JOY ALONG THE WAY: HOMECOMING DAYS STIR OLD MEMORIES

There is nothing like college homecoming days to make a member of the alumni reminisce about college days and drag out old yearbooks to refresh memories.

My college loyalties are divided between Flat River Junior College, now Mineral Area Community College (MACC), and Southeast Missouri State Teachers College, now Southeast Missouri State University.

Unfortunately, Flat River Junior College didn't then have a yearbook and graduates must rely on memories only. Too, Flat River didn't have a football team nor an annual parade. But in my mind, they did have something that soared high above these things: English professor Charles E. Bess, popularly known as Charlie Bess. Seems as if my memories of Flat River are wound around Professor Bess, his reading of poetry and that tantalizing gold Phi Beta Kappa key that twinkled from a chain across his vest. His eyes twinkled just as merrily as he read to us from the English poets. You wouldn't think a teacher could teach so much just reading from a book. But after reading one of the lovely old poems, he would close the book softly and there would be silence before conversation started again.

Later in life, when I read Winifred Garrison's poetic lines, 'Softly I closed the book as in a dream, and let its echoes linger to redeem silence with music, darkness with its gleam.' I was back in that college room, listening to Charlie.

All of Professor Bess' students over the years were impressed by him and took up a collection to send him to the Lake Country of England to traipse the countryside he brought to us so visually in his readings.

Southeast Missouri State College had a football team. Homecoming days, a yearbook, the Sagamore, and another great English professor, Jeptha Riggs. He, too, could mesmerize us with his rendition of English poetry and prose. His manner was less ebullient but just as effective.

I plucked my old Sagamore from the shelf and turned to Riggs' picture. Oh, he was so young looking!

I turned to the pictures of the football players -- Jerome "Red" Blanton, Lynn Twitty, Wm. Crabtree, Louis Bono, "Red" Hubbard and others. Ooo-wee, they were so young looking. Blanton wrote in my Sagamore, 'We had lots of fun in Play Production. I shall never forget, "Op O Me Thumb," a play, I presume, we were both in. I had forgotten all about it. I don't know about Bono, but I know all the others mentioned here are now playing football in the skies. Finally, I look at my own picture. No wrinkles. Plenty of hair. I was never that young.

I turned to the Queen section. There was Virginia "Skeeter" Williams. What a lovely profile! Long black hair with a chignon in back.

No straight, stringy hair in those days., with parts all over the top as if a drunken hairdresser had made an arrangement. Maid of honor, Mable Louise Hunter, who wrote beside her picture, "Dear Jean, I'm just beginning to know you and it makes me feel that I've certainly missed a lot the first part of the year. Let's see each other more. Everybit of happiness, Mable Louise.' Every bit was run together as one word which is all right with me. We have seen much more of each other and still wish everybit of happiness to each other.

REJOICE!

Jean Bell Mosley is an author and longtime resident of Cape Girardeau.