xii
Where We Look for Help

Jack owed his relatively high salary and relatively good life at Novum State to the old bulls of SUUFAMP: the State University Union of Faculty and Maintenance Personnel. Each year the union took 475 tax-deductible dollars from Jack’s paycheck—a paycheck which had increased by about ten grand. Once a year he received a computer-generated roster listing his step, grade, and years of service, and the grade, step and years of service of every university employee from the locker room towel jockey to the president. His rank, salary and benefits, like those of everyone else in the institution, were spelled out in an 80-page printed contract. So were his raises and promotions through the foreseeable future and into retirement. Fresh from the back room politics of Busiris, where nobody knew anything about the budget, where promises were made to be broken, and where the only people who won financially were administrators and professors of engineering, business or law, Jack considered his $475 investment money well spent.

Jack had always believed in the idea of union, and gave SUUFAMP his heart-felt blessing.

He went one step further. He got himself appointed union membership committee chair, and thus received a seat on the SUUFAMP executive council.

“You might think the difference between Busiris and Novum State is the difference between a private and a state school,” he told me in 1986. “Or you might think it’s the difference between a state which sent Governor Altgeld home in disgrace and another which sent Bob La Follette to the U. S. Senate. I’m here to tell you the difference is one five-letter word. Spell that U N I O N.”

“Lou Feracca has talked union from my first day at Busiris,” I reminded him. “I always favored it.”

“The union has some drawbacks,” Jack admitted. “It too easily excuses sloth. It spends too damned much time and money defending marginal people on the lower end of the scale. It promotes everyone equally: the lazy, the merely competent, and the brilliant. This place has its share of free riders and chronic complainers, and in my bad moments I long for a system that would boot them off the gravy train. But it’s better to reward everyone indiscriminately than to screw everyone indiscriminately. Which seem to be the only choices. I have seen the alternative, and believe me, Novum is better. I am a worker, and this is the workers’ paradise.”

SUUFAMP had not achieved power without a struggle. At one point in the early seventies, the union organizers—virtually all of Jack’s friends—had been sent packing by the university’s president, on orders from the State University System Chancellor, on orders from the Governor.

“It was more complicated than that, actually,” Jack wrote in an early letter. “The founding president was a guy named Lewis Carey, a good guy really, an old liberal Democrat who’d lost his Senate seat in a close race in November of 1968. Carey was basically a good old boy who’d been given the job as president by his buddy, Governor Reynolds, who was also a lame duck in December 1968. Carey’s understanding of a university was only slightly more sophisticated than Rose Marié’s dad’s, but he knew how to get things done, especially in rural Wisconsin. In his home district he had a million contacts, Chamber of Commerce and farmer types both. Carey got a dairy farmer to donate the 80 acres on which the school was built. The general contractor was another old chum, who cut Novum a pretty sweet deal. City Council delivered access roads and zoning easements. ‘Help the school and help yourselves,’ Carey told them.

“He was right, of course. That whole strip of banks and franchised food places along University Avenue is built on former farmland that was sold, believe it, at a pretty fair price. The same contractor that built the school built most of them. Novum’s Advancement Office figures the school pumps $10,000,000 into Lake-of-the-Woods, excluding the dough people save by not having to send their kids to college in Madison or La Crosse. There was a lot of civic pride in those days too. Novum blossomed while other schools were beginning to wilt.

“Republican governor-elect Knowles was an old political enemy of Carey, but the State Board of Regents and State University System Chancellor buffered education from anything so mundane as politics. At least for a while. Eventually Knowles had his way with the regents, and thus with the chancellor, and thus with President Carey. Carey was muscled into retirement, and in 1973 Novum began a nationwide search for a new president. The committee was full of academics and civic leaders from the Lake-of-the-Woods Chamber of Commerce. Governor Knowles sent the chairman a letter nominating some insurance baron from Milwaukee who’d bankrolled his campaign, hinting that this fellow could do Novum and the community a lot of good academically and politically.

“On nine issues out of ten the liberal academics and the Republican businessmen would have been at loggerheads, but they were all pissed over losing Carey and made common cause on the insurance magnate. Knowles’ man never even got an interview.

“Eventually they hired an East Coast type named Arthur Springerman, a farm boy from upstate New York who’d achieved a Ph. D. from Columbia and had six years of experience as Vice President of Student Services at Cornell. The farmers liked him, the academics liked him, the businessmen liked him.

“Springerman turned out to be not such a good choice. He was a big affirmative action man in all things: hiring, new programs, and student recruitment. First item on his agenda was African-American Studies. This was right about the time I was starting the Afro-American program at Busiris. Well shit, it made sense in Illinois, where we had a solid black student population and a cosmopolitan campus. Afro-American was not exactly what north country Wisconsin kids were desperate for. Then Springerman started a program in “Cultural Studies,” another thing not likely to appeal to farm kids. Then “Communications Arts.” At one point he funded the Phy Ed Department into starting a lacrosse team. Coach, scholarships, equipment . . . everything but teams to play against.

“He spent a ton of money, but none of it wisely. When the new programs and their new faculty attracted few students, he sent admissions people off to recruit in Chicago, New York, Baltimore and Washington. Kids who couldn’t make their local junior college were awarded scholarships to a four-year institution in one of the better education states in the country. Of course the kids from East Coast urban areas were bored out of their skulls in Lake-of-the-Woods, and Lake-of-the-Woods was offended by their fast and loose life style. The out-of-state students were not exactly the hardest working, either.

“Springerman’s faculty hires were an ethnic crazy quilt that made the original Novum faculty seem bland. Most of them were only slightly more competent than their students. Brand X degrees from Brand X colleges. How could Novum compete with Northwestern in hiring qualified people to teach Afro-American? We couldn’t even hire decent people at Busiris, ‘the Northwestern of Downstate Illinois.’ Springerman signed them sight unseen, without consulting other members of the department or school. In one case he created a whole new department.”

“Springerman’s liberalism alienated Lake-of-the-Woods high-rollers, who wanted not a lacrosse team but a winning football program. They began pulling out of the Foundation. His arbitrary hiring and program development alienated the faculty, who sought a stronger voice in university governance. They threatened votes of no confidence and circulated petitions demanding collective bargaining. Springerman’s affirmative action recruiting, especially his allocation of financial aid, alienated Wisconsin farm and small-town kids, the bread and butter of Novum’s student population. They started staying away in large numbers. It doesn’t take much to fuck up a good thing.”

Then Knowles stepped in again.

From day one, he felt, Novum State had been a hotbed of liberalism, agitation, and general craziness. With town-gown battles a daily occurrence, enrollments falling, and the faculty talking union, it was time to close the place. Minimally he wanted the union squashed and all those who supported it axed. Springerman, to his credit, refused to swing the ax. That was just fine with Governor Knowles. Out went Springerman, and in came Buchanan, Novum’s third president. The really bad one.

“This son-of-a-bitch fired none of Springerman’s Cultural Studies assholes, but every one of the union guys,” Jack wrote. “The same way Stoddard’s stooges trimmed the trouble-makers at Busiris. Not exactly that way. This fellow shot them all at once, and he was more man-to-man about things. He told them, ‘Those are my orders, and you know the reasons. You also know that if I don’t do as Madison says, they’ll get someone else in here who will.’ At least there was no sneaking around, rubbing them out on trumped-up charges, ruining careers. He just told them they were finished, turn in their resignations effective June 1. Spend the rest of the year meeting classes and looking for some place else to teach.

“The trouble was these guys had balls. Especially Linda Tholen. Linda’s a red-haired and fire-tempered spark plug of an Icelander who grew up on a South Dakota farm and takes no shit from nobody. There was not a single letter of resignation or a single letter of application elsewhere. They acted collectively, as the assholes at Busiris never seem to be able to do.

“They did not walk out of the classroom—which would probably have been suicidal. They sent, first, the dove of peace: ‘Let’s all meet with the chancellor and attempt to work things out.’

“When the dove found no middle ground, they tried the swallow: ‘You come after us and we’re coming after you,’ they threatened. ‘You really want our resignations? You can force our resignations. But we’ll eat you alive in little birdie bites.’

“That got them nowhere either.

“Third day, they sent the crow. The Novum State faculty marched collectively on the capital, those who had been fired and those who had not, demanding to meet the governor. He wouldn’t talk to them, naturally, but reporters did. The story was all over the Milwaukee Sentinel and the Madison Capitol Times. I think it even made the Minneapolis and Chicago papers. They printed pamphlets and letters laying out their credentials, their position, and Wisconsin’s history of progressive education, and mailed them out to parents, community power brokers, and state politicos. They followed Buchanan around with placards and truth squads, handing out their leaflets and talking to media every time he opened his mouth.

“It was Novum State’s version of a Big Damned Mess. It worked perfectly. Buchanan left after less than a year, and they all got their jobs back. Most of them are here today, just about every person on this faculty whom I respect. These people have books and articles, they’re great teachers, they’re all over local and sometimes state politics. They did what they had to do when they had to do it.”

One of the veterans was Jack’s buddy Lloyd Cowley. Another was Ed Haley. A third was English Department chair Linda Tholen.

The old radicals had lost some of their youth by the time Jack showed up, but at biweekly meetings of the SUUFAMP Executive Council he saw the inner workings of university governance within a collective bargaining framework.

“They’re more powerful than the Bucks Boosters,” he told me when I phoned in early February of 1988 to invite him to Busiris to talk union with his old colleagues. “Let me tell you about last week’s meeting.”

The chair of the History Department had died suddenly of a heart attack, and the department had recommended as its new chair one of the older males. The matter was of no great consequence, as Novum chairs lack the power, wealth and glamor of a chair at, say, Busiris Technical University. In response to Springerman’s authoritarianism SUUFAMP had deliberately weakened the chairs: the contract made them non-supervisory positions with limited and mostly procedural and advisory duties. In the matter of appointment, contract procedure stipulated a departmental recommendation based on a secret ballot of all employees, tenured, tenure-track, fixed term, and even part-time. SUUFAMP brought the results to administration, which rubber-stamped the recommendation and made the actual appointment. The net effect was to make chairs elective, and responsible more to their departments than to the dean or vice president.

In this particular case, VPAA Van Overbekke was not pleased with the department’s choice. Van Overbekke was new to Novum, which went through administrators like Cocoa Puffs. He underestimated the SUUFAMP’s power, and wanted to make a good impression at the state level regarding affirmative action. More female chairs would improve the school’s affirmative action profile, and History was one of few departments with female possibilities. Van Overbekke sent his dean Vance Hayes, one of the Old Ones who could have given his boss good advice on the matter had his boss been the type to listen, to tell SUUFAMP to tell the History Department to reconsider. And next time, to select a woman.

Hayes made a somewhat apologetic speech and braced himself for the reaction.

SUUFAMP President Linda Tholen looked at him. “History elects the person they think will do the best job, Vance. If that person happens to be a woman, fine. If that person is a man, also fine.”

“Well there was this business last year at La Crosse,” Hayes began.

“That business at La Crosse has nothing to do with us.”

“I was told it does.”

“It does not. It’s a completely different situation.”

“Van Overbekke thinks it could have a bearing.”

“You can tell Van Overbekke that he’s a dumb son-of-a-bitch and doesn’t know what he’s talking about.”

Hayes shrugged his shoulders. “Maybe you’re right,” he admitted and went off to report to his boss.

“What do you think of this Van Overbekke anyway?” Lloyd Cowley asked the others after Hayes had left.

Paul Lesinski was sitting on his right. “I don’t know. He ain’t much of a listener, that’s one thing for sure.”

Linda Tholen was on his right. “I have a few problems with the way he handles faculty.”

Haley was on her right. “I don’t see him being around much longer, unless. . . .”

“He can’t read a contract,” Jack observed.

One after the other, around the conference table in Sandburg Center 201, Exec Council members cast their ballots in the informal straw vote. It was thumbs down all around. “Not in touch with western Wisconsin.” “Reminds me a little of Art Springerman.” “We could do lots better than him. For the money.”

Van Overbekke was gone within two weeks. He did not even survive the spring term.

“Don’t tramp on SUUFAMP,” Jack noted in finishing the story.

After the meeting, Jack, Paul Lesinski and Lloyd Cowley adjourned to the Silver Dollar for burgers and beers.

“We have a proposition,” they told him.

“I’m listening.”

“Linda Tholen is thinking of running for state-wide union president this spring.”

“She’d make a good one,” Jack agreed. “She’s been good for us at the local level. She’d be good for us at the state level.”

“Exactly. We think she might even win. Even as a woman. Even in Wisconsin.”

“So.”

“So if she goes to Madison, our local needs a new president.”

“That’s what vice presidents are for.”

“Ordinarily, yes,” Lesinski told Jack. Lesinski was the vice president in question.

“What do you mean ‘ordinarily’?”

“It’s a two-year term, and I’m due for a sabbatical the year after next.”

“I’m beginning to see things more clearly.”

“I’ve worked up a research project. Something in genetics. There’s a forest on the Polish-Russian border, virgin timber, goes back centuries. Used to be a major source of amber, but the whole forest is now under international protection. My idea is that there is probably some very old amber there, which we can date from the wood once we find it in situ. In the amber there will be some very old bugs, and in the bugs there will be some very old genes. People at the National Science Foundation are interested, and I think I can line up a NSF research grant. In fact, I want to ask you for a recommendation. My folks are from that corner of Poland. It’s now part of the Soviet Union. It would be a great opportunity for me.”

“Fuckin’ crazy place to go right now.”

“I’d be okay. Goin’ home.”

“So Linda goes to Madison. Paul goes home to Mother Poland. That leaves Lloyd in Lake-of-the-Woods.”

“Lloyd heads our negotiating team. Next is a contract year. You can’t have the president be the head of negotiations.”

“Negotiations is an unbelievable headache, good buddy,” Lloyd reminded Jack.

“So Paul skips the country, Linda goes to Madison full time, Lloyd shuttles between here and Madison, and we are looking for a new local president.”

“That’s where you come in,” Lloyd told Jack.

“Let me say this about that.”

“You’ve been very strong as membership chair.”

“When I took on the job, every employee of this institution except four belonged to the union. I keep good records and contact all the new people within a month of their being hired. Today, every employee except four belongs to the union.”

“You’re good with speeches and ideas. People respect your opinions. You’d have the cooperation of everybody on Exec Council.”

“I really see myself as one of the new ones.”

“You are,” Lloyd said. “But you’re one of the good new ones. Plus you’ve been in teaching for a lot of years, and you’ve been around the block a few times. You’re one of the older new ones.”

“As opposed to whom?”

“A couple of people really have their eye on the presidency. Brad Newlund in particular.”

“Brad’s a little soft, but he’s done okay on the Executive Council. He was with us today on Van Overbekke.”

Cowley was dismissive. “Soft isn’t the word. Chair of the Committee on Equity and Cultural Diversity? What kind of candy-assed shit is that? You read that interview with him in the newspaper a month ago? ‘My idea of criminal justice is that we should correct wrongs. We’re not necessarily doing that by apprehending and punishing criminals.’ No understanding of the community, and thus no community support.”

“Also no common sense on internal matters,” Lesinski added. “Newlund couldn’t resist Lizzie Bordon if she had a faculty appointment. He’d open the door to every whining wimp in SUUFAMP. Half of this job is keeping your own people in line. That’s where Linda is good. Our own assholes would eat Newlund alive.”

“A little round pot belly, and beady little eyes. No scars. No toughness.”

“All the good ones walk with a limp.”

“No limp and a lot of ambition.”

“So we don’t like Newlund,” Jack admitted. “There are two hundred other faculty at this place. Not to mention staff. Why not a secretary or janitor as SUUFAMP president?”

“No clout,” Cowley said. “Even they know the best of the staff has less clout than the worst of the faculty. Just a fact of collective bargaining life.”

“There are still two hundred faculty.”

“Twenty-five of whom are responsible for 95 percent of what gets done at this institution.”

“Agreed. So expand the pool to twenty-six.”

“I don’t know,” Cowley mused.

“Forget he’s everybody’s caricature of a union boss,” Jack argued. “He was with us today on Van Overbekke. He’s no administration lackey.”

“Oh, no,” Lesinski agreed. “That’s the point. Newlund won’t sleep with administration. Just the opposite. He loves all faculty and hates all administration. It’s a knee-jerk reaction with him.”

“He’s rigid,” Cowley added. “Righteous. You know what I mean? Too moral. He gets hold of an idea, and he can’t see things from any other way. Everything is a confrontation.”

“He can’t do politics,” said Lesinski.

Cowley agreed. “Completely inflexible. Doesn’t respect opposing points of view, even within the membership. Most important, he doesn’t know when to compromise. He’s the kind of guy to pull you out on strike on a 52-48% vote.”

“I’ve never really been good at politics myself. I’m a lot more confrontational than you guys think.”

“You’d be great,” Lloyd told Jack.

“I’ve been at Novum less than two years.”

“One year longer than Newlund.”

“We didn’t come here on our own,” Paul admitted. “We represent a contingent on the Council.”

“Is Linda Tholen part of that contingent?” Jack wanted to know.

“She could be.”

Jack paused. Jack had a lot of respect for Linda Tholen.

“Look, fellows,” he said finally, “I’m a teacher and a writer. I’m not good at day-to-day details, and I’m really not that good a politician. I’m a good writer, and a good speaker. I’ve got people calling me asking for articles I don’t have time to write. There’s a backlog of story ideas. You think negotiations is a pain in the ass, try writing. Your time belongs where your talent is, right? What you can do well, you do and you do it well. You don’t fuck up trying to do what you can’t do well.”

“Sometimes we do things not because we want to, or even because we’re especially good at them,” Cowley argued. “We do them because we owe. We look to the union for help, and we owe the union our help.”

“Sometimes we do things because we’re afraid who might do them if we don’t,” Lesinski added.

“I have a really radical idea, fellows,” Jack suggested at last. “Why don’t we let the membership decide?”

“Don’t be naive. What if they decided on Newlund?”

“Then the membership deserves what the membership gets.”

“Except we get it right along with the rest of them.”

“I’ve put too much into this union to see it go down the tubes.”

“SUUFAMP is not going down the tubes, Lloyd. And Novum State is not going down the tubes. Whoever replaces Linda at Novum has her above him at the state level, the rest of us below at the local level.”

“Linda wants you to think about this seriously, Jack,” Cowley told Creed.

“Linda does?” Jack asked.

“Linda does,” Lesinski told the as yet untenured John Charles Creed.

In April of 1988, Linda Tholen was elected state-wide president of SUUFAMP. That summer Paul Lesinski wrote his successful application for a NFS grant to pursue genetics research in the western Soviet Union. Lloyd Cowley spent spring, summer, and fall negotiating Jack’s 1989-91 contract.

In May Jack was elected president of the NSU local of SUUFAMP, defeating Brad Newlund by a margin of 2:1.

“It’s better to be on the inside of what’s going down than on the outside,” Jack told me. “Friends aren’t enough.”

Jack’s first-hand experience at a university operating under a collective bargaining agreement was the reason for his first and, to my knowledge, only return to Busiris Technical University after that Friday afternoon in February 1985. He had, of course, spent an invisible Saturday and Sunday vacating his offices, but once the pranks began, and the police questioning and surveillance, Jack had kept a careful distance from campus. Then it was Wales. Then Lake-of-the-Woods. Then it was . . . well, as Michael Stella had perceived, Jack didn’t really want to be part of Busiris Tech anyway.

Still, a man does not easily throw over fifteen years of his life, especially when those are the strength of his twenties and thirties. Jack carried a lot of mental baggage from his Busiris days, even in the last years of his life, and the visit of May 18, 1989 was important to him for several reasons. The thought of playing a role a hand in realizing one of our favorite Tookey’s Tap fantasies—a faculty union at Busiris—appealed to him tremendously. As did an opportunity to survey in person the devastation at Busiris. As did imagining the terror his visit struck in the hearts of those to whom even the name “Student Union” was anathema.

More significantly, the visit was a sentimental journey through a remembered landscape . . . and an opportunity, finally, to lay to rest the ghost of Lily Lee Martin and clear a path in his heart for whoever was to come.

“I’d had a few relationships in Lake-of-the-Woods,” Jack admitted, “but they always ran into red lights where the present intersected the past. I couldn’t get past the ghosts standing at the crossroads. After my talk at Busiris, the ghosts disappeared and all the traffic signals turned green simultaneously. Kelly drove right down my life on solid greens, here to the California coast.”

Some of those who remembered Jack—and few, even at the distance of half a decade, did not—read his announced address on “Collective Bargaining and the Academy: One Man’s Experience” as yet another part of Creed’s Revenge on Busiris. Others remembered the posters Lily had printed in 1976 and wrote this meeting off as another hoax. Actually, it was neither revenge nor hoax. We were quite serious about organizing Busiris, and Charles Creed was a logical source of experience and advice.

Even during the downsizings of the seventies, in the First and Second Eras of Ill Feelings, many Busiris faculty had recognized the need for some formal representation of faculty interests outside the framework of the Busiris Senate. Lou, Jack, and I were not alone. During the reign of Bertholt the Terrible, however, the slightest whisper of union would have gotten even a senior professor fired. Reich’s treatment of Jack had shown what he was capable of doing. Then came the spring, summer and fall of 1985; we were happy to hang onto our jobs. Talk of raises or unions was out of the question.

By 1989 anyone with a double-digit I. Q. could see the crisis at Busiris was once again being shouldered more by faculty and staff than by administration. Those of us who remained had increasingly less to lose by voicing our anger, and increasing anger to voice. The faculty’s collective animosity had earned Reich and Hauptmann their notices (Jack was correct in predicting his resignation would be the end of their careers), leaving Busiris administration in chaos. Some read in the fall of Hauptmann and Reich signs of a new disposition among the Board of Trustees which might be turned to faculty and staff advantage. At least there was a vacuum in Administrative Services, a window of opportunity which might soon close. Clearly, there was no time like the present to seize power.

I had been talking quietly with a couple of persons outside the department, one of whom mentioned the Wisconsin system as a particularly effective model for organization. I knew of Jack’s involvement with SUUFAMP, and shared some of his letters. Our group finally decided to set up a series of informational meetings with representatives from several institutions representing several different models of university faculty unionism. Jack and Lloyd Cowley were invited to Riverton to explain the mechanics of the Wisconsin system.

Jack was in no sense coming to organize Busiris, as the announcement in the Riverton Standard-Republican implied.

That was not the way Administrative Services saw matters, however. The Old Ones remembered, and the New Ones had heard. Or they could check his files which, despite Reich’s promise of confidentiality and a purge, contained all documents related to February 8, 1985, plus earlier complaints, plus detailed reports of police investigations during the balance of 1985 and into 1986. So when our announced meetings—authorized, properly scheduled through the proper University channels—listed “John C. Creed” among the probable speakers, Busiris Trustees went right through the roof.

Administration attempted first to revoke our permission to use Busiris Hall auditorium, and, when that became too hot an issue, attempted to persuade us gently to uninvite Jack. Failing that as well, they had him legally declared persona non grata on campus. Citing the 1972 march on the Hilton, University attorney Howe argued that Jack’s presence might well result in a disruption of the peace which Busiris security could not control. Busiris requested and received a court injunction forbidding Jack to set foot on campus, and warned us that if he appeared at our meeting in Busiris Hall Auditorium, Riverton police would be more than happy to arrest Jack for criminal trespass.

I phoned Jack with the news that Busiris had officially declared him an outlaw. He suggested that our meeting would go more smoothly if Lloyd Cowley alone presented SUUFAMP. I suggested that rescinding our invitation was not exactly a show of strength, not a good way to begin a union-management relationship we all recognized as adversarial.

“Whether I show or not,” Jack pointed out, “the possibility of my presence brings Riverton cops to your meeting. This too is not a good start for a union.”

The logical solution was to move the meeting off campus, which we did. After rejections from the local VFW Post and a couple of area churches, we settled on the Headquarters Hall of AFL-CIO Local 133. If the late change of location cost us some support, the drama of negotiations heightened our case for a union . . . and the Brewery and Distillery Workers provided some muscle when Busiris officials attempted unsuccessfully to have Jack a menace to all Riverton (including, presumably, his own daughter), and extend their injunction to the city limits (which included his own home).

Outsider agitators Creed and Cowley arrived in Riverton early Thursday evening.

On his biweekly visits to Jenny Lynn, Jack normally stayed at the Rocket Motel, a $15-a-night-cash-in-advance place north of town, or with me or Lou. I had suggested Jack stay with Linda and me, Lloyd with Lou and Patricia, but Jack had declined the offer. “This one’s on SUUFAMP,” he told me. “I haven’t done anything first class since the Ritz. Let Lloyd and me whoop it up at the Heidelberger. We can be together and out of your hair. SUUFAMP will pick up the tab. One of the many benefits of union.”

“This one’s on SUUFAMP,” Lloyd repeated to Linda and me, Patricia and Lou, and Jenny Lynn (Timm was already at the Naval Academy) as the waitress at the Heidelberger cleared the remains of seven Thursday evening steak dinners. He penned in a $15 tip and handed her a credit card. “One of the many benefits of union, Professor Tucker.”

We adjourned, with Jenny, to Tookey’s Tap, remodeled in 1986 and nearly a family place, more than hospitable to women, middle class yups, and long-haired students. At Tookey’s we were joined by Phil Steiner from physics, Joe Rausch from mathematics, and two undergraduate English majors. The male was carrying a dog-eared copy of Age of Faith.

“Where’d you get that?” Jack wanted to know. “The book’s been out of print for a decade.”

“I know. It’s even missing from the Busiris library.”

“You won’t find any of my work in the Busiris Library. Or in Riverton Public either.”

“It’s funny you should mention that. I thought it was because everything burned up, but the Faculty Publications Collection was in the Special Collections Room in the basement and survived. Your book isn’t there. And your stories and articles are missing from all the magazines.”

“It’s like I never taught at Busiris,” Jack said smiling.

“Everyone knows you did, sir. You’re definitely a legend at Busiris.”

Jenny listened with wide eyes.

“So where’d you get the book?”

“First I read the copy at my home town library. Then I decided, this is fantastic, I got to have a book of my own. I asked the local B. Dalton’s, but no luck. I wrote the publisher, but no luck there either. Finally I photocopied the whole book. Then Terry—this is my girlfriend here, Professor Creed, Terry Cunningham; I’m Randy Hobson. Terry found this copy used at Powell’s, up in Chicago.”

“One of the few remaining real bookstores in the Midwest. Not too many students in my day hung around the University of Chicago.”

“Today either,” Terry told Jack. “I’d like to have been at Busiris in the sixties when you were here, Professor Creed. A lot of us are really into the sixties these days. I was alive in the sixties, but I don’t remember anything. Except the music.”

“You missed a good time.”

“I think I was a freshman your last year at Busiris,” said Hobson. “1984-85? I don’t remember anything, though. I was pretty green.”

“You didn’t miss much of a good time.”

“Not from what we’ve heard,” Cunningham said. “We heard things were pretty wild in Riverton right into the eighties. Carol McQuillan was my R. A. freshman year.” She said this with a peculiar twinkle in her eye.

Jack smiled. “I wasn’t here after 1985,” was all he said, “and I wasn’t on campus much before 1985.”

So the students too had heard the legends. Over Pabst beer and Bartles and Jaymes wine coolers Randy and Terry pressed Jack for tales of the olden days, and the events of 1985 and 1986. Aware of his daughter’s presence, Jack expounded at length on Busiris in the seventies, but steered clear of the eighties, of Lily Lee and of February 1985. He seemed to perform more for Jenny Lynn than for the rest of us, as if consciously choosing to reveal selected facets of a persona she had not previously known. The Black Studies program was discussed, and the March on the Hilton. Jack talked about the flush days and the hard times of the seventies. Three or four beers into the night, he recounted some of his saltier tales of student-teacher interactions, and recited a few of his memos to dean, vice president and president. He did not lie, but he did not exaggerate, either.

“There was that memo, what the hell was it on? Contingency contracts. I told them they were fucking over students and faculty both. Exactly what I said. I get this letter back from Reich: ‘Please avoid using such language on documents which may be read by women.’ You talk about patronizing women. . . .”

“He had obviously never been inside a women’s dorm at Busiris,” Terry said.

“Or at a Riverton Central softball squad practice,” added Jenny Lynn.

“Then there was the goddamn air conditioning. Have they ever replaced that thing, Tucker?”

“Broke as this place is? What do you think?”

“Every summer, on the summer the air conditioning in Busiris Hall would go down,” Jack explained.

“Just last summer,” I added.

“Regular as the seasons. They got some ancient water-cooled system there, and it breaks almost immediately upon being turned on. We’d swelter for a week, and then came a memo from the president: ‘I want to personally apologize for the delay in repairing the Busiris Hall air conditioning system. Unfortunately the broken component is not available in Riverton. It has been special ordered from the home factory in Indiana. We’ve been told to expect a delay of up to two months. Again we apologize for the inconvenience.’ Well fuck those fuckers, Old Main was cool enough. Of course they had a brand new unit over there.

“Busiris Hall windows have those little vents on the bottom, you can open them maybe six inches if you’re lucky enough to have an outside office. Afternoon sun baking through the glass. No breeze at all. I used to plaster the windows with aluminum foil to try to reflect away some of that heat.

“I’d phone the president’s office, get his secretary, tell her, ‘Tell Stoddard the air conditioning’s not working, and Creed’s not working. I’ll be back when the weather cools or the damned machine is fixed.’ Then I’d slam down the phone. Or I’d walk into Old Main, through the front doors, and shout as loud as I could, ‘Well goddamn! Cool enough over here. Ought to move all our classes into this building.’ Then I’d turn around and walk out.”

“He did,” Lou nodded. “I heard one of those phone calls.”

“You were a hell-raiser, dad,” Jenny said in awe.

“Your dad was a hell-raiser in those days,” Phil Steiner assured Jenny Lynn.

“When they first built our place, we had a similar problem with the air conditioning,” Lloyd Cowley remembered. “They had the buildings finished in time for September classes, but the air conditioning wasn’t in. Hottest September on record, swear to god. Middle nineties. You know they got them sealed thermopane windows, not even a little vent on the bottom. You can’t open a window even if you want to.

“Well, they give all of us charter faculty a brick, same kind of a brick that was used to build the buildings. A little brick with a bronze plaque on it. Charles has seen ‘em. We were just roasting in those offices, sweat dripping from our foreheads, and Ed Haley, I’ll never forget it, picks up his brick and says, ‘I always knew they gave us these things for a good purpose,’ and bashes it right through the window of his office. Then Linda Tholen did the same. A whole epidemic of lost bricks and busted windows. Well they got the air conditioning installed in a big hurry. We wasn’t even union in them days.”

Terry produced her copy of Hail Red and White: a Centennial History of Busiris Technical University, the authorized version, written by the chair of the Busiris history department and published by the University in 1987 as a fund-raiser. “I thought you might get a laugh out of this, Professor Creed. You won’t have time to read it carefully tonight, but I’ll loan you my copy. You can give it back tomorrow night after your talk. This book doesn’t mention your name anywhere. Not one word about you or your Pulitzer Prize or the Black Studies program. You should read what they say about all the shit in 1985.”

“I bet it doesn’t mention that director of security was running a whore house out of the dorms, either,” Jack laughed. Jenny’s eyes widened again.

“Check the index,” Feracca suggested.

“Lou,” said Patricia.

“Under W,” said Jack.

“Dad.”

“Well, that was all hearsay anyway,” I said. “If we’re going to get into hearsay. . . .”

“I’m probably the hearsay champion of BTU,” Jack chuckled.

“While you’re here, you should do an interview with The Sentinel,” Hobson suggested. “Terry is the features editor.”

“Sometime,” Jack said, looking at his daughter. “Not tonight.”

“I’ve gotta go anyway, dad,” Jenny said. “Curfew tonight, practice tomorrow. You coming to the game Saturday?”

“If they don’t ride me out of town on a rail.”

“10:00 at Central complex.”

“Game and lunch afterwards? Before Lloyd and I leave.”

“It’s a date.”

“Thanks for being here tonight.”

“It’s been a real eye-opener. Kind of like a whole new you, dad.”

“Same old me, daughter.”

“Same old me, dad.”

“Oh, not really,” Jack mused. “But a girl’s supposed to grow, and growth is good. I couldn’t have shared my spider side with the kids who went with me to Wales. Now? Now I can tell you a truth your coach won’t tell you. Or your mother either. Most of the time you’ll get a lot more help from the dark side than from the light side.”

“Ain’t that the truth!” Lloyd Cowley added.

“I wouldn’t know about that,” said Jenny Lynn.

“Hope you never do, Lynn. But some day you will.”

“Tomorrow, dad.”

“Hit ‘em where they ain’t.”

“So tell us about 1985, Professor Creed” said Terry Cunningham as soon as Jenny had left Tookey’s.

“I think that’s best left where it is,” Linda said.

“Tell me what you heard from Carolyn,” Jack invited.

“Oh, a few things,” Terry hinted.

“For gosh sake, Jack,” Linda flared. “Haven’t you done enough already? Let bygones be bygones.”

Jack stared thoughtfully at his beer glass. “I did that once,” he said. “I walked away without saying a word in my own defense, without answering a single accusation or rumor.”

He looked directly at my wife. “So tell me honestly, Linda Tucker, wife of Andrew Tucker and friend of Rose Marié Creed—what did all my silence cause you to think of me?”

“This isn’t the time to open old wounds,” Lou objected.

Linda reflected for a moment. “It’s something we all thought a lot about, Jack,” she said finally. “I’m not going to discuss the matter at length in front of this company. But I can tell you I’ve always known you were an incredibly strong person. We all do. Even Rose Marié admits that much.”

“I’m going to object to this line of questioning as well,” Lou said.

The students backed off. “Maybe some other time, Professor Creed.”

“Maybe some other time,” Jack told them. “Then again, maybe not. I’m not at liberty to discuss details. I’m not sure I would discuss them if I could. That’s water over the dam.”

“In your book you said that people who are ignorant of history are condemned to repeat it,” said Randy.

“I’ve changed my mind since then. I now believe that people who are obsessed with history are condemned to repeat it. You fall into the same traps again and again.”

“The letters to students and donors were the best thing,” Terry said. “Those letters and the tape recorder at commencement.”

“I don’t know a thing about the letters,” Jack told her. “Or any of that.”

Lloyd had not heard about the letters.

“I can tell you about that one,” Linda said. And did.

“Holy shit!” he exclaimed. “That must have taken . . . months.”

“The actual mailings took less than two weeks,” Jack told him matter-of-factly.

“For shit’s sake, good buddy. Photocopy and folding time alone. Then seal the envelopes. . . .”

“I figured it all out once,” Jack said distractedly. “If one person put those mailings together alone, they probably took 20 ten-hour days. The photocopying and folding were done in Old Main. The labels were run inside Old Main. That’s after-hours work, an hour here, a couple of hours there. It must have taken months. Longer if the person wasn’t supposed to be there, or had a family and spouse to get home to in the evening. I think those mailings were in preparation long before I left Busiris.”

“A bunch of students acting together could have done it quicker,” Terry suggested.

“Think what you want to think.”

“That would be something.” Randy’s eyes were glassy, and not from the Pabst.

“You have to draw a line,” Jack said dismissively. “Move on. You can’t go back. The sixties and seventies are dead and gone. They’re of no help to you now.”

“That’s not what your book says,” Randy insisted.

“It’s what I think now.”

“Is it really?” I asked Jack. “Is that what you’re doing here?”

Jack took a long drink from his beer.

“See you tomorrow night,” Terry Cunningham reminded Jack as she and Randy left. “Maybe we’ll talk some more then.”

“What do you hear about Lily Lee?” Jack wanted to know as soon as we were alone.

“No longer at Busiris,” I told him. “She and Jim are no longer even in Riverton.”

“You said that on the phone. Any new details?”

“Things were very hush-hush, on campus and at the bank. First National is in big trouble, both here and in Chicago. Bad loans on a number of huge urban redevelopment projects. Big Jim resigned before the blow-up, although he reportedly left with a bundle of money. One story is he left in protest over something fishy. The other story is that he was part of the fishiness. All we know for sure is that he left. We don’t even know where he left to.”

“I thought all that S&L business was in Texas, California, and Florida,” Lloyd said. “Oil money, land speculation money and computer money that had gone looking for someplace to invest itself and had to settle for D-2 bonds.”

“Most of it was, but we’ve got problems here in River City.”

“You hear anything about Lily?” Jack persisted.

“Who’s Lily?” Lloyd wanted to know.

“Equally murky,” I told Jack. “One story is she never got along with Reich and Stoddard, or they with her. Busiris kept her as part of its deal with First National. She stayed because Jim wanted the kids to graduate from Busiris, where their mom’s job would have got them free tuition. Linda and I figure that tuition is worth about $60,000. Or was. Worth three times $60,000 in Lily and Jim’s case. Busiris rescinded our free tuition, thanks to . . . the current predicament. Lily felt no need to stay.

“That’s one scenario. Another story has your old friend Annie Brower sticking a stiletto in Lily’s back, possibly with help from Reich. Brower replaced her in Affirmative Action, with a little help from Victoria Nation. Brower as head of affirmative action is ridiculous given her background.”

“One more example of the co-option of programs designed to help minorities and workers by comfortable middle class feminists,” Jack observed.

“Well Brower is gone too now. Lasted only a couple of months. Hauptman and Reich got in big trouble with the faculty over retrenchment and with the Trustees over enrollment. Maybe because of Lily Lee too. Anyway, they cashiered Brower almost as soon as they hired her. Right before they got the ax themselves. Shit’s flying all over the place. It ain’t the same place it was when you left.”

This was all news to Charles. The acting VPAA issued a very strong statement about a month ago after some co-ed wrote a first-person experience essay on the marvelous and mind-expanding relationship she was having with her sociology professor. The composition teacher to whom she handed the essay was none other than our Miss Vicky. The feminists went through the roof: meetings and marches and propaganda letters in the Sentinel about age and ‘power differentials’ between students and teachers. Usual harassment line these days. The Standard-Republican had a pretty good time with it too. I thought I sent you that stuff. The student herself had no complaint, except against Nation for plastering her personal experience all over the newspapers. She’s left school, of course. And the guy is gone. I thought I sent you that shit.”

“Lily would have brought some sanity to the discussion.”

“Lily’s gone, rumor has it, because she came down firmly against Nation and Reich and refused to write the decree that would officially ban student-teacher relationships. Brower was brought in specifically to write the thing, with the help of Nation and her feminist colleagues, here and abroad. By the time they got their act together Reich was gone, and Brower was gone. Nation harassed the new guy into fulfilling the unwritten agreement she claimed Reich had made, and anti-miscegenation law has returned to B. T. U. And the rest of the country. You got to keep up with these things, Jack.”

“So Lily Lee is no longer at Busiris,” Jack repeated.

“Not even in Riverton.”

‘There was a time, Tucker, when that news would have broken my little heart. Then there was a time when . . . well, you know. Now, I’m not sure how I feel.”

“I can put out confidential inquiries if you want,” I told Jack. “Lou and I figured it’s best we don’t.

“Who’s this Lily Lee?” Lloyd Cowley asked again as I turned to leave.

The most important part of Jack’s visit was not the Thursday night dinner, or his Friday evening speech, or the interview he gave Terry Cunningham early on Saturday morning. It was Jack’s daylight excursion on Friday.

The morning of May 19, Jack absented himself from Lloyd Cowley, promising to meet him in the Heidelberger at 5:00, on the excuse of having some personal business to attend to. In a way he did.

Just after breakfast and slightly hung over, Jack picked up his camera, his telephoto lens and ten rolls of Kodachrome 200, and rode the Heidelberger Inn shuttle to the Riverton Air Port. There he rented a car. Then Jack drove to Burr Oak Park and spent four hours revisiting and photographing shrines of his previous existence: camping sites, picnic tables, remote trails, the visitor’s center. He drove country roads he’d last seen a decade earlier in the company of Lily Lee Martin, searching out obscure groves and hardscrabble roads where the two of them had talked, walked, made love. He drove past the four-bedroom Dutch Colonial Lily Lee and Jim had built for themselves outside Riverton, the house to which Lily Lee had retreated late that afternoon of February 8, 1985, a home occupied in 1989 by complete strangers who, had they seen Jack, must have been a little paranoid over this mad photographer in the bushes along the roadside.

He drove past the apartment on Harding, where he had written Age of Faith, now occupied by strangers, and past Thomas Jefferson Elementary School, where both Timm and Jenny Lynn had spent six years. Past Riverton Central, where his daughter even then was pointing toward final exams of her junior year. He drove past Percy Thompson’s home, and Jerry Jones’ home, and Victoria Nation’s apartment. He drove down Washington Street toward the Hilton. Past Main Street Floral, and the laundromat, now closed. Past the picnic shelter at Riverfront Park, and First National Bank. Past Tookey’s and the Maple Shade Motel. Approaching Busiris Tech, he drove past the Kappa Delta Sorority House and the Black Students Alliance.

Then Jack parked his rented car and walked unobstructed onto the Busiris campus. “I figured nobody in Security was going to stop me, and nobody from Riverton P.D. would recognize me. I was right.”

He walked past the parking lot which marked the site of Old Main, where he’d been fired four years before. He walked past the Faculty Club and Stoddard Field House, through the Student Center and into the quadrangle, photographing old sidewalks and young maple trees. He walked unchallenged into the library, its upper stories still under reconstruction, and down to the basement. For a couple of moments he stood staring in silence at the door to his old study. He entered the Special Collections room and rifled the card catalog to the Philander Chase collection: each book, each pamphlet, each manuscript letter a separate card with a special call number. Each document in its own protective acid-free envelope. He could not help remembering that rainy afternoon in St. Louis when all these precious parchments had been heaped in highly acidic cardboard boxes in the back seat of his Crown Victoria.

Jack walked finally into Busiris Hall, into the basement room where he’d helped push Afro-American Literature into the English Department curriculum. He poked his nose into several classrooms where he had once taught Lily Lee and Carolyn, Billy Jo Allen and André Washington. Paul Popowski, Carolyn McQuillan, Deirdre Williams. Sandy Chase and Annie Brower and Blondie Robertson.

Once again he climbed the stairs to the third floor of Busiris Hall, to room 313, at that time still an empty room. He gave the door handle a gentle turn, but it did not open. Again he stood staring, shot a few photographs, then shrugged his shoulders and headed back down the hall.

“It was just an empty office in an old building I might have visited once in a dream,” he told me later that night. “The place seemed no more precious than, oh, Bradley, or Illinois State, or Western Illinois, or any one of fifty other schools where I’ve given readings or talks. The mystery was gone. After all my . . . carrying . . . there was only an empty shell.”

“Maybe you were just ready to let it go.”

“Whatever. It’s beyond helping now. I’m out of their history, and they’re out of my mine. It’s just a bunch of photographs.”

“Time to point yourself forward.”

“Furthur it always is.”

Jack, Lloyd and I met a dozen or so others for a quick meal downtown at Roy’s Ribs. Then we drove in the Novum State car to Headquarters Hall, where a hundred people awaited us at 7:40. By 8:00 the number had doubled. A very aged Virgil Cutter introduced himself, said a few words, and shook Jack’s hand. No sooner had Cutter toddled off than Ted Jones, who had arrived with Victoria Nation, approached Jack with outstretched hand and a mouth open to say something. Jack shot him a glance so cold that he dropped his arm, closed his mouth, wheeled on his heels, and walked away. We never saw him again.

Jack spoke first on the mechanics of life under the State of Wisconsin-SUUFAMP Collective Bargaining Agreement: contract negotiations, grievance, meet-and-confer, step-and-lane, committee structures, dues. Strictly the facts. The more cynical in his audience thought Jack was putting us on by being too dry, but those who listened carefully heard a meticulous blueprint for the Promised Land. “This is the way it works at Lake-of-the-Woods,” Jack concluded. “And take it from me: it works.”

Lloyd Cowley gave a more emotional, motivational speech, painting a vivid picture of the early organizing days of SUUFAMP and the hardships confronting anyone attempting to unionize. “It ain’t easy, fellows,” Lloyd concluded. “No matter what, you got to stick together. If you go down, you go down together. If you survive, you survive together. The union is always your best source of help. Just ask Charles Creed. He knows better than anyone.”

Jack sat in his chair, nodding distractedly.

Throughout Jack’s talk, Victoria Nation lurked in the shadows in the back of the room, but she left before the question and answer period even began. Jones was long gone. After fifteen minutes of tepid questions, Phil Steiner wrapped up the formal question session, and Jack found himself surrounded by a small knot of colleagues and admirers. Randy Hobson said hello, and then Terry Cunningham. Jack returned Terry’s history of Busiris, which she made him autograph.

“Now I’m in the book,” he said wryly.

“In my book at least,” she laughed. “We still got things to talk about.”

“I’ll probably be tied up tonight. Tomorrow morning okay?”

“Anytime, any place.”

“I want to be at the high school by 10:00.”

“I got a lot of questions.”

“You buzz room 212, and I’m ready.”

“May be very early.”

“You buzz, Terry, I’m there.”

“It’s a date, Jack.”

“Woo, woo.”

Terry Cunningham’s interview with Jack, printed in the final 1988-89 number of the Sentinel, contained none of Thursday night’s discussion or Friday’s presentation. She focused on the Field House Construction Compromise, on the founding of the Afro-American Studies program, on the glory years of Bucks basketball, on what Jack had written since leaving Busiris, and on Jack’s evaluation of the women’s movement in general. Jack slipped in a couple of complimentary mentions of Lily Lee and Carolyn, and got off three or four cracks about Victoria Nation, but only an insider would have understood. In comparison to “Women’s Lib.: The Conservative Revolution,” Jack’s remarks were tempered. He sounded like a man who had fought his battle at Busiris and, having won it handily, was content to revel in memories.