Charles Willard Mathews memoir, part 2 - School Days
Continued from (Charles Willard Mathews memoir, part 1 - Boy's Life)
This Has Been My Life (Cont.)
 |
| Chuck Mathews, Doctoral candidate |
Basketball was a similar story
except that I stuck it out and lettered in the sport. We had a reasonable team
and got a few victories in the state tournament before being eliminated.
Socially, high school was great. I dated Betty White, daughter of an old Marissa family who owned the lumberyard. We had a crowd of eight; Betty, Eloise Ballard, Catherine Buchman, Peg Hayes, Billy Brown, Vernon Triefenbach, Pat Myers and myself. We had dinner parties, swimming parties and such.
Peg Hayes had a dinner party with
candlelight and pink ice cubes. The 'pink ice cubes' somehow became the theme
of the evening. An article in the school paper about them was hot stuff to us,
but others in school knew us for what we were, a stuck up bunch of snobs.
Entertainment was playing spin-the-milk-bottle and rolling up the rugs and
dancing. If there was anything else we did, I can't recall. Oh yes, we would
hang a sheet with back light. One at a time one sex would go behind and choose
one to be silhouetted on the sheet. The other sex would then try to guess who
was on stage. A variation was just to show a bare foot beneath the screen and
to guess whose foot was showing.
I graduated second in my class of
forty. Billy Brown was first. In all respects he excelled beyond me; sports,
big man around school, girls and grades. Even so, he was my best friend in
school. He went on to marry a lovely girl, May Norton, who he met at
Northwestern University while he was majoring in medical sciences. At this
writing he is retired because of health from a successful career in radiology
at Hollywood Presbyterian Hospital. Except for occasionally checking on some
lemon orchards he owns, he stays close to his family in California.
Yes, high school was fun. Studies
were easy and I felt good about it all, even though it was during the Great
Depression, Dad returned to engineering with the State of Illinois highway
department until he retired, shortly before his death. During this period he
frequently worked far enough from home that he'd not get home during the week. Thanks
to him I was able to work two summers with paving crews. The first summer I was
just sixteen and I served as his chainman. I made a pile, 35 cents an hour for
70 hours per week. It was years and years before I matched that stupendous
weekly salary. It was new highway construction between Sparta and Duquoin. We
stayed in the Culp home in Ava. The next summer I worked on the highway that
goes north from Coulterville. I was flagman, general flunky, whatever odd light
job that was to be done. But I proved my worth. Soon I was responsible for
keeping the burlap on top of the new pavement wet. One day a little lad asked
me "Do you get paid for that? I'd do it for nothing". Well, it was a
super-hot summer and men were dropping off the gang like flies. The contractor
must have been pretty desperate, for I kept getting moved to harder and harder
work until one day I was put in 'the puddle'. That is directly behind the
mixer. When a batch was mixed and dumped in a pile, the men in the puddle had
to shovel it around to fill up the low points before the spreader/smoother came
along to produce a nice even surface. It was a job that had to be done rapidly
and from which there was little rest. I was very proud of myself for I stuck it
out for the rest of the summer. For years I carried some small scars on my toes
where cement that leaked through my boots burned my toes. At the end of the
summer we had a few days at Uncle Rolland's cottage on the eastern shore of
Lake Michigan.
I suppose my work those summers
made me want to be an engineer like dad. I would have gone to his school, the
University of Illinois, if we could have afforded it. My second choice may
have been the school where my mother and father might have met but didn’t,
Monmouth (Illinois) College, but again it was expensive, and I settled on the
cheapest and nearest school, Southern Illinois Normal University, as it was
then called, in Carbondale. Tuition per quarter was less then than $20. There
were 1500 students and classes were small enough that the professors really got
to know many of their students. I got a room at the Parkers, southwest of the
Chemistry Building on the way to Anna. I had a roommate named Eubanks that I
had not met until we shared a double bed. I guess we got along reasonably, but
I recall real-controlled friction between us during that quarter. I studied
diligently that quarter because I was unsure of the difficulty of getting
reasonably good grades. It pleased me that all grades were Bs or better, so
from then on scholastics were well under my control. We also boarded at the
Parkers and each evening after dinner would listen to Amos and Andy on the
radio.
Then one day I was invited to a
smoker. What is a Smoker? What does one who doesn't smoke do at a smoker? What
did I do? I became the 13th pledge of a new local social fraternity, Kappa
Delta Alpha. A few weeks later I put all my possessions except my books in my
Gladstone bag and moved to the Entsminger house at 502 South Normal, which the
fraternity had rented. Katie Doss became our housemother and cook. My first
roommate was a fellow pledge, Robert Boyle from Centralia who later became a
Jesuit priest. Those were exciting days and the fun of college came into full
bloom. I had to learn to discipline my own time and my own actions. I continued
to make good grades, but I found chess and craps exciting games, too. Although
I consistently won at both, I felt compelled to withdraw from heavy
participation else my studies would slip. That first year of college I did no work.
It cost me and my parents a total of $300. The fraternity cost $5 per week for
room and board. So, to help out on the expenses, I got a job in my sophomore
year working for Clifton Kirby, manager of the Kroger store. First it was
Saturdays, then also early morning to put out the vegetables and fruits, then
it was whenever I was free to work a few hours. Those were the days that stores
had counters and clerks gathered together all the things that the customers
asked for, sacked them, took the money and carried them to the customer's
autos. One morning another clerk dumped a pile of trash over in the back room
and Mr. Kirby accused me of the act which I denied without success. The culprit
never opened his mouth while the manager continued to berate me. So I took off
my apron, handed it over to the manager saying "If you can't trust my
work, you can't trust me to punch your cash register" and I walked out. The
next Friday he called me and wanted me to return to work on Saturday. I
demanded he increase my wages from 25¢ to 35¢ per hour and he acceded. WOW! That
experience was one of the finest for me in all my college days. I learned the
value of personal integrity and a little about how to conduct my personal
affairs. I stayed with Kroger until I graduated. The district manager offered
me a job in management which I flatly turned down since I was now set upon
being a teacher and educated to be a teacher. Little did I realize at that time
what I was rejecting and how hard it would be to get any kind of a teaching
position in 1937.
I graduated that spring without a
job or a good prospect. So I asked a favor of a cousin of my mother who was
President of the Illinois Bankers Life Insurance Company - Arthur Sawyer of
Monmouth. I'm sure that it was out of love for my mother more than need for
manpower, I began to open mail in their home office in Monmouth. As the summer
rolled by I felt that I was not going to get into the teaching field. Then in
late August early on a Sunday morning, I had a telephone call asking if I was
available to teach in Fisk. My response was "Where is Fisk? How did you
get information about me?" It turned out that I had applied for a position
in Dexter, Missouri and that school had passed it to the Fisk superintendent
who had just had a teacher quit. So Fisk, population 400, needed a principal
who could coach all sports for boys and girls, teach mathematics and English,
and would coach a school play. Because of the cotton crop, school started in
early August and then would be closed in late September to harvest the crop. I
suppose that with mechanical picking nowadays that is no longer required. The
salary would be $900 and ten percent would be withheld until I finished my
contract. I agreed. putting my clothes in my one Gladstone bag, I bussed
through the day and night and St. Louis to an unknown land. A writer could
prepare a best seller on the next nine months of my life, the beautiful and
nasty side of life in a hillbilly town set in the swamps between the St.
Francis River and the Ozarks. I loved it. I loved it. But I would not bend to
such things as owning an automobile so I could haul the basketball team around.
Nor to the advances of the young wife of the school board clerk who had tired
of patting her husband's bald head. Suffice it to say that when I left town at
the end of the term to attend the University of Illinois summer school, the
school board was split on whether to renew my contract or not. In the long run,
this was my good fortune for it pushed me to a rapid decision to press onward
toward a PhD.
Jean and I had planned to be
married on June 4, 1938, but at Christmas time we got the bright idea to be
married earlier so she could join me in Fisk for a month. As far as we were
concerned that was great. But others were not so inclined. Some family members
thought advancing the wedding until April 2 was a matter of necessity. And
there were those in Fisk who were very upset because an eligible male had been
snatched from their grasp. We did get married indeed, on Saturday, April 2,
1938. Jim Chandler drove us to Cape Girardeau and had dinner with us before
returning to Carbondale. Sunday morning we attended the Presbyterian Church
near the hotel and in the afternoon we boarded the little country bus to
continue to Fisk. Hardly a storybook honeymoon, but it was a spirited start for
life together, sometimes for better, sometimes for worse, but always for love,
for real.
As I say, we packed our bags and
went arm in arm to the bus out of Fisk the day school ended. We had mixed
emotions, being sad to leave young men and women who we had come to like and to
care about. We were also glad and excited to be moving on for a summer at the
university. Urbana was a big city to us and the University of Illinois seemed
bigger yet. It was with trembling that I enrolled that first summer session -
and with a great deal of support from my family and Jean's. Even though a month
later Jean had rushed surgery for an ovarian cyst, we survived and my grades
were good. With no strong prospects for a teaching job, I found a Works Project
Administration job on campus ($35 per month) and we decided to stay in school.
We leased a third floor apartment with only a rear stair entrance. It was just
off campus in Champaign. Renting the bed room to my ex-roommate, Robert Boyle
and a friend, Jean and I slept that year on the rollaway in the parlor. If all
work and no play made Jack a dull boy, I understand why I'm not the brightest. I
recall though there were some fun times. The YMCA had Married Couple Potlucks,
where there was never any food to carry back home. One evening I found Jean
weeping because her cup cakes were not right, so I proceeded to make them, and
of course I told everyone at the potluck that I had. (That was a lesson well
learned on how to displease a bride.) I also remember the morning when without
a cent to our name, I found a dollar bill on the front porch under the mail
box. After trying to give it to the mail carrier without success, Jean and I
bought a box of macaroni for our next day's meal. It was a strain that year but
another fun year. And I earned the Master of Arts degree in mathematics.
In the fall of 1939 I began my
studies for my doctorate. As a perennial student, I would not quit school until
I'd had it all. With another couple (Dallas and Christina Young), we agreed to
occupy a retired couple's home while they spent the winter in Florida. We kept
their grandson and another young man as roomers. I now had a teaching
fellowship which paid my tuition and gave me a small stipend, about $1500 for
the year. Jean worked some in a dime store and then a department store and we
stretched our pittance into subsistence. With a bicycle for transportation and
milk at 50¢ per gallon if I took a bottle to the dairy to get it, we made it
through the year, and enjoyed life.
We spent those graduate student summers
in Carbondale taking care of the 80 acres of peach trees that 'Dad' Chandler
used for experimental work and testing new sprays. They were carefree in the beautiful
southern Illinois hills away from the books.
The next year we rented a
one-room apartment made out of half of the upstairs of a big old house on East
Illinois in Urbana. We had already decided that we knew how to hack it with
little money. And, too, that if we wanted children we would be foolish to wait
and wait and wait. Since there was no problem in placing C.O.D. orders we did
so in the spring. On Friday, the 13th of December, Charles Willard, the THIRD
arrived, undoubtedly the ugliest, reddest-skinned kid that even started life in
Burnham Hospital. Still he was the most wonderful child ever carried out of
that place.
A few months later I stood up for
my doctor's orals. There is a book by that name - Doctor's Orals - worth
reading because it is full of the things that happen. Anyway, I flunked! The
floor collapsed. I was crushed. But stubbornly, when they offered to allow me
to try again in six months, I agreed. So as the Second World War burst on the
scene the next year, I took the oral tests again and passed. What a glorious
feeling!
Next: CHARLES WILLARD MATHEWS MEMOIR, PART 3 - WAR AND BEYOND
Comments
Post a Comment