Conclave of Heathens

Three of the heathens: Tom Eades (left), me (center), and Charlie Gardiner (right). (Photo by Tom Hiltsley [somewhat heathen].)

“I hafta remember to not blurt anything that could be perceived as hateful or snide,” I said; “even to you guys.”
I was attending the 50-year reunion of my college class.
“I hafta lay low,” I said.
50 long years ago, 1966, our class graduated Houghton College (“HO-tin;” as in “hoe,” not “how” or “who”), an evangelical religious college about 75-80 miles south of Rochester.
Our class was labeled the “radicals” who supposedly turned the college around.
Houghton was very strict at that time; I don’t know as it is now.
Like, after us they gave up.
I visited my hairdresser the other day: “Yeah, I know Houghton. It has a nursing-home. I deliver coffee there.”
He delivers coffee for a coffee service.
“Girls weren’t allowed to wear slacks, they weren’t allowed to wear shorts or sleeveless dresses. Makeup and jewelry were verboten. Dancing was ‘of-the-Devil,’ as was television.”
“Wow, I never knew it was like that.”
“Were it not for certain professors, who were in deepest do-do for having televisions, we would have been unable to follow the Kennedy Assassination.
People at the college declared Kennedy had it coming.”
Certain of us were perceived as radicals: me, Tom Eades, and Charlie Gardiner, among others.
We resisted the strictures of the college. We were known first as “Da Cronies.”
Eades and Gardiner patronized bars — I didn’t. My sin was having a bad attitude, and I was strident.
We often got called on the carpet, threatened with dismissal, but they never canned us.
We all got degrees. I was first in my family.
So here we were again, 50 years later, a conclave of heathens.
“What can I say about this?” I kept asking.
Eades gave me the story line. “Hughzey you survived this entire torturous ordeal. Made the whole day without infuriating anyone.”
Eades invited me and Charlie to our Alumni Banquet. Cows had given their lives so we could pig out on steak, prime rib, whatever. Charlie’s was so rare it looked like ham.
The entire day I never felt as out-of-it in my life.
I’m not one of these people. I haven’t attended a church function in 50 years. I’m not a believer.
So why Houghton? It was a compromise with my hyper-religious father, who wanted me to attend Moody Bible Institute in Chicago, like he did.
At that time Moody wasn’t a college, and I wanted a degree.
Furthermore, Moody was an urban school, which I found frightening.
So Houghton it was; and my father was mad as Hell it didn’t “straighten me out.”
But Houghton, for whatever reason, was the first place I found adult authority-figures who valued and solicited my opinions. Instead of automatically branding me “of-the-Devil.”
Nevertheless we heathens set the tone for our class. Cantankerous and ornery. “Of-the-Devil, I tell ya!”
And here we were again to sew fear and loathing. Although that ain’t what happened.
They were not judgmental, as they were 50 years ago.
But they get to natter about my failure to clap, sing, close my eyes during prayer, or stand for standing ovations.
I just felt too out-of-it.
At least I managed to not excoriate the college president for shilling for a car-dealer.