23
Crazy Bus vs. the Organization
In those olden days degrees were granted and academic policies decided (so we were supposed to believe) at meetings of the entire faculty. At these we debated whether to abolish the F, eliminate “well-rounded education” requirements, exhort the city council of Lovington to recognize a garbage workers’ union, insist on our right to pick our own “faculty representative” for the National Collegiate Athletic Association, require football players to actually attend classes, and so forth. Since I was suffering withdrawal symptoms after long immersion in real world politics, I found academia’s version of the game fascinating. Before long I became identified with a faction called “the Organization,” composed mostly of high-tech types, those from the hard sciences, and some from the more traditional fields, such as history. At the other end of the spectrum stood the “Crazy Bus,” driven mostly by professors in the Department of Sociology, the College of Education, School of Law, younger anthropologists and philosophers. Crazy Bus philosophy was a mix of 1930 Marxism, Nihilism, Hedonism, and disgruntlement. Ours was basic pragmatism with an overlay of Harvard Envy and survivalism.
That survivalism isn’t as exaggerated as it sounds. The usual uproar over whether the U should shift from being an educational institution and become a instrument of social reform had been drowned out by a fuss over a poem. This poem, aptly entitled “Love Lust Poem,” was more lust than love. It had been included in a stack of poems a teaching assistant had copied and put out for his freshmen to select from for the basis of a required critical paper. Think of “Love Lust Poem” as the flint.
Now think of the tinder as a legislator who yearned to be a congressman but had no name recognition.
Think of the person who pulled the trigger, striking flint to steel and igniting the tinder of ambition as an African American housewife and mother who had enrolled in this course to advance her education. She and another older student were offended by this piece being used among the kids in freshman English. They objected up the administrative channels all the way to the president and past him to the regents and hence to the legislature. At the capital, the Xerox machines went into overtime action, making “Love Lust” a contender as the most widely distributed, read, and discussed poem in the twentieth century and the keystone in the congressional election campaign of State Representative Harold “Mud” Runnels.
The candidate was known as Mud Runnels, mostly because his business was selling oil well drilling mud I’m sure, but his repertory of jokes and anecdotes were not the sort one heard at church picnics. While the poem was a remarkably specific and earthy description of a multitude of ways to produce sexual gratification, I doubt if it included language Runnels hadn’t used in his stories. However, the desire to become a congressman had improved his standards. Copies of the poem went to legislators, civic clubs, church groups, veterans’ organizations, etc., with demands that the offending teacher be fired, the dean dumped, the English Department chairman replaced, the university president ousted. At Runnel’s urging, the House Appropriations Committee voted overwhelmingly to cut the appropriation of the university to one dollar for the next fiscal year.
Expressions of outrage came from all parts of New Mexico. For example, the Silver City Council suggested the university be shut down. (The councilmen considered the “Love Lust Poem” serious enough to take time off from their own problem. The madam of their main street whorehouse had been sending her protection money to the FBI Academy in Washington for delivery to the Silver City lawman taking a refresher course there. Something had gone wrong with the delivery of the money. Arrests were made which aroused the fury of the lady operating the whorehouse.)
This poem uproar was wonderful grist for the faculty mill. The Crazy Bus folks invited the governor down to a rally on the mall, where one of the academics read the poem to him over the public address system, with heavy emphasis on the four-letter words and to the cheers of students. The chairman of the English Department (who had previously accepted a job offer in New England) invited local TV newsmen to attend a freshman English class and brought in gay and lesbian folks to explain to the youngsters the sexual mechanics of their life style. On the other side of the spectrum, The Organization was more quietly engaged in discussing how some semblance of academic freedom and paychecks might be salvaged from this mess. They were, but no thanks to us.
The university president then was Dr. Ferrell Heady, an all-around admirable man. He kept his cool and his sanity and refused to fire anyone. The teaching assistant was shifted to a more mature section, and Mud Runnels became our new Democratic Party congressman. Bedlam at faculty meetings shifted back to whether we should declare the campus a Safe Haven for Vietnam draft resistors, eliminate all grading and entrance requirements, prohibit the National Guard from entering university property, etc.
The anti-guard sentiment grew out of a protest of the bombing of Cambodia. Students declared a sit-in of the Student Union building and sat. I sent some of my reporting students over to show me how they could handle the event. Campus police showed up, got the students to separate themselves into those who wanted to be arrested and those who didn’t, and brought in a bus to haul the arrestees (including my students) off to be booked into jail. All very civilized.
But the governor somehow came to believe that he had been asked for help. He called out the National Guard. The National Guard brass sent in several truckloads of guardsmen—mostly teenagers and some still high school students. The guard officers seem to have told these kids that the sit-inners were Communists and were probably armed with machine guns, etc. So the kids climbed off their trucks preterrified by their officers—helmets on and bayonets fixed.
The first casualty of this was a guardsman bayoneted accidentally while getting off the truck. As the fiasco wore on the toll climbed to eight. The other victims included a TV cameraman (the guard spokesman insisted he had been stabbed by a rosebush), assorted folks who had gone down to see what was going on, an injured athlete passing by on crutches on his way to class, and two fellows carrying an early victim to an ambulance on their stretcher. Since the sit-in folks had all ridden away on the jailhouse bus they missed the excitement.
When Dr. Heady tired of the foolishness and retired, the regents looked at William E. “Bud” Davis, president of Idaho State U, to replace him. Since Davis was a blue-collar fellow untainted by Ivy League elitist pretensions and could cite success in nagging the Idaho legislature for funding, he looked good to me. On the dark side, he was a former coach and had once even coached the Colorado U footballers. True, he had been drafted into the job after the regular coach and much of the team had been fired for NCAA violations and, true, he had been replaced after a single disastrous season. But none of us in the Organization wanted to be presided over by a coach—even a losing one.
Davis apparently sensed this opposition, apparently wasn’t aware that no regent even knew we existed, and asked to be invited over to my office to field our questions. In about thirty minutes he had converted us. When he got the job he came by my office again and asked me if I’d be his administrative assistant. I said I wanted to continue teaching. He said how about trying it for a year until he learned the ropes, meanwhile still teaching one course. Pay raise? Such philistine matters are not discussed in the lofty world of academia, but the answer is no. The recompense was a second office and the added status of having fellow faculty members believe you knew what was going on.
My new office in the administration building was larger and its broad oft-washed windows looked out on the grassy mall surrounding the duck pond. The grimy window in my faculty office looked down on Yale Park, the staging area for student protests and the launching point for the demonstration-of-the-month. City crews had removed river stones from the landscaping in the divider on adjoining Central Avenue depriving the Doves of their ammunition, but the lawn still often carried the aroma of fresh tear gas and it was a view I hated to trade for the dead calm outsid
e my new window and the more intellectual excitement at the seat of power.
The intellectual excitement was quick to come. Davis, who had been splitting his time between winding up affairs at Idaho State and lining up financial support in the New Mexico legislature, arrived Saturday to take over full time. He was awakened Sunday morning by a call from the chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee. Had Davis seen the front-page headline in the Albuquerque Journal? No. What did it say? It said that a modern dance troupe from New York scheduled to perform in Popejoy Hall would doff its tutus and do its thing with genitalia adangle, in the name of high art and improving the culture of the outback. The Senator had been one of the U’s supporters in the antiwar riots and the “Love Lust” affair. He said he didn’t think he could deal with this in his committee. If the dancers’ skivvies went down, the U’s budget would inevitably follow.
Davis called a meeting of those he could reach on Sunday morning and asked our opinion. He doubted naked dancing on the university stage would have raised eyebrows in Idaho. How about New Mexico? I pause here to put this in context. This was about thirty years ago when some semblance of public modesty still survived. Davis was a certified Democrat and had been the Idaho party’s nominee for U.S. Senate. Members of the group he’d managed to assemble were also of the Democratic persuasion—but mostly of my own fuddy-duddy blue-collar John L. Lewis, Harry Truman type—not the modern, politically correct demos of today. Our preliminary suggestion was to declare that we needed money for faculty pay raises and new hires more than we needed liberation from our vagina/penis inhibitions. He should tell the dancers to keep their tutus on.
“First day on the job,” says Davis, “and you want me to establish myself as the only Philistine among the Greeks.” How about some better ideas? Being the gofer, I located the manager of Popejoy Hall. What’s his opinion? He doesn’t care. Does the contract provide for a naked dance? It doesn’t. This is a new one they’ve been practicing and want to add, sort of to see how it flies in Toonerville. Maybe I should just tell them to stick to the original program, he says. Good idea, I say. Davis agrees.
In an odd way, typical of academia, it was. Here’s how it worked. The dancers decide their artistic integrity is being stained. They bitch to friends in the Department of Dance, who spread the word that our new president has laid the heavy hand of censorship on art. The cry of censorship reaches the media. The president’s office, where I now have a chair, gets calls from the outraged. Reporters arrive and are told the president has been made aware of the situation and is looking into it. More calls. President informs those interested that he understands the dancers are going to dance just as their contract provided. The university is making no modifications in the original contract. (How’s that for creative ambiguity?)
The dancers, of course, defiantly doff their tutus and do their thing au naturel.
I am not a fan of modern dance, didn’t go and wasn’t aware until weeks later that what was then called “indecent exposure” had been committed in Popejoy Hall. The press saw no need to cover a dance without the controversial full-frontal nudity and apparently didn’t attend either. Those who had so fiercely opposed naked dancing on the taxpayers’ stage stayed home happy in the mistaken belief they had won. The thousand or so in the audience were apparently unimpressed. (A student of mine who went said he’d seen better every morning in the latrine of his Army barracks.) And the legislature gave the U its best appropriation in years.
Alas, Davis was not always so lucky. The very worst of it hit him just after he emerged from a flight at the Albuquerque airport. I emerged from another flight and ran into him in the lobby of Albuquerque International Airport just as the bad news arrived. A reporter who had been awaiting the president’s return rushed over and asked Davis what he had to say about the Federal Bureau of Investigation raiding the Pit.
A jaw-dropping question. The Pit is UNM’s eighteen-thousand-seat basketball arena, New Mexico’s version of Madison Square Garden and the home of the U’s athletic money machine—its basketball team. The FBI, Davis and I were told, had paid its visit hunting evidence of illegal interstate gambling. Rumors of point spread fixing, etc., added frosting to the cake. In New Mexico basketball is king. Even with dismal losing teams, the beloved Lobos were outdrawing UCLA during John Wooden’s string of championship seasons. Today sports scandals are too common to draw much attention. But that was back in the age of relative innocence. In New Mexico, this was a disaster akin to being annexed to Texas.
The FBI’s gambling raid produced more smoke than fire but investigators of the NCAA were more successful. Most of the team turned out to be ineligible, coaches were jettisoned, sports writers found it hard to believe that Davis, a former coach himself, didn’t know what was going on. More painful for me, they found it hard to believe that I, Davis’s gofer and an experienced investigative reporter, was as ignorant of all this as I insisted.
That experience may have improved my journalism teaching. Having written many a caption under photos of embarrassed politicians trying to explain things, I now learned how it felt to be the face staring sheepishly into the camera above those captions. It teaches compassion.
Looking back on my two sessions as presidential gofer I can think of only one improvement for which I can take total credit. The medical school surely would have been established even if I had not found those eleven mattresses for the sheriff’s jail but I alone improved the scenery beside the Administration Building. The landscaper had carefully measured off the space between my office and the duck pond, and carefully placed trees rooted in tubs exactly where he wanted them to be planted the next day. One of them blocked the view from my office window. When the workday had ended I went out and moved the tree about fifteen feet to the north. There it still stands—the only monument to my gofer career.
I had hoped I had produced a permanent solution to another university problem—elimination of a chronic exam-day bomb threat—but I doubt if the cure lasted. The solution was to ask the president’s secretary to divert the bomb threat calls to me. These came early on mornings when important tests were scheduled and the procedure had been to immediately notify campus police. They would go to the threatened building, search for the bomb, and inform all instructors they could either move the class outside to the lawn or reschedule it later. My policy was simpler. I thanked the caller for his courtesy, hung up, told the secretary it was just a joke, and forgot it. This produced “deniability” in case the word got out that we were ignoring bomb threats. But what bomb threater is going to publicly complain? Classes were held as usual and after five or six such episodes the fraternity boys who were getting F’s on the exams they hadn’t showed up to take discontinued the practice. I don’t know if the bomb threat tradition has been restored. One day after delivering a lecture so bad even I knew it was boring, I decided to quit academia and return to the real world.
For about fifteen years teaching had been fun. Now what I enjoyed doing was writing. I quit academia, knowing I wouldn’t miss the administrative chores of the Ivory Tower; thinking I would miss teaching even though I had lost the edge. Miss it I did but not for long.
24
The FAQs
If my experience is typical the Frequently Asked Questions faced by writers at book signings are “Where do you get the ideas?” and “When do you write?” In my case, the first question is often how did a white man such as myself get acquainted with the Navajos and their traditional culture. Answering that requires a brief biographical recap, eight grades in an Indian school, Indian playmates, growing up knowing that the us of the us-and-them formula put us hardscrabble rural folks, Indians and whites, in the same category—contrasted with urban folks who had money, or so it seemed to us. In other words, I had no trouble at all feeling at home with Navajos. They were the folks I grew up with. To experience exotica, I attended a College of Arts and Sciences faculty meeting. Navajos like Alex Etcitty, Austin Sam, James Peshlakai, and a good many others,
seemed to sense this, and that I was seriously interested in their culture. They helped. For example, when I told Peshlakai I intended to have Jim Chee take the woman he was wooing to witness a traditional wedding, Peshlakai sent me a videotape of his daughter’s wedding. When I was working on a subplot involving friction on the Navajo/Hopi border, he took me to meet some of those most bitterly involved. When I was having trouble with Talking God because I had never seen the Yeibichai curing ceremony which was crucial to the plot, Austin Sam found one and took me to it. From the time Alex Etcitty thumbed a ride with me on the road to White Horse Lake until his death he was a hugely helpful bridge between the scholarly dissertations on Navajo mythology and the Way of the Dineh I was reading, and the current world of sheep camps, bootleggers, and the shaky assimilation of teenagers. Etcitty was born to the Taadii Dineh, the clan of his mother, was elderly when I met him, and never failed to field my questions. He helped me understand the Dineh values, which make having more than you need a sure symptom of evil, which make beauty in sky or landscape valuable enough to stop the car and watch the cloud shadows move across the valley, which make adding your prayers to an aunt’s curing ceremonial far more important than keeping your job.
There were many others who helped me. A teacher of English at Shiprock who had his students consider a subplot I was planning to see if it would work. It wouldn’t. I had to junk it. A young man at Tuba City explained to me how an eagle is caught when an eagle is needed for a ceremony. A Marine Corps veteran—one of the famous code talkers of the Pacific war—described his journeys to the Four Sacred Mountains to collect the elements required for his medicine bundle.
Even with this kind of help, even with the knowledge that myth, ceremonials, and taboos vary among the multitude of Navajo clans, I was nervous about my role as a white man describing Navajo ways. That problem was eased at the 1987 Navajo Tribal Fair. When Marie and I showed up at Window Rock to attend the event I was told I was supposed to ride in the fair parade. After I asked for an older and fatter horse than the one offered, I was relegated to a convertible and traveled down the highway one car behind the Navajo tribal princess through rows of highway-side spectators greeting me with shouts of “Who the hell are you?” The tribe more than made up for that put-down by presenting me with a plaque declaring me
Seldom Disappointed: A Memoir Page 24