It Was Only Midnight
(A Mean Trick to Play on a New Freshman)
(Screem 1 of 3)Fay Buchanan was from Nebo, a very small village in the farming section of western Kentucky. He told me when he first came to Bowling Green to enroll as a freshman at Western that this was the first time he had ever been more than ten miles away from the house he was born in.
Fay was one of several students rooming at the Rock House on campus, where my brother and I also lived. Our mother, a member of the music department faculty at Western, was also responsible for overseeing the operation of this house and for supervising the behavior of the students staying there. If it had been a fraternity house (there were no fraternities or sororities at that college in 1929), she probably would have been called the house mother.
It soon became obvious to us all that Fay's limited travel and dearth of broad experience had led to an extreme shyness and lack of sophistication which affected everything he did or said. He was intelligent enough, but at the same time quite naive and altogether too trusting. Such a boy of nineteen inevitably becomes the target of pranks and practical jokes played by other college freshmen, and Fay was no exception.
In order to pay for his meals, he worked several hours each day as a dishwasher in the kitchen of Potter Hall, one of two dormitories on campus. This job required him to report for duty at five o'clock each week-day morning, a responsibility he took seriously and carried out faithfully. And to make sure he would never be late, he set up and carefully followed a schedule known well by everyone in the Rock House.
Before going to bed each night at exactly eleven o'clock, he would place his straight razor on the small table next to the bathroom basin (when asked once why he still used a straight razor instead of a more modern safety razor, he merely said his father had never allowed any "modern gadgets" in their home), neatly stack his school books for the next day on the floor just to the side of the door to his tiny bedroom, open his east window slightly (never the one to the north, he told us, because that would bring bad luck--besides he added, that would make the room too cold in winter and too hot in summer), and finally set his little windup alarm clock to go off at four-thirty the next morning. But he took this last step only as an extra precaution, because he was regularly awakened at that time by the noise I would make in cleaning out the ashes from the big coal stove in the hall. This stove was the only source of heat for the entire second floor-a hall, four bedrooms, and a bathroom--and it was my responsibility to "bank" the fire before we went to bed, and then at four-thirty in the morning to remove the ashes, shake the grate, put on more coal, and open the bottom draft door. This was a routine exercise for me, and everyone upstairs--especially Fay, whose room was closest to the stove, was used to it and depended on it.
Upon hearing this familiar noise each morning, Fay would get up, methodically turn off his alarm, wash, shave, dress in his R.O.T.C. uniform (including the wrap-around wool leggings) , and then leave a few minutes before five to begin the short walk to the dormitory.
But now the mean trick!
It was in the middle of January, the thermometer was hovering just above zero, and the early mornings were very dark. In fact, in that part of the winter, it was no lighter at five in the morning than at midnight. And it was because of this particular set of circumstances that our prank against Fay was sure to work.
My roommate, Howsie Meade, and I had just returned from a school dance at about midnight. A light snow was beginning to fall, and our feet were almost frostbitten; so the warmth of the house was particularly welcome.
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