But, in any event, I met them and we drove from the airport to the Miami University campus with Mr. Laughton (a large man) in the front seat with me and the remaining luminaries crammed into the back seat. Nevertheless, we made it, and they performed brilliantly, just as they had on Broadway. Perhaps, however, more memorable to me than their performances was what happened after the show. I was to take them back to Cincinnati, where they were spending the night. After I got the same “trusty” automobile ready, I walked into the dressing room to see how nearly ready they were for the trip. The first thing I saw was Charles Boyer, the handsome Frenchman who had played numerous dramatic roles and who was perhaps one of the most famous performers in history, taking off his stage makeup in front of a large mirror. However, Mr. Boyer’s hair was on a dummy’s head! I had not known that Mr. Boyer wore a toupee—why would I know such a thing?—and I was completely flummoxed when I saw the bald Boyer and the hairpiece on the dummy’s head. I don’t think I made a fool of myself, but it was a little while before I was able to calmly assemble the group to head back to Cincinnati.
I continue to marvel on this evening and why one or more of the four didn’t let me have it for not treating them with the dignity they certainly deserved. Perhaps, however, they found it a relief from the usual hoopla and adoration to which they were normally accustomed.
THE REMAINING YEARS at Miami were happy ones. Marilyn and I got engaged (I bought a ring for three hundred dollars, which exhausted most of what I had accumulated from that summer’s highway work) and planned our wedding for August 31, 1952, just before heading to New Haven, Connecticut, to attend Yale Law School (yes, I got in!).
Three final Miami memories. It’s funny the things you remember—that stick in your mind—after a lot of years have gone by. I had—and have—scores of happy memories of my days at Miami University. But a quirky story is one of my very favorites. One of my fraternity brothers was getting a degree in education, and in his senior year was doing student teaching at a local school. One day when I walked into the fraternity house where I was living, I saw my friend sitting at the top of a flight of stairs that went from the first to the second floor. As I walked in, he threw a sheaf of papers up in the air and they landed on several different steps. I couldn’t imagine what he was doing, so I asked him. He said, “Charlie, I have got all these papers to grade, and I don’t have the time or energy to do it. So, I am throwing them up in the air and the steps on which they land will each have a grade. Those that land on one step will get an ‘A,’ on the next step a ‘B,’ and so forth.” I said, “You can’t be serious.” He assured me that he was. I don’t recommend this to any aspiring teacher, and I certainly hope that no “A” students had their papers land on the “D” or “F” steps, but I suspect that in the big picture it didn’t really make a whole lot of difference.
My roommate during my junior and senior years at Miami became one of my dearest friends and remains so today. Dan Brower and his beautiful wife, Phyllis, were constant companions for Marilyn and me, and we had many, many happy times together.
But, there was a “dark” side to Dan Brower. I have one phobia—I really hate spiders, and the bigger they are the more I hate them. Somehow Dan learned this and here’s what he did. He bought one of those giant rubber spiders that is about five or six inches across with horrible colors and so forth, and he put it under some papers next to my typewriter, obviously knowing that at some point when I was going through the papers I would uncover it. His plan worked even better than he dreamed because I accidently knocked the papers onto the floor, which made the spider virtually jump out at me, and I went screaming out the door. Dan and my buddies had so much fun with this that they concocted an even more diabolical scheme. All of us in our fraternity house slept in a large dormitory-like area in double-decker bunks. My bed was one of the lower bunks. One of the guys got in the upper bunk and dangled a big spider on a thread and lowered it down inches from my sleeping face. They then spotlighted it with a flashlight and woke me up. I don’t think I need to describe any further the trauma that ensued. Thank God I’ve always had a good heart because if I didn’t, I would have long since been gone. Finally, a memory that always makes me smile but certainly wasn’t funny at the time. Before being accepted as a full member of a fraternity in those days, one had to serve something of an apprenticeship—called pledging. As a pledge one had to perform a number of duties around the fraternity house to make the lives of the active members more pleasant. One such duty was called “wake boy.” As the name implies, this consisted of waking the older members of the fraternity based on a list that was posted each night with names, times, and any other instructions. This was normally a fairly simple matter but there was one important and ongoing warning. One of the active members was a fellow named Mike Saborse. Mike was a veteran of World War II and had been engaged in quite a bit of combat. His memories were still fresh, and, if he was awakened too abruptly, he might come up swinging. So, we all took special care to wake him up slowly and tenderly! One morning I went to the fraternity house as “wake boy.” It had snowed during the night, and as I came to Mike’s bunk I found that he had left the window open and was covered with about an inch of snow. Unconsciously, he had buried under the covers, and the snow had covered the blanket over his entire body. When I saw this I was absolutely terrified because I had no idea what might happen if I awoke him in a way that caused him to have snow descend on his warm and cozy frame. So, what I did was to pull up one edge of the covers very quietly and whisper, “Mike, it’s Charlie Mechem, don’t move. You are covered with snow and you must get up slowly and let me brush the snow off as you sit up.” Happily, this worked, and I brushed the snow off as he slowly awakened. A disaster was averted. A singular incident indeed and nothing remotely like it has happened to me since!
I need to reiterate that these years were amazing in retrospect—not just for us but for the United States itself. World War II was over, the Great Depression was over, and the Cold War had not escalated to a point where it was of great concern. General Dwight Eisenhower was elected president in 1952. He was the ultimate war hero and was immensely respected and popular, and this simply added to the healthy and robust mood of the nation. Those years now seem light-years away!
The mood of the 1950s is beautifully described in a wonderful book, Rules of Civility by Amor Towles. He puts it this way:
In the 1950s, America had picked up the globe by the heels and shaken the change from its pockets. Europe had become a poor cousin—all crests and no table settings. And the indistinguishable countries of Africa, Asia, and South America had just begun skittering across our schoolroom walls like salamanders in the sun. True, the Communists were out there, somewhere, but with Joe McCarthy in the grave and no one on the Moon, for the time being the Russians just skulked across the pages of spy novels.
Our wedding, at the First Methodist Church in Marilyn’s hometown of Newark, Ohio, was wonderful. Not fancy, not huge, just the kind of ceremony that I am sure thousands of Midwest boys and girls celebrated during those years—friends and family, smiles and tears. Marilyn was beautiful in her wedding gown on her dad’s arm. I knew this was a tough day for Brownie (that is what everyone called Marilyn’s dad), because they were very close, and I knew how much he would miss her. We were told later that the day was oppressively hot—hardly uncommon for an August day in Ohio! But we were oblivious to it. For us, everything about the day was wonderful.
Immediately after the reception we set off for New Haven in an old Nash* that I had bought for four hundred dollars. That old car served us well for several years, but we finally had to get rid of it when it began to use more oil than gas and put a smoke screen out the exhaust pipe that in today’s world would contribute significantly to global warming.
CHAPTER IV
New Haven, Here We Come!
AS I MENTIONED earlier, we took off for New Haven as newlyweds and we obviously had more stars in our eyes than sense in our brains because we arrived there with no place to live and with no job for Marilyn. However, again my good-luck charm worked. We found a little spot north of New Haven that was literally