I was on the baseball team and the basketball team, and I was in the Key Club and I had a steady girlfriend, which is another reason I wasn’t particularly disturbed when we had no tenth year reunion.
The last time I saw my steady girlfriend, who later became much more than that, she was loading our living room furniture, my stereo, the bed, and the washer and dryer into the back of a truck.
Who knows what she might still have been in the market for?
Frankly, I am puzzled as to what to write witty and clever for the invitation.
I can say we’ll all drink a few beers, likely, and we won’t have to hide behind Robert’s and Alf’s drive-in to do it.
We’ll take a look at one another and say things like, “You haven’t changed a bit” when what we really mean is, “I wouldn’t have known you in a million years because the last time I saw you, you had hair.”
We’ll see who is fat now who didn’t used to be, and who lost weight and who is still obnoxious and who got rich and who wouldn’t kiss you goodnight for love nor money in school but has been pregnant practically every day since graduation. And who has retained all his hair and his slim, boyish figure. Like me.
We’ll listen to the old songs and tell a lie or two.
And maybe for old times’ sake, I’ll even have a dance with my steady girlfriend who later became much more than that while some body sings, “In the Still of the Night.”
Come to think of it, fifteen years later is a perfect time to have a high school reunion. It’s a short enough period for the good memories to be fresh and for the ravages of age to have taken only a soft toll.
And long enough to have forgiven an overdue library book, a punch in the belly, and even the night I walked into an empty house and found out for the first time adulthood isn’t all it was cracked up to be.
THEY WERE PLAYING OUR SONGS
THE THREE OF US were children of the forties, but we had left the campus when the trouble began. We were born of men back from the war and the women who waited for them to come home.
We barely remember Korea. My daddy was gone two years, and I really never knew why. The name Harry Truman rings a vague bell. The thing I remember most about Ike was how the people down home cursed him for spending too much time playing golf at Augusta.
Kennedy was ours, but we lost him in high school. Vietnam was festering during our college days, but on a sleepy Deep South campus, it would take longer for the explosion of dissent to finally come.
After school, one of us—ordered to do so—went to the fight. The other two, lucky as hell, stayed home and learned about making a living.
We made the same fraternal pledge fifteen years ago. That tie still binds us somehow. One of us is losing his hair. Another has put on a few pounds. I get down in my back occasionally and I don’t sleep as well as I used to.
Monday night was a reunion of sorts. It is rare we can be together as a threesome for an evening out anymore.
But this was special. They were playing our songs at a club called the Harlequin. We wouldn’t have missed it.
First, you must get this picture: The year is 1964. The band is black and loud. Beer cans are illegal on campus. There was such a thing in those days, however, as “Humdinger” milkshake cups. They would hold two full cans until they became soggy and fell apart. A date must be selected carefully. She must not mind beer on her skirt. There were a lot of good women like that in 1964.
And the band would play until midnight, time to beat the curfew back to the girls’ dorms. The frolic before was always grand and glorious because, as that campus anthem went, we came to college not for knowledge, but to raise hell while we’re here.
Our music was a soulful strut. Maurice Williams and the Zodiacs, “Stay;” The Isley Brothers, “Twist and Shout;” The Temptations, “My Girl;” The Drifters, “Save the Last Dance for Me;” Marvin Gaye and the classic, “Stubborn Kind of Fellow.”
And two more groups, hallowed be their names: The Atlanta Tarns. The Showmen.
We were on the edge of our seats Monday night. And then, there they were. Four black men from Norfolk, Virginia. Four black men who can dance and sing and take you back where, the Lord knows, you never wanted to leave in the first place.
Four black men called The Showmen who put “39-21-46” on a record years ago.
“We’re gonna take the roof off this place,” they said, and they did.
The Tarns were next. “Atlanta’s own Atlanta Tarns,” announced the announcer. They have aged, the Tarns. But their voices still blend in perfect, deep harmony, and when they sang “What Kind of Fool?” everybody in the house was nineteen years old again.
As is the custom, we went down front to the stage before the night was over. We sang and we danced along. Our parents did the same to Big Band swing. A group of teenyboppers went crazy over a child named Shaun Cassidy at the Omni the other night. Who knows what sound will attract our children?
But does it really matter? Music, any kind of music, is memories and sometimes hope for the future. Music can soothe, music can hurt. Music can be lost loves and old friends. Music can give advice worth heeding.
“Listen to that,” said one of us to the other two Monday night. “They’re right, you know.”
The Tarns were singing. It was one of their old songs. You have missed something if you have never heard it. Three fellows bound for middle-age gathered in every word:
“Be Young.
“Be Foolish.
“Be Happy.”
WHEN THE SMOKE HAD CLEARED
DORSEY HILL STILL LAUGHS about the night I came through fraternity rush at the Sigma Pi house in Athens.
“Damn’dest sight I ever saw,” he says. “You were wearing white socks and black, pointed-toe shoes, and your head was skinned. I mean skinned. I said, ‘Where on earth did THAT come from?’”
But they took in the skinhead anyway at the house on Milledge Avenue, the one with the white columns, and there were some high times the next four years.
I forget exactly who went to put the Chi Omega owl to the torch. The Chi Omega sorority house was across the street from ours, and they were an uppity bunch. One year they built a paper owl, a huge thing, for rush.
We were sitting on our front porch in those marvelous rocking chairs, and somebody thought it would be a good idea to burn the owl.
Every fire truck in Athens showed up to put it out. So did Dean Tate, dean of University of Georgia men. When the smoke had cleared, we were on something called “social probation.”
That meant we couldn’t have another party until every member had graduated from school, had fulfilled his military obligation, and had fathered at least two legitimate children.
In retrospect, it was worth it. Fifty silly sorority girls, outraged and bewildered, watching their precious paper owl go up in a glorious blaze. Strike another one for dear old Sigma Pi.
I could do this all day. There was the basement we called the “Boom-Boom Room.” Beware, young coed, to enter there. It was in the “Boom-Boom Room” where we administered a water-drinking torture called “Cardinal Puff” during initiation. A pledge almost died after “Cardinal Puff” one night.
Maybe that is what started it. Sigma Pi once thrived. We had the captain of the football team, the captain of the basketball team. But hard times came along.
I heard they had to sell that beautiful old house to pay their way out of debt. I heard the membership had fallen off to almost nothing. I heard the university had even taken away the charter and that Sigma Pi had died a quiet, slow death on the campus.
I shed a quick tear, but nothing more. It’s been a long time.
But there was a telephone call last week. It was from a Georgia coed. She had a sense of urgency in her voice.
“You’ve got to help,” she said.
“Help who?” I answered.
“Sigma Pi at Georgia,” she went on. “I’m dating this guy who’s a member. They’re trying to make a comeback, but they
’re about to go bankrupt. They lost a couple of pledges who were supposed to move into the house. They needed their money for rent. One of them joined the Navy.”
I called the Sigma Pi house in Athens. The president answered the telephone. We used to have eighty members. “We’ve got eleven,” he said. We sent more than that to burn the Chi Omega owl.
The new house is being rented from a university faculty member, the young man said. The current members are trying to hold on to the house until more members can be pledged. More members, more money.
“We even keep the heat turned off,” he said, “to save money.” There are no parties, the president told me, because there is no money for parties. There are no meals at the house because who can afford cooks? What Sigma Pi in Athens needs and wants is some help from the alumni. A donation, maybe, at least a visit to help with rush.
“Just some encouragement,” said the president.
That’s not much to ask. I’ll try to get up a group and come over, I said. We’ll have a few cold ones and talk about it. And afterwards maybe we’ll all go over to Chi Omega and apologize.
In a pig’s eye, we will.
SWEETHEART OF SIGMA CHI
HOW I GOT INVITED to a University of Georgia fraternity party at my age isn’t the story here. The story is what I saw when I went there.
It was the Sigma Chi’s annual gathering to select a chapter sweet heart. Sigma Chis the nation over take selecting a chapter sweetheart seriously because somebody once immortalized young ladies so chosen with a popular song entitled, appropriately enough, “Sweetheart of Sigma Chi.”
A banquet preceded the party. I don’t know what I expected. I had seen Animal House. I knew that it was only a short time ago the college campus was a social battleground. Sometimes, it was just a battleground.
But what, I asked myself, are the prevailing moods and customs of the campus on this, the eve of the 1980s?
I knew about the early sixties. It was button-down, slick-it-back, eat, drink and chase Mary in the tight skirt and monogrammed sweater. The late sixties and early seventies were angry and hip and taking things that made you crazy and wearing clothes to look the part.
The Sigma Chis on this night came dressed as a GQ ad. They were three-pieced and button-downed and blown-dried almost to a man. Their dates were clones from the Phi Mu house fifteen years ago.
The chapter president, whose hair was shorter than mine, opened with a moving invocation. Gentlemen rose from their seats when ladies excused themselves from the tables. The dinner lasted well over an hour. Nobody threw a single morsel of food.
When the new sweetheart was introduced, the chapter stood as one and sang her their delicate, obviously inspired rendition of the sweetheart song while she cried. Donna Reed would have played her part. John Belushi would have been asked to leave.
There was some loosening up when the party began, but the frolic that followed wouldn’t have qualified as even a mild public disturbance.
The band played Marvin Gaye’s “Stubborn Kind of Fellow,” “Sixty Minute Man,” and the Temptations’ “My Girl.” I know all the words to all three songs. A young man asked for something by Jackie Wilson, and the band gave him “Lonely Teardrops.” Who turned back the time machine?
The booze was mostly beer. Somebody had a half-gallon of Jim Beam bourbon and was pouring it into Coca-Cola. The smokers I saw were pulling on Marlboros.
Later in the evening, a small ice fight broke out—it always did— and everybody danced the “Gator.” I know grown people who still dance the “Gator,” which involves lying on the floor and acting like a half-crazed reptile with a bad case of the shakes.
The University of Georgia was never a leader in the radical league and the war is over now and things are quieter everywhere, but it did occur to me after the Sigma Chi party that perhaps life on the campus has returned to normal, sis-boom-bah.
- Fraternities and sororities, spurned by many students just a few years ago, are making a big comeback at Georgia. “We are nearly overrun during rush,” a Sigma Chi told me.
- Pot smoking is still prevalent among some students, I was told, but “drinking is back stronger than ever.” Sigma Chi fines members caught smoking pot in the fraternity house.
- Political activism is down on the Georgia campus. SDS is dead and gone. The student body president ran with a bag over his head, the “Unknown Candidate” with no platform. He won in a walk.
The strongest and most active group on campus, believe it or not, is the Young Americans for Freedom, a conservative, pro-Reagan outfit.
“They don’t want to stop a war,” said an editor at the student newspaper, “they want to start one.”
Wonders never cease, and spring quarter approaches. Let’s go get a six-pack and have a panty raid.
ONE FOR BILL JOHNSON
ATHENS—WINTER QUARTER WAS a sinus headache that seemed to linger on and on. The glory of the fall and football had passed. Springtime on the University of Georgia campus was always brightness and color and cold beer in tall cups and young things from Fitzgerald and Dalton whose mommas would have fainted had they known their babies were parading around in public dressed like that. And would it all ever return again and save us from January’s gloom?
There was only a trickle of people about the campus Monday. Joggers ran up Lumpkin Street. Will this generation’s legacy be a pair of worn running shoes and a green sweatshirt? The Campus Crusade for Christ is presenting Master of Illusion this week. One of the sorority houses has a banner hanging outside congratulating a sister for being accepted to the Harvard Law School. Girls used to go to college to find a husband.
But things change. There is even a sign now at the entrance to the athletic department training room in the Georgia Coliseum that reads, “Women are in the training room. Remember to wear your shorts.” I was thinking of some names like Rissmiller and Swinford and Ridlehuber as I read that sign. Would they have stood for such encroachment? Women in the training room, indeed.
Who can come back here—even in the’ depths of the winter doldrums—and not launch himself into a sentimental journey? Boys become men here. Gangly, chirping girls become sophisticated women. How many of us had that first, heady taste of sin on these grounds? I recall being anxious to leave. I was out of my mind.
Bill Johnson loved Georgia. He loved everything about it. We were in the same, overloaded boat. We both had school, and we both—by choice—had work as well. Bill Johnson was employed by an Athens radio station. I worked for an Athens newspaper.
How do friendships begin? He was “the voice” of Athens High School sports. I was second on a two-man sports department totem pole. The boss covered the Bulldogs. I had Athens High. My friend Bill Johnson and I were together in a thousand rickety, crowded press boxes in places like Gainesville and Augusta and Hartwell and Elberton.
He was good at what he did. Bill Johnson was barely past twenty, but there could be no question as to his promise as a sportscaster. His voice was smooth, yet strong. There were those nights after games we would drive back to Athens together and fantasize about our futures.
“Do you think,” he would ask, “we’ll ever get to the big time?”
I reckoned that we would. We promised if one of us made it and the other did not, the·friendship would last. I have never made a more sincere promise.
There is something about those days of dreaming. There are no limits in an ambitious mind. Bill Johnson would be as good and as important as Ed Thilenius someday. And I would be paid to write a story about a ball game for an Atlanta newspaper.
The last time I saw Bill Johnson was the day he graduated from Georgia. We had a few last beers together and said how much we would miss each other. He also had to leave a young wife in Athens for a short military obligation. But then he would be back and look out, Lindsey Nelson.
That was March 1966. Spring quarter was beautiful that year. We wrote back and forth. He was stationed somewhere in Texas.
Ca
me the autumn and a wonderful Georgia football team. You remember. Kirby Moore. Kent Lawrence. George Patton. Bill Stanfill.
There was the second half comeback at Auburn that gave Vince Dooley his first Southeastern Conference title. Undefeated Georgia Tech fell the next week in Stanford Stadium. And Georgia would go on to the Cotton Bowl and belittle Southern Methodist.
Somewhere tucked away I have Bill Johnson’s last letter. He was ill, he said. It was the first I knew about it. Some crazy blood infection. But he said don’t worry. He said the doctors were thinking of letting him go to Dallas to see Georgia in the Cotton Bowl.
A week later, on December 7, Bill Johnson died. He was twenty-three.
The church up in Summerville, his hometown, was packed. When we carried him through town to the cemetery, the old men stopped on the streets and covered their hearts with their hats. The young widow cried hard.
Monday, as I walked across the campus, I remembered another promise. I told Bill Johnson I would mention him one day in a column if I ever got a job with a big city newspaper.
This is that mention. It’s for a friend, a long time gone.
5.
THE VIEW FROM LEFT FIELD
I knew it was time for me to get out of sportswriting when I covered the 1978 Super Bowl game between Dallas and Denver and enjoyed the halftime show that featured dogs catching frisbees more than I did the football game.
I will still fall into a sports column now and then, however. It’s comfortable there, like an old pair of sneakers.
AT THE BALL GAME WITH MY DAD
I WOULD HAVE TAKEN my father out to the ball game Tuesday night. I would have taken him to the Atlanta Stadium to see Pete Rose try to break Wee Willie Keeler’s hitting streak record.
His birthday is Saturday. He would have been sixty-six. A trip to the ball game would have been a nice present from a son to his father.
Kathy Sue Loudermilk, I Love You: A good beer joint is hard to find and other facts of life Page 6
