1 April 2021
Hilda Hill worked her magic once again. She knew the president of Itawamba Junior College and she figured it was the perfect place to park me while the nature center was being funded and built up near Iuka, Mississippi. It didn’t hurt that the president was a former high school science teacher.
Like most junior/community colleges in Mississippi, Itawamba Junior College started as a continuation of the agricultural high school in Fulton, Mississippi. In 1941, the high school started a two year extension with college classes at the and the college became a separate entity in 1948 – the year I was born. Most junior/community colleges provided basic two year college instruction because students couldn’t afford to travel to Oxford, Starkville, Hattiesburg. Remember the 40’s were part of the period of segregation in the South and no Black students need apply.
By the time I was hired on at IJC (later ICC) the agricultural high school was still located on the same campus as the college. I was asked to teach biology, botany, zoology, and physical science. IJC only hired you for the fall and spring semester. If you were lucky, you could pick up summer classwork and I was often asked to teach either chemistry lab or, on occasion, chemistry lecture. Eventually, I was also to teach anatomy and physiology at night for nursing students. I think my beginning salary for two semesters was somewhere around $7,000 (1979 dollars).
Eventually, I developed such a tough reputation I was put in the embarrassing position of having the department chair having to split classes so I would have students to teach. No one seemed to want to take my general biology classes because I was considered too hard. I usually made my botany and zoology classes pretty easily.
For a while, I was still living at the house in Fulton paying rent to the superintendent of education via proxy to the owner. The Dean of Student Affairs, who was in charge of dormitories on campus, asked if I would be interested in helping with dorms. They had just built a massive men’s dorm and the dorm manager was a sweet old lady named Jewel Blaylock. She needed some help corralling rambunctious freshmen and sophomores. I sold all my belongings at the house and moved into one of the rooms on the third floor of the dorm and helped her out. It was rent free for me and a great savings.
Later, a new women’s dorm was built and Jewel moved over to there and I took up residence as the manager of the men’s dorm. The residence had a kitchenette, living room/dining room with a full bath, a bedroom with another full bath. It was luxury after living in a small dorm room for about 6 months.
Jewel would occasionally ask for help in the women’s dorm and she more than compensated me by cooking me meals. After she retired from the college we still remained close friends and I would often go over to her retirement house and eat dinner with her.
The biggest problem in the dorms was getting noise levels down at night, getting the guys to clean their rooms, and to keep them from drinking and smoking dope on campus. Every so often you’d have to chase a girl out of one of the rooms but the other issues were more constant.
Again, my intimidating personality helped with the noise. I would walk the halls at night and very courteously knock on a door and ask them to turn a stereo down. I would hold weekly inspections of their rooms. Otherwise, the debris got so bad in some of the rooms that you couldn’t walk on the floor. Beer sales were across the county line and I really didn’t have too much trouble with that – they drank beer at home on the weekends. Marijuana was a bigger problem. For college students, they never seemed to realize that smoking dope had a distinctive smell.
One year, we had a welcome party in front of my dorm for new students. One student in the music department served as DJ and the Dean of Students provided refreshments. Apparently, some of my dorm students figured this was the perfect time to get stoned in one of the rooms. Their mistake was they chose a room on the first floor right by the front entrance of the dorm. To be safe, they smoked in the bathroom of their room and put a towel under the door to the bathroom and to their dorm room. What they didn’t take into account was the vent into the bathroom emptied out into the vestibule of the front door. The campus security required no investigation.
I became friends with campus security because they were often called for dorm issues. They once brought me a specimen and asked if it was marijuana. Cannabis has such distinctive hairs (trichomes) on its leaves that I was readily able to identify it for them. Another time, they asked me to open a room for them to search. They were looking for evidence of grass. I was just sitting there after they had finished searching the room and they hadn’t found anything. Security couldn’t understand it because they supposedly had an informant. I was sitting at a desk in the room waiting to lock up and noticed a band aid box sitting on the bookshelf of the desk. I thought – strange – why isn’t that in the medicine cabinet. I opened it up to take a look and it was filled with marijuana seeds. I knew them immediately because in graduate school, we used irradiated marijuana seeds to grow certain aquatic fungi.
The college was very conservative. The board of trustees was mostly Church of Christ members. Fulton was a very closed town. The physics teacher, Jim Long, had been teaching there for 20 years and he told me he still felt like an outsider. If you were born in Fulton, you were OK. Otherwise, you were a foreigner.
There was a faculty senate (and yes, I did my stint as president) with virtually no power but at least you could air issues. However, you were never allowed to attend board meetings.
The heart of the college was the faculty lounge – about 400 square feet with a coffee urn and seating. It was where everyone congregated in between classes and after class. That’s were you made friends, caught the local gossip, and found out what the college was doing administratively. The dean of students and the registrar often joined faculty. About the only administrators who did not attend were the dean of academic affairs and the president.
Speaking of the president, the president’s wife was the head librarian at the college. For some reason she took a shine to me and if I asked for it, I got it in the library. I ordered videos, slides, books, and magazines. I don’t think she ever told me no to any request.
The department at the time consisted of two other biologists besides me, Lucy Senter and Johnny Mattox, a physics teacher – Jim – and a chemistry teacher, Herb Parham. IJC had a reputation in the physical sciences. Students trying to get into med school would often take chemistry under Herb. He had a way of explaining chemistry that students could understand. Ole Miss often referred students to him for freshman chemistry. The engineering school at Ole Miss and Mississippi State often referred students to Jim Long for physics. To this day I’ve never met any better teacher in physics or chemistry than those two – and I’ve know a lot of chemistry and physics teachers over the years.
Not part of our department but someone who would also teach physical science was Reid Smith. He was actually in the math department. We would eventually become best friends. Reid and his wife Jane owned a shoe store across the street from the college. Jane ran it while Reid taught and then Reid would run it when he was finished with classes. They paid the way for college for three kids with that store.
To get the faculty a little closer, Reid and I hatched the idea to throw some parties. Reid and Jane would host and I would provide the guest list. We knew some people wouldn’t come if others did so it was like walking through a mine field to get the guest list correct.
One party we threw was a crawfish boil. Reid and I went out to the bottoms around the college and collected crawfish. We then purged them in salt water. You have to purge them (get them to puke and crap) to clear out the digestive tract otherwise they taste like mud. We didn’t have a whole lot of crawfish – enough for everyone to have 4 or 5 so we supplemented the menu with shrimp and plenty of booze. Another lifelong friend, Effie Kemp, provided the bourbon tea. To say the party was a hit is an understatement. It got to where we had to throw one every couple of months. Reid and I are still friends to this day (he’s 90 this year)!
All of the science people were great to work with. It was a pretty decent place to work as long as you didn’t upset the board or displease the president. Next to the faculty lounge was the faculty dining room which was also attached to the college cafeteria. The cafeteria and faculty dining room were run by Morrison’s. Not too long after I got there, they changed managers. The new manager was Les Miller. His wife and his son also worked the cafeteria.
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Les’ son was Steve. He was in his early 20’s and didn’t really hang around the college crowd. He was also a lot more mature than others. He found out my love of music – by then I had quite a collection of albums plus a killer stereo system. He started coming over and hanging with me at the dorm.
We got to be pretty close. One night, I get a knock on my outside bedroom door. It’s Steve with a strange look on his face. He looks at me and asks “Are you gay?” I said yes and he says “OK” and starts to walk away. I said “Wait, you don’t get to ask a question like that and then walk away.” He came inside and we sat and talked a long time. He was the very first person I had ever come out to. He could have easily have gotten me fired from an institution that in the hiring interview asked what church domination you were.
If anything, we became a lot closer. I knew Steve was straight and knew several of his girlfriends over the years. Once, when I was in Fort Lauderdale, I got a call from his then wife wanting to know if Steve was gay. She was getting a divorce and wanted some ammo. She knew I was gay and assumed from that. I said she would have to ask Steve. I then called him and let him know about his wife calling me. It was good to know that he eventually married well a second time. To this day, when he sees me when I go to Fulton, he gives me a great big bear hug.
Steve also became my hiking and camping buddy. The year I moved to Hollywood, Florida, Steve went with me to Europe. He’s a great traveling companion.
About the time I was ready to leave IJC for the graduate school at the medical center in Jackson, Steve knocks on my door and walks in with a tray of brownies. I think you know the kind. He ate two, I ate two. I felt absolutely nothing. Steve later told me when he left, he drove home and stopped at a stop sign and was so stoned on two brownies he was waiting for the stop sign to change colors. Those must have been some potent brownies.
Anyway, a few other friends wanted to give me a going away party. As I got ready to leave, I popped a single brownie in my mouth and headed to the party. I can’t tell you how many times people at the party told me how relaxed and calm I looked. Apparently, brownies mellow you out pretty well.
Jim Long (physics) was a big fisherman. He suggested I might like to join their fishing club. I did and went to my first tournament somewhere in Alabama. By pure dumb luck I caught the biggest fish and the most fish and won all the prize money. Jim thought I was a ringer and that worried him until the next tournament when I got skunked. I finally quit after a few more tournaments because these people were obsessed with fishing. Jim probably could have turned professional.
While at IJC, I convinced the faculty to go all in on a science competition for the regional high schools. We worked hard on making test questions for general competition and for lightning rounds for both biology, chemistry and physics. All the high schools participated and we had hundreds on campus. It kept going for a while after I left.
I was also able to write a grant and get a greenhouse attached to the biology/chemistry/physics building. The other thing I did that I’m proud of is that we took one of the classrooms and converted it to a lab. I was asked to write up an equipment list. I admit to dirty pool here. Instead of ordering one microscope for a pair of students, I ordered one for each of the students and ended up getting new microscopes for my botany/zoology lab. At least I helped get some new equipment.
Since I taught botany, I decided to teach the students how to make homemade beer as a lesson in fermentation. It was working pretty well. I would have students come in during the week and do readings for alcohol content with a hydrometer. Then I noticed it looked like the container was loosing a lot to evaporation which was strange because it had a lid on it.
I noticed one kid was absent several lectures and one lab and asked if anyone had seen him. The class broke out in laughter and said he had been sneaking the beer and hadn’t made it out of the bathroom yet. Beer than hasn’t been fully processed is an excellent laxative. Lesson learned for him.
One year I had them make alcohol with peaches to show you could ferment just about anything. I then had them distill it down into peach brandy. Whenever I made booze, I would always ask Johnny Mattox to try it out. I walked into his office one day with the peach brandy and handed it to him and said taste this. Before I could add “It’s brandy.” He downed it in one shot because he thought it was the usual beer recipe. It took his breath away. You could ignite that brandy it had so much alcohol in it.
We had to set up our own labs at IJC. I always taught at least three so I was always in the storeroom pulling out equipment and supplies. We did have one work study student but he mostly helped anatomy and physiology lab set ups. One afternoon I walked into the storeroom and the lights were off. I didn’t think anything of it because there was a single bulb in the center with a pull cord. I went to reach for the cord and stepped on the work study student’s back. He was having sex with his girlfriend on the floor. I shut the light off and said excuse me and allowed them to put themselves together and leave. I never said a word to any of the faculty.
One of my years teaching at IJC I took students down to the Gulf Coast Marine Laboratory in Biloxi. It was great. We stayed in the dorm, had a boat take us out and trawl to collect specimens. Once at sea, the captain pulled up to an oyster reef and plucked some oysters for us to eat right from the sea. My students wouldn’t touch raw oysters but I was in oyster heaven.
We also trawled and pulled up shrimp and squid. I had a collection permit from the state. It was not shrimp season but since I had the permit, my class had the only legal fresh shrimp on the Gulf Coast. What was amazing was the squid. When they net was pulled on deck, they couldn’t decide what color they were supposed to be so they just flashed every color they were capable of trying to match something.
Later that night we had a shrimp and squid boil. It was amazing. I later told the students that they were 18 (drinking age was 18 then) and they could go out and see the sights of Biloxi but they had to be back in the morning by 8 am to leave to go home. I told them they were on their honor for best behavior and not to embarrass the school. Everyone complied except one kid. He came in around 2 am drunk and kicked a transom out of one of the dorm doors. Later, I had him write the station and apologize and offer to pay for damages. To their credit, they didn’t make him. Could you imagine doing that today?
The dean of academic affairs was very religious – remember, one of my interview questions was with what church I was affiliated. Yes, it was illegal to ask that even back then. He also had a PhD from Nova Southeastern. At the time, Nova degrees were generally not recognized as legitimate by some states and colleges. Today, it’s considered an innovative institution.
Anyway, one of the dean’s pet projects was the new performing arts center. It caught fire. I was out watching the fire department try to put out the fire when the dean started to walk into the building. I blurted out “Are you crazy!” The next day I was called into the office and officially reprimanded with it entered into my record. I was simply concerned for his safety.
By that time I had spent five years there and would have probably spent the rest of my life there but I realized the dean simply had it in for me. I applied and was accepted to the microbiology PhD program at the University of Mississippi and left soon after that. My good friend Carl Comer, the registrar, called me into his office and said if the dean had threatened me, not to worry about it. I lied and told Carl no, I just wanted to pursue other things. Not long after, I headed to Jackson to have a long talk with my brother.
Stay tuned!
