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

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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.

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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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Substitute For Turkey ALrsoN BRYAN Alison R. Bryan, 7CQ, Princeton '13, engaged for many years in missionary work in India for the Presbyterian Church. In America's outposts far from the homeland, the celebration of holidays is more than a matter of form. With the approach of Thanksgiving, word comes over the cables to the City of Jackals that world-famed Dr. Robert E. Speer is to be the mission's guest. His hostess longs for a turkey to celebrate the day, but has to rest content with the traditional India substitute, a peacock. Twenty miles from the City of Jackals, flocks of them decorate the sugar-cane plantations, plundering fields of grain, undisturbed by the pious Hindus. Shooting in most of the village areas would outrage the people who regard the peacock as sacred to the gods, if not an incarnation of a god. Word of the distinguished guest and the plan for the dinner reaches Kodoli. Both for Dr. Speer's sake and also for the sake of the sport, the commission to procure a Thanksgiving peacock is accepted. The day previous, Wednesday, arrives, and is crowded with pressing duties, delaying the shoot until late afternoon. The village of Thanapude is chosen because the headman or mayor is friendly, and because the farmers are glad to be rid of the flock that decimates their slender grain supply. Arriving near sundown, the birds have left the fields, and gone to roost in the trees bordering the plantations. In the half light, shooting is impossible. But hope is not lost. By ten oiclock, the nearly full moon will be riding high enough in the cloudless sky. So, your alumnus with two or three Indian friends waits. At last, against the brilliant disc of the moon, here and there in trees without dense foliage, balls that might be our quarry are discernible. Getting the ball fairly against the moon and between the sights of a twelve gauge Winchester shotgun, and the trigger is pulled. A thud a few feet in front brings Dr. Speer's Thanksgiving feast to the ground. But the day is to be celebrated in several other homes of these American outposts. So on to another tree and another, until six of the peafowl are in the bag. It is near midnight, and time to tramp the five or six miles through the fields and across the Varna river to Kodoli and home. Just then out of the shadows into the brilliant moonlight steps first one and then another, with long cudgels, short axes, and other village weapons. They block our path. We protest. Constantly being reinforced, until well over one hundred men oppose us, they charge us with shooting illegally. VVe explain we have the British Government license to shoot. But they do not believe us. It seems that in the darkness, we had strayed over the unmarked boundary into Devavadi, God's village, out of the fields of the friendly mayor's village. Wondering if it is possible to bluff in a situation of this kind, we raise our gun, levelling it at the ringleader, a short stocky farmer with an ax, who pulls back his shirt and unconcernedly challenges