compelled to speak approvingly of the discredited McCarthy.  I’m not even sure why those particular comments in one of Harvey’s many broadcasts stuck in my mind, but they did.

Two other incidents during my stay at KDWT are worth noting.  The first was a result of my neglecting to put away some records I had been going through.  Phil must have asked me several times to do that chore, but I just kept putting it off.  Phil came from a military background, and one day when I came in, he barked at me, “You’ve got ten minutes to get those records stored!”  I never again left records lying on the table.  One of the job’s fringe benefits, by the way, was that I got to take home some classical music records that had come to the station and were not going to be used in our programming.

The other incident was the outcome of a little listener response contest that Phil set up to see which of us received the most listener “votes” during our separate programs.  The loser was to push the other one around the town square in a wheel barrow.  Somehow I won the contest, and during my last week with the station, Phil delivered on his penalty, and I got a very public ride around the square, with Phil telling whoever we met, “I said I’d do it!”

          Parallel with my radio station activities was my association with the Orient St. Church of Christ in Stamford, which happened to be across the street from the house of the Sosebies where I had a room.  I quickly became active in the work of that church and was especially involved in the youth activities.  The youth group was led by a warm-hearted man named Joe Benson and his wife, Flo.  Joe would regularly meet with the young people, often in his house out in the country.  I remember the breeze on our faces as we rode in his pickup from town out to his home, where we would have games, refreshments, and sometimes a Bible lesson.  Those were delightful times in church fellowship and service.

          Because I was a bit older than the rest of the youth group and was familiar with Scripture, I was put in charge of their weekly Bible class at the church.  That deepened my connection with them, and I developed warm friendships with them, being both their leader and their companion.  I also led singing regularly, making a special effort to coordinate my selection of songs with the sermon theme when possible and always providing links between the songs by appropriate Bible readings.  There was a “Gospel Meeting,” as we called it, a week of trying to reach out to the community through having a guest speaker every night.  One of these was conducted by a professor of Bible from Abilene Christian College, forty miles away.  I consulted with him, and he gave me his sermon topics for the week so that I could connect the songs with his subjects.  He told me afterward that he had never had such close coordination with the song leader for a Gospel Meeting.  I got to know Brother Tony Ash better during the years I spent on my undergraduate work at A.C.C.

          I took a fancy to one of the girls in the youth group, Pat Massey.  She seemed somewhat pleased with my attentions to her, and I sometimes took her home from youth group meetings.  We would carry on lengthy conversations sitting in my car outside her house, though I think I talked a lot more than she did.  After a couple of times like this, her mother came out to the car and made it clear that she was not comfortable with this situation, even though she didn’t accuse me of trying to “make out” with Pat.  I think she was worried about how the neighbors would react.  However, Pat was the first girl I had ever kissed—“a mere peck” as I wrote in my diary.  However, there was a complication: she had a boyfriend in the army named Gerald.  She wrote him regularly and told me about her friendship with him, and noted that he was not a Christian.  I expressed concern with his unsound spiritual condition and took it on myself to send him a Bible.  After receiving it he wrote back that he already had a Bible, thank you, and made clear that he did not need spiritual instruction, especially from a guy who was probably a rival for his girlfriend’s affections.  I ask for your indulgence to remember that I was only a naively idealistic youth of 19 at the time.

          During this year I developed a very close friendship with Fred Selby, who was a member of the youth group at the Orient St. church.  He was a little younger than I and was still a senior in high school.  His mother lived in a farm house halfway between Stamford and Rule, where my parents still lived and my brother had his appliance store.  I would often visit Fred and his family on my way back and forth between Stamford and Rule.  His mother, Veda Selby, was an exceedingly warm and hospitable lady, and she became a sort of second mother to me.  Indeed, I say with some discomfort, I felt more emotional attachment to her, and more admiration, than for my own mother.  Veda’s husband had been a drunkard and had forsaken the family, but she and her children managed to keep and work the farm.  And then Fred’s older brother, David, developed leukemia and eventually died during Fred’s freshman year in college.  Veda was a strong, nurturing mother through all of this, and still had hugs and cookies for guests to her home.

          Toward the end of the year that I worked at the radio station, Carl Reed, a friend of Fred’s, set out to recruit the two of us to spend the upcoming summer selling Bibles and Bible study aids for the Southwestern Company of Nashville, TN.  It sounded both adventurous and idealistic, and Fred and I accepted his offer for us to be on his sales team.  When I announced my plans and gave my notice to the radio station, both the owner and the manager tried to persuade me to stick with the station and build a career in radio.  Mr. Ratliffe opined that I would regret giving up the opportunity to build on my experience and relinquishing the relative security that a regular job afforded me.  I refused to be dissuaded and soon left Stamford for Mt. Vernon, Ohio, where I spent two and a half months finding out that I was not a good door-to-door salesman.  More of that in the next installment.

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Dr. Elton Higgs was a faculty member in the English department of the University of Michigan-Dearborn from 1965-2001. Having retired from UM-D as Prof. of English in 2001, he now lives with his wife and adult daughter in Jackson, MI.. He has published scholarly articles on Chaucer, Langland, the Pearl Poet, Shakespeare, and Milton. His self-published Collected Poems is online at Lulu.com. He also published a couple dozen short articles in religious journals. (Ed.: Dr. Higgs was the most important mentor during undergrad for the creator of this website, and his influence was inestimable; it's thrilling to welcome this dear friend onboard.)

         

         

         

         

 

 

Personal Ecclesiastical History (childhood into adolescence): Twilight Musings Autobiography (Part 7)

Personal Ecclesiastical History (childhood into adolescence): Twilight Musings Autobiography

Elton Higgs

I need to drop back and describe my early religious and social life, from childhood to graduation from high school.  The center of my social life has always been connected with my family’s church attendance.  We went to church at least three times a week, as did many people of my generation.  We had two hours of Sunday School and worship services on the First Day of the week, and then there were regular evening services on Sunday and Wednesday night Prayer Meeting.  In addition, my father, as an elder of the South Side Church of Christ in Abilene, TX, often went to “business meetings” on some other night of the week.  Once or twice a year, especially in the summer, we would have a week-long “meeting,” an evangelistic effort for which we gathered every night to hear an out-of-town guest speaker.  We were supposed to invite our neighbors to attend in the hope that they would “obey the Gospel” by going up to the front of the tent, confessing their faith in Christ, and being baptized.  Ideally, they would then become a part of our congregation.  Often those who were already Christian would go forward to confess their straying from the Lord. This was called a “restoration” and would be counted along with the baptisms to evaluate the success of our Meeting. During the mornings that week, the guest speaker would conduct classes, mainly for the ladies, since the men were at work.

The South Side congregation was at odds with the other congregations of the Church of Christ in Abilene, and indeed with all of the “mainline” Churches of Christ in the country.  We all in common practiced taking Communion every Sunday, did not use instrumental music in worship services, and insisted on immediate baptism as a part of the conversion experience; but we differed in our views of what the Bible taught about the End Times.  We, the minority group of the Churches of Christ, were premillennialists, that is, believers that the Second Coming of Christ would usher in a literal thousand-year reign of Christ on earth, along with His faithful followers.  Mainline Churches of Christ were vehement rejecters of this doctrine, asserting that the thousand-year reign mentioned in Rev. 20 was figurative, not literal.  The family of my best friend in boyhood were members at a mainline Church of Christ only two blocks away from my church.  That congregation had been established primarily to combat the heresy of their wayward brothers and sisters down the street.  Both their regular preacher and most guest preachers for their week-long evangelistic meetings would target the South Side church in their sermons.  My friend often tried to win me away from my error, but I stood firm in my belief.

This rivalry would have been comic if it had not driven such a wedge between congregations which were much more alike than different.  However, being a persecuted minority did open us up, years before the mainline began to have this insight, to an understanding of the power and importance of prayer, and of the truth that we are saved by grace and not by works.  These two elements in Christian belief and practice would seem to be self-evident from Scripture, but mainline Churches of Christ for many years were quite comfortable combining their emphasis on being the true “New Testament Church” with what amounted to embracing a kind of salvation by works, since their main emphasis was proving that they fulfilled all the requirements set forth in the New Testament to be identified as the True Church.  It was a highly rationalistic approach to religion, one that was not sensitive to the “feeling” side of religious experience.

My earliest memory of attending the South Side Church of Christ is of my pre-school Sunday School teacher, Miss Addie Prater—just “Miss Addie” to all the kids.  She handed out little picture cards to illustrate the stories she told us.  She was a kind woman and was beloved by all.  I don’t remember having a personal attachment to any of my other Sunday School teachers, but I felt quite comfortable in my general interactions with adults.  I became friends with the other children whose families were regular attenders, and several of these endured through my high school years.

I have memories of the physical layout of the church building.  Inside, it was arranged like most Churches of Christ, with a Communion Table in the front center of the auditorium, and a raised podium with a pulpit, and behind that a built-in baptistry,  a layout reflecting the church’s emphasis on weekly participation in the Lord’s Supper and baptizing new believers immediately after their confession of faith in Christ   The church was heated by floor heaters fueled by natural gas.  They had to be lit with a match attached to a long stick.  These heaters with their grates received frequent unintended contributions of coins held too loosely in children’s hands.  In the summer, cooling had to be supplied by pulling down the tall top windows with a long pole with a hook at the end.  Very few churches were air conditioned in those days.

The outside of the building had wide steps leading up to a covered porch supported by three or four tall pillars.  On either side of these broad steps, extending out from the porch, were broad concrete “arms” extending horizontally from the top of the steps to the bottom, creating a drop-off at the end of about 4 or 5 feet.  It was a wonderful place for show-off boys to jump down from, sometimes pretending to be Hitler jumping off a cliff. 

Behind this “new” brick building was a white frame building that was the former church building, which in my young days was used for Sunday School rooms at one end and to house the preacher’s family at the other end.  There was no connection between the two buildings, and in rainy weather, one had to make a dash in the open air to get to a Sunday School class.

The big lawn beside the church building, in addition to being used for tent meetings, was also often the site of “dinner on the ground,” that is, a potluck meal.  I doubt that even in the early days the food was actually spread out on the ground, like a big picnic, but certainly in the 40s and 50s long tables were set up to hold the food and to seat at least some of the eaters. The home-cooked dishes that were shared on these occasions attracted probably more than did the tent meetings. It was certainly a time of good cheer and fellowship.  

This lawn was also a wonderful place to play croquet, a favorite game of the young people’s group during my teen years. The youth group met weekly usually on a Thursday night and was overseen by the preacher and his wife.  There were indoor table games as well.  Some of them included throwing dice to determine the number of spaces to move on a game board.  My father, who was an elder in the church, did not allow dice or playing cards in our home, and he objected to the use of dice in the young people’s games.  So our preacher, Karl Kitzmiller (the earliest in my memory), made a spinner that took the place of the dice.  Those nights of youth activities were satisfying and full of fun.  I was closely bonded with about a half dozen other young people.  I still remember the names of some of the people I knew best: Ray Conant, Frances and Wanda Prater, Janice Evans, Barbara Burroughs, Rita Hagar.  On Wednesday and Sunday nights after church, we would often go over to a drugstore on Butternut St., about a 15 minute walk, for fountain refreshments.  Since I lived within walking distance of the church and the drugstore, I would drop off at home as we walked back.  Other preachers I remember from those days were a newly-married couple from Kentucky named Frank and Pat Gill, and a mature man, Jimmy Hardison, who had a daughter named Sylvia, for whom I later, after her family had moved to Louisville, KY, had a brief infatuation.  She was the first girl with whom I held hands!  But the romance was squashed by her father, who informed me through a letter that she was too young to be courted.

I was an earnest believer in my youth, and I even made occasional forays into personal evangelism.  There was a boy 2 or 3 years older than I in the congregation named Jimmie Evans, son of one of the elders.  Jimmie was a football player and not by temperament a pious young man like me, so I undertook to bring him to Christ—specifically, to persuade him to be baptized.  I would sit with him in a car outside the church between services or after church and preach to him.  Amazingly, he finally went forward and was baptized, but it didn’t seem to have much affect on his life, for he became increasingly wilder as time went on.  He married right out of high school, and as I remember, the relationship didn’t last.  I don’t believe his “conversion” was a very strong validation of my evangelistic methods.

Growing up in the South Side Church of Christ was certainly a spiritually nurturing experience and laid the foundation for my continued church involvement through my life.  I learned the value of fellowship with a spiritual family, and much of my identity as a Christian was established in this setting.  Sadly, the personal ties made there did not long survive my family’s move away from Abilene, but while they lasted, they helped form my character.  I will speak more of my church experience during the next two years in Rule, my high school town, and Stamford, where I lived on my own and had a full-time job during the year between high school and college.

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Dr. Elton Higgs was a faculty member in the English department of the University of Michigan-Dearborn from 1965-2001. Having retired from UM-D as Prof. of English in 2001, he now lives with his wife and adult daughter in Jackson, MI.. He has published scholarly articles on Chaucer, Langland, the Pearl Poet, Shakespeare, and Milton. His self-published Collected Poems is online at Lulu.com. He also published a couple dozen short articles in religious journals. (Ed.: Dr. Higgs was the most important mentor during undergrad for the creator of this website, and his influence was inestimable; it's thrilling to welcome this dear friend onboard.)

My year in Small-town Rule High School: Twilight Musings Autobiography (Part 6)

My year in Small-town Rule High School: Twilight Musings Autobiography

Elton D. Higgs

          I don’t remember all the details of my family’s move from Abilene to Rule, TX, in the summer of 1955, but I’m sure it must have been once again because of my father’s ill health (cancer) and the need to be near my brother Otho and his family.  They had moved to Rule a couple of years earlier to establish an appliance sales and service store, with a jewelry repair service at the back of the store.  For me, it was a radical change in culture, and the year I spent there introduced me to experiences that I would never have encountered in Abilene.

          Rule was a small town of around 1,500 people, surrounded by small farms.  It had a couple of blocks of stores on the main road through town, a cotton gin at the edge of town, and a farming economy that depended on rain and good crops.  The high school had about 100 students in it, and the focus was much more on athletics than on academics, as is common in small towns in the South.  My graduating senior class had only 21 students, so my previous experience in a “big high school” of several hundred students identified me as a sort of egghead nerd who had never been exposed to the close-to-the-ground life of a farming community.

          Athletic games were great social events for the whole town, and boys who played football were minor celebrities.  I remember the star of the team was one Sonny Wharton, a good-looking lad who led the pack of boys in my class.  Since I had never played football and was not very big, nobody thought it strange that I didn’t volunteer to join the team; but those qualities were no hindrance to my going out briefly for basketball, and then a few weeks of running track.  I was pretty much a flop as a basketball player, but I might have had some success at track if I had known how to train.  As it was, when I was running my first (and only) 220 yard dash competition, I didn’t pace myself and found my legs giving way, and I skidded several yards on my belly on a cinder track.  I had scars for years afterward from that incident.  That brought an inglorious end to my athletic endeavors.  The burly coach at the school gave my brother Otho a concise assessment of my athletic abilities: “He’s the most uncoordinated 18-year-old I’ve ever seen.”  Just as well I had other places to shine.

          More to my taste and abilities was participating in the drama team.  Since the pool of actors was small, we prepared only a one-act play for the regional drama competition.  I learned my lines and was ready to go, but the afternoon of the affair, I was running a fever, and it was all I could do to get through the play, let alone do a quality job.  It turned out that I had chicken pox, and I was out of school for a week.  Happily, my other drama roles had better results.  One of my electives was a Future Farmers of America class (there was a scarcity of alternatives), and one of the activities was a little radio drama on farm safety.  Our team went to the state competition and won first place!  Who would have thought it?  My final thespian venture was the senior play, a farce in which my role as a father involved lathering up my face and pretending to have hydrophobia in order to scare away an unwanted suitor for my “daughter.”  The audience loved it!

          There was, however, a cruder side to my taking the Future Farmers course.  Every class member had to join the school’s FFA chapter, and traditionally that meant going through an initiation of the sort that only high school boys can devise.  Like all such unpleasant initiations, it hinged on humiliating and intimidating the new guys, and their showpiece exercise was to have them strip to their birthday suits, get down on all fours, and pretend to be hogs being judged.  Each of us had a handler shouting instructions on how best to display our porky selves.  The faculty leader was present, but he merely laughed nervously and looked on.  I survived the ordeal, but the image of it is indelibly etched on my pictorial memory.  At least my enduring without complaint made me accepted by the guys, even if I was basically a city boy.

          I held several jobs during that year, the first of which was helping my brother Otho in the installation of appliances and TV antennas.  Poor TV reception in Rule meant that many people chose to install an outdoor antenna on their housetop or atop a 60-foot tower with a rotator so that it could be turned 360 degrees to catch the signal from a particular station.  Those who couldn’t afford such luxury had to make do with a “rabbit ears” indoor antenna, which usually brought in only a “snowy” picture.  I learned some basic electronics in helping install those devices, and that has been a valuable asset ever since.  I also clambered on rooftops and climbed up some of those 60-foot towers, which gave me the confidence when I needed to do that for myself later on.  (I even installed my own rooftop antenna with a rotator on it at the first house my wife and I bought.)

          My work experience with Otho was not without problems.  On the lighter side, one time when we were installing a rooftop antenna during the winter, with some snow still on the ground, I was up on the roof following instructions from Otho on the ground.  At some point, I started sliding on the wet roof and didn’t stop until I hit a snowdrift down below.  When he was assured I wasn’t hurt, Otho burst out laughing, and he enjoyed telling that story for months afterward.  He said I just slid down smoothly as if it was a joy ride of some sort.  I suspect he wished he had been able to film it. 

But another action on my part almost cost him a finger.  He had installed a telescoping tower on the back of his pickup to use in raising home towers and accessing them for servicing.  While we were in transit, the telescoping tower segments were held in place by a wire wound around the overlapping legs of the segments.  The wire had to be taken off, of course, when the tower was ready to be cranked up.  One day, the tower seemed to be stuck when I tried to crank it up, and Otho climbed up to see what was wrong.  Unfortunately, I had failed to remove the restraining wire, but I kept applying pressure to the crank while Otho was trying to find where the bind was, and the restraining wire snapped and the tower shot up a few feet with great force, catching Otho’s thumb and almost completely severing it.  I remember Otho hollering something like, “Elton, you’ve ruined me!”  Somehow he managed to keep the thumb from coming completely off, wrapped his bleeding hand with some rags, and drove to the hospital, where they managed to get his thumb sewed back in place.  He recovered, but my terrible error rather soured our work relationship for a while.

Another job came from Novis Owsley, the dry goods store owner down the street from Otho’s shop,.  They were good friends, so Novis (Mr. Owsley to me, of course) dropped in frequently to the store.  One day, he asked me if I would be willing to come in early each morning, before school, and sweep out the store and take out the trash before the store opened for business.  I consented, and I spent some good hours listening to popular music on the radio and enjoying being there by myself.  I still remember some of the hit tunes of the time that I became familiar with, like “Que Sera, Sera” and “Love and Marriage Go Together Like a Horse and Carriage.” Then, when the fall cotton harvest time came around and the “braceros” (migrant workers from Mexico who picked cotton) would come into the store to buy basic clothes, Mr. Owsley needed someone who could speak enough Spanish to service these workers, and my basic Spanish was sufficient for the job. 

So I became a dry goods salesman, along with two classmates who also worked part time.  Sammy and Sharon were “an item” at school, so they obviously worked well together, and the three of us became fast friends.  Sharon was a sweet Southern girl who showed affection to everybody.  Her pet name for me was “El-twan,” and she used it regularly.  Sammie was a pleasant but serious young man, and easy to work with.  Between us, we sold quite a few clothes for Mr. Owsley.  (Some years later, I was surprised to find out that when Sammie and Sharon went away to college, they split up and did not get married as everybody expected.)

My final job in Rule was as a school bus driver.  That required me to get a chauffeur’s driving license, which stood me in good stead when two years later I applied for a college outdoor maintenance job which required a special driving license.  I drove the afternoon bus to take the kids home.  My route included both town and country stops and took me about an hour to complete.  A couple of times, I got supplementary work driving the bus for out-of-town sports events.  One of those times was to transport the girls’ basketball team, and I asked for one of my friends to go along with me.  The principal was understandably reluctant to permit such a thing, for reasons I think I was too naïve to understand at the time.  Finally, however, he gave in, based on my solemn promise that my friend Herbert would never be out of his seat next to me in the front of the bus.  Bus driving certainly added to my experience and skills in a significant way.

At the end of the year, I was declared to be the valedictorian, based on both my Abilene High School and Rule High School grades.  My family had a little celebration after the ceremony at our house, and I remember my brother Otho coming up to me with some advice: “Elton, stick to your books.”  By which he meant, don’t try to make you way in life doing anything that requires great coordination or practical skills.  I took his advice and pursued an academic career, but I’m also glad that I gained more from my practical experiences in Rule than perhaps he thought I had.

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 Dr. Elton Higgs was a faculty member in the English department of the University of Michigan-Dearborn from 1965-2001. Having retired from UM-D as Prof. of English in 2001, he now lives with his wife and adult daughter in Jackson, MI.. He has published scholarly articles on Chaucer, Langland, the Pearl Poet, Shakespeare, and Milton. His self-published Collected Poems is online at Lulu.com. He also published a couple dozen short articles in religious journals. (Ed.: Dr. Higgs was the most important mentor during undergrad for the creator of this website, and his influence was inestimable; it's thrilling to welcome this dear friend onboard.)

Jr. and Sr. High School: Twilight Musings Autobiography (Part 5)

Jr. & Sr. High School in Abilene: Twilight Musings Autobiography

Elton D. Higgs

Five of my last six years of public education were in Abilene, but I spent my senior year in Rule, TX.  The year at Rule High School was such a contrast to all my Abilene school and social experiences that it deserves a separate essay, which will come in the next installment.  My junior high and first two senior high school years in Abilene entailed growing through exposure to new educational structures and fresh opportunities for developing skills.  It was during these years that I had to come to terms with having to work hard in my courses, instead of breezing through, as I did mostly in grade school.  I learned to adapt to trying to do my best, even when my best was not going to bring me the good grades that I was used to.  In reality, some of the courses that were most difficult for me turned out to have long-lasting benefits. I hope that perhaps I made some first steps toward humility in the process.

It was during junior high school that I played in the band for a couple of years.  My brother Thavis got me a cheap clarinet and encouraged me to participate.  The director, Mr. Griep, was a classmate of Thavis in the master’s degree program at Hardin Simmons University, but that connection didn’t bring me any advantage.  I was a mediocre player, neither the best nor the worst in my section.  I remember being a part of a trio and practicing with two girls for a competition.  We did a passable but not an excellent job. The band played and marched at half-time for football games, so there was a lot of practice for that.  We traveled with the team for out-of-town games as well as performing at home games.  We went to the state band competitions, and I think we got a first, as a result of Mr. Griep’s vigorous drilling.  By the third year of junior high, I was losing interest in the band and didn’t sign up again.  However, I still remember the embouchure (lip configuration) for the clarinet and can make some kind of appropriate sound when I pick one up.  That is the only musical instrument that I ever learned to play, but it sharpened my ability to read music, which was a lasting benefit.

I had another girlfriend experience in junior high.  There was a girl named Charlotte Elliot who appeared on local television as a singer, and she caught my fancy.  I left notes in her locker, but, alas, she did not reciprocate!  I lived through it somehow.  As well as I can remember, all of my subsequent infatuations were with girls from church, none of which lasted long.

Taking a couple of years of Spanish in junior high school led to my first trip out of the U.S.  The class went to Monterrey, Mexico for cultural exposure to a Spanish-speaking country and practice in the language.  My family couldn’t afford the cost, so it was a blessing that someone at the school paid the fee.  I never knew for sure who it was, but I suspect it was my Spanish teacher, who thought I had done well in the class and wanted me to go.  I gained some proficiency in speaking Spanish, and even my rudimentary ability enabled me to work in a dry goods store in my senior year in Rule, selling clothes to Mexican migrant workers who were there picking cotton.  They were commonly referred to in Texas as “wetbacks” because they were pictured as having entered the country by wading the Rio Grande River (sound familiar?).

I went to Abilene High School for my sophomore and junior years, and I have several good memories of those two years. One of my initial courses there was two semesters of typing.  I was terrible at it, and my grades were the lowest of any course I ever took.  But the basic skill I gained has been monumental in its significance.  I became thoroughly immersed in touch typing, rather than hunt-and-peck.  I have often thanked God for making sure my advisor signed me up for the class. 

The high point of those years was singing, first in the Men’s Chorus and then the next year in the Acapella Choir, with admission only by audition.  The Acapella went on tour for a week toward the end of the year, and all music had to be memorized.  The director was Gene Kenny, a man with high standards, demanding the best we could deliver and using mostly classical and folk music for his material.  Those who heard the Choir commented on its mature sound for a high school group.  There was individual talent, too, in the person of a marvelous bass-baritone named Julian Long.  The Choir made a recording (33 rpm disc) of its repertoire, of which I still have a copy and play from time to time.

Another major high school memory is two world history classes I took from a dynamic teacher named Sarah Hardy.  She was probably in her 50s or 60s and had been around for a good while.  She engaged my attention and interest more than any other high school teacher.  I didn’t realize at the time that her anti-Russian bias marked her as a political conservative, but she was fond of saying that Stalin was from an Eastern culture and could not be expected to act like people from the West.  The framework of Western History she gave me in those two courses has been useful during all of my subsequent academic studies.

My five years in junior high and senior high in Abilene were a time of broadening my cultural and political perspectives.  My Spanish courses not only took me to my first visit to a foreign country and provided skills used in employment later, but also laid the foundation for studying other foreign languages, such as French and Latin, which were necessary to my graduate studies in English.  And not only did I enjoy singing high-quality music in the Acapella Choir, I developed an ear and a taste for classical music and excellent choral singing.  My early enjoyment of classical music was reinforced during my high school years by occasional times when I visited my brother Thavis’s room while he was attending college.  He had records of classical music that I listened to while he was in class.  And my world history class broadened my cultural and political outlook and paved the way for pursuing more history in the future, which meshed well with my interest in English literature as it developed in my college years.  All in all, my advanced public schooling in Abilene gave me valuable chances for trying new things and adjusting to the mix of success and failure in those endeavors.

My family’s move to Rule, TX in the summer after my junior year was necessitated, again, by my father’s illness with cancer, this time of the lungs.  We needed to be near my brother Otho, who had moved to Rule a year or two previous to our arrival to establish an appliance and watch repair store.  Otho provided work for my Dad in minding the store when my brother was out doing service or installation for the appliances he sold.  My enrollment in Rule High School was a part of the process of resettling, and it proved to entail experiences I would never have encountered back in Abilene.  More of that in the next installment.

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Dr. Elton Higgs was a faculty member in the English department of the University of Michigan-Dearborn from 1965-2001. Having retired from UM-D as Prof. of English in 2001, he now lives with his wife and adult daughter in Jackson, MI.. He has published scholarly articles on Chaucer, Langland, the Pearl Poet, Shakespeare, and Milton. His self-published Collected Poems is online at Lulu.com. He also published a couple dozen short articles in religious journals. (Ed.: Dr. Higgs was the most important mentor during undergrad for the creator of this website, and his influence was inestimable; it's thrilling to welcome this dear friend onboard.)

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Early Difficulties Translated into Valuable Lessons: Twilight Musings Autobiography (Part 4)

Early Difficulties Translated into Valuable Lessons: Twilight Musings Autobiography (Part 4)

Elton Higgs

My family’s move from Stamford, TX, back to Abilene when I was 7 years old turned out to entail challenges that became opportunities for me to grow.  The transfer to a new school is often difficult for a child, but since my illness in Stamford had forced me to begin 1st grade again, I went into 2nd grade with the advantage of being ahead of my classmates in both age and classroom experience.  That advantage put me ahead of the game for the rest of my primary school years.  Adding to the ease with which I made the transfer to a new school was the fact that I had very supportive teachers there, and that spurred me on to do my best.  I was hungry for approval, and it came most easily to me by performing well in the classroom.

I’m not sure what the immediate catalyst was for my family’s making the move back to Abilene in 1944, but it coincided with a downturn in our financial security.  Since my brother Otho and his wife Lucille had already gone back to Abilene and set up a business in watch repair, it made sense for my family to be there so that we could be more easily helped by them.  Not long after we moved back, my father was diagnosed with throat cancer, and that necessitated my going to work at an early age to earn some pocket money and eventually to contribute to the family’s purchase of groceries.  I had to adjust to the need for me to be a contributing member of the household, not just a dependent. 

We rented a house in Abilene only a few blocks away from Travis Elementary School, so I was able to walk to school.  I have numerous memories of my years at Travis.  My second-grade teacher, Mrs. Buttrick, enabled me to attract the attention of the woman who was to become my third-grade teacher, Mrs, Jackson.  Mrs. Buttrick had given me the task of reciting a little piece for the Parent Teacher Association, and after the event, Mrs. Jackson summoned me from the playground to tell me what a good job I had done.  Her commendation was a complete surprise, and it paved the way for a close relationship with her when I went into her class the next year.

At some point in my 3rd grade year, the principal of our school, Mr. Etter, gathered all the boys to present some basics on the “birds and bees.”  I suppose it was an appropriate time for such a lecture for me, because I subsequently developed a crush on my 4th grade teacher, Miss Caffee, and in the 5th grade I exchanged romantic looks and notes with a girl in my class.  It was there that I learned how “love” was engendered by the locking of eyes “across a crowded room.”  She sent me a little missive saying she liked me, and I manifested my early linguistic skill by replying “Likewise,” a word that probably no other boy in my class would have used.  I don’t remember that the girl to whom it was addressed responded, so our brief remote romance must have faded.

I was honored in 5th and 6th grades to be voted a Patrol Boy, which gave me the responsibility of standing at the pedestrian crossings outside the school to make sure traffic stopped to let the kids cross safely.  I was quite proud to wear the belt and the badge that went with the office.

Our Physical Education teacher was Mr. Sherman, a tall man who had a commanding presence.  Under him I learned to play soccer, a relatively new game at the time in the U. S.  It had this strange rule that you couldn’t touch the ball with your hands, so you had to learn literally to “use your head,” as well as your feet.  Mr. Sherman also coached the competitive team sports, football and softball.  My parents would not allow me to go out for the contact sport of football.  However, I did have a stint catching for the softball team.  I did not excel in sports, so early in life I accepted that my greatest successes would be achieved as an “egghead.”

My 5th grade teacher, Mrs. Barnes, inadvertently became an early sponsor of my entry into the work world.  She was a kind older lady, and my chief memory of her was her answering the door bell when I was going door-to-door selling greeting cards, my first work for pay.  Out of pure charity, no doubt, she bought some of my wares, for which I was grateful.  Though I don’t remember much about our relationship in the classroom, it must have been generally positive. 

Peddling greeting cards brought me my first pocket money, with which I bought my first bicycle, enabling me to graduate from self-employment to a brief career in selling newspapers.  I broke into the newspaper trade by walking around downtown Abilene selling the Fort Worth Star Telegram (which competed with the local paper, the Abilene Reporter News) on the street, in hotel lobbies, and in restaurants.  Getting up at about 4:30 in the morning to do this job; I rode my bike downtown to pick up my papers, passing by the lighted clock on a bank on Chestnut Street, which shone eerily on the deserted pavement.  I would set out with a bundle of papers under my arm, for which I had to account at the end of the day by giving my employer the wholesale price for each paper sold and returning the unsold papers.  It was a marvelous feeling to pay him his money and have no papers to return.  There were tips from time to time, but I didn’t have to tell him about those.  I found that areas around hotels were the best places to sell, since out-of-town people were most likely to want a newspaper from a major city like Fort Worth.  The papers were delivered twice a day by truck from Fort Worth, mostly on time but sometimes not.  When the papers were late and the delivery boys got rambunctious, Mr. Bennett, who managed the Abilene franchise for the paper, used to say, “When I die, I won’t go to Hell; the Lord will just make me wait for the paper truck to come!”

After several months of selling on the street (newspapers only!), I advanced to doing home deliveries on my bicycle, which gave me a steadier income.  The wind seemed to be my adversary during my newspaper delivery years.  When I was peddling papers on the street, the wind at the corners of tall buildings (as much as 17 stories in Abilene at the time!) would nearly rip my papers out of my arms.   When I was riding my bicycle on the residential route, it was exceedingly difficult to make headway facing into the wind.  Moreover, the bicycle I was riding supplied an additional challenge: it had only a cruising speed and it took a lot of initial energy to get it going.  However, that necessary struggle on the bicycle turned out to be good for my legs, creating good, firm muscles that have stood me in good stead over the years.

Meanwhile, back at Travis Elementary, my 6th grade teacher, Mrs. Lavinia Ward, took me under her wing and I worked hard for her, but my efforts were more quantitative than creative.  She didn’t much challenge that deficiency in my work in 6th grade, but it turned out that she went up to junior high teaching (7th grade) the same year I entered South Junior High School, so I had a social studies class with her there.  Her standards at that level, however, were appropriately more challenging.  I turned in an assignment (making a papier-mache map) on which I spent a great deal of time and turned it in expecting that I would receive the same kind of praise from her that I had in the 6th grade.  However, she returned the map with the comment that she expected some original thinking on the assignment, not mere hours spent.  That was my first real experience with thinking analytically, and I am thankful to Mrs. Ward for initiating it.  I was thereafter academically the better for it.

Our very early experiences shape attitudes and character.  In my case, God used what appeared to be difficult circumstances (early illness and the need for me to work) to help me develop special strengths.  My late start in schooling gave me an academic advantage which fed into my choosing an academic career.  My days selling greeting cards and delivering newspapers developed self-discipline and a sound sense of thrift in using the money I earned.  My family struggled financially during those years, and I was able to help out with my little bit of earnings, as well as being able to buy a few small things for myself.  I was profoundly affected by my father’s example of being a faithful tither, even when things were tight.  Even before I began earning my own money, I would put two or three cents of my weekly allowance of 25 cents into the offering plate on Sundays, so it was easy to transfer that principle when I had my own earned income.

I entered junior high school eager to navigate my last six years of public education and prepared to continue working to help the family. More about junior high school in the next installment. 

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Dr. Elton Higgs was a faculty member in the English department of the University of Michigan-Dearborn from 1965-2001. Having retired from UM-D as Prof. of English in 2001, he now lives with his wife and adult daughter in Jackson, MI.. He has published scholarly articles on Chaucer, Langland, the Pearl Poet, Shakespeare, and Milton. His self-published Collected Poems is online at Lulu.com. He also published a couple dozen short articles in religious journals. (Ed.: Dr. Higgs was the most important mentor during undergrad for the creator of this website, and his influence was inestimable; it's thrilling to welcome this dear friend onboard.)

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