IOWA HAWKEYE ANNUAL & SOME PERSONAL REMINISCENCE

IOWA HAWKEYE ANNUAL & SOME PERSONAL REMINISCENCE

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© October 6, 2008

“We read history through our biases.”

Wendell Phillips (1811 – 1884), American orator

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Reference: This is a response to a neighborhood friend of my youth, and fellow student at the University of Iowa in the 1950s. He is looking for a classmate who played football with him for the Iowa Hawkeye’s in the 1950s. Phil Leahy is a fellow Irishman who is trying to fill in the holes of his genealogical chart. I used the opportunity to do some nostalgic thinking of that time and place and space.

We are all motivated differently. My motivation has been through the embracing of my insecurities, which are always evident in my writing and apparent in my response here.

We live and die and seldom become acquainted with ourselves for fear that the ghosts that lead us forward may crush us should they be encountered and stared down. I have spent a writing lifetime revealing mine because they have made me what I am. I share this with you here to encourage you to embrace your ghosts to discover similar liberation.

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Phil,

I have been in Minnesota the last ten days visiting BB's father, 91+ who has Alzheimer's and our grandchildren there, three girls, two twins, 3, and one six months. The twins were born on BB's birthday, January 17, 2005. I'm sure you wanted to know that, too.

BB and I had a chance to visit with Del Ploen and his wife, Kay, on the way home. We had brunch with them, and talked about old times.

Del looks great. He is CEO of his company, now run by his four sons, which produces vitamin supplements and growth enhancers for livestock, and other products for human distribution throughout the world. He still fishes and hunts with his brother Kenny, who still resides in Canada.

We got into a humorous discussion of how ephemeral life is and the meaning of celebrity.

Kenny is in so many "Hall of Fames" that he has been on the go just attending them: University of Iowa, All-American, Rose Bowl Champions, Canadian Football, and of course, he is the greatest athlete in terms of honors from our humble neighborhood and community.

Kenny like you was not only a great athlete but also a great student. That combination, alas, has been lost to history.

Unfortunately, he like you has had to deal with physical challenges largely because of the many contributions he and you made to athletics.

I think we exact too great a price of our athletes for our pleasure, not realizing that the body can only tolerate so much abuse, and when it does, it exacts a price years later.

Kenny is fine, I don't mean to say he isn't, but he does have to deal with pain associated with these early exploits of his life.

We arrived in Clinton, Iowa late at night, and left early in the next morning after staying at my sister, Pat Waddell's. We went to an early breakfast with Pat and her husband, Bill, before continuing on the long trek back home.

I did call and talk to Gussie Witt, whom I love like a brother. He told me that he had a chance to visit with you and Kenny and Don Hart when you were in Clinton. He sounded good, and upbeat, as is his way. He told me he loved me, which I returned in kind. Can it get any better than that? BB talked to him, too, as she loves the guy as well.

Regarding the Iowa Annual, I only have one and it is for 1953. In it there is reference to a John Taylor Suchy with a picture on page 109 as a member of the Sigma Delta Chi professional journalism society. John Suchy hardly looks like a football play, especially a center.

I'm glad you found your connection to Leland Flynn. It must be fun searching for the identity of your roots. Apparently, your ancestors go back some in this country.

I've never checked out mine, or frankly been interested in doing so, knowing from oral history of my many Irish and some Norwegian relatives that my Irish progenitors arrived after the potato famine in the 1840s, and the Norwegians after that. I have priests and nuns and professors, and successful entrepreneurs in my family tree, but far more who came here and settled on the lowest job possible with little motivation to improve their status.

Incidentally, on the opposite page or 108, I just noticed that there is a picture of Bill Anderson and me as members of the academic freshman honor society, Phi Eta Sigma. I am right in the center of the picture of the top row.

Not meaning to acquire them, as was true of my career, not actually gunning for promotion. I attained all the honor societies that are available to a fledgling scholar. In addition to Phi Eta Sigma (freshman honorary), there is Omicron Delta Kappa (leadership honorary), Phi Beta Kappa (academic undergraduate honorary) and Phi Kappa Phi (academic graduate school honorary). Phi Kappa Phi was at the University of South Florida to which I returned to academia in 1970.

My Clinton contemporaries remember me as primarily an athlete, whereas I was primarily always a scholar.

BB was in National Honor Society, as were you, but I graduated in the top ten percent of my class and went up for NHS every year from my sophomore year on, but was never inducted. Jim Law saw to it although Don Stamp and Al Marr were.

The irony here, and my life is a collection of ironies is that I was voted by my classmates as "teacher's pet" with a picture of that fact in the high school annual, yet it was my alleged "abuse" of teachers that kept me out.

There was some truth to this.

My freshman English teacher, who was not an English teacher but a home economics teacher recruited to teach English, gave me a pink slip and sent me to principal Olen Higbee (you couldn't invent a better name of a principal for a novel).

From the time I registered for classes at Clinton High, I felt a Catholic bias. "You will find it difficult to get these kinds of grades at this school," said one of the registrars examining my St. Patrick's report card. Bobby Witt was with me and gave it no mind. It has never left me.

I was put in a class of relatively poor students because I came from lowly St. Patrick's -- yes, there was Catholic bias in Clinton in those days -- and we were diagramming sentences.

My teacher got lost in a complex sentence she was putting on the board, and I went to the board, took the chalk from her, and diagrammed the sentence. She sent me to the principal who put my behavior in my record and told me if such behavior continued I would be expelled. The behavior continued as I challenged incompetent teachers, of which there were a few, only in more guarded ways.

Throughout my life, I have challenged incompetence and constantly gone against the grain. It is my nature, as my stimulation is not derived from outside pressure but inside curiosity and commitment. By some accident, I have arrived at a time when 99.9 percent of behavior seems to be governed by comparing and competing, fitting in, going with the crowd, and being a safe hire.

In retrospect, I think the reason why I got away with some of the things I did in high school, challenging teachers, is the fact that Ed Rashke had me on the varsity basketball team my freshman year.

People wonder why I have never written a sequel to IN THE SHADOW OF THE COURTHOUSE, and you have it here. It would not be a happy book, a nostalgic book, but a book about a time and place of great bias with the saving grace of a coach such as Ed Rashke and a teacher such as Leonard Herkleman.

Bobby Witt could have been a scholar, but he only wanted to be a great baseball player. He played all the other sports to fashion him into that ambition. I never had a class in high school with Bobby. I had all my classes in St. Pat's with him, and know of what I speak.

Before I close, I notice on the same page as I am (page 108 of the 1953 Iowa Annual) there is a picture of Lora Jackson, a Clinton High classmate of mine, a brilliant girl and wonderful person.

Lora Jackson was in the woman's freshman honorary society Alpha Lambda Delta. Lora became a doctor of medicine, I hear, gave it up and became an artist, a sculpture if I hear correctly. I applaud her.

I waited too long to become a writer. It takes more energy than it took in athletics but the same kind of training. I've been nominated for a Pulitzer Prize for Nonfiction, and have had a best seller, but I started too late to make an impact. We don't read what stimulates thought but who stimulates us saying what we want to hear, and for whom we applaud with celebrity. Kenny knows this.

I told Del Ploen I would like to write a book about the outstanding careers of people from the Courthouse area, from Del Ploen's on North Second Street and Eighth Avenue North to St. Patrick's and Fourth Avenue North, and from Second Street to Bluff Boulevard.

BB almost screamed upon hearing this, as she wants me to finish my South Africa novel before I die. I think she wins out, but it would be a beautiful book, and it would include you and your exploits.

Be always well,
Jim