John’s memoir chapter of his time at Brown

In the fall of 1947, I entered Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. It was, at the time, the smallest Ivy League college and, perhaps because of its location 75 miles from Bass River, it had become a kind of familial college. I had two cousins already enrolled, David Barus and Alec Taylor; Alec’s younger brother Sandy would join us too. The name Barus also had significance because David’s great uncle Carl Barus became so famous a name at Brown that the Engineering Lab was named after him.

It was a pleasantly warm afternoon when I arrived for the first time at 34 George Street, the rather undistinguished but conveniently located dormitory to which I had been assigned. I had also been provided with a roommate, a young man recently graduated from a military academy. His father had died the year before and he was obsessed with the approaching anniversary of his death.

Brown’s campus occupied the summit of what was called College Hill. From the Van Wickle Gates, a central road descended towards downtown Providence. At the bottom of that very steep slope stood the main entrance to the city’s large and imposing Courthouse, where I spent a lot of time, for the following reason: Whenever I ventured downtown during the day, I made sure to be dressed like a potential juror, rather than an undergraduate. When heading back to college, I entered the Courthouse’s ground floor, summoned an elevator, and was lofted effortlessly to the fifth floor. After exiting on that level, I walked out the Courthouse’s rear entrance, having achieved the summit of College Hill with zero effort.

One of the dwellings that lined that route down to Providence was a fraternity house called Alpha Delta Phi, which I had pledged during my first undergraduate fall. Pledge week for Brown’s seventeen fraternities mandated that freshmen anxious to join a particular fraternity should call there and circulate among the brothers, who chatted with potential pledges, to decide which of them would prove the most welcome addition to their ranks. My cousin David Barus, already a junior, was a potential leader of Alpha Delt, and my suspicion is that he may well have promoted my candidacy among his fraternity brothers.

At any event, I was offered the chance to become a pledge and impulsively accepted; Alpha Delt was, by universal consent, one of Brown’s most esteemed fraternities. It all seemed rather too easy. But that acceptance mandated, to my mind, serious demands on my time. Tormented by what I considered a demanding academic schedule, I found being a pledge increasingly onerous. I was obliged, for example, to make a paddle for my new associates which I was quite sure would be applied painfully to my backside once I had fashioned it. I would have been able to create it easily and decorate it to suit but study time, to my mind, was more important.

The long and short of it was that only weeks after becoming an Alpha Delt pledge, I de-pledged, an almost unheard-of occurrence throughout Brown’s fraternity row. Within hours, a concerned and disappointed David Barus showed up at George House, hoping to persuade me to change my mind. But I remained adamant and never joined any fraternity, remaining instead a George House resident for all four of my undergraduate years.

I majored in French, with a minor in music. I much enjoyed music courses at Brown, especially those taught by the Music Department head, Professor Arlan Coolidge. He was a splendid teacher, and his classes were as interesting as they were popular. They took place on the capacious ground floor of Manning Hall, a large building just west of University Hall. One of his first lectures consisted simply of playing us the sounds of live instruments, such as an extended note on a cello string devoid of vibrato, and flutes played without any tremolo. Hearing and identifying those elemental musical sounds was a compelling procedure. I found all of Professor Coolidge’s classes – indeed, everything he talked about — fascinating and signed up for additional music courses, simply because I had so enjoyed his first one.

At Brown I was once asked to perform in a French version of Molière’s Tartuffe, which I did, and I also composed an accompanying tribute to French playwriting in general. I recited the tribute in a French class one afternoon, after a lot of rehearsal. It was received with impressive fervor by the professor, who was also the play’s director.

Music continued to play a large part of my undergraduate existence. After one of Arlan Coolidge’s courses had introduced me to Richard Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde, I became hooked on it. In fact, the opera was to be a broadcast from the Metropolitan Opera one December weekend at the start of Brown’s Christmas break. I decided to stay at college so that I could hear it in my George House room. The performance, though heard on a mediocre radio, was riveting and hypnotic. The Liebestod, the opera’s haunting climax, was compelling, and it was worth the following morning’s hitch-hiked ride down to Bass River in some bitterly cold weather.

One pivotal job that I undertook my freshman year was working for the Brown Daily Herald. My first assignment was writing headlines for weekend issues, and I shall never forget 1947’s October Saturday when Brown’s football team played the Yale eleven in New Haven in a downpour. Yale was heavily favored and had as its star the celebrated running back Levi Jackson. Mud and flood predominated. The final score was Brown 20, Yale 14, an upset that made national news.

One of the offices in University Hall that I used to know well belonged to Vice-President Bruce Bigelow. He had an extremely pleasant and cordial secretary, whose name sadly escapes me. She became a good friend, always ready for a chat whenever I stopped by. She read all my articles in the Herald, and once suggested that I should write a column for the paper. I passed this on to the editors, who agreed. My secretary friend even recommended a title, Parenthetically Speaking, which I happily used. The column made its first appearance in 1949 and marked the end of my Brown Daily Herald editorial stint.

Over one Providence winter there was a great deal of snow, and I fashioned a large and imposing snowman. The texture of the snow was such that it modeled superbly, and I created a very handsome, three-dimensional figure. But it only enjoyed a short life. The following weekend some football players, returning from a drunken revel somewhere in Providence, made it their business to knock my snowman down. I wrote a column about it and actually received a written apology from one of the offenders.

My work on the Herald was the only formal writing I did prior to writing 27 books, and I learned a great deal from it.

(Editor’s note: Some of John’s columns in the Herald will be added to this website in the future.)

Shortly into my sophomore year, I was inveigled into helping edit and produce a publication christened Course Critique, an annual student-written guide to every academic course taught at Brown. It was, for obvious reasons, not universally beloved by either faculty or administration, but it proved very popular with students, and early copies sold briskly.

Among those involved would be myself and also a fellow undergraduate friend named Anthony Dryden Marshall. At the time we met, I had no knowledge of his background. Many years later I discovered to my astonishment that he was the only child of the famous philanthropist Brooke Astor. (Late in life, in his early eighties, Anthony was put on trial for having defrauded and stolen money from his ailing mother. One of his children, Philip, turned him in. Tony’s wife, Charlene, a minister from Maine’s Northeast Harbor, was devoted to him, and pushed his wheelchair in and out of the courtroom every day. After a long and sensational trial, he and another defendant were found guilty and he was sentenced to prison.)

A year or two ahead of me, Tony was on the Course Critique masthead but never, to my certain knowledge, made any contribution to its monetary health. In fact, it was I who had to rescue the publication from financial embarrassment during my senior year. Somehow, there was sufficient overage in my scholarship-assisted tuition fund to enable me to pay off several hundred dollars worth of debt.

Tony Marshall was in the Marine Corps Reserves, and one year I went down to visit him at Quonset Point in southern Rhode Island. This was long before I was drafted into the Corps, which would establish yet another link between Tony and me.

Years later, I persuaded Tony to join the board of trustees of the Ocean Liner Museum, which I had helped found in the early 1980’s.

(Editor’s note: There is more information from John’s memoirs and other sources about the Ocean Liner Museum elsewhere on the website.)