Grant Neuteboom is muttering to whomever will listen, Jesus! Lets take a breakfast break. In the spring of my senior year at high school, I went one evening up to the College to meet Rex McEntire who was rehearsing in the auditorium. He introduced me to Thatcher, then to Grant Neuteboom an actor, class president, wit; what we would be calling in a few years a BMOC. I told Neuteboom that I was anxious to see the rehearsal. Be patient, he said, Were all anxious to see the rehearsal. It was around eight. They had been in the auditorium since six. Tonight, Neuteboom went on, Thatcher is blocking the action of act two with dramatic interludes while he chooses the colors for the set. By eleven oclock, with the actors strewn across the seats and the steps leading up to the stage, Thatcher was still debating color schemes and traffic patterns. Not a line of the play had been uttered. Not an actor had walked across the stage. Oh, Christ, Thatcher, Neuteboom said, in a stage whisper Lets paint the whole thing a light beige and go home. About 12:30 we went home. The flats were not beige. Not anything. Many nights would have to pass before the right colors formed in Thatchers mind. Yet the play went on, on time, and was probably very good. I think it was Our Town, That night was the first of many nights with Thatcher in the auditorium. There would be other nights with other directors, some of whom made Thatcher look speedy and decisive. Thatcher went at a play like Billy Rose, if you compared him with Dan Bailey and Dewey Hudson and their improvisations that eventually thickened into their Varsity Shows. Thatcher at least began with a script. Dan and Dewey sometimes ended with one. For a Varsity show, Alls Fair, where all I had to do was walk across the stage three or four times with a potted plant, saying, now?, I rehearsed a month. The Varsity Shows were works of genius Ive never doubted that Bailey, Hudson, Pete Petrie, and the others who concocted those mad productions were geniuses. I can even to this day hum at least one of Phyliss Hancocks tunes. Another time I was a shepherd in a tableau for Roland Parrys Christmas Oratorio, A Child is Born, wrapped up in a blanket a nice pastoral touch to a Madonna and Child. I also played butlers, doctors making brief house calls, gardeners, taxi-drivers. I carried bags and opened doors. I served tea. But being lousy has never stopped an actor or a director from filling a space when a body was called for and a potted plant wouldnt do. During my sophomore year I had a job from 7-11 p.m. at 50 a month as the night guardian of the Moench building, five nights a week. I sat in a desk chair near the pay telephone on first Moench. It rang once in nine months, and I sprained my ankle attempting to answer it. I also had to check the pressure gauges in the boiler room, answer any questions lost night school students might ask, point out the rest rooms to whomever needed personal counseling, and be in general a kind of charge of quarters for the building. Then at 11:00 p.m. lock up. Usually I read or worked on school essays. I wrote an econ paper for O.M. Clark on What Can We Do With Trusts? I was stumped until Raymond Sanders came by, glanced at my topic, said Wear them! and went back upstairs to a rehearsal. I passed Econ I, though I have always assumed my final exam on O.M.s conun-drumic topic, How Can Jeeter Get More Turnips? pulled out that course for me more than Ray did; for I had read Tobacco Road and had hoed turnips, thus bringing some practical experience to the microeconomics of the day. Now and then as I sat there contemplating the Good while the money poured in, Thatcher would loom above me, bright with a proposal directly from the auditorium where a rehearsal was becalmed. Wayne, he would say, there is a small but significant part in this play we are doing, and it occurs to me that it would be a fine rounding out of your stage experience with us if you could find the time to play it. Not a meaty part, mind you; but one that needs the subtlety and tact of an experienced actor if the scene is to work well within the context of the play as a whole. In as much as our rehearsal schedule, not a flicker of irony here coincides with your a pause duties here in the building, I thought you might be able to slip upstairs and give us the benefit of your participation. He meant that after I closed up the building, we could all work together through the night unmolested. I always accepted the part. A meaty role would not have seemed to round out my career. What Thatcher didnt know was that until the rehearsals were over, I couldnt go home and go to bed. For a good part of my sophomore year, I not only went to classes in the Moench building and guarded it until closing time. I lived in it, sleeping on the green chaise lounge in the Green Room just off the east side of the auditorium, keeping my clothes, toilet articles, books, and other personal things in the student body office just off the west side. Both years at Weber I had trouble finding a place to live. In the fall of 19411 crashed with my newly married sister in a small room in her house at the west end of 17th Street, in Marriott. A seven mile walk every day. Then I hitchhiked in from Plain City and depended on the hangers out at the Bank Smokery to get me home again. For a couple of months I had a good room on about 8th and Jefferson, until the rent came due. The job in the Moench was good for me. I would lock up, rehearse my walk-on part until the rehearsal died its natural death sometime around dawn, take my blanket from the student body office, curl up on the green lounge sofa in the Green Room, and sleep until the 8:00 a.m. bell awakened me. I would wrap my blanket around me and dash into the hall, through the auditorium to the student body office just as the first students came up the stairs: I was the ante-meridian Phantom of the Opera House. Early in the spring term of 1943, Mr. Espey arranged for me to live in the old court house on Twenty-Fourth Street, which I had almost to myself until the naval cadets moved in. I had a bed and everything there. Doing those plays with Thatcher. I learned of his dark complexity. I came to love him, as the hours wore away toward morning, and the greater my love the greater my perplexity: that commanding presence, that histrionic and thespian body, that voice I can see and hear him again as I write, and all my puzzlement returns. Much richness came out of Thatcher. Much did not. By the Spring of 1947, Mr. Monson, seizing the moment, realized that a few years