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. Inasmuch 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 didn’t know was that until the rehearsals were over, I couldn’t 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. I kept 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 so 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 THATCHER’S THEATRICS—Students depict life in Russia in a 1941 play directed by Thatcher Allred. Author Wayne Carver says, “Within (Thatcher's) fussy, exasperating maneuvering was a person whose respect we wanted to deserve.” CENTER STAGE by Wayne Carver had no idea what life would do with me, so at Weber, as 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 courthouse on Twenty-Fourth Street. When Thatcher retired, the newspaper stated that among the projects he would fill his time with was the writing of a history of Weber College/Ogden City Community Theatre, a history that still needs to be written. When I first saw Thatcher’s son, Gordon, after the accident that killed Thatcher During my sophomore year, I had a job from 7 to 11 p.m. often as I could, I took only courses that interested me. One of five nights a week—at $50 a month—as the night guardian of my Classes with Thatcher Allred—“The Art of Interpretative Speech”—was the most valuable course I ever took in school. I learned to read poetry and prose in Thatcher’s interpretative class. I learned to make some engagement of my own voice with the language and voice of what I was reading, a collaboration that was new to me; to make use of pauses, inflections, intonations; to discern tone; and to catch the mood of a work, to use it, not just go with it—a difficult trick to learn for the sentimentalist that I was discovering myself to be. But it was not Thatcher’s taste in literature or his way in class that made him for so many of us a great teacher. There was just something about the man. He liked us. We worked hard to earn his respect. Within that fussy, exasperating maneuvering was a person whose respect we wanted to deserve. the Moench building. 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 restrooms to whomever needed personal counseling, and be in general a kind of charge-of-quarters for the building. Then at 11 p.m., lock up. Now and then asI sat there, 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 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, “T’ll 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.” Even now, long after I first encountered my instructors 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. Thatcher Allred (Wayne Carver graduated from Weber Junior College in 1943 after serving as president of the freshman class and president of the student body. Dr. Carver, a prominent author, was a member of the English faculty from 1947 to 1954. He taught at Carleton College in Northfield, Minn. from 1954 until his retirement this year. This article is an excerpt from an essay he wrote for “Weber State College: A Centennial History.” ) * Free Checking Accounts * Low Interest Loans * 24-Hour ATM Access * Guaranteed Student Loans * Money Orders/Travelers Checks * Many Other Services Offered Exclusively Serving Faculty, Staff, Students and Alumni of Weber State University Phone: 626-6365 Hours: Mon.-Fri.-9am-5pm Drive-up until 6pm 4140 Harrison Blvd. (just off campus) Ogden, Utah 84408