My father and I scraped together the change in our pockets and found enough for breakfast at a diner. I had one dollar in my wallet but did not tell him, intending it to be a surprise when things got more desperate. The counter of the diner was lined with workmen soft-eyed and gruff from behind half-asleep still. I was relieved to see that the man working the griddle was not our hitchhiker. I ordered pancakes and bacon and it was the best breakfast I had had in months. My father ordered Wheaties, mushed the cereal into the milk, ate a few bites, and pushed it away. He looked at the clock. It said 7:25. He bit back a belch; his face whitened and the skin under his eyes seemed to sink against the socket bone. He saw me studying him in alarm and said, “I know. I look like the devil. I’ll shave in the boiler room over at school, Heller has a razor.” The pale grizzle, like a morning’s frost, of a day-old beard covered his cheeks and chin.
We left the diner and walked south toward the high dull owl of dead tubing. A tenuous winter mist, released by the rise in temperature, licked the damp cement and asphalt. We boarded a trolley at Fifth and Weiser. The interior was gay with the straw of the seats, and warm and nearly empty. Few other people were heading outwards against the pull of the city. Alton thinned; the row houses split like ice breaking; a distant hill was half tranced green and half new pastel houses; and after the long gliding stretch beyond the ice cream stand crowned by a great plaster replica of a cone, the motley brick houses of Olinger took hold around us. The school grounds and then the salmon-brick school appeared on the left; the boilerhouse smokestack admonished the sky like a steeple. We got out by Hummel’s Garage. Our Buick was not there yet. We were not late today; cars were still nosing into their slots. An orange bus racily heaved through a loop and swayed to a stop; students the size of birds, colored in bright patches, no two alike, tumbled from the doors in pairs.
As my father and I strode along the pavement that divided the school side lawn from Hummel’ss alley, a little whirlwind sprang up before us and led us along. Leaves long dead and brittle as old butterfly wings, an aqua candy wrapper, flecks and dust and seed-sized snips of gutter chaff all hurried in a rustling revolution under our eyes; a distinctly circular in visible presence outlined itself on the walk. It danced from one margin of grass to another and sighed its senseless word; my instinct was to halt but my father kept striding. His pants flapped, something sucked my ankles, I closed my eyes. When I looked behind us, the whirlwind was nowhere to be seen.
In the school we parted. A student, I was held by regulations to this side of the wire-reinforced doors. He pushed through and walked down the long hall, his head held high, his hair fluffed from the removal of his blue knit cap, his heels pounding the varnished boards. Smaller and smaller he grew along their perspective; at the far door he became a shadow, a moth, impaled on the light he pressed against.
The door yielded; he disappeared. With a grip of sweat, terror seized me.
V
GEORGE W. CALDWELL, TEACHER, 50.
Mr. Caldwell was born December 21st, 1896, on Staten Island, New York City. His father was the Reverend John Wesley Caldwell, a graduate-of Princeton University and the Union Theological Seminary, New York. Upon graduation from the latter place he entered the Presbyterian minis try, making his the fifth generation of clergymen supplied by the Caldwell family to this denomination. His wife, nee Phyllis Harthorne, was of Southern extraction, hailing from the near environs of Nashville, Tennessee. To their marriage she not only brought her great personal beauty and charm but the energetic piety characteristic of Southern gentlewomen. Countless parishioners were to stand indebted to her example of devotion and Christian testimony; when, at the tragically early age of forty-nine, her husband was called to move “from strength to strength” in the Higher Service, it was she who, in the difficult year of his lingering illness, carried on the work of the church, on several Sundays herself mounting into the pulpit.
The couple was blessed with two offspring, of which George was the second. In March of 1900, when George was three, his father resigned his Staten Island pastorate and accepted the call of the First Presbyterian Church of Passaic, New Jersey, at the corner of Grove Street and Passaic Avenue-a splendid structure of yellow limestone still standing and recently enlarged. It was here that for two decades John Caldwell was destined to shed his learning, wry wit, and firmly held faith upon the upturned faces of his flock. So it was that Passaic, of old called Acquackanonk, a gentle river town whose rural beauties were at that time far from eclipsed by the vigor of its industry, came to be the seat of George Caldwell’s rearing.
Many still living in this city remember him as a cheerful boy, adept at all sports and as skilled in retaining friends as at making them. His nickname was “Sticks”-presumably an allusion to an unusual physical thinness. Following his father’s intellectual bent, he showed an early interest in formal science, though in later years he claimed, with the joking modesty so intrinsic to the man, that the height of his ambition was to become a druggist. Fortunately for a generation of Olinger students, Fate decreed otherwise.
Mr. Caldwell’s young manhood was troubled by the premature death of his father and by America’s participation in the First World War. An instinctive and natural patriot, he enlisted in the Headquarters Troop of the Seventy-Eighth Division late in 1917 and narrowly survived, at Fort Dix, the great flu epidemic which was then sweeping the camps. He stood ready, Serial No. 2414792, for overseas duty when the Armistice was declared; George Caldwell would never again come so close to leaving the continental boundaries of the nation he was to enrich as worker, teacher, churchman, civic leader, son, husband, and father.
In the years following his military discharge, George Caldwell, now-with his sister, who had married-his mother’s sole support, was engaged at a variety of jobs: as a door-todoor salesman of encyclopedias, as the driver of a sightseeing bus in Atlantic City, as athletic supervisor in the Paterson Y. M. C. A., as a railroad fireman on the New York, Susquehanna, and Western Line, and even as a hotel bellhop and restaurant dishwasher. In 1920 he enrolled in Lake College, near Philadelphia, and, with no financial assistance save that engendered by his own efforts, succeeded in graduating with distinction in 1924, having majored in chemistry. While compiling an excellent academic record and sustaining a demanding schedule of part-time employment, he as well earned an athletic scholarship that reduced his tuition by half. For three years a guard on the Lake football varsity, he suffered a broken nose a total of seventeen times, a severely dislocated kneecap twice, and a leg and a collarbone fracture once each. It was there, on the lovely campus whose central jewel is the shining oak-lined lake deemed sacred by the Lenni Lenape (the “Original People”), that he met and was enchanted by Miss Catherine Kramer, whose family were indigenous to the Fire Township region of Alton County. In 1926 the couple married, in Hagerstown, Maryland, and for the next half-decade travelled widely through the Middle Atlantic States including Ohio and West Virginia, George being employed, as cable splicer, by the Bell Telephone and Tele graph Company.
“Blessings come in strange disguises.” In 1931 the national destiny again intruded upon the personal; due to the economic disturbances sweeping the United States, George Caldwell was dropped from the pay rolls of the industrial giant he had so conscientiously served. He and his wife, who was shortly to enlarge George Caldwell’s responsibilities by another human soul, came to live with her parents, in Olinger, where Mr. Kramer had several years before purchased the handsome white brick house on Buchanan Road presently occupied by Dr. Potter. In the fall of 1933 Mr. Caldwell took up teaching duties at Olinger High School, duties he was never to put down.