Latin School of Chicago - Sigillum Yearbook (Chicago, IL)

Page 30 text:

A letter From Mexico STIRLING DICKINSON Stirling Dickinson, CX-727, Princeton '31, traveller, author and artist whose love of nature manifested itself during his days at the Latin School, his books are Mexican Odyffey, Weftward from Rio, and Dfath if Incidental. If I had received your letter a few weeks ago, asking me to con- tribute something for the anniversary issue, on the value of education, Ifm afraid I would very impolitely have burst out laughing. I never felt so little in need of education in my life. That is rather a bad admission, but if you ever managed to knock a hole in the gas tank of your car and then lie under that same car with your forefinger stopping up the hole, if you have, in addition, gotten stuck in a river for five hours with Indians and burros trying to pull you out, if you have gone on from there over a wild mountain trail and then smashed your battery all to bits some twenty miles from a habitation, and if, finally, you have knocked off the muffier and culminated your three days short cutv to your destination by breaking the rear axle, perhaps you will appreciate why education seemed unessential. What I needed was not Latin, or Greek, or Algebra, but a bigger collection of wrenches, bolts, screws and spare parts. However, since this eventful trip from Chicago to Mexico, I have been getting established in my new home which lies on the mountainside above the fine old colonial town of San Miguel de Allende. Sunshine, warm weather, and pretty fair cooking have done their work, and I now bear no grudge against my car, the road-or education. I imagine a great deal will be said and written in praise of the school, to each student it has meant something different, depending, I suppose, on what particular course that student's life has taken. For myself, it is hard to pick out a single phase of Latin, a single memory, that outshadows all the rest. Yet many times in my Work, writing and landscape painting, I remember the nature study classes with Miss Murray. Whether, on a trip across South America, they have meant a keener interest in the strange fauna and flora, or whether, as today, they mean a greater awareness of details indispensable to a painter, I can only look back with a great deal of thankfulness and not a little longing to the days when we took field trips to the Indiana Dunes, or rode the street car to the wilds', at the end of Lincoln Avenue. And when, the week before I left Chicago, at a particularly dull moment in an autographing party , Miss Murray herself came up to me and asked if I wasn't, by any chance, the little boy who once collected moths and butterflies, I was able to say, very, very proudly, that I was.

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SIGILLUM The sea down around Java-the Banda Sea, Arafura Sea, Flores Sea, and Celebes Sea-this whole body of Venetian glass water, interrupted by the most timeless and sunblest islands, makes the china and tableware department at Marshall Field's look perfectly dull. Day after day you steam ahead on a comfortable modern freighter, do your eight hours and have the rest of the time to think, read, write, and listen to the fool stories of pearl trading, smuggling, and white men's misadventures in the South Seas. The whole stern, the whole poop deck belongs to the crew. The skipper and the illegitimate other officers are way forward where they don't even see you. There's a big canvas awning stretched on the awning spars-like a yacht. You bring your bunk up out of the fo'csle and sleep on deck without a thing over you. Day after day you steam right through this opalescent water with these green and gold and purple islands drawn up pretty much on parade on both sides, and occasionally you see a canoe like a pecan shell sneaking along close in shore, or you look across at a rain squall and someone remarks, That's the harbor of Bali. Then one morning you are waked up by a terrific racket and clamor. Overside are a whole parking lot of junks, tubs, and lighters painted red, green and blue with dragon's heads and tails carved or painted at the bow and stern. The poop is cluttered with fifty or so brown men, very handsome fellows in turbans and sarongs who gaze at you witha mixture of indifference and contempt that is measured down to within a millimeter of being an insult. That's the East-you've arrived at Samarang or Batavia or Sourabaya. My memories of Chicago Latin are of course associated with UR. P. and Doc McLeod and Percy Whiting and Tom Bosworth. For me, however, they aren't merely memories but ideals. But I know I got a lot of Latin from those men, and I haven't seen anything that I would rather have had. I have no doubt that their spirit is being carried on in the new Latin and that you fellows are sharing the same privilege and the same tradition. Success to the School and to this interesting anniversary event!

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Changing Times ARTHUR MEEKER, JR. Arthur Meeker, ,2O, Yale 724, brilliant student, novelist and traveller, author of American Beauty, Strange Capery and Vertal Virgin. It is always a problem to make up one's mind what to contribute to the columns of one's old school magazine. And this problem grows increasingly difficult with time. It is eighteen years-half my life-since I graduated from C. L. S. Is it so long ago that I have completely lost touch with my youth, can no longer bridge the space that separates the man I am from the boy I used to be? . . . I hope not, for I'd like to feel that they are not so very far apart even now, though my hair is thinner and my waist is wider than they were when I posed for the senior class photograph, and I have noticed lately that my friends' sons are beginning to be old enough to address me as sir Cwhich is definitely Middle-Agel. But what to write? Frankly, I haven't the least idea. It's easy enough to jot down a list of impossible subjects, such as, for instance, chatty reminiscences of one's classroom days, full of esoteric quips and humorous allusions that, alas! have a way of sounding dated and determinedly quaint, twenty years after . . . or Advice to the Young Cwho wants advice? I didn't then: do you, now? . . . or rambling, inconsequential autobiographical notes? Does it matter that I am a novelist by profession? Wouldn't it be all the same if I were a diplomat, or a physicist-or even a plumber?j Best, on the whole, I think, to leave oneself entirely out of the picture: I, at any rate, have no intention of tracing the consider- able number of steps that have led the eager, enthusiastic cub reporter of 1925 into becoming the fairly aloof fiction writer of 1938. However, if you'd care to send me a stamped, self-addressed envelope . . . The world, eighteen years ago, was extraordinarily different from what it is today. Think how sweetly old-fashioned we were: no radios, no talking pictures, no neon-lighting, no air-mail or passenger plane service . . . We'd just fought and won a war to save Democracy. Prohibition was a novelty, so was the Speak- Easy. CCan you even remember them?D The Jazz decade was beginning, those garish, brittle, incredible years that seem more remote to us now than the Naughty Nineties. CYes, I was a Bright Young Person, once.j We'd never heard of depressions or recessions. Every boy, after leaving school, went to college for four years, as a matter of course . . . Sometimes he got a diploma, too . . .