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