Cakes and Ale

Eastern Baptist College, Part 4

As is the case with most institutions, the faculty is the heart and core of the student experience.

Eastern Baptist College, Part 3

Either despite or because of the tenor of the times, the spiritual dimension of life at Eastern was never lost.

And the theological discourse was rarely tame.

Eastern Baptist College, Part 2

Eastern Baptist College

July 23, 2018 – I spent barely six months at McConnell AFB, Kansas, from February to August 1968. It was the briefest and, in some ways, the most educational period of my Air Force experience.

As a sergeant in the base chapel, one of my responsibilities was to greet airmen who had been newly assigned to the base and to make sure they were aware of all the base chapel had to offer them. The majority of the new assignees were returning from their year in Vietnam.

I had signed an agreement to enlist in the Air Force in July 1964, more than a month before the Gulf of Tonkin resolution that granted Lyndon Johnson authority to dramatically increase the number of troops in Vietnam. We didn’t know then that the resolution was based on a lie but one of its side-effects was that many people with my date of enlistment were sent to Europe and North Africa, and thousands who enlisted a month later were sent to Southeast Asia.

By 1968, many of the returning Air Force veterans had concluded that the Vietnam War was a hideous mistake and morally bankrupt as U.S. policy. The troops who came through McConnell AFB chapel, reeking of sweat and marijuana, couldn’t stop talking about it. It was largely because of their testimony that I became an anti-war veteran and when I was separated from the Air Force in August 1968 I knew I would seek ways in college to express my views.

After a year to get adjusted to the academic routine, I joined with other anti-war vets in my class and began submitting articles and cartoons to The Spotlight, the college newspaper.

Actually, my first cartoons for the student newspaper were anything but hostile.

And there was certainly enough on a Christian college campus to distract and amuse. Certainly a sense of humor was useful in dealing with the restrictions of a conservative, moralistic culture, including twice-weekly mandatory chapel.

McConnell AFB, Kansas

July 23, 2018 – Looking through my attic this weekend for a folder of letters I had written home from my Air Force assignment in England from 1965-1968, I discovered instead a box of fifty-year-old publications.

I had carelessly preserved the publications because many of them included cartoons I had created as a young adult and I thought they might be interesting to have someday.

The papers in the attic were in an advanced state of deterioration so I brought them down stairs to scan them digitally before they were dust. They brought back memories of my developing adolescent sense of humor, and of the officers who encouraged me to keep it active.

July 23, 2018 – I ascended into our sweltering attic this weekend to look for a folder of carbon copies of letters I wrote in the 1960s.

The folder – if it still exists – holds copies of my missives home from RAF Stations Bentwaters/Woodbridge, England, where I was stationed from January 1965 to January 1968. I was a clerk typist for the chaplain’s office so it was easy enough to squeeze a carbon set behind the bond paper on which I typed my letters.

The letters were addressed to my parents, siblings, buddies, and girlfriends, and when I was 18 I thought they would provide a useful diary of my time in England. As it turned out, the letters also included adolescent drivel that varied in proportion to the person I was addressing. I left out a lot of my experiences when I wrote to my mother, lied to my buddies about sexual conquests that never happened, and exaggerated my attentions to girls I found attractive but would not see again for three years.

Years ago I decided it might be wiser to keep the letters hidden and I tossed them carelessly into some pile in the attic. But recently I started writing a memoir of my Air Force experience and I decided the letters – even if not entirely truthful – would be helpful reminders of times and dates of key events. When, for example, did I visit Framlingham Castle? Or the Taboo Club in Soho? Or what month did I share a room on the ferry from Hoek Von Holland to Harrich, England with beautiful Solfrid Kvarme but lay hopelessly sea sick on my bed as she glared at me with disappointed disgust?

I’m still looking for the folder of letters. But as I probed through the detritus of the attic I did find other discarded artifacts of the era. In one box, which disassembled itself because of the heat of many summers and dissolutely surrendered the papers it once protected, was a pile of yellowing papers I had collected over many years. The deteriorating bounty included brochures and clippings that held drawings and cartoons I had contributed over many years. The collapsing box was stuffed with brochures I had designed and illustrations I had drawn for publications I had known in my youth, including bulletins and pamphlets from my days at RAF Stations Bentwaters/Woodbridge, McConnell Air Force Base in Wichita, and Eastern Baptist College in St. Davids, Pa.

Many of the papers looked like they would crumble into dust if they weren’t rescued soon. I scooped them carefully into my arms and brought them downstairs to my office where a scanner sits on my desk.

And I started scanning while the artistic records of my youth yet survived. They are posted herein in chronological order.