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

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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 . . .

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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 After that, he went into his father's manufacturing business or some friendly stockbroker's office. Every boy expected to make, and usually did make, quite quickly a good deal of money, often married a girl with a good deal more. Ten years out of school, he'd turn into a respectable member of a suburban community- Winnetka, perhaps, if inclined to plain living and high thinking, Lake Forest, if the reverse. In either case, he had a wife, a car, two children, a Balance in the Bank-and, I suppose, a Future . . . Yes, I know I escaped, but that was because I happened to sink into being what was then, and still is, in Chicago, a most uncommon kind of social outcast, a professional scribbler. And even I made some money, one couldn't help it, in the Jazz decade. In 1938, on the other hand-but I'll spare you the comparison. Let me say this only, that, having four nephews between the ages of fifteen and twenty-one, I understand and sympathize with your problems as perhaps a good many of my contemporaries are unable to. You've a tougher job to tackle than we had, and much the same equipment as was ours. Boys haven't changed much since IQZO. Theyire still lively and fun-loving, enthusiastic and cynically clear-sighted, now as they were then. Now as then, they feel that they have seen through thingsf' only to find, as the years revolve, that it's really the things that have seen through them, and have taken their measure with a slow inevitability. I'd like to close with a wise and playful adage, some smart half-truth wittily expressed, such as Virginia Woolf used so charm- ingly to round off her essays. But, at the moment, my mind is a blank. Failing that, how about a quotation from a famous author? CSay, for example, Hugh Walpole's once celebrated It's not life that matters, but the courage one brings to it . . . What a lie that is, by the way! As if life didn't matter more than anything else one can think oflj But, somehow, I'm honest enough not to try to be clever or graceful where only candor will do. I've spent enough years being insincere to have come to value sincerity as the supreme virtue. So I'll be silent now, at the risk of sounding halting and inept, and bow myself out with the cheering reflection Ccheering, that is, to youj that, whatever you do, you can't make any very bad mis- takes for a comfortable number of years, since, as Emerson says- ah, there's our famous author at last!- Youth is everywhere in place.