As It Must to All Men
Editorial, University of Idaho Argonaut, 1939.
It's funny about a newspaper office. When a faculty man dies, they ask one who knew him best to write an editorial about him. They think you can write it better if you knew him, only sometimes you knew him too well, and then you don't write any better than anybody else.
"Lester Schuldt, instructor in English, died Sunday." If you knew him, it's hard to write much about that. It hits you. It's like your car lights going out when you're on a dark road and a long way from home. It doesn't make sense, but there it is.
But you knew him best, and you have to write. So you remember that he believed in literature and was human and wise. He thought science and sociology and all the other things in books should be interpreted in how people felt and thought. He made you know people were important. He thought literature was important because it explained people, and he thought you ought to try to write literature if you wrote at all.
Naturally, he didn't think too much of you if you wrote news for a newspaper. That is easy. It consists only in jotting down what people do and not much about why they do it. If you knew Mr. Schuldt and wrote news, you did it because it was easy. You didn't feel very well when you talked to him, because he knew you didn't go down deep in people and bring up something because it is hard. You kept trying to tell him you would do it later when you had more time. He never said much, but you knew he thought there wasn't much time. Now he has proved it.
You ought to be relieved when someone like that is gone. Everybody knows somebody who makes him feel uncomfortable because he isn't doing his best. You ought to feel happier when he is gone, because now there is one less to keep pulling you up where the job is hard. It should be easier now to slip down where the job is easy and learn your facts and make your grades and quit worrying about people. You should be relieved, but somehow, you aren't.
It's funny about a newspaper office. You try to write an editorial because you knew him best, but the words don't come. The typewriter that used to be a part of you becomes something foreign and mechanical, and the thoughts stop before they get to the keyboard.
Then somebody comes in and says to you, "Say, did you get the story on Schuldt?"
And you say, "Yeah, we got it."
Romance of the Road
Story, University of Idaho Argonaut, 1940.
He was always there, even when the snow was deep, to meet the night train. He was about 14, a slender, somewhat tense sort of boy. Nobody noticed him usually. Few hurried passengers saw the worn overshoes, the faded red sleeves of his sweater protruding from the lagging sleeve-length of this trench coat. He always stood at the corner of the depot, out of the way of people, but he was always there.
He must have been a puzzle to the depot staff. To them, it was a job when the train came in-baggage to check, switches to throw. To him, it must have been an adventure.
He must have seen it; it was in his eyes. The straight beam of light darting through the night. Then the distance-mellowed blast of the whistle and the frolicking shadows near the station as the light stretched out ahead.
He must have seen it. The way the closer beam froze the snowdrops a moment in midair, then let them fall. The smooth, gliding control of mighty force that gradually brought power to leash. The spurting clouds of steam that fought for life a moment in the night air and were lost.
It was in his eyes. He always moved closer, staring at the big driver wheels and the sleek, riveted surfaces of the cars. Then, when the transfers were made and the smoke clouds leaped again, he would stand by the station and watch while the mass and light and power swept off into the night. Then he would turn to go home, and it would still be in his eyes.
Probably he didn't know much about railroads. He was pretty young to know about watered stock, and closed unions, and workmen who lose their jobs just before pension age, and fixed charges, and free roads for busses, and insurance investments. It was only the power and the bulk and the winding steel stretching to far places he had in his eyes. He was pretty young, but he would probably learn those other, more important things. He looked like a bright boy.