It wasn’t that long ago that I took my friend Mrs. Hannemann down to the Gorham Normal School alumni reunion. Mrs. Hannemann graduated with the class of 1912 or so.
When it was time to leave the meeting, I asked if she’d wait by the door so I could bring the car down and save her a walk up to the parking lot on Gorham’s hilly campus. She said, “When I can’t walk up that hill, I won’t come to these meetings.”
Alas, as it turned out, Mrs. Hannemann never did attend another alumni meeting. The next year when I asked her if she would go with me, she sighed and said, “No. I wouldn’t know anybody there.”
Because one should go to reunions when it is still possible to at least recognize what is written on nametags, I attended my 50th Gorham college reunion.
The people seated at our table looked very young to me. And then I remembered that, because of my military service – as well as being a slow learner – it took me 12 years to get my undergraduate degree and that I was dining with a bunch of spring chickens.
I asked several of them, “Who was your favorite teacher?”
The science teachers said, “Mr. Miller. George Ayers.” The history people snapped back, “Miss Wood.”
And then I asked, “Who changed your life?”
“Mr. Ayers. He would have us out in a field with a telescope at 2 a.m. watching Saturn appear over the horizon. I took every course I could from him. My whole teaching career was based on what I learned from Mr. Ayers.”
It would be hard for me to name my favorite teacher at Gorham, because there isn’t one of them I wouldn’t like to take a course from today. If you attended “Normal,” you know they were an exceptional bunch.
I stayed in contact with Alan Pease until his recent passing. It was Mr. Pease who wrote on one of my history papers, “This is very well written but you haven’t said anything.”
Mr. Pease could see that I was cut out to be a newspaperman and that my column would one day be syndicated in over 50 towns and cities. For what does a social commentator do but listen at keyholes and then transcribe in purple prose scraps of what he has heard? He pads out the column with anything he can think of that sounds plausible and, because half of it is true, his readers eagerly nod and take it for gospel.
Philosopher Jim Whitten became a lifelong friend. At my 1965 wedding on Chebeague, I introduced him to Doug McGee, who was teaching philosophy at Bowdoin. Later, when I noticed they were still chatting, I asked what they had found to talk about. Mr. Whitten said, “Nothing yet. We are still defining our terms.”
At the banquet, I was reminded of our 1963 European tour. Allston Smith, the registrar, assembled the package for students who wanted to broaden their horizons.
My buddy Tom Dennen and I eagerly signed aboard. We had both lived in Sweden, and he had worked in a store with some kid who later played in a band called Abba.
Because your diary will give you a much more accurate picture of what you did in 1963 than your memory, I turned to mine and this is what it said:
“From St. George, Maine, to the Boston airport, I rode with David Oakes, a Bowdoin man I knew because he hired my father to build him a house in Tenants Harbor.
“We stopped in Freeport and picked up Donald MacMillan and took him to the train station in Boston. He was on his way to D.C., where, he said, he suspected he was going to get some kind of honorary award from National Geographic. He would have been 88 at the time. Because of my Gorham connection, I can boast that I accompanied Admiral MacMillan on one of his expeditions.”
Only one incident comes to mind of our time in Sweden. In Gorham, Dennen and I had been in the habit of speaking Swedish so we could discuss the relative merits of our female classmates while in their company. Yes, I know, but it is something little boys do.
We were in a store in Lysekil when a very attractive girl walked in. Dennen blurted out something like, “Wow. Check out this one,” in our customary Swedish.
I quietly said, “Remember where you are.”
Once on familiar soil, the two of us rode from Sweden to Paris and back on mopeds.
According to my diary, when we mustered in London for the trip home, I only had a dollar to check my bag. It cost a dollar and 5 cents, but they let me through. When Tom Dennen showed up at the last minute, I loaned him 10 Swedish kroner so he could get something to eat.
Did you live on the cusp when you were in college? Did you keep diaries of your daily doings?
Have you burned them yet?
The humble Farmer can be seen on Community Television in and near Portland and visited at his website:
www.thehumblefarmer.com/MainePrivateRadio.html
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