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CHAPTER III

Miami University

MY CHOICE OF a college was not complicated. For financial reasons, I needed to go to a state-supported Ohio college. I really only thought about two—Ohio University and Miami University. I rejected Ohio University, even though it was and is a fine school, because I wanted to get farther away from home (it was only thirteen miles from Nelsonville), but not too far. I had never been to Miami (forty miles north of Cincinnati), but I liked everything I knew about it and the few people I knew who went there as well. So, off I went to Miami in the fall of 1948, and I have never regretted the decision. It marked a major turning point in my life, in more ways than one.

I knew very few people when I arrived at Miami, and so I was looking forward to meeting my roommate and becoming pals. I just knew that would make it easier for me to adjust and be less homesick. (I knew I was going to be homesick!) So, after unpacking and bidding my folks goodbye, I waited anxiously in my room for my new pal.

They arrived! Yes, I said they for I was to have not one roommate but two! Not just any two guys. Oh no! These guys were high school buddies from nearby Dayton. They were nice guys and we got along, but they didn’t need me to be a friend. Moreover, they went home to Dayton almost every weekend, and I was by myself. The result was that I studied a lot—far more than I would have if my roommate situation had turned out as I had expected. This in turn got me into study habits that led to better grades than I had ever imagined and made it possible for me to seriously think about attending Yale Law School. And thereby hangs another tale of good luck.

In those days, Miami had a system of faculty counselors. I was assigned to a political science professor named Straetz. When I first met him he looked me right in the eye and asked where I wanted to go to law school. I said that I didn’t know. He said, “Don’t you think you should try to go to the best law school in the country?” I acknowledged that seemed the right thing to do. He then said that as far as he was concerned the best school was Yale, and that’s what I should strive for. He made it very clear, however, that I had no chance unless my grades were very good.

So, I had an advisor who set me on a tough, but wise, course and an environment in which I had plenty of time to study! I call that good luck! In spite of all this, my first semester was not a happy one. I was lonely and missed my home and family. When I went home for Christmas, I told my brother that I wanted to leave Miami and enroll at Ohio University—close to home. Instead of lecturing me, he said he understood, but suggested that I finish out the year, and if I still wanted to transfer he would help me convince my father that it was the right thing to do—not a task I wanted to handle by myself!

By the end of my freshman year nothing could have persuaded me to leave. And, again, good luck was on my side. I went on to build an academic record that allowed me to get into Yale. I was elected president of the student council and developed a wonderful group of friends, particularly my fraternity brothers.

HOWEVER, THE GREATESTstroke of good fortune came in my junior year—when I met the lady who became my wife and who remains so today. I am sure everyone remembers how and where he or she first met his or her spouse. I surely do! Again, my good luck!

One of my duties during my term as president of the student council at Miami was to meet the candidates for freshman council and explain to them the rules of election—such as no signs on trees. We assembled in a classroom late in the afternoon on a rainy day. Shortly after I had begun to speak, a late arrival came into the back of the room and quietly sat down in the last row (it was, by the way, the first and last time in her life that Marilyn Brown was late for anything).

In any case, I was instantly smitten. She was the prettiest thing I had ever seen. When I finished my remarks, I handed out a printed copy of the election rules. But, I slyly made sure to walk to the back of the room and hand-deliver copies to those in the last couple of rows, including, of course, Miss Brown. I might add that she was even prettier up close.

All the candidates signed the sheet with their names and addresses. I noted that Miss Brown lived in a dormitory called Swing Hall. After the meeting, I went back to my room at my fraternity house and located one of my fraternity brothers, Sam Badger, who worked as a waiter at Swing Hall. I asked Sam if he knew Marilyn Brown who lived at Swing. He said he did, and I asked him if he could arrange a date for me. He did and—as they say—the rest is history.

Another one of my duties as president of the Student Faculty Council at Miami University was to head up the so-called Artists Series, which was a program of music and drama that lasted throughout the year and featured six or seven different performances. The most memorable one by far, indeed the only one I recollect, was when a quartet of the world’s most distinguished actors came to Miami to perform George Bernard Shaw’s great play Don Juan in Hell. This group—Charles Boyer, Charles Laughton, Sir Cedric Hardwick, and Agnes Morehead—were certainly four of the world’s great performers, and they were taking Don Juan in Hell on the road after a dazzling success in New York City. The nearest airport to Miami University is Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport, and that is where the group was arriving. I managed to borrow a clean but fairly old car (since Miami did not permit students to have cars) and drove to the airport to meet the group. In retrospect, I simply cannot imagine that I did this. Why I didn’t have the presence of mind—or why someone didn’t tell me—to hire a limousine and escort the actors in the manner to which I’m sure they were accustomed, I simply can’t imagine.

But, in any event, I met them and we drove from the airport to the Miami University campus with Mr. Laughton (a large man) in the front seat with me and the remaining luminaries crammed into the back seat. Nevertheless, we made it, and they performed brilliantly, just as they had on Broadway. Perhaps, however, more memorable to me than their performances was what happened after the show. I was to take them back to Cincinnati, where they were spending the night. After I got the same “trusty” automobile ready, I walked into the dressing room to see how nearly ready they were for the trip. The first thing I saw was Charles Boyer, the handsome Frenchman who had played numerous dramatic roles and who was perhaps one of the most famous performers in history, taking off his stage makeup in front of a large mirror. However, Mr. Boyer’s hair was on a dummy’s head! I had not known that Mr. Boyer wore a toupee—why would I know such a thing?—and I was completely flummoxed when I saw the bald Boyer and the hairpiece on the dummy’s head. I don’t think I made a fool of myself, but it was a little while before I was able to calmly assemble the group to head back to Cincinnati.

I continue to marvel on this evening and why one or more of the four didn’t let me have it for not treating them with the dignity they certainly deserved. Perhaps, however, they found it a relief from the usual hoopla and adoration to which they were normally accustomed.

THE REMAINING YEARS at Miami were happy ones. Marilyn and I got engaged (I bought a ring for three hundred dollars, which exhausted most of what I had accumulated from that summer’s highway work) and planned our wedding for August 31, 1952, just before heading to New Haven, Connecticut, to attend Yale Law School (yes, I got in!).

Three final Miami memories. It’s funny the things you remember—that stick in your mind—after a lot of years have gone by. I had—and have—scores of happy memories of my days at Miami University. But a quirky story is one of my very favorites. One of my fraternity brothers was getting a degree in education, and in his senior year was doing student teaching at a local school. One day when I walked into the fraternity house where I was living, I saw my friend sitting at the top of a flight of stairs that went from the first to the second floor. As I walked in, he threw a sheaf of papers up in the air and they landed on several different steps. I couldn’t imagine what he was doing, so I asked him. He said, “Charlie, I have got all these papers to grade, and I don’t have the time or energy to do it. So, I am throwing them up in the air and the steps on which they land will each have a grade. Those that land on one step will get an ‘A,’ on the next step a ‘B,’ and so forth.” I said, “You can’t be serious.” He assured me that he was. I don’t recommend this to any aspiring teacher, and I certainly hope that no “A” students had their papers land on the “D” or “F” steps, but I suspect that in the big picture it didn’t really make a whole lot of difference.

My roommate during my junior and senior years at Miami became one of my dearest friends and remains so today. Dan Brower and his beautiful wife, Phyllis, were constant companions for Marilyn and me, and we had many, many happy times together.

But, there was a “dark” side to Dan Brower. I have one phobia—I really hate spiders, and the bigger they are the more I hate them. Somehow Dan learned this and here’s what he did. He bought one of those giant rubber spiders that is about five or six inches across with horrible colors and so forth, and he put it under some papers next to my typewriter, obviously knowing that at some point when I was going through the papers I would uncover it. His plan worked even better than he dreamed because I accidently knocked the papers onto the floor, which made the spider virtually jump out at me, and I went screaming out the door. Dan and my buddies had so much fun with this that they concocted an even more diabolical scheme. All of us in our fraternity house slept in a large dormitory-like area in double-decker bunks. My bed was one of the lower bunks. One of the guys got in the upper bunk and dangled a big spider on a thread and lowered it down inches from my sleeping face. They then spotlighted it with a flashlight and woke me up. I don’t think I need to describe any further the trauma that ensued. Thank God I’ve always had a good heart because if I didn’t, I would have long since been gone. Finally, a memory that always makes me smile but certainly wasn’t funny at the time. Before being accepted as a full member of a fraternity in those days, one had to serve something of an apprenticeship—called pledging. As a pledge one had to perform a number of duties around the fraternity house to make the lives of the active members more pleasant. One such duty was called “wake boy.” As the name implies, this consisted of waking the older members of the fraternity based on a list that was posted each night with names, times, and any other instructions. This was normally a fairly simple matter but there was one important and ongoing warning. One of the active members was a fellow named Mike Saborse. Mike was a veteran of World War II and had been engaged in quite a bit of combat. His memories were still fresh, and, if he was awakened too abruptly, he might come up swinging. So, we all took special care to wake him up slowly and tenderly! One morning I went to the fraternity house as “wake boy.” It had snowed during the night, and as I came to Mike’s bunk I found that he had left the window open and was covered with about an inch of snow. Unconsciously, he had buried under the covers, and the snow had covered the blanket over his entire body. When I saw this I was absolutely terrified because I had no idea what might happen if I awoke him in a way that caused him to have snow descend on his warm and cozy frame. So, what I did was to pull up one edge of the covers very quietly and whisper, “Mike, it’s Charlie Mechem, don’t move. You are covered with snow and you must get up slowly and let me brush the snow off as you sit up.” Happily, this worked, and I brushed the snow off as he slowly awakened. A disaster was averted. A singular incident indeed and nothing remotely like it has happened to me since!

I need to reiterate that these years were amazing in retrospect—not just for us but for the United States itself. World War II was over, the Great Depression was over, and the Cold War had not escalated to a point where it was of great concern. General Dwight Eisenhower was elected president in 1952. He was the ultimate war hero and was immensely respected and popular, and this simply added to the healthy and robust mood of the nation. Those years now seem light-years away!

The mood of the 1950s is beautifully described in a wonderful book, Rules of Civility by Amor Towles. He puts it this way:

In the 1950s, America had picked up the globe by the heels and shaken the change from its pockets. Europe had become a poor cousin—all crests and no table settings. And the indistinguishable countries of Africa, Asia, and South America had just begun skittering across our schoolroom walls like salamanders in the sun. True, the Communists were out there, somewhere, but with Joe McCarthy in the grave and no one on the Moon, for the time being the Russians just skulked across the pages of spy novels.

Our wedding, at the First Methodist Church in Marilyn’s hometown of Newark, Ohio, was wonderful. Not fancy, not huge, just the kind of ceremony that I am sure thousands of Midwest boys and girls celebrated during those years—friends and family, smiles and tears. Marilyn was beautiful in her wedding gown on her dad’s arm. I knew this was a tough day for Brownie (that is what everyone called Marilyn’s dad), because they were very close, and I knew how much he would miss her. We were told later that the day was oppressively hot—hardly uncommon for an August day in Ohio! But we were oblivious to it. For us, everything about the day was wonderful.

Immediately after the reception we set off for New Haven in an old Nash* that I had bought for four hundred dollars. That old car served us well for several years, but we finally had to get rid of it when it began to use more oil than gas and put a smoke screen out the exhaust pipe that in today’s world would contribute significantly to global warming.