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by Nils Peterson ’54
Giving themselves over to art: A Centre quartet with Klell Napps ’54, Nils Peterson ’54, Harold Hanson ’55, and Dan Purdom ’54.
It’s impossible to believe, but I graduated from Centre 50 years ago. To put this in a kind of perspective, when I attended my first Homecoming in 1950, those coming back for their equivalent reunion would have graduated in 1900. So there’s a century of Centre life mixed with the strange history of our larger time playing around in my head.
Memory comes most easily for me when it is connected with something physical. I recently found a copy of Dwight Steere’s setting of the First Psalm with some old music in my piano bench, and all of the pleasure of the Centre College Choir came back to me. The first pleasure of choir was getting on the yellow bus and going over to, well, we called it, among other things, The Coop, but it was KCW, the Kentucky College for Women. We rehearsed in their small auditorium.
Back then the town separated the men from the women, not only our shyness. (Well, some of us were shy. As a 16-year-old, I was competing for the girls of the 1950 freshman class with veterans from World War II. “Competing” may not be the right word.) The women had much more elegant quarters then the men. They had maid service, sit-down meals, and a dress-up dinner night. At Breckinridge Hall we had the sheets changed every couple of weeks and a weird hash plunked on cold plates in the cafeteria. On the other hand, the women had to sign out to go out, and had to sign in to come in—was it by 10 on weeknights, 12 on weekends?
Dr. Steere insisted on quality. As a result, the choir was demanding. We had to memorize challenging music. I remember Thompson’s “Peaceable Kingdom” and Bach’s “All Breathing Life” with its tricky fugue. But we learned how satisfying it was to be asked to give ourselves over to great art, to be responsible for coming in with the right note at the right time. In addition, the choir had sopranos and altos, and that made singing more interesting to the boys of Breckinridge.
The spring choir tour placed us together with the women on a bus for a long delicious time as we went around performing at churches and occasionally other colleges. Once we came back to school early to sing a New Year’s service at Auburn University in Opelika, Ala. (I remember Dr. Steere hitting a tiny, incongruous bell at the stroke of midnight.)
I missed my freshman year’s tour because I was on probation, but the yearly “A” in choir pulled my grade point up sufficiently the first two years to keep me from flunking out. The other thing it gave me was a lifelong love of choral singing. There’s not been a year in the last 50 when I have not sung great music with a fine chorus. When I went to graduate school, the university’s choir performed once a year with a New York orchestra and once a year with the Philadelphia Orchestra, so I had a chance to sing with some of the great conductors of our time. I still sing with the local symphony chorus.
And I’m still grateful to Dr. Steere.
My second object is a term paper I wrote for Dr. Hazelrigg for a class in American Lit. We had been reading T.S. Eliot’s difficult poem “The Waste Land,” and for some reason I thought we hadn’t spent enough time in class on it, or that it hadn’t been fairly treated. So I set off to explain to myself and to my teacher the five sections of the poem. And the truth is, though my scholarship was of the “shoeshine and a smile” variety, my imagination, my instinct, and my awakening love for poetry helped me do a decent job. Oh, I misspelled “Caesar,” and Dr. Hazelrigg wrote “Oh No! Not this year.” The year before I had misspelled Caesar all the way through my Shakespeare paper, and this after four years of Latin. I got an “A” on my “Waste Land” paper, and in those days I didn’t get many; my proofreading was only one of my difficulties, though a big one.
What makes this paper memorable to me even more than the “A,” and why I still have it, is that at my 25th reunion, Dr. Hazelrigg took me over to his office and gave it back, telling me that over the years he had shown it to students to illustrate what could be done on one’s own. I don’t think I have ever felt more complimented. Though I was fond of him as an undergraduate, I loved him even more a quarter of a century later. Maybe because of that paper, I became a teacher of literature.
My third object hangs in my closet. It is the dinner jacket I wore at Centre. It still fits across the shoulders, and it buttons, though the sleeves are too short. No doubt the sleeves were too short then, too. I still have it partly because I have trouble throwing things away, but, more than that, it has a pink stain on the shoulders that brings my memory of Centre powerfully back. So much so, I can’t possibly give it away. The last time I really wore it was at the spring dance in 1954. It was the evening when there was a King and Queen and a Court spread out before latticework all over the football field. I was a member of the court. All the women were there in their beautiful off-the-shoulder gowns, and they’d all made hats out of cardboard and pink crepe paper. Of course, it started to rain, and we, as Southern gentlemen—even the imitation ones from New Jersey—whipped off our coats and put them over the bare, damp shoulders of our partners. Of course, as the ceremony progressed, the hats got wet and dripped pink. No amount of dry cleaning was ever able to rescue my coat, but I love it the more for that. As I write this, I find myself wondering if any of the women’s gowns survived, if somewhere there’s a pink-shouldered white formal hanging in a plastic bag in a closet because the owner wants to keep the memory of a spring dance half a century ago.
Nils Peterson ’54 directed the creative writing program at San Jose State University for more than 20 years. Originally from New Jersey, he now lives in Campbell, Calif. His e-mail address is nissepete@aol.com.
Centrepiece
Centre College
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Danville, KY 40422
Phone: (859) 238-5717
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