Tales from Chestertown

I went to college many years ago at Washington College in Chestertown, on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. Life on the eastern side of the Chesapeake Bay is like a different world from the Maryland suburbs of Washington, D.C., where I grew up: a much slower pace, fewer people, more agrarian. I remember marveling that at the town’s one stoplight (there are more now as the village has grown), when the light turned green, the driver of the first car (if in fact there was more than one car in line) would proceed in due time in a leisurely fashion, and the other motorists would patiently wait to go. What’s the rush? Imagine that scenario playing out in my hometown of Rockville, or any densely populated suburb.

I have a lot of fond memories of W.C., as it was then known (today it is referred to as WAC).

Everything was in walking distance, so many of us didn’t have cars, at least until junior or senior year. We would walk to friends’ off-campus house on Saturday nights to watch a new groundbreaking TV comedy show with John Belushi, Chevy Chase, Gilda Radner, and other members of an amazing cast. During the week, I’d study in the library till nine or 10 pm, then head over to the on-campus pub or one of the local off-campus joints for pizza and beer (the drinking age at that time was 18). On the weekends, we would set up our massive stereo speakers by our dorm windows and turn them facing out so we could hear music while we drank beer and played frisbee on the quad.

If you needed to go somewhere or a ride home, you could bum a ride with someone who had a car. In the warm weather, in the fall and spring, we would find someone with a car to drive to Rock Hall, about 30 minutes away, to pick up a bushel of steamed crabs (which cost about $30 back then), then swing buy the liquor store to get a keg of beer. I guess beer was a major part of college life.

I remember being very sick with the flu one year on my birthday in February, but that didn’t stop me and my friends from having a large, frigid, outside dance party in front of one of the dorms, then walking as a group into town to the ice cream parlor. I asked the counter worker to put one scoop of every flavor in the biggest bowl she could find. We had a communal feast. I wonder now how many people I infected that night.

Washington College is a small liberal arts college. By small, I mean there were 650 students my freshman year. Not in my class – in the whole school. The college was, and still is, known for its English and chemistry departments. A fund endowed by Sophie Kerr, a popular writer in the 1930s and ‘40s, awards the top writer (judged by the English professors) a tax-free, no-string-attached prize each year. It’s the largest undergraduate literary award in the country. When I was there, it was about $18,000; these days it ranges from $60,000 - $80,000, depending on interest rates. And no, I didn’t win it.

Joseph McLain is one reason why the chemistry department was so highly regarded. He graduated magna cum laude from Washington College in 1937 while earning varsity letters in basketball, football, lacrosse, and track. After serving in World War II, he joined the faculty and became head of the chemistry department in 1955. In 1973, the year before my freshman year, he began an eight-year term as the school’s president.

McLain was a renowned scientist. He wrote textbooks on solid-state chemistry and, according to his biography on the college’s website, “helped develop rocket propellant formulas and pyrotechnic actuation devices used for stage separations in space flights and eventually would hold more than thirty patents -- including several for smoke grenades used by the Army to camouflage movements of advancing troops.” On campus, however, he was dogged by rumors that he had developed napalm -- a horrific notion at the time because the Vietnam was just winding down and news clips showing villages and villagers being consumed by napalm fires were fresh in everyone’s mind.

I was an English major, so I spent a lot of time reading novels, poetry, plays, and other literature, and writing papers. At such a small school, we had the advantage of having small classes and getting to know our professors. I remember one night a group of us students were at one of the local bars and met up with one of the English professors. He ended up seducing one of the girls in our group and taking her back to the on-campus house where he lived. I never forgave him for that.

Being literature nerds, the English department celebrated the birthday of novelist Vladimir Nabokov on April 22. My senior year, as part of the festivities, the creative writing professor, a young man in his 30s, challenged the beloved department chair, Norman James, to a morning tennis match. I decided to sleep in that day instead of attend the contest. Dr. James looked as if he had not done anything more strenuous than read in decades. Everybody loved him for his jovial countenance, intelligence, and joy of life. If you had an afternoon class with him, you could tell what he had had for lunch by the remnants in his full beard.

After one point in the match, Dr. James sat down on the court, fell back and died on the spot of a heart attack. It was such a tragic, sad end to my college career.

A happier story: There is a tradition of streaking every May 1. Much of the college strips down on the night of May Day, blocking traffic on Rte. 213, the two-lane road that bisects the campus, and parading around campus.

My senior year, the local police, who usually stayed away from campus, decided to try to put a stop to it. They arrested a couple classmates, putting them a squad car and then in jail in just their sneakers. Students flocked to the town hall to protest. The action made The Washington Post, which ran a grainy photo of the perpetrators with black bars hiding their eyes, presumably to protect their identities, although they published their names.

Fast-forward 25 or so years: One of my daughters also attended Washington College, and one year my son, three years younger than his sister, came to campus to visit her for a weekend and check out the college. Of course, it was May Day weekend, and what had once been a few naked people running across the highway had evolved to an evening-long nude cocktail party. My naive, and at the time prudish son, got quite a show that weekend. He ended up going to a different school.