in and around the war, a couple terms of rehabilitation at BYU, and a trip in a basket to the Armys psychiatric hospital in Sheridan, Wyoming, reading Spinoza and taking MMPI tests had prepared me to teach freshman composition. With some time off to finish a degree, I taught with much happiness at Weber until 1954 when I left for Minnesota to teach for pay. For most of a year, I shared an office with Thatcher in one of the wooden G.I. buildings tucked in the wedge between the gym and the Moench building. We were then in the first great wave of post World War II grantsmanship. The Ford Foundation, I think it was, was sending experienced teachers without Ph.D.s back to school, encouraging the growth of that American monster with long strangulating arms that forty years earlier William James had called, with loathing, The Ph.D. Octopus. President Dixon was making sounds about a new campus on the Eastern bench of Ogden and a four-year charter that would mean a faculty ranked from instructor to full professor. Down on Jefferson we were all instructors. Thatcher, seeing before him long years in the middle ranks while the hungry generation of new indoctorates were promoted over him, began to dream of a fellowship and a Ph.D. He had done graduate work at Iowa (M.A.) and Stanford. Now he would learn German, do a few courses at the University of Utah under Lowell Lees, and crown his life in the academic theater with the big degree and the top rank. One Monday morning when I arrived at the office, every inch of space was covered with poster board, lined into a grid, and in the square impeccably printed, organ-ized with painstaking exactitude were the inflected endings for all those unlearn-able German verbs, nouns, pronouns, and adjectives, now available at a glance to the intrepid student. Later on in the day, Thatcher came in with half a dozen books on how to read German. He never cracked a book, never studied a chart. Together we would occasionally admire his wallpapering job. He learned no German, wrote no dissertation. I do not know how these omissions affected his status at Weber when it became a four-year college. Some matters are best left to conjecture. When Thatcher retired, the newspaper stated that among the projects he would fill his time with was the writing of a history of the Weber CollegeOgden City Community Theatre, a history that needs to be written. When I first saw Thatchers son, Gordon, after the accident that killed Thatcher in 1979, I asked him what had become of the history his father had been working on. He had, Gordon confessed with no sign of surprise, done little or nothing on the book. I mentioned that I had always hoped Thatcher would put down his own memories of the varied life he had lived. Gordon smiled and said, Ill tell you something so very typical of Thatcher. When I cleaned out the trunk of the car after his death, I saw a large bound journal. I opened it. On the first page in that impressive, formal hand of his was flourished in black ink: The Personal History of Moses Thatcher Allred. The rest of the pages were blank. He had bound together different colored sheets of paper, each one to represent a different phase of his life. There was not a word on any of them. At the center of Thatcher I have to say it again and again, it seems was this mystery, this unaccountable plethora of concern over detail and this paucity of realized objectives. Something more ominous and debilitating than a shadow fell between the desire and the act. Yet no one outside my own immediate family has ever meant more to me than Thatcher Allred. Thatcher and Leland Monson were not congenial types. At times there were severe antagonisms between them, but they are yoked together in my life. Oil and water, one was will power and salesmanship and strenuous exertion, the other brooding, isolated, entropic inertia. But even now, long after I first encountered them on that little cockpit of a campus on Jefferson and long after their deaths, they remain the yin and the yang of my prolonged laboring toward some kind of coming into being. When I send my mite each year to the Weber Development Office, I do it in remembrance of them. And Other Works I must not leave the impression that one could graduate from Weber Junior College merely by taking speech and literature courses and hanging out in the auditorium while Thatcher devised color schemes. Under the persistent myth that the young are enlarged cubit upon cubit by becoming acquainted with everything provided they are not keen on it the College required me to take a course in botany. I came within a hair of learning the names of all the phases involved in mitosis (a sordid process, I discovered, that becomes more lubricious the more one learns). In ten weeks of intense squinting into a microscope and of frantic twisting of knobs and swiveling eyepieces, I succeeded in scratching my glasses so deeply that everything I did get into focus looked like an escutcheon with a bar sinister. Told to draw what I saw, I had Ruth Bowen draw what she thought I should see. Everyone appeared to be pleased. I took a photography course from Dr. Minor who had admired my work in botany. I made a pinhole camera, took half a dozen pictures from different angles of my Aunt Inas pre-New Deal outhouse, its floppy roof held on by an old tire from Grandpas decaying Overland. It was not Walker Evans, but the study was the first of its kind in Plain City, and I passed the course. Physics. Still searching for the truth concealed in the interaction of matter and energy in LaVon Earls walk, I took another physics course which promised to reveal why the sky as well as bodies of water appear blue. Fifteen minutes into the first class, the promised explanation was so clear and common-sensical that I would not to this day have the appearance of blue happen any way other than the way it does. I forgot to write down the explanation. I also took geology over in the old West Central building and can to this day say feldspar whenever the occasion arrives. Several years later I had an office across the hall from the geology rocks and terminal moraines and whatever else Walter Buss kept in that maze of rooms. I stacked up in neat piles on my desk the themes and research papers from Basic Communications I (one of the many semantic shifts freshman English undergoes every once in a while), then I would read Henry James, with the door to my office open. I would