Antioch College - Towers Yearbook (Yellow Springs, OH)

Page 126 text:

-,. - .rug , , Howard Wells Ream, Bellevue, Olzio Samuel Theodore Sawyer, Ir., Bradenton, Florida Walter Earle Short, Los Angeles, California Ierome Leon Strauss, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

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it 1 I iscx-nan von Erlach's Spanish Riding Academy is one I spot in the world still practicing the highest school 'f rw . . . . -5 of fldlflg art. It is a proud castle of immense dimen- 1 li' . . . M ,, . re e -- sions, a miniature Place San Marco wherein the art is practiced on the noblest of thoroughbreds. And yet to many Antiochians the rigid walls of this academy, this hall of white, and child of the Italian Renaissance, would seem drab and lifeless compared with the trees, the rocks of their own -a.4' Miami gorge. In the gorge is a little-known series of bridal paths where the announcing flourish of trumpets is missing, the necessity of white leather breeches, scarlet coats, two point hats, and gilded saddles paraded before a gallery of nobility lacking. Here the saddle may be of the most colorless western sort, the habit of moth-eaten knickers and a torn sweater, the beast a rat-bitten, gaitless nag, and the gallery a rabbit, a bird or two. An unsignaled canter still offers the blood-heating sensation ol an ancestral charge with the sound of pounding hoofs, the rush of air. The thrill of being astride is still there. The same air tears at the untasseled mane, the burr-filled tail, and tousles the rider's unprotected locks. It is to be astride! . . . alive! . . . that thrills, and all the finest riding art, the finest of stables, the most blooded of horses, lives in the mind as mere imagina- tion. In the gorge it is skill and the open spaces. At the academy it is convention and rigid conformity to rules. Is not physical freedom and a proliiic imagination after all the most pro- found? . . . Certainly it is the most pleasant. I23

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'ftiwsit A qj- jj HE Tropics is a harsh and uncompromising mistress. In this land nothing is sincere and very little goodg where a man will loan you his wife and kill you if V wi you cast the least reflection on his reputation, where a woman will hold light her favors but repair to church each morning and thank God for the pretty Howers, such being her sense of religion and virtue, where God gave the land sweet beautiful flowers but robbed them of their odor, such is the Tropics. In some cases she deals out fever, disease and tremors. In others she destroys intellects and makes tramps out of mother's joys. The idol of the college eight, the prize men and prides of the Alma Mater become as morons in her grasp. She robs them of their dignity and self respect and places in their stead, scorn and disgrace. The receiver takes all, complaining loudly, incessantly, but still stays for more. These individuals sit amongst their companions and laud to the skies the virtue of their wives or Sweethearts back home, then in sleep awaken the night with their cries rehearsing again a carouse with some nigger harlot. From the ordinary diary of a seaman. By an Antiochian who has been there. I25 I