Dooey Doolittle
Kemper got itself a new president in 1959; Sam West, Episcopal priest, former chaplain at the Kent private school, and Kemper Old Boy from the 1930’s. He brought along with him a little priest, Glenn P. Williams, also Episcopal, to serve as the corps’ chaplain both years that I attended. Glenn was known among the cadets as Dooey Doolittle because we only occasionally figured out what it was that he was supposed to do, or what he was doing at any moment. From time to time we would see him stride out of the administration building and about the campus with airs of great purpose and determination. His uniform was a grey polyester suit, black linen bib, clerical collar, rimless spectacles. But we never knew where he was going or what he was doing and we never asked because it just didn’t matter as he didn’t bark orders or issue up demerits, we weren’t required to salute him, and he never did anyone a favor that I heard about. A few days a week he’d say the prayer before mess, but his presence was like a ghost on campus. We could see him, but he didn’t affect anything beyond the moment when standing before the head table in the mess hall he’d say “In Jesus’ name”— we’d respond in unison -- “Amen” and chow down.
However, my Sophomore year, in a tiny classroom on the North side of “D” barracks Rev. Williams held forth a course on religion for me and a half a dozen other cadets. I don’t know how it was that I and my compatriots got selected for the honor, and I’m certain that I never signed up for it; perhaps my folks or maybe Sam West himself determined that I needed an extra dose of church’n up.
I was not born again or baptized for having taken that course, though they were fishing for candidates, but in that classroom under Reverend Williams’ tutelage I learned one thing for sure, the Ten Commandments, in order, King James style. My favorite of course was good ‘ole number X, especially the caveat about coveting thy neighbors wife. At the time I thought one’s neighbor’s wife more properly came under number VII, adultery, and in class I raised the subject, but the discussion quickly got out of hand, Father Williams blushed and he cut off the debate.
Well, some good came out of my religious education under the right tutelage of Reverend Williams. I do not now nor have I yet coveted my neighbor’s wife. Nor for a fact, has my own personal personage yet been dipped in a Baptismal fount. Never mind my ox.
I remember the name of just one of my religion classmates, an old boy named Joyner. He’d skipped the previous year to attend public school where he didn’t do too well, and the year before that he’d gotten into deep trouble at Kemper. He’d picked on another cadet so bad that the kid just up and disappeared. They called out the dogs of Boonville and searched high and low, and the kid didn’t show up for three days. But the kid showed up. He said that he’d hidden out in the closet and never left the campus. His friends had brought him food and no one snitched, at least so he said. They sent Joyner home after that and he didn’t return ‘till my new boy year. All this happened the year before I got there, and I was gullible, so they might have been just pounding sand up my butt. (Not my neighbor’s butt.) I don’t know. I liked the story however, so I chose to believe it.
But Joyner still had it in for one of the old boys when I was there, a guy named Newman. I don’t know why Joyner had it in for Newman, but at every opportunity, Joyner made fun of Newman’s nose; Yeah, his schnozz. When those two guys were within shouting distance of each other, Joyner would make a snide remark about Newman’s beak. I checked out Newman’s proboscis and it seemed ordinary enough, but Joyner was determined to rag on Newman at every opportunity. After a while Newman ragged back at Joyner; he’d make fun of Joyner’s eyebrows, or should I say eyebrow, y’know, a unibrow that went unbroken all the way across his forehead. It was a real comedy every time those two cadets crossed paths, so I guffawed for the first few times I witnessed an exchange. But after a while it became routine and I just let it pass, like the scenery.
Anyway, Joyner was one of the guys in religion class. But it didn’t matter, as I found out when I transferred to a Chicago public high school that Dooey’s religion course was an off the books not for credit deal. But then again, the freshman and sophomore courses I took on Military Science and Tactics didn’t count for didly-squat either. They didn’t even make it into the activities blurb under my graduation photo.
Glenn Williams was director of the glee club that was the previous year the purview of University of Missouri music student and Kemper night watchman Dick Huffman. When I inquired about Huffman, they told me that he had suffered a nervous breakdown and would not be returning to run the glee club and skulk the barracks halls at night. I liked Huffman. He was one of my better teachers and I was disappointed to have him gone.
Dooey however, had no music education or experience whatsoever. My new boy year I was a tenor in the glee club and had fun at practice and performances. We even got to perform for a West Point reunion at Fort Leonard Wood. Mr. Huffman gave me my first experience of what it was like to be led by a competent choir master and perform before an audience. Under Mr. Huffman’s excellent tutelage I met a life requirement that I had set for myself. I sang Handel’s Messiah with the full University of Missouri orchestra, chorus, and soloists in the university’s concert hall at Christmas time 1959. I’m still proud of that accomplishment. However, when I achieved that goal I experienced what I have come to think of as a Kemper odd moment. We in the chorus had sung our last chord. The orchestra played its last note. The maestro signaled a complete rest, placed the tip of his baton in his left hand and he turned to face the audience to receive applause. And there was utter silence in the concert hall. The maestro stood motionless, the orchestra at rest, the last echo of the last note disappeared into the aether. Our audience remained seated and silent. Dick Osborne, cadet lieutenant, athlete extraordinaire, letterman, graduating senior and baritone, let out two loud “Haw- Haw’s”, and the spell broke. First one person applauded, then a scattering, followed by everyone else in utter politeness.
The maestro tapped his left palm twice with the tip of his baton, took a bow, made a grand sweeping gesture to the orchestra and chorus, walked off his podium and out of the orchestra pit. Osborne never stopped laughing. As if on cue the orchestra, soloists, and audience stood up, the applause petered out, and everyone went home for Christmas. Another odd moment in the panoply of Kemper remembrances.
I looked forward to my sophomore year in glee club, but after a few practices it was obvious that Dooey Doolittle didn’t know squat. The group sounded so awful that a performance would have been embarrassing. Between glee club and sitting for Dooey’s dopey religion class I too wondered just what the Rev. Williams was doing at Kemper. After a bit of thought I devised what I believed to be a graceful exit plan. I told Dooey that my balls had dropped and so had my voice. My tenor range had disappeared, and I didn’t do baritone. Glenn didn’t see the humor, and he sneered at me like I was a misplaced turd, but he let me go.
I don’t recall the grade I received in his ersatz religion class, but it didn’t matter, then or ever. The value of his course on my transferable transcript was squat.
That’s all there was between me and Rev. Williams for my two Kemper years. When I returned to public school, though my grades were good, my academic coursework was so spare that I had to attend summer school to catch up and graduate with my classmates. This upset me and it was close. That religion course or Military Science and Tactics I and II would have made the difference had transferred. Perhaps Dooey and Sam simply coveted my butt for a dip in the baptismal, my neighbor’s not-coveted wife notwithstanding.
Thirty-five years later I got Reverend Williams’ home phone number in rural Michigan from none other than Sam West. Sam was very old, had suffered a stroke, sounded frail and was difficult to understand on the phone. Not wanting to upset him with sharp questions about a distant unpleasant past I let him ramble for the few minutes that we had. He was still bitter about his brief difficult three year tenure at Kemper. Prior to accepting the job at our alma mater he was a Chaplain and assistant headmaster at Kent, a Connecticut high-faloot’n strict Episcopal boarding school. He’d accepted the Kemper presidency with the promise that he could update his hidebound alma mater to mid twentieth century standards and practices. His model was Kent, but west of the Mississippi. However, he experienced stiff resistance from the old guard management and directorship who owned the debt and the original owner’s family who still held sway over the direction of the school. They canned him before he’d completed three years. Sam said that thereafter he led what he said was strictly a parish life, tending his flock. I just listened but I got the impression that there was something else to his departure, but he was so old and still bitter. It was so long ago and he sounded so upset that I didn’t press the matter.
Then Sam asked me if I remembered Glenn Williams, chaplain back in the day. Of course I did and I mentioned that he was the worst glee club director that I’ve ever had. He had a laugh and agreed, then told me that Rev. Williams quit Kemper after a couple of years and moved to a small Michigan town serving a congregation ever since. Sam had kept in touch, he gave me Rev. Williams’ number and I called straight away.
Reverend Williams answered the phone with a deep hearty professional hello. He was expecting a call from the high pooh-bah of the ladies auxiliary, certainly not a long ago student. Though the voice was that of an old man and not the young man I had known, Dooey Doolittle was still in that voice after so many years. We exchanged bona fides and pleasantries after which he offered up an apology for having been the worst glee club director of all time. We both laughed but I agreed with him. Then I made the mistake of asking how he was, much too general a query for an interview. There’s no telling from where an answer to that question will come. His daughter had recently been busted for drugs and was undergoing rehabilitation. It was difficult for him. That put a kibosh on the moment, but I pressed on, expressed my sympathy and a confidence that his daughter would pull through the ordeal alright, and then I just asked him how he remembered his years at Kemper and he un-corked.
He said that Sam West had recruited him with promises of glory in the classroom and a chance to remake Kemper in the disciplined Kent Christian mode. Instead all he got was one freshman religion class, the occasional prayer at mess, and the glee club directorship.
Then he said something that knocked me over; he’d once caught an old boy ordering a new boy to jack off in the hallway of the barracks. (To be honest, I was writing so fast that no matter how many times I’ve looked at my notes I can’t tell whether it was “Jack”, “Jerk”, or “Jag”. My memory says Jack, but my notes are calligraphically ambiguous.”) I stifled a laugh at that moment as a comical scene presented itself in my mind and I’d had so many odd moments with Kemper people that I simply chalked up one more. I asked what he recalled of the long ago event and he explained that the old boy was standing in the barracks hallway in front of the new boy and ordering the boy to hold his crotch in one hand and a gun in the other while he recited a poem. (This was from an Episcopal minister, the same guy who blushed in class at my attempt to tie my neighbor’s ass to adultery. And I hadn’t heard the term “jack off” in a conversation since high school. Well, maybe once or twice in a traffic jam.) But I kept my cool because as soon as I heard the word “gun” the memory of the ritual that he had witnessed popped into my mind. I’d seen it in the barracks, and until that moment, had forgotten it.
Kemper’s military faculty issued a vintage World War II M1 rifle to each cadet. (Firing pin removed of course.) We had to keep our disabled rifles in a state of pristine cleanliness and pretend working order or suffer the consequences. (The Kemper boy’s military scene required much pretending, and there were dire consequences for the most trivial pretentious infractions.) To call ones rifle a “gun” however, was a mortal insult to the military lingua franca, to say nothing of the emasculated weapon itself, and the offending cadet would take a mandatory lesson on the distinction between rifle and gun, lest he err again. The offending cadet had to stand in the barracks hall holding his crotch with his left and his rifle held in the right hand, and recited (and performed with precision) thus:
This is my rifle (Loft rifle in the right hand.)
This is my gun (Grab crotch with the left.)
This is for combat (Loft rifle.)
This is for fun (Grab crotch.)
SIR! (Release crotch, bring rifle to port arms.)
I never suffered this formal indignity as I never let slip the “G” word, but I saw a couple of guys take this lesson. My new boy year, tall blond and only slightly epileptic Fletch stood in the middle of the hall reciting, lofting and grabbing, and my old boy year Heart went door to door in the barracks with this act. In both instances the same old boy with the apropos nick name Real Prick, stood nearby directing the action. At the time I thought it was not worth a laugh, but it didn’t seem too harmful, and I’d forgotten about that little tort ‘till Reverend Williams reminded me after thirty five years.
So I asked The Rev. Williams what he did when he saw that scene in the barracks. He told me that he immediately told the old boy to knock it off and the old boy told him to go away.
“Then what?” I asked. He said that he went straight to the commandant George Grayeb, who told him never to interfere with an old boy’s authority. (Ahh-- Colonel Grayeb, the dim eyed one, known among the cadets as the Commode, or the Shovel Head. Sometimes he’d return our salutes with both hands. He carried an eighteen inch swagger stick with a 30 caliber cartridge on one end and a bullet on the other, to point things out.)
Next Glenn said he went to headmaster Sam West who, recalling his days as a Kemper cadet shouldering a Springfield ’03 rifle, simply laughed and told him not to worry about it. The Rev. Williams said that he never went into the barracks again. But he wrote a letter to the chaplain at West Point to ask for advice on what to do. The chaplain wrote back and chewed him out for wasting his time, and that he didn’t want to be bothered with the goings on at an obscure little military boy’s school in Missouri, and not to write again! At that I let out a guffaw, but it was too late, The Reverend Williams was hurt, the memory pained him and the conversation came to an abrupt if polite conclusion.
So many times when I’ve interviewed people who attended or taught at Kemper in my day, I’ve been surprised and taken in directions that I could not have predicted. I’m tellin’ ya’ I can’t make this stuff up.
Dan Staffin
KMS 59-61
If you have stories you would like to add to this page, please email them to Neill Horton at KCDotNet@Gmail.com.
