Less Than Entirely Evil

Sometimes the past can be recaptured—or at least briefly revisited—thanks to Facebook.

Back in the early 1970s, I was a freshman in college, living away from home for the first time. I wanted to see another part of the country and understand how people outside the New York City area thought, so I chose the University of South Carolina.

Goal: accomplished.

The Coliseum:The School of Journalism was in the basement.

People in the South had their own distinctive culture. I had never seen a firearm before in my life. Everyone I met owned rifles, and a pistol or two for good measure.

Religion was very central to the Southern psyche. People were constantly trying to save my heathen soul, from Campus Crusaders to Moonies to Hari Krishnas to a group that was aspiring to be taken up into space by an alien race. A middle-aged man with a placard that read: “Repent!!! You’re going to HELL!” walked back and forth in front of the student union building every day with a megaphone.

Streaking (running sans clothes) had taken the university scene by storm and naked herds of laughing students flashed by now and then wherever one walked. Panty raids on women's dorms were also common. Because the drinking age was 18, beer keg parties erupted regularly and were always Open House.

Our mascot was, and still is, an (illegal) Gamecock named Cocky.

So there was a strange mixture of guns, religion, sex and alcohol permeating the campus.

My parents had overprotected me for 18 years, then sent me 700 miles away to one of Playboy’s Top Four Party Schools in the country (that year) for an education. They had never gone to college, so I guess they had naively lofty ideas of what the experience was all about. Amid all this enticing chaos, I was attending classes and trying to learn something.

My first class in my first semester in college was a required speech class. My teacher, J. Russell Weatherford, was a theater arts graduate student who had recently left the Air Force American Forces Radio and Television Service to return to college. A tall, lanky man with wavy, black hair, he told us stories about the Aleutian Islands off of Alaska where he had been stationed.

Professor Lumpkin shared his similar halberd collection with us.

I also had a wonderful teacher, Professor Hope Henry Lumpkin, a retired military officer who taught the History of Warfare, which I took as an elective. An ardent pacifist, I felt I needed to understand the other way of thinking. It was an ROTC class and I was the first and only girl who had ever taken it. I remember his well-over-six-foot, perfectly erect frame striding back and forth across the auditorium stage, menacing halberd in hands, intoning in his booming voice, “Cran and élan, men! Cran and élan! Guts and spirit!” He earned me the permanent resentment of my classmates when he informed them that as the father of three daughters, with a woman in the class, he would not be sharing his salty stories with us that semester. I, also, was disappointed. I understand that he taught up until his death in the 1980s.

The USC horseshoe, site of many an infamous keg party.

Most of my college professors have probably passed on to eternity at this point. All, that is, except that young graduate student who had taught my speech class. So recently, I decided to look him up on Facebook and see what he was doing. I was surprised to find that he was living in New York City—a short bus ride away. So I wrote to him and asked if we could meet. Of course, students remember teachers, but teachers are less likely to recall students. He had no idea who I was, but he kindly agreed to meet me, anyway.

What struck me most about our meeting was that we had first crossed paths when we were young and everything in our lives lay ahead of us. Now we were meeting almost 40 years later, after we had lived out much of our lives, and had done—or not—whatever we had intended to do. I'd spent that time as a professional writer in a variety of fields. He'd pursued the entertainment field, working as an actor, writer, producer and much more on projects that took him from New York City to Texas to California and back. We both had stable home lives and were fairly content with how our careers had evolved.

And, we were complete strangers. Yet—there was still that tenuous link from the past. So we agreed to keep in touch.

For all the negative press that Facebook receives—and much of it well deserved—it still offers exquisite opportunities that simply wouldn’t exist otherwise. I like to think of them as the Un-Evil Moments of Facebook. So, Mr. Zuckerberg, for this magical portal to reconnecting with old friends and teachers, as well as keeping in touch with my on-the-fly adult daughters, I thank you. It would seem that you are not entirely evil, after all!


Postscript: Since publishing this, I have learned that Professor Henry Lumpkin was a military historian with the United States European Command and Naval Academy. He was Professor Emeritus of History at the University of South Carolina. He was also author and narrator of two television programs, And Then There Were Thirteen and Saints and Legions, broadcast by SCETV Network.