My big finish in the summer of ’75…

You don’t want to see certain portions of my college transcript. Or rather, I don’t want you to see them.

I had what you might call a very slow start in higher education. When I left Hawaii to travel all the way to Columbia to attend USC, I thought I was ready, and had everything I needed. I was thinking about that in recent days as I heard from folks with young kids enduring the herculean mess of moving them into their dorms for this fall semester. My parents, who in any case were back in West Honolulu, didn’t have to help me move enough stuff to furnish a small house (which seems to be the fashion today) into the Honeycombs. I just had the three things I had brought with me on the plane: my Dad’s old overseas bag, my tabletop stereo and a box full of record albums.

But at 17, I wasn’t as self-sufficient as I thought. For instance (just to keep it simple) I initially thought one of the best things about being off at college was that nobody made me get up in the morning to go to class. Turns out that was one of the worst things for a guy like me, since the people who ran the classes still expected me to show up, and would hold me accountable when they handed out grades. Who knew? Nobody told me. The only thing I remember from my freshman orientation was when the guide taught us guys what it would take to make the ball atop the Maxcy monument spin. Some of you older guys no doubt know the answer, but they probably don’t teach that anymore at orientation. If they did, they’d get canceled.

Enough about USC, which I only attended for that one wreck of a semester. I want to reflect on Memphis State, or at least on the more positive aspects of my time there. This came up because I’ve been thinking lately about taking advantage of the senior deal on tuition to take a course or two at USC, and the Gamecocks want a transcript. Turns out that you can’t order a transcript from Memphis State anymore. You have to get it from a place called “the University of Memphis.” But I sent off for one a couple of days ago, and had it back in my email almost immediately.

It contained good news and bad news. The bad news was the lingering effect of the mess I’d made in Columbia. That was because I had crammed my schedule that one semester at USC with honors and upper-level courses, but (thank goodness) had taken them on a “credit/no credit” basis. The deal was that a “no-credit” didn’t count against my GPA. But out on the Tennessee frontier they’d never heard tell of such a thing, so Memphis State carried them as Fs, until I finally spoke to the right people and got it fixed. That gave me a chance to climb out of the hole.

But just a chance. Unfortunately, my climbing those first couple of years in Memphis was not what you’d call spectacular. Lots of Cs, and a couple of times worse than that. I was still, by habit, a slacker.

Dang. I promised in my headline to show you the good side, and I’m still dwelling on what went before. Well, here we go: the good bits…

Then I met my wife. That first semester that we were dating, I picked up one of her habits. She called it “studying.” I had heard of it — I even knew some people who did it — but I had never seen it as a needful thing back in high school, and had not changed my ways. But she did it like it was a normal thing, and since I was hanging out with her so much, I just fell into the same habit. I didn’t turn into a grind or anything, I just studied some.

The results were rather remarkable. I do recommend it to young people, if they can find the time. (And I should say that none of my grandchildren should ever emulate the shameful record of their grandfather earlier in his academic career.)

It took me awhile to get the hang of it, and the occasional C still cropped up in the first couple of semesters. But my last spring semester, and the crammed summer schedule I took on that last summer so I could graduate in August, showed the kind of work I should have been doing in Columbia back in 1971. You can see the part covering the summer above.

Sorry about that one B. My whole time since I had declared a journalism major I had been avoiding the two required editing courses taught by one L. Dupre Long. Mr. Long was the adviser to the lab newspaper The Statesman, which he ran with an iron fist. I never went near The Statesman until I was required to when I took those two courses under him. I had my existence over on the independent, relatively anarchic student paper, The Helmsman. We ran a student-drawn comic strip with a character named “El Depraved,” who was sort of a villain, or at least an object of ridicule. For some reason, this led at one point to my being invited to visit the office of the department chair, who gave me a stern talking-to, but probably not as stern as Leon (as Mr. Long’s friends called him) would have liked.

I took them both over the two summer terms, which were much shorter than regular semesters, thereby diminishing my suffering.

Anyway, the grading in the editing classes was highly subjective, and Leon just wasn’t going to give me an A in that first course. On the second one, he relented. But instead of posting it on the door of his office, he gave me the news in a face-to-face meeting that seemed to last hours, and it was mostly about how I was full of potential but too much a slacker to show it, and I sat there in agony because I knew that had once been true, but I also knew my work in his class could not be faulted, so I sat there nodding and thinking “Alright already! Just tell me the grade!”

Finally he came out with it, and it was an A, as you can see. That was the last grade I learned about before graduation, and it pulled my cumulative GPA to exactly 3.0. I walked out with the first B average I’d had in my entire college career, and in those days (before the grade inflation of the 21st century), that was enough to graduate cum laude.

But the programs for graduation had already been printed, so I never had any proof of it I could show to anyone until now. So I’m glad I got this transcript, because there it is.

Similarly, I had never declared a second major in history. But sometime toward the end of that last spring semester, I realized I had taken so many history electives that I was only six hours away from meeting the requirements of such a major. So I crammed two of them into the summer, one of them in the three-week mini session before the two summer sessions, which turned out to be one of my favorite courses ever. (“US SO IN HST TO 1865” on the transcript refers to “U.S. Social and Intellectual History to 1865.”)

I like to tell people that I majored in history, because let’s face it — journalism isn’t an academic subject. It’s a trade for literate people to engage in. You learn it working in a newsroom, not sitting in a classroom. And I want to seem at least somewhat educated. So I tell people I also majored in history, but I always explain that they would probably find no written proof of that anywhere.

I always say that because to me, one of the most amazing news stories you ever see — and you see it quite often — is about idiots who brag to the world, for instance, that they were Marines and received commendations for valor in the last war — when some aspect of that, or all of it, is a lie. And of course, the first reporter who checks it out discovers that and tells the whole world. It has always astounded me that anyone would be stupid enough to think he could get away with something like that. I would never do anything like that — not only because it’s wrong, but because I would expect to get caught.

But now, I don’t have to attach asterisks when I tell people about my history major, or my at-the-buzzer 3.0. Which is nice. I know neither is a major achievement, but I see them as better than nothing. Having done nothing at one point in my youth, I know.

This is great. I should have sent off for this transcript years ago…