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Show Recollections ofWeber State CollegeL. C. EvansAbout thirty-five years ago this Friday I exploded into a kind of nirvana, an ecstasy of spirit, an iridescence of feeling, a flaming out of the souls fires like shook foil shining. All this while sitting on an old bench on the stage of the Moench building, facing an aged grand piano and flanked by two of my freshman composition students, one on bass and the other on drums. Off to the side sat the Administrative Council probably including Pres. Dixon, Lelancl Monson, Clarisse Hall, Reed Swenson, Wally Baddley, Whit Young and a couple more. We were plowing under full sail through a medley of My Blue Heaven, I Cant Give You Anything But Love, Baby, and Aint She Sweet. It was the weekly assembly except that this was a faculty show. I had never before played with a backup and what a thrill! The president and Leland werent what youd call stony-faced but they were trying manfully to stay on the port side of flabbergasted. Here was one of their young faculty members in English cavorting in a most unseemly manner that gilded the whole affair with just the faint edge of obscenity. It was delicious. But, then, those two would have forgiven me for just about anything. Ive loved them all my life for it. Behind the heavy drape backdrop I could hear Laurence Burton and Dean Hurst, who had just finished a vaudeville routine that brought the house down, shuffling back and forth, apparently dying to burst out and join the fun. I wish they had. We brought the house down again. For an encore I remember we did Pennies From Heaven, dedicating it to the Utah State Legislature which had only recently given us our yearly bowl of Dick-ensian gruel. I started at Weber for 2250 a year, which included emceeing most of the assemblies until I told a joke I found in the Readers Digest and that did me in much to my relief. It was about this fellow who stopped at a local hotel for supper and. It was perfectly sanitized but simply failed to pass Council inspection. L. C. Evans was a student at Weber State College from 1935 to 1937. He taught English at the College in 1946. In I960 he moved to the area of Philosophy and taught Philosophy until his retirement in 1985. He was chairperson of the Department of Political Science and Philosophy from 1971 to 1974 and dean of the School of Social Sciences from 1974 to 1982. Nobody ever believed I got it from the Digest but I swear its true. Well, so much for starting in medias res, as Aristotle admonished, at least for tragedies. Those were joyous times, full of sound and fury, but signifying far more than nothing. Im not going to fall into the old cliche and say my memories of Weber go back further than I care to remember. They go back very, very far and I care very much to remember as many of them as I can. In fact were back now to the middle Twenties when I was a grade schooler at Madison elementary, just east across Lester Park from the Moench building and the Weber campus. I can recall seeing that magnificent old facade through the trees during recess but not being really sure what it was. At that time it was probably Weber Stake Academy, which it remained until 1933 when it changed hands and became a state institution. When I started a few years later as a student at Central Junior High, the first two buildings on Twenty-fifth above Adams, my schoolmates and I would troop through the park under the sycamores, elms, chestnuts, maples, pines, and beeches, down along the south side of the Moench building. We would peer through the basement windows at the chemistry students in their rubber aprons bustling back and forth among the flasks and test tubes and Bun-sen burners of the lab. It was terribly impressive. Looking back, Im certain those brief glimpses had much to do with my later becoming a college student myself. Indeed, as a Weber student many years later my experience of the chem lab was added upon and I smelled it as well as saw it. At least once each quarter there was the rotten egg gas experiment which, as the lab was in the basement, filled the entire building with a stench that could come only from the infernal pit. And once each quarter the question was raised anew, Why in the hell did they put the chemistry lab in the basement? From that pestilential pot of vapors steamed an invisible, odoriferous cloud that seeped into every pore of that ancient building. Nothing escaped; absolutely nothing. The heavy brown linoleum, the plaster walls and ceilings, the blackboards, the lecture tables, the chairs, the drapes, the carpet in the auditorium, the typewriters, the chalk, the erasers, the library on the second floor front, the faculty books and shelves, the writing paper, the examination bluebooks, the lights and the chains they hung from, the doors, the doorknobs, the glass in the windows and doors, the railings, the mopboards, the paint, everything was tainted permanently, forever redolent with that nauseous aroma. Even the pedals, keys, pipes, sheet music, carved wooden sides, and the very bowels of the tremulous Moench organ were sopped in it. Faculty and students were steeped in it. You could smell Weberites in those fragrant days. Ive heard it said that drunks cannot smell the alcohol on one anothers breath. That was the way it was at Weber then. Just a few years after I began teaching I sat with a few hundred students and faculty at the weekly assembly to watch Avard Fairbanks begin the head of the statue of Louis F. Moench that presently stands between the Social Science and the Miller Administration Buildings. It was one of the most memorable experiences of my life to see the artist molding his very literal clay and to see out of this plastic dust those fine, manly features emerge. I thought of myself |