I was walking from my office in Carnegie Library to my classroom in Old Main. I was due to teach an afternoon section of the dreaded English 101; today's lesson concerned the bubonic comma splice, which still infects the body of letters. As I reached the huge doors of Old Main and turned to mount the steps, I was greeted by a tall, gray-haired professor of local note.

"Hello, Dr Cochran," I said. "How's it going?"

"Fine, fine," he said, trying to place me, a newly hired young instructor. We chatted amiably, if disconnectedly, for a minute or two, until the professor was hailed by an approaching Danville High School student, Malcolm Cochran, Dr. Cochran's own son.

"Hi, Dad," Malcolm said.

"Hi, son," Dr. Cochran said, "how's your mother?"

Since Dr. Cochran lived at home with his wife and son, just up Walnut Street toward town, his question revealed not an identity crisis but an inattentiveness characteristic of absent-minded professors.

This was the same Dr. Cochran who drove on business to Cincinnati, spent the night, then returned to Danville the next day on the train. Later in the day, of course, he discovered that his car had disappeared.

Thomas E. Cochran, for 22 years professor of psychology and education, was not the only notable (or noticeable) professor at Centre during my early years in Danville. I have used the adjective "absent-minded," but I might also have said eccentric, exceptional, aslant, idiosyncratic, quixotic, zany, whatever, to limn these "characters."

Take John Aden, who taught English from 1946 to 1953, later at Vanderbilt a national authority on Dryden. The students called him "Black Jack" Aden. Why? Because in the classroom, though often superb, he was demanding, strait-laced, confrontational. He is supposed to have begun the first meeting of each class with the bristly statement, "I don't give As."

Outside of class he was a good-humored jokester, if acerbic, and a good friend, a great husband and father. But difficult. For instance, on the volleyball court, during faculty evenings in the Woman's Gym at K.C.W., Jack took pleasure in batting the ball out of bounds in his own home court at every opportunity, to his glee but the glare of his teammates.

But, truth to tell, one time Black Jack met his match, particularly on the issue of grades. To a senior coed who had expressed disappointment over a low grade, Aden said, "Miss ____, you couldn't make a B in this course if you came to class in a sarong!"

So she came to Aden's next class wearing a raincoat, having climbed through the window of Charlie Hazelrigg's corner office in Carnegie. At a ripe moment, she took the raincoat off. She was clad in a sarong! Later that day, I understand Professor Aden and the South Sea coed had a discussion about her grades, but I don't know the details.

Or Dr. Carl Misch, associate professor of German, who had been a newspaper editor in Munich, Germany, in the early 1930s just before Hitler came to power. Dr. Misch fled Germany in 1933, went to France, then came to the United States, where he was naturalized as a citizen in 1949. He was the quiet type who seemed to absorb U.S. academic protocol very easily.

At that time, a student had to have three years of a foreign language to graduate. The story goes that one struggling male student had passed two and a half years of German courses in three and a half years at the college. He was one course short for graduation but could not pass that last term of German, try as he might. In desperation - as I heard the story - the boy went to Dr. Misch and asked for mercy.

"Dr. Misch, I'm desperate. I need your last-term course to graduate, but I haven't been able to pass the course. Uh, could we work out some sort of compromise? If I come to class every day, do all of the homework, take all of the tests, recite in class, could you promise me a grade of D so that I can graduate?"

Dr. Misch, not unmindful of the senior's plight, said he could do that.

"That's great! Thank you, Dr. Misch." The senior then paused a bit. "But, Dr. Misch," he said, with some degree of hope in his eyes, "if I were to do better than a D, could I hope for a better grade?"

Dr. Misch shook his head. "No," he said, "that is your insurance."

My early memories of Centre have a quaint, innocent transparency to them. I've noticed it, as Dr. Clarence Heffelfinger would have said, "humberds" of times. I mean who could have imagined that our respected dean, Frank H. Heck, would drive President Groves' new car, with Dr. Groves asleep in the back seat, all the way from Danville to Dallas, Texas - in second gear? I was standing within earshot when the (nameless) professor came up to the circulation desk at Doherty Library and asked the student assistant, "Where do you keep the books?" And who could forget the constant double-armed, crooked-elbow movement of French professor J. Proctor Knott when he was attempting to maintain the lateral equilibrium of his trousers at their normal horizon. Incidentally, Dr. Knott had read every book ever written. And how many of us have walked as far as artist Jack Kellam has walked, or swum, for that matter? Not Manet, if any!

Gruff, rough, and tough on the outside was John Harper Walkup, professor of chemistry; on the inside he was helpful and hale, more good-hearted than he would admit. A highly responsible, though unorthodox, teacher, he taught chemistry to generations of Centre students, many of whom still revere him. But make no bones about it: he was direct, in judgement and in language.

"Fish or cut bait" he would say to the student doing less that his best, or "Don't put the stump water in the whiskey" to the student seeking a shortcut. Bill Sagar, who taught with Walkup for 20 years, remembers that one time he said to a boy and girl who were working on a conductivity problem in the chem lab, "Conductivity is like love; in order to be successful, you have to make contact." Or, while observing what might be termed the college's main social activity, Walkup observed, "You know, it comes to a pretty pass when you see more going on in the Centre dorms than you see going on in my barnyard."

My wife and I well knew John and Ivene, Johnny (their son), and Megan (their wonderful honey-colored cocker spaniel); they lived above us in Steiger Arms during the interesting summer of 1950.

As for my long-time friend and colleague, Charles Tabb Hazelrigg '37, the goldenfoot dancer from Mount Sterling who hired me in 1949, two anecdotes will suggest his bent.

In the early '50s, while teaching a friendly, good-humored class in early American literature, Charlie for several days wore a flesh-colored band-aid on his nose to protect a sensitive scratch. One day when he walked into the classroom, he saw that everybody in the class was wearing a similar band-aid, similarly placed. He hesitated not a nonce, sat his briefcase on the desk, opened it, and pulled out a package of multicolored band-aids! "You've not got much imagination, to use only flesh-colored band-aids. You could have been more colorful than that!" And he handed out a radiant handful of tinted band-aids, green, pink, yellow, and firmly instructed the class to put them on.

But red was the color of the day when Dr. Hazelrigg, prepared to continue discussion of Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, entered the classroom to discover that each of the coeds had a large red A affixed to her chest. Hardly taking a breath, he said to them, "My chief regret is that I was not responsible for you having those letters."

Me?

Surely not me: I don't have nutcake for dessert or starch in my toga.

Oh, sure, alumni at Homecoming keep telling me that one day I climbed out of the second-story window in Old Main and disappeared. Some of these former students even claim that I furtively descended two levels of the fire escape and showed up in class five minutes later through the hall door. And then had the presumption to make a point about Chaucer, a sort of low trick from a cheap roman a clef. But I deny all that.

And I haven't said a word about Jose Larraz and West T. Hill and the country-ham sandwiches. Or about Dr. Steere and the piano bench.

"Goodbye, Mr. Chips, Dr. Pangloss, et al." is the 17th in Paul Cantrell's occasional series on life at Centre, where he taught from 1949 to 1989.

Centrepiece
Centre College
600 West Walnut St.
Danville, KY 40422

Phone: (859) 238-5717
Fax: (859) 238-5723
E-mail: alumnews@centre.edu
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