History of My Reading: Two Cultures (Part 2)

It was either just before or just after I committed to Knox College that I saw Galesburg, Illinois for the first time, sort of. In our senior year of high school, my debate partner Mike and I won the district debate championship for both the Catholic Forensic League and National Forensic League.  The CFL national finals were in Denver, and along with winners in other categories from our school and the other Catholic high school in the diocese, we went west on trains.

In those pre-Amtrak days, the trip from western Pennsylvania to Chicago was woeful.  The B&O line cared little for passengers, and the train cars were old, stripped nearly bare and were always either too hot or too cold.  But in Chicago that changed.  The eastern trains were limited in height by the tunnels.

 But the western trains were taller and above all, newer.  Passenger service was a dream.  The whole gang of us (plus our chaperone/advisor who thankfully was from the other school-- a young male teacher with a casual manner) had a great time, mostly in the dome car of the Denver Zephyr.  Gliding through Nebraska in a crashing thunderstorm, and watching the lamp on the front of the train swing back and forth across the Colorado range were unforgettable.  (Not to mention the girl I'd met that day who fell asleep with her head on my shoulder.)

I knew that the train would pass through Galesburg, and even stop briefly.  On the way to Denver I nervously awaited Galesburg and tried to see whatever I could.  I didn't see much: a sliver of the CB&Q station that I came to know well, but which is no longer there. Nothing however that looked like a college. Still, this meant that I could travel to college and back by train, which added to the romance.

 After I made my decision and my commitment, I endured the countless School of Hard Knox jokes that spring and summer, and other reactions that wouldn't have been different had I enrolled in the University of Mars. (Though I was grateful for the indifference of my high school's nuns and priests who thereafter considered me a lost cause, if not a lost soul for not choosing a Catholic college.)  Even without such uncomfortable questions and comments, I had my moments of doubt.  If I'd made a big mistake, it seemed irreparable, final, leading to a doomed life.

But in June 1964 a letter arrived from Knox with my first college reading assignment.  It was from Hermann Muelder, Dean of the College.  It was a formal but tidily written letter, saying that incoming freshmen were asked to read two books on the Two Cultures controversy "that has prevailed in scholarly circles on both sides of the Atlantic since 1959."  If we couldn't find these books where we lived--and it was dead certain I couldn't--we could order them from the Knox bookstore, which I promptly did.

 They were The Two Cultures And a Second Look by C.P. Snow, featuring the essay that originally had sparked the debate, and Cultures in Conflict: Perspectives on the Snow-Leavis Controversy, a collection of essays edited by David K. Cornelius and Edwin St. Vincent, which included the first and most famous rejoinder by literary critic F.R. Leavis, and more. There would be a panel discussion by faculty members and group discussions by--us!  Freshmen! during Orientation Week, the letter said.

 "Topics from these readings may, in fact, be used for your examination in Speech and for themes in the English course which you probably will take," the letter added. Though I noted the extra incentive of preparation for an exam and graded course, I was most impressed that I would be introduced to college with a class-wide consideration of ideas based on writings on the subject, and could participate in such a discussion myself, along with classmates and faculty members.  It was exciting, challenging and above all an affirmation of the Knox Idea and therefore of my choice.

Then in September it came time to set sail, or to tie down the boxes, trunk and my new suitcases on the luggage rack of the 1961 Mercury station wagon.

 As the time came nearer, I became fitfully aware of the seeming finality of it all. That day would be a demarcation line in my life. I was going to college some 700 miles away, a bewildering folly that only as the day came nearer my family came to terms with, just as I was having new doubts.

 In a way I owe this propelling away to a couple of slightly older young men whose names I don't remember, and to Sister Cornelia. Sister Cornelia taught religion in my senior year.  Her nasal drone was full of scorn for any attempt to question the textbook version of church history, let alone any nuances of doctrine or morality.  I was her particular target.  I couldn't get far enough away from the likes of her.

 That summer of 1964 I started out working on a painting crew for the county hospital.  It was an education in misery in general, but I noted the two older boys on the crew who were both in local colleges, and obviously unchanged by it.  They were the same brutal, contemptuous, unthinking and unfeeling boys they'd obviously been in high school.  One fantasized about what it would be like to shoot someone.  He was studying to be a doctor.  Again, I couldn't get far enough away from them.

  When the day came to leave however, I suspiciously came down with a cold.  So I started this journey with Corricidin sloshing through my clogged head, as we turned away from the distant overlapping rows of blue mountains to the east, and headed west.  My father drove, my mother in the front seat, my 10 year old sister Debbie in the back seat with me.  My 14 year old sister Kathy didn't come with us.

The day was as cloudy as my head. The drowsy drone of the Pennsylvania Turnpike shortly became the Ohio Turnpike and for awhile the landscape remained basically familiar, as home was left imperceptibly behind.  But on the other side of Indiana the gradually gentler hills began to resolve into a constant flatness.

  By Illinois began the endless fields with the blackest soil I'd ever seen. My mother passed sandwiches back from the front seat along with sweetened tea from a thermos for my cold. My grandmother had sent along a supply of her pastries she called jumbalones.   As we crossed Indiana my mother remarked that she'd never been this far west.  My father hadn't either.

The roads rolled on all day. There was some room left in the back of the station wagon for Debbie to crawl over the seat and play or nap, while I stretched out a bit to doze my cold into submission.

 Then we were in Illinois west of Chicago, which was as far west as I'd been until the previous spring's debate trip to Denver.  I'd gone to Chicago in my 6th grade by train, the result of a contest among paperboys to sell subscriptions.  The gang of us--all boys this time--stayed at the Morrison Hotel and ate at the Forum Cafeteria across the street.  We saw a movie (Hitchcock's Vertigo) and made a brief side trip to the Great Lakes Naval Training Base.  We spent almost as much time on the train to and from Chicago, where I learned to play poker.

 There was no interstate with a Galesburg offramp in those days, as there was when I drove the huge Ryder truck to California almost 22 years later.  As evening came on, my parents started looking for a motel near a junction to Rt. 150 into Galesburg.  We overshot the mark a bit and wound up near Moline, where we stayed overnight in a wood frame cabin at the Green Acres Modern Motel.

I felt better after a night's sleep, though it may have just been excitement and anxiety that blunted my cold.  It had rained hard during the night and as I would discover later, my mother's fears that the rain would penetrate the canvas covering on top of the luggage rack proved partially justified.  There was a little water stain in one of my new Samsonites, but no real damage to anything.  The stain is still there.

After breakfast at the Green Acres Cafe at the motel, we got onto 150 and, after some worry we were headed in the wrong direction, started seeing the signs for Galesburg.   Once inside the city I saw no sign of a college building, until we passed a very large white frame building with a lot of activity in front of it--especially men and boys carrying suitcases for young women.  It was Whiting Hall, and a few blocks more, there was 261 West Tompkins and Anderson House, my assigned residence.

Pres. Sharvey Umbeck

After checking in (which I described elsewhere), I went off to campus for lunch with my classmates, while the parents lunched with college president Sharvey Umbeck.
Our lunch was a kind of cookout on the Gizmo patio. By then it was sunny, and I could feel my sinuses expanding as I sat eating, probably a burger, although all I remember is potato chips on a paper plate.  From there I got my first view of the Knox campus.

 I returned to what was now my room, took a shower in the facilities at the foot of the stairs on the second floor, and began to unpack in the quiet.  Something I read in a recent Knox Alumni magazine (a new mandolin album from Rick Willy Lindner)  reminded me of a memory: looking out from my third floor turret window to see Rick Lindner below, apparently just arriving, toting at least one black guitar-sized case and a smaller one, which must have been held a mandolin.

 Then my parents and sister returned from a shopping trip in downtown Galesburg with extra items for my room.  While my father affixed a lamp on the wall by my bed, my mother put out a soap dish and toiletries on our small sink with the orange-brown stains from iron in the water.  Debbie gave me a paper bag of candy for my first night of studying.

 They were ready to get back on the road. When my mother was in high school she listened to Notre Dame football games on the radio, and once asked me if I might apply there.  It turned out that South Bend, Indiana wasn't far out of their way, so she was finally going to get to see that campus on their way home.

After helping my father secure the returning empty luggage on top of the Mercury, I stood in front of Anderson House with my mother and sister with the afternoon sun in our eyes, while he snapped a photo. And then they were off, and I was on my own.

 That night we met with senior student advisors, who outlined the rules, put the fear of God into us about the amount of time we needed to study, and warned us against the college health center and its doctor.  In the days after that, a blur of assemblies, events such as the various clubs and organizations presenting themselves, and tests (where we were introduced to Professor Stipp's signature multiple choice exam questions in history: which of the following event happened third?)

Western Civ Prof. John Stipp

But somewhere in there was the promised day of discussions on the Two Cultures books.  This time the two cultures were the sciences and the humanities (or at times, just literature.)  The premise (more or less) was that each misunderstood and disdained the other, and members of each culture did not communicate with members of the other, even in the academic institutions to which they all belonged.

I still have a copy of the main text, C.P. Snow's lecture that started it all.  I lost the other book somewhere along the way, but I have a similar collection published at about the same time called The Scientist vs. The Humanist (edited by George Levine and Owen Thomas, Norton 1963) which probably has many of the same essays.  (For example, it has the same excerpt from Dickens' Hard Times that I actually have a sense memory of reading in the assigned collection.)

It's difficult to summarize what the debate was actually about.  In his "Second Look," Snow wrote that he'd only wanted to talk about the dominance of the traditional emphasis on literature at the expense of science in British education, by which he really meant Oxford and Cambridge.  He didn't see the same problem in American colleges.

 The anthologies further muddy the waters by presenting essays on a similar theme from the 19th century, when what universities taught in literature and the humanities (classics in Latin and Greek, logic and rhetoric, for example) as well as in science (or natural philosophy) was vastly different than even the most traditional Oxbridge curricula in the early 1960s.

 Jonathan Miller (medical doctor and theatre director, performer and creator of science television) later agreed that it was a rather parochial argument among academics.  But it struck a chord and became about something larger, if harder to define. I read these books with something of an open mind, largely because I didn't have the background to know much of what they were arguing about.  (And I must add that re-reading them is still pretty confusing.)

 So off I went to hear the faculty discussion of these books, probably to the theatre in Alumni Hall that was in its last few months of use as an auditorium.  My remembered impression is that while the speakers were informative (unfortunately I don't have a list of them), it became clear after awhile that the discussion was less about whether there were Two Cultures on campus, and more about whose side are you on.

Or maybe that's just how I heard it. To me it felt like a contest, with the loyalty of members of my class as the prize. I remember the science side as being less than impressive.  I recall a few evenhanded speakers, probably somebody like Gabriel Jackson giving historical perspective.  But the only faculty member I can positively identify as being on that panel was a professor of English, William V. Spanos.

With black hair and beard and a booming voice that made him seem a great deal taller than he was, Spanos was characteristically combative.  He undoubtedly railed about science and technology in the same terms as he wrote about them in his book A Casebook on Existentialism, which he finished the next year:

 Scientific rationalists and the technological society "locate reality in the objective realm of measurable matter, and value in the production and utilization of objects. In so doing, they subordinate man to the tool, consciousness to efficiency, and the individual to the social and productive organizations (including educational institutions.)  By the inescapable logic of this system of valuation, the individual becomes dehumanized.  Defined according to his function and evaluated by the degree of his utility, he is reduced to the status of an object..."

It was a sweeping and even breathtaking argument, especially to innocent first year ears.  While this kind of opposition is implied in the Dickens' Hard Times excerpt (Mr. Gradgrind's insisting on nothing but facts, and forbidding the arts as mere fancy) it goes much farther than Snow or other essayists.   Snow's insistence that the future belongs to the scientist (much is made, for example, by literary critic Lionel Trilling of his assertion that scientists "have the future in their bones") does leave this opening, however.

 Literature and the humanities were feeling beleaguered--as indeed they were, at least in society at large--and undervalued, or even considered irrelevant. Probably someone took up the Dickens thread to declare the importance of the derided faculty of imagination as well as the collection and organization of facts. In those days as I recall the role of imagination in science was not emphasized, or even acknowledged.

I started out equally sympathetic to the science side, thanks largely to my romance with science fiction and its heroic scientists, but I also had a respect for the scientific method and for the accomplishments of science.

But when it came time to pick a side--and that time came when we broke up into discussion groups chaired by one or another of the faculty members on stage--I chose to scamper over to Old Main to hear more from Mr. Spanos.  (As I've mentioned before--in fact several times-- if Paul Shepard had not left the faculty the previous spring, I may have made a different choice.)

 It is interesting by the way that the one place that science and literature meet--namely science fiction--is never mentioned in those books, nor was it likely noted in those Knox discussions, for it was much more academically disreputable at the time.  But several science fiction authors and editors talked about Snow's thesis, and even agreed that literature was dangerously isolated from science and its influence on the future (which remains a valid argument concerning mainstream fiction.) Science fiction not only portrays a future shaped by science and technology, but offers critiques of such societies (present as well as future) partly by placing human characters in that context, which is a chief role and function of literature and more generally the humanities.

Considering these books and this debate today, it's hard not to conclude that science and technology have won, in academia and elsewhere, relegating literature and the humanities to the margins. (Though both at times lose out to finance and economics, not to mention leisure studies.)

A recent survey suggests that in the US humanities majors have dropped even more steeply since the Great Recession of 2009, notably including majors in the elite liberal arts schools whose families were statistically likely to survive and recover from the downturn better than others.

 Yet science today is deeply troubled by previously undervalued complications, flaws and self-inflicted crises of confidence because of sloppy and dishonest work.  That's without some blindness to consequences that has plagued science since at least the Manhattan Project.  The great physicist Richard Feynman who said so many wise things, was wrong to suggest that a philosophy of science is irrelevant.

 The most obvious and damaging problems are in the social sciences, particularly behavioral psychology and economics, which threaten to merge.  They are at once heedless of the possibility that human flaws identified by literature for centuries can infect their sciences, filled as they are with hubris, and clueless that some of their astounding findings about human nature have already been dramatized with more accuracy and irony in the oldest stories known.

 Snow raised a political argument that Trilling in particular wrote about (and then Snow doubled-down on it in his "Second Look.")  Snow basically said that while scientists are committed to using their knowledge to lessen suffering in the world, literary writers are indifferent, if not reactionary.  He cited several modernist writers with racist, totalitarian or other destructive political views.  Even Trilling (Snow said) wrote that the essence of modernism was the individual, with no concern for society, therefore for others.

At this remove, it must sound strange to many that Snow is asserting, in today's terms, that scientists (and by extension, professors of science) are liberal or left while literary types are on the right. As for the needs of the individual vs. the demands of society, modernism indeed did champion the individual.  As Spanos argued, the individual was the subject for existentialist and modernist writing partly because technological, mass society was threatening the humanity and integrity of individuals. (Spanos may not have agreed with that "partly," but he wasn't a fiction writer.)

 But while some views on the subject were extreme (though sometimes mostly for contrast, shock and dramatic effect), a concern for the individual and repugnance for conformity did not necessarily add up to a dearth of care for others and the social welfare.  Snow's socially conscious and caring scientist is equally a caricature. Selfishness and careerism were hardly unknown in the sciences, and literary types were known to join the Peace Corps.

Knox College Alumni Hall as it was

Snow concentrated on modern writers, though modernism was pretty much over in the mid 1960s. But it was pretty much the most recent writing covered in Knox literature courses. The New Criticism of the 40s still dominated there as well.

Whatever the flaws within these categories in the literary world, they were merely a preview. Since then we've had postmodernism, a largely silly category, and the once enlightening but ultimately even more ingrown and incomprehensible deconstruction and semiotics dogmas that throttled literature departments 20 or so years later.

 Trilling's point that students could appreciate the brilliant work without agreeing with the writer's politics or other views is worth re-considering in an age and atmosphere in which current and fast-changing values and behaviors tend to shrink what's acceptable in past literature to an intolerant vanishing point, if the writer has one or more currently defined flawed or repugnant views.

But now as then, it's all too complicated to be reduced to a unreal division into Two Cultures.  It's much too overlapping and complex. But we love to chose up into two sides, and start demonizing the other.  Still, if there was more heat than light in the Two Cultures debate, and less than meets the eye in our two assigned books,  it was stimulating.  And rightly or wrongly, probably useful to first years during orientation, pondering their choice of courses, if not their majors.

History of My Reading: Two Cultures (Part 1)

According to what I hear and read, a high school student selecting a college these days involves at least one family road trip to target campuses, follow-up visits to the short list and then serious negotiations with the top choice (or two), involving conversations in person and on the phone with administrators and teachers. Colleges often bus or fly "prospectives" to campus for group and personal tours, while prospective interest expressed in a particular field of study might mean texts, emails and a phone call from the relevant department chair.

 So my experience in choosing a college in the early 1960s might seem unbelievable. But when I committed to Knox College, I hadn't spoken to a single person there. Until I got out of our black Mercury station wagon in front of Anderson House, my first year residence, I had never set foot in Galesburg, Illinois. The first representative of Knox College I'd actually met was the student who ticked my name off his list and showed me my room at the back of the third floor.

 Nevertheless, I had carefully considered what college I would decide to go to. But my decisions were made mostly sitting at my old varnished wood desk in my room, reading. Or lying on my bed, staring up at the light fixture that had been there since the room was new, and I moved in at the age of five. The Roy Rogers bedspread of my childhood was gone by then.

Probably the brown linoleum with cowboy scenes that covered the hardwood floor of my room was gone by then, too. But the shade on the overhead light was still there: a gold colored fixture shaped like the wheel on the bridge of an old sailing ship, with a pearl white shade that had various nautical decorations on the sides. But facing down at me was a kind of compass, with the four cardinal directions marked in red. The question was: which way would I go?

I wasn't sailing east, down Route 30 a few miles to St. Vincent College, where many of my high school classmates were headed. But should I go south, to Georgetown in Washington, D.C.? That was unlikely. I only applied there to keep my Central Catholic high school teachers off my back--their only interest seemed to be that I go to a Catholic college. I deliberately chose a school that was unlikely to give me the scholarship I would need even to think about it. If lightning struck however, it was the one Catholic university I knew of that I might consider.

 But basically I wanted out of the stifling insistence of Catholic schools. I had some idea colleges wouldn't be as doctrinaire as high school but I didn't want to take the chance. I could go north, to Michigan State. The only person I knew who was actually in an out of state college, a second cousin, was going there, and she was enthusiastic. Plus it was pretty cheap. My shot in the dark was Columbia University in New York, which I had visited for a high school journalism convention, but  it was very expensive.

 Or I could sail west--either a little ways west, to the University of Pittsburgh. Or farther west, to this school nobody I knew had ever heard of, that liked to call itself the Harvard of the Midwest.

I'd only heard about it because I'd entered a Scholastic Magazine Writing Awards contest my junior year, and I placed in one of the categories (Dramatic Script.) It turned out that in addition to a small cash prize, this award made me eligible for a Scholastic Magazines Writing Awards Scholarship at the two institutions of higher learning that gave one: the University of Pittsburgh, which I certainly knew something about (it was 30 miles away, and I'd been on campus several times) and this other place, Knox College, that I knew nothing about.

 They were both described as full four year scholarships--just what I needed. I wanted to go away to college. But any chance of college necessitated a scholarship.  So I applied for both.

 As for the choice, I was pretty much on my own. Neither of my parents had gone to college. I was the oldest in my generation on both sides of the family, so nobody else had yet gone through this. I literally did not know anyone who had gone to college, except my Aunt Toni (who lived far away in Maryland), my Uncle Carl, and eventually a few students a year ahead of me in high school who were just starting. (I don't count the priests and nuns who taught at my high school, at least some of whom presumably had degrees. They were useless.) Nobody I knew had experience in this process.  I talked about college a little with classmates, but college shopping was still basically yet another middle class mystery.

 My uncle and aunt had gone to the two local Catholic colleges, and had lived at home. Most of the students I knew from high school were going to these same schools. Those that weren't--who went off to Pitt or Carnegie Tech or Penn State--just seemed to disappear. I didn't have much of anyone to talk to about my strong need to seek a bigger world, let alone how best to accomplish it. So I researched the only way I knew how. I read. And most of what I read was what these institutions sent me.

  Probably in the spring of my senior year, and certainly by the time I was getting ready for college that summer, my parents presented me with two new matching Samsonite suitcases. They looked like this:

I used one or another of them on trips home, and for years of train, air, auto and bus travel. Decades later they became storage units, repositories of whatever improbably survived from high school and college. In one of them is stored a number of items relating to that college decision (though it was my mother who saved the important papers.)

Such as the letter received by my high school principal on May 3, 1963 from the Scholastic Awards announcing that I had won a second in the national writing awards.  In addition to a $25 check and a pen from the Sheaffer company sent three days later, I learned in a separate letter from the Scholastic Awards that the University of Pittsburgh and Knox College each gave a four year scholarship in connection with the Writing Awards, and as a junior I was eligible.  I could apply for either or both.

 The letter included forms to fill out and send to them in the fall (between September 15 and November 15), to be passed on to the respective schools. I applied for both. Junior and senior years involved taking a lot of tests related to college and eligibility for scholarship, the most important being the S.A.T.  There were few guides to taking these tests in those days--too much help was considered unethical. But we did take the PSAT and then the SAT in both junior and senior years.

I remember towards the end of this test-taking process being roused on a Saturday morning and driven to an unfamiliar school to take one.  I was drowsy and in a bad mood and I did badly.

 But fortunately I had a good day for the senior SAT, soaring over 700 in verbal and actually topping 500 in math--each being at least 50 points higher than my junior test.  Of course these numbers don't mean much now--the tests have apparently changed several times since then.  I didn't do as well on my senior Achievement Tests, and actually scored higher on American History than English.  Maybe those were the ones I took that Saturday.

 I have a December 1963 letter from Michigan State about sending them a deposit to confirm that I was coming, so I must have received the acceptance letter earlier. In early January 1964 I got a letter accepting me into the University of Pittsburgh, with a scholarship offer a few weeks later.

I don't have anything surviving from Georgetown, but I was accepted without scholarship.  I believe I was wait-listed at Columbia. In February 1964 I got a letter from Allan Christiansen, Director of Admissions at Knox, informing me that I'd been awarded the Scholastic Magazines Scholarship. I had until April 1 to notify them if I was accepting.  Pitt wanted to know by May. So then it was time to decide.

  I'd read somewhere--probably in some august publication like the Reader's Digest--that to make a big decision you should list all the pros and then all the cons.  So that's what I did, and I actually still have the three legal size card stock sheets I used.

 I had apparently already eliminated Michigan State.  I'm sure one factor came in the envelope asking for my deposit.  It was my student punch card, the kind with the little holes.  The "do not fold, spindle or mutilate" cards that were even then a symbol of depersonalization. I was a little leery of such a big school anyway.  High school was claustrophobic, so a large university had some appeal.  But it was also overwhelming and hard to make judgments about.   Their academic programs seemed lost in skills and prep-professional majors, like hotel management. Anyway, once acceptances came in from elsewhere, I had no interest in Michigan State.

 So my decision sheets started with what had to be the first consideration: cost. Surprisingly, on paper, Georgetown was not more expensive that Pitt or Knox--in fact, even with room and board, it was slightly cheaper.  But no scholarship. Once scholarship offers came in from elsewhere, it wasn't a practical choice.

I'd marked Georgetown as "large, urban, fairly distant."  Pitt was "large, urban, close."  I actually did know someone who was a first year there, and she loved it.  But Linda tended to be enthusiastic about everything.

She showed me around one day. There were three new high rise residence halls shaped like cleanser cans.  They were officially designated buildings A, B and C, but the students had dubbed them Ajax, Bab-o and Comet. I'd been to the Pitt campus before (and a few more times at Forbes Field across the street, where the Pirates played.)

I was always impressed by the Cathedral of Learning--a building that should be more famous than it is--and the magic I felt the first time I walked into its small offspring, the Steven Foster theatre, never left me.  (I subsequently saw a lot of Shakespeare there.  And eventually, taught a writing course in the basement of the Cathedral.)  Still, I left that visit with the campus still a blank of buildings.

One day my Uncle Carl visited, and came into my room for a private chat.  We sat on my bed, under those four directions on the ceiling lamp.  He suggested that I would make a lot of contacts at Pitt that would be useful to me later.  He was assuming I would stay in western Pennsylvania, an assumption I wasn't making. But this was the best informed advice I got in my decision-making process.

Pitt Cathedral of Learning

Pitt had sent me a few sheets of information they distributed to Scholastic Magazines applicants, about the English and writing programs.  I noted that these looked good.  My comment was "could not make a mistake going here."  That was the ultimate consideration: the fear of making a huge mistake.

 Pitt made sense in many ways.  The campus was far enough away for some independence, close enough for whatever support I might need.  I knew of at least one high school friend who was likely to go, so I wouldn't be starting out completely alone among strangers. So for awhile, it must have looked like Pitt was it.

  I'd gotten my first letter from Knox in September 1963, when I'd first applied for the Scholastic Awards scholarship.  That's when they sent me several brochures and a course catalog.  I'd been looking at them for months, but now in the early spring it was time to give them one last examination.

Prof. Douglas Wilson from 1960s Knox Idea

Unfortunately I no longer have the actual material they sent me, though I picked up similar brochures in 1968.  In addition to the course catalog, the probably sent a brochure introducing Knox College, and they certainly sent the more substantive Knox Idea, and a thin brochure, probably four pages counting the title page and the back, on heavy cream white paper.  On the cover it said "The Writing Program At Knox."

The contents of the late 60s Knox Idea I have appears to be largely the same as the one I received in 1963, especially since the photos of students seem from at least a few years before my time (though I do seem to recognize one or two), and all the faculty are familiar, though perhaps younger. I remember the same photos of dorm rooms, which made them look improbably large, as students later complained.

I  remember the same photo of Everett Dirksen (Republican Senate leader from Illinois, who bowed to the Civil Rights bills with the quote about an idea whose time has come) in the section on guest appearances.  (And there were no examples of notable guests from my years or later.)  But the booklet itself is not as I remember it.   I recall the Knox documents I got as being on glossy paper with a unique but old fashioned typeface, and borders and backgrounds of purple and gray.

 One element that is definitely different is the trees.  The brochures/booklets I got had photos of the Knox campus, with many trees leafily lining the brick walks and sheltering the grass between earnest old buildings.  The trees were a comfort, a hope, as they were to me in my western Pennsylvania reveries.  Later editions don't have these photos, probably because most of the trees were cut down.

Those trees gave me an impression of the campus that was very important to its appeal.  But Dutch Elm Disease came.  Some of the trees were gone when I got there, and I awoke in Anderson House too many mornings to the portentous whine of chain saws several blocks away on campus. Still, many trees survived, including the persimmon trees in Standish Park that Mary Jacobson loved during our few walks there in a future year.

 What turned me towards Knox? The financials were slightly better than Pitt, enough to cite to my parents as a basis for my decision.  That cream white brochure on parchment paper called "The Writing Program at Knox" was modest but elegant, and gave me a sense of the writing program's independence, importance and its context.  That my scholarship was identified as the Scholastic Writing Awards Scholarship.  That it was a coeducational liberal arts college.  That it was an unknown land, and yet, in a town I might understand, in the Land of Lincoln.

The campus, the trees, and above all how they filled out the image of the Knox Idea: The Knox idea of education is to lead students to learn and to think. The Knox idea encourages students to enter into the spirit of free inquiry essential to a liberal education....Knox College wants its students, in and out of class, to question, to probe, to decide for themselves what is true--and to accept the responsibility for their decisions. The Knox idea emphasizes that the faculty has, as its principal concern, the intellectual development of Knox students. 

 Faculty members are firmly committed to the belief that the students' progress is most important and must be served by, rather than subordinated to, an interest in research or in books, buildings, or equipment.

 It said that Knox students are expected to "acquire certain abilities:" To think logically To speak and write clearly and effectively To be resourceful in obtaining further knowledge.... And so on. All of this represented the culture I wanted to be part of.

 It meant leaving the culture I was in.  Leaving the limited and deceptive "free inquiry" of  Catholic schools, and the limitations of the time and place that had brought me up so far. Though it was becoming economically middle class, the world I knew was culturally working class.  Most men didn't see the point of college, when there were secure and well-paid jobs in union plants.  But even those who saw college as a step up into professions, expected those students to return to home and family.

 It was a delicate dance at best.  Even those who got their education locally and stayed near would run into the attitude expressed in the phrase we all heard: "Who do you think you are?"  Improving your earning ability or even status was understandable, to a point.  But suddenly, betterment meant you think you're better than us, better than me.  Their sense of betrayal and alienation, or simply of inability to understand why, were never far off. My world had been expanded by television, newspapers, movies, magazines and books.  There was a world I saw in ideas and images, though had not yet touched. A world of principles and expression, of potential to be realized, of gifts to be developed and then given.

So I set sail for Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois. Did I find any substance to the Knox Idea there?  It was never that pure, seldom articulated, often lost.  But in the end that wasn't the point.  It wasn't a question of whether Knox College believed in the Knox Idea and tried to live it.  It was that I did.

History of My Reading: Portrait of a Reader as an NCB

In my previous posts on childhood and adolescent reading, I was guided by musings on the books as artifacts and how I came to read them--childhood books at home, then from the public library, then my own paperback purchases.  But I neglected (or forgot) some other books that were important to me, that can also be viewed in light of a few personal characteristics and circumstances.

So let's review: My systematic reading began in school. Instruction was visual and sound-based, sounding out words, which came to be known as phonics.   I was in the top reading group in first grade (the Rosebuds), as we followed the unexciting adventures of Dick and Jane. By third grade I was excited by the expanding vocabulary, especially action words like "zipped" and "whizzed."  

Throughout the grades in Catholic school our major reading was the Baltimore Catechism, with its question and answer format. (Who made me?  God made me.)  We not only read it but recited, and were quizzed on it--our answers had to be verbatim.  Otherwise would be the near occasion of sin.  So it was for nice Catholic boys and girls.  But the ritual aspects and language probably prepared me for poetry.

I learned quickly, especially vocabulary.  But I was not a prodigy by any means.  I may have read often, but I had far too much physical energy to stick with reading for very long at a time.  I was an active, "free-range" kid.  I had bouts of childhood illnesses to thank for some of those reading experiences--even beyond comic books. But even by high school I had particular trouble with long narratives.

The worst were when our English courses included Silas Marner by George Eliot and Great Expectations by Dickens.  Even though they were probably abridged versions, they were excruciating.  I especially didn't enjoy being forced to spend so much time with such an awful and scary person as Miss Havisham.  That drudgery put me off nineteenth century English novels for a very long time.

But it is also true that I got some exposure to a breadth of literature, especially English and American, in high school English classes.  We were not assigned individual novels or poetry anthologies.  We were required to purchase sets of paperback collections, approved for Catholic school students.  But even though there was the usual Catholic slant in descriptions of authors and works, and Catholic authors like Cardinal Newman were raised to equal rank with more recognized writers, I did get a taste of a range of writers, including many not covered in any of my college literature courses.  In particular, I recall we read a lot of essays, by the likes of Samuel Johnson, Oliver Goldsmith (in fact, I recall one of the volumes was entitled "Shakespeare to Goldsmith:), William Hazlitt, Charles Lamb,  Thomas De Quincey and--yes--John Henry (Cardinal) Newman.  I did tend to think they were long-winded but it was how I learned that the essay is considered a literary form. 

Especially in my public library reading before high school, I got through other books if the story was exciting, even if I didn't understand all the other stuff.  I read some awful stuff, too.  I had a paperback copy of Strive and Succeed by Horatio Alger.  I think this is when I was a hotshot paperboy and fancied myself a businessman (even if my profits went largely to snacks at the neighborhood stores along my route.)  I now have a paperback reprint of that exact edition, and it is truly a terribly written book.

 Sometime before high school I enjoyed reading Tom Sawyer which encouraged me to go on to Huckleberry Finn.  That was a bit more difficult, though it was episodic enough to keep me going.  I may have tired a bit in the middle, until it got exciting again.

One author I recall reading, probably in high school, was William Saroyan.  I got his books out of the library: The Human Comedy, My Name is Aram (short stories), probably one or two more.  I may have seen on television the James Cagney movie adapted from his play, The Time of Our Lives.

 I really liked Saroyan, his small town stories about growing up, learning tolerance and integrity. I did not have the same kind of experiences but I could imagine them, and some of his characters were like some of the older people I encountered.

 Saroyan was a popular and prize-winning author from the 30s to the 50s, but has largely been forgotten.  He was never mentioned in any of my lit courses at college.  Probably judged as too sentimental.  Even Steinbeck (who I also read at this time, though sporadically) was a bit suspect. As was Sinclair Lewis, for stylistic reasons I suppose. I read Babbitt and perhaps Main Street on my own in high school, after I tried to read Kingsblood Royal, which was about racial prejudice.  It was one of his more obscure novels, which I read because a girl I had a crush on said she liked it.  I was excited by the satiric edge--satire, particularly political satire, was big in the early 60s. 

Possibly for the same satiric reason, I read George Orwell's Animal Farm, as did some of my high school friends.  We knew enough about Nineteen Eighty-Four to talk about it, although I'm not sure I read it.  I probably tried to.  I know I saw the 1956 film version on TV, which graphically presented the basics.  We couldn't miss such elements of it as the thought police in regard not only to totalitarianism we studied, but tendencies of the Catholic school environment we existed in. 

The Kennedy campaign of 1960 plunged me into politics, so in addition to the paperbacks I've mentioned (by and about JFK as well as the James Baldwin books that largely led me to the March on Washington in 1963) and the Reader's Digest Condensed Books version of the Washington novel Advise and Consent, I read two other novels about politics: All the King's Men, Robert Penn Warren's fictional portrayal of Huey Long, and The Last Hurrah, Edwin O'Connor's evocation of old style Boston politics. If I couldn't follow them completely, they left definite impressions.

 So by the end of high school, the recognized literary works I read (as opposed to tried to read but failed) were mostly poems, essays, short stories, short novels, or episodic novels, as described in my post on paperbacks: Updike, J.D. Salinger, etc.  

 I read the classic poems and essays mostly as school assignments (I was especially taken with Matthew Arnold and the few William Blake poems included in the anthology), but once I discovered The College Survey of English Literature (Harcourt Brace 1951) that had belonged to my uncle Carl Severini, I read poems and essays in that volume. In the winter of 1963 I found solace there when President Kennedy was assassinated, in two poems by Shelley: the long poem "Adonais" he wrote on the death of Keats, and a short poem, "Mutability."  I read Frost and was intrigued by E.E. Cummings, but for awhile "Mutability" became my favorite poem:

We are as clouds that veil the midnight moon;
    How restlessly they speed, and gleam, and quiver,
Streaking the darkness radiantly!--yet soon
Night closes round, and they are lost for ever:

Or like forgotten lyres, whose dissonant strings
Give various response to each varying blast,
To whose frail frame no second motion brings
  One mood or modulation like the last.

We rest--a dream has power to poison sleep;
We rise--one wandering thought pollutes the day;
We feel, conceive or reason, laugh or weep;
  Embrace fond woe, or cast our cares away;

It is the same!--For, be it joy or sorrow,
  The path of its departure still is free;
Man's yesterday may ne'er be like his morrow;
  Naught may endure but Mutability.

 Mutability, but I copy this poem from the very volume I read in high school.

In trying to remember which classic adventure stories I actually read when young, as distinguished from encountering as movies or comic books, I only recently recalled The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas.  Once I remembered it, the experience of reading it came back to me.

 I read an old hardback from the library, which added to the thrill. That book had a feature that leads me to my second point about my pre-college reading: I was the model of an NCB (Nice Catholic Boy.)  I went to Catholic schools for 12 years.  By high school I was starting to see the Church a bit more objectively, and eventually I was troubled by hypocrisies and lame rationalizations for activities like the Inquisition.  I remember being both uneasy and thrilled that the villains of The Three Musketeers were the Catholic Cardinal and his men.

In high school I read Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter in paperback, with just enough comprehension to get the basic story and mood.  The idea of being ostracized for dissenting behavior, being literally marked for going against the dominant beliefs of the community, was haunting, given the doubts I was starting to have.

 Many of the questions I had in high school questions came from actual Church history, and from applying principles we were learning in, say, Problems of Democracy class, to what we were analyzing in Religion.  I was attracted to the subject of individuality versus the conventional wisdom, and of the liberty to dissent.  This led me to books like David Reisman's Individualism Reconsidered, Edgar Friedenberg's The Vanishing Adolescent, and the work of John Stuart Mill.  I write more about these books in a subsequent post.

  But there was one extraordinary reading experience, one literary novel, that became formative for me in a number of ways.  How I got my hands on it was perhaps the most extraordinary element.

   My sophomore year of high school I joined the Speech Club and began going to tournaments at other schools, giving extemporaneous speeches ("Extemp.")  My junior and senior year I participated in Debate.  My partner Mike and I won district championships our senior year in both the National Forensic League and Catholic Forensic League competitions. The speech club advisor was Sister Ronald.  Almost all of our teachers were nuns, of various denominations.  I believe she was a Sister of Mercy, which (along with the Sisters of Charity who taught me in grade school) were begun and/or headquartered in our local region.

GCCHS

I had a complex relationship with another of the Sisters of Mercy, who at first championed me--made me editor of the high school newspaper as a freshman (not quite as radical as it seems--we were a new high school with only two classes at the time, first and second years) and promoted me into the first bunch of the National Honor Society inductees.  Later she fired me from the newspaper and tried to get me thrown off the NHS, after lecturing me about my lack of humility.

  She also seemed particularly bothered by observing that I talked to too many girls. Her fixation on me even became a source of embarrassment for the school administration, as I learned when the principal asked me to "forgive and forget."  I answered with a quote from Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, whose biography I had recently read for some unknown reason.  "I can forgive, but if you ask me to forget, you ask me to give up experience."

 Anyway, Sister Ronald must have known about this situation, and my ongoing emotional turmoil.  She was a bit of a mercurial character as well.  One day out of the blue she slipped me an old, hardbound copy of a book.  She suggested I read it and return it to her, with the clear implication that I should not tell anyone else about it.

The book was A Portrait of the Artist As A Young Man by James Joyce.  I knew pretty quickly why it had to be kept secret. Our Catholic high school strictly controlled what we read.

  Our textbooks, even the literature collections, all displayed the nihil obstat and imprimatur indicating the contents were free from doctrinal and moral error.  James Joyce, while not on the official Church Index of forbidden books, was not exactly approved either.

 Joyce's novel Ulysses had been notorious, even banned in the United States until a landmark court case.  His collection of short stories, Dubliners, was mostly considered acceptable--one of the stories may even have been in our paperback collection of modern authors.  A Portrait of the Artist was somewhere in between, but it soon became clear to me why we weren't encouraged to read it.

The novel follows the childhood and adolescence of Stephen Dedalus in and around Dublin in the very late 19th century.  The early set piece scene of a Christmas dinner exposes the tensions among Stephen's elders regarding the Church's treatment of a hero of Irish independence.  Stephen goes to a Jesuit school, where he is bullied by students and clergy, but also supported by other students and clergy.

from the 1977 film of A Portrait

At 16, Stephen becomes obsessed with sex and on one of his long feverish walks finds himself in Dublin's red light district.  He returns to prostitutes often.  Then his school holds a retreat: several days during which ordinary school work is suspended and students are expected to concentrate on spiritual contemplation when not attending lectures by a priest brought in especially for the retreat.

 This priest gives several sermons--fulsomely reproduced--describing the physical and mental torments of hell in great detail.  Stephen subsequently repents and becomes a saintly figure.  But when he is invited to consider whether he has a vocation for the priesthood, Stephen just as suddenly recoils against it.

By the last few chapters, he has rejected the Church and is preparing to leave Ireland, for a life of "silence, exile, cunning" to artistically "forge within the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race."

 Anti-clerical diatribes, sex with prostitutes (though at best I only vaguely understood this section), rejection of the Church--no mystery as to why this book wasn't approved, or was treated like it didn't exist.  Why did Sister Ronald give it to me?  I'll never really know.  I remember that I just as secretly returned it to her.

 The Viking Library annotated edition of Portrait notes that the sermons on hell were very similar to those the Jesuits gave from the 16th through the 19th centuries.  Well, it didn't end there.  Sometime after I'd read this book, in my junior year of high school, we had the first of our retreats--and the priest engaged to give the lectures devoted one of them to an exact echo of these graphic descriptions of hell.

 I had my spells of being especially devout--I was an altar boy for several years--but I don't recall being particularly moved by this lecture.  Perhaps I'd been immunized.  But while the hell sermons stood out--I recall reading them at night in bed, my cold arms holding the book outside the bed covers--the influence of the book was probably subliminal, suggesting that I wasn't alone in questioning the immediate world pressing around me.

A Portrait of the Artist As A Young Man was the only book I read in high school that I subsequently read again for a class in college.  It had more of a direct impact that time, the fall term of my junior year in a course on modern novels with Howard Wilson.  James Joyce became a literary hero and model in the years immediately following.

 As for "silence, exile, cunning," I never got the silence quite right--I was a loudmouth, though I yearned for silence around me.  I was soon to learn that when necessary, I could engage the cunning--with mixed success. But exile I understood.  It was the future I saw for myself with increasing definition over those late 60s years.    

History of My Reading: The Comic Book Era

Since I've posted on the 80th anniversary of Superman, who appeared first in a comic book, I'm going to continue the "history of my reading" series with this post about comic books.

Comic books influenced the art world most conspicuously in the 1950s with American Pop Art (although Gertrude Stein maintained that Picasso loved newspaper comic strips which she said influenced Cubism.)

They became subjects of literary speculation if not yet actual acceptance as literary products in the 1960s when Marshall McLuhan started talking about them as emblematic of the new media.  The Batman TV show, with its interpolated "Bif!" and "Pow!" derived from comic book panels, reflected the comic book's sudden status as fashionably hip.

Later the countercultural Zap Comix became an integral part of the hippie scene.

The late 60s also saw the beginning of the Marvel characters that reinvigorated and revived comic books, especially Spider-Man, enthusiastically introduced to me in college by fellow Knox student Erica Overberger.

Since then, apart from becoming the source of major movie empires,  comic books have morphed into the literary form of the graphic novel. But my major comic books period was earlier in the 1950s.

 My first exposure was to the newspaper comic strips, which historically also preceded comic books.  These black and white comic strips of maybe five horizontal panels appeared on a page in the daily newspaper, accompanied by single panel vertical comics, and perhaps a crossword puzzle and the daily horoscopes.

 The Sunday newspaper however had an entire section of perhaps 6 or 8 pages of full color comic strips with many more panels each.  In my childhood, I saw the local Greensburg paper (the evening Tribune, until it merged with the morning Review to become the Greensburg Tribune-Review) but it did not then print a Sunday edition.  Instead we got the Sunday Pittsburgh Press.  Despite the difference, many of the comic strips were the same, though there were more on Sundays.

Usually leading the page in both papers in my 1950s childhood was the very basic art and story of Nancy, with her friend Sluggo.

One of the most famous comic strip lines often applied to other subjects but originally to environmental destruction.

Then I regularly saw many of the well-known newspaper comic strips of the time, including Peanuts, Archie and Jughead, Blondie, Pogo, Terry and the Pirates, the Phantom (one of my favorites), Dondi, Prince Valiant (Sundays only), Dick Tracy, Steve Canyon, Joe Palooka, Gasoline Alley, Dennis the Menace, Beetle Bailey, and the one panel Family Circus and Our Boarding House...Among the detectives, fighter jocks and soldiers of fortune there were Rex Morgan M.D. and intrepid reporters Brenda Starr and Scoop Mallory.

 But there were others, particularly in our daily Tribune, that aren't as well known.

For example, I read Johnny Hazard for the jet airplane flying scenes.  Curly Kayoe was an obscure strip about a fighter. He once had an opponent called Phil O'Dendron who always wore a black t-shirt in the boxing ring to cover up some dread secret on his chest.  I kept waiting for it to be revealed, and felt cheated when the strip announced that the secret had been told to people who had written in, but the strip itself never said.  It remains a mystery in my life (though I can now pretty much figure out what it was.)

Historically, the first comic books were crude compilations of a particular newspaper comic strip.  Very soon they featured their own characters, and then their own stories for characters established in the newspaper strips. Superman was a creature of the comic books, just four years after they began.

 When it came to new current comics, Superman was not only my favorite but almost the only character I followed. That's partly due to the way I consumed this comics.  New comic books were a dime, which was not nothing in the 1950s, when a loaf of bread was 20 cents and a quart of milk was a quarter (at least at the neighborhood stores where I was sent to buy them.)  Fortunately I had a way to read comic books for free.

My grandfather's tailor shop was approximately half of a long, narrow building on Depot Street in Youngwood, about six miles from my Greensburg home.  My grandparents lived on the same street a couple of blocks down from the shop, towards the train tracks (and the depot.)  The other half was a barber shop, owned and operated by Sam Gelfo, whose father came from the same town in Italy as my grandfather.  There was a cluster of families from Manoppello in Youngwood and Greensburg--enough that there was a Manoppello Club in Greensburg.

My grandfather's tailor shop was relatively dimly lit, especially in the back where he worked the steam press.  The barber shop however was very bright, with white walls and those black and white checked floors.  Three or four barber chairs facing a wall of mirrors, with many colorful bottles and other containers on the marble shelf.

In the window that looked out onto the street there were chairs and benches for waiting customers.  There were magazines--and comic books.  Lots of comic books. So when I visited my grandfather's shop I usually managed to spend some time in the barber shop, invariably reading as many comic books as I could.

  Since my time was limited, I stayed mostly with the Superman titles.  And there were a lot of them: Action Comics, Adventure Comics, Superman comics and separate comic books for Superboy, Supergirl, Jimmy Olson and Lois Lane, plus the World's Finest featuring Superman and Batman. I read them in great gulps, in a frenzy of red capes and blue-black hair.  The barbers got interested in how many I could read in an hour and often asked for a running count.

An entirely different set of comic books would come my way when I got sick and had to stay home from school.  Colds and their variations, plus measles, mumps and chicken pox--it added up.  Sometimes I could read actual books but often--especially with colds--I was too drowsy to do any more than follow a comic book story.

I would ask my father to bring some comic books home. My father worked for the Singer Sewing Machine Company, and drove a Singer panel truck.  When he wasn't in the store, he was out on "calls" doing repairs and sales.  On his travels he might stop at the little stores that were everywhere then--they sold some grocery staples like bread and milk, soft drinks, candy and baked goods, cigarettes--a bit of everything.  Some sold comic books including the kind they weren't supposed to sell.  When comic books didn't sell out, a store could get its money back on unsold copies.  The owner tore off the top part of the front cover off (with the title and issue date) and returned that to the distributor for cash or credit.  He was supposed to throw the rest of the comic book away.

But some didn't.  They kept the mutilated comic books and sold them for five cents each, or maybe three for a dime.  These were the comic books my father often found and bought. They were sometimes titles and characters I'd never heard of.  And once, out on some country road somewhere, he unknowingly found comic books that were years old--perhaps decades.

 There were multiple issues, for example, that featured the Little Wise Guys.  Sometimes three, sometimes four kids and their adventures. There were comics about a baseball player called Swat Malone, and the various nefarious ways opposing teams would try to cheat and keep him from hitting home runs, which he always did anyway.

But the most amazing set were vintage issues of the original Captain Marvel.  Billy Batson, SHAZAM!  His sister, Mary Marvel. I was completely enthralled and wanted more.  But eventually I realized there were no more.  There hadn't been new Captain Marvels for years.  I'd even sent away for membership in the Captain Marvel club, but got a card back saying the club had been "discontinued."  Did that mean it might start up again?  I couldn't believe there would be no more Captain Marvel.

Part of Captain Marvel's specific appeal was that he was an ordinary pre-adolescent boy (Billy Batson) who could transform into this superhero by saying the magic word given to him by a wizard.  Better than Clark Kent and Superman any day!

 The original Fawcett Publications Captain Marvel stopped publishing in 1953 but based on the drawing style some of the issues I saw may have been from the 1940s. I was drawn to the drawing and the specific colors and look of it. The character was later revived in different forms by several companies--for awhile the two biggies, DC and Marvel both had versions.  But none of them stand up to the original.

According to this video I ran into on YouTube,  in the early 1940s the original Captain Marvel was the most popular superhero, superseding Superman.  Because of that, Fawcett spun off related characters: first Captain Marvel, Jr. and then, notably, Mary Marvel, one of the first and most prominent female superheroes.  She was created by Fawcett writer Otto Binder.

The Marvel Family, separately and together, were enormously popular.  So DC Comics sued them for copyright infringement of their Superman character. The suit dragged on for more than a decade but before it was decided, Fawcett was drained and dropped all their comic books in 1953.

DC then hired former Fawcett writer Otto Binder to write stories for--who else?--Superman.  He wound up creating both a number of classic super-villains who challenged Superman, and a female counterpart in Supergirl.  Ironically, she was a perfect copy of his creation for Fawcett: Mary Marvel. (He'd been so proud of creating Mary Marvel that he named his own daughter after her.) Mary Marvel was also a model for Isis, the first female superhero to star in her own TV show, in 1975.

In the years I was reading new comics in the barber shop, the superhero comics were beginning to get convoluted and fanciful. But the old rationale was often still there: they fought for the weaker, for fairness and justice for all.

It didn't take long for me to want to do more than read the comics--I wanted to write and draw them, too.  We got magazines in school, some with cartoons accompanying stories, and one that was pretty much a comic book.  In the back of at least one issue I remember a little tutorial on drawing cartoon figures.  I used these instructions to draw my own strips.

 My father was also a member of the county Democratic committee and before elections he would get what were then called "specimen ballots"--sample ballots with the approved candidates' boxes checked, to be given to prospective Democratic voters.  They were long pink sheets of paper, with blank backs. I would get the ballots left over from the ones he was supposed to distribute.  I drew my cartoon strips on the back.

 One of my characters was based on Captain Marvel.  Another was a comic character called Flatso.  Along with my ongoing drawings of an imaginary map--changing the borders of the countries to reflect the outcome of wars-- I was absorbed in these comics for awhile, usually in bed just before sleep.  But I wasn't very good at it, so eventually I stopped.  Still, there was a certain magic about doing those strips that I recall fondly.

Eventually I began acquiring and reading other kinds of comic books.  I liked science fiction ones--not just space adventures but actual science fiction, usually anthologies of stories with separate characters.  Stories might hinge on ultraviolet and infrared light, or the acidity of certain plants.

 But I also read war comics, suspense stories, and even horror comics, including the notorious one in which a husband, annoyed that all his wife did was eat chocolate from those Whitman sampler boxes, chopped her up and distributed her body parts in a similar sampler.  These led to stricter standards for comic books, many of which displayed the Comics Code of approval.  This is when my neighborhood friends and I passed comic books back and forth.  Some probably were inherited, like that horror comic.

Not to be neglected were the Classics Illustrated comic books.  I read my first Jules Verne and H.G. Wells stories this way.  Classics Illustrated offered a wide range of stories: from the Iliad, Treasure Island, The Hunchback of Notre Dame and Moby Dick to several Shakespeare and Dickens' stories.

  I don't remember which ones I read, outside of From the Earth to the Moon, The War of the Worlds and The Time Machine.  I do remember I was limited by the higher price--15 cents--and the fact that they were not readily available either from my friends or at the barber shop.  But I remember those three vividly, as comic books, apart from the movies and the original stories.

 Comic books were sort of midway between books and the animated cartoons I saw on TV and at the movies.  The drawings didn't move or talk but, like characters in books, they spoke in your head.  There was a visual vocabulary and language peculiar to comic books.  Mastering that was a skill that suggested that mastering the skills of reading print-only books was possible.

 Comic books also could be collected, displayed, lent out and traded.  But they were over pretty quickly. They didn't have the sustained worlds you could live in for weeks that books had. Eventually comic books in my life went the way of baseball cards and model airplanes--until that fit of Marvel mania in the late 60s and early 70s, with Spider-Man and the Silver Surfer, Iron Man, the Fantastic Four and The Incredible Hulk.  Apart from that, I never got deep into the world of comic book mythologies, comic book collecting and so on.  Still, they furnish these memories.

Postscript: Another direct offshoot of the comic book are books that illustrate academic or otherwise complex subjects.  Probably the most prominent practitioner of this has been Larry Gonick, who I worked with on the Boston Phoenix in the early 70s.  His books like The Cartoon Guide to Physics and similar treatments in science, history and economics look to me like Zap Comix colliding with Classics Illustrated.  His most recent is a collaboration with Tim Kasser, professor of psychology at ye olde Knox College, titled Hyper-Capitalism (New Press, 2018.)