I looked in newspapers.com not thinking there was a photograph but thinking I might learn what day the graduation took place--as it turned out, August 22, 1959. Two years earlier I was just wearing off the last pumping of pneumo-peritoneum for tuberculosis. From August 1957 till the end of August 1959 I worked at the Kansas City Southern Freight House in Port Arthur as the night telegrapher, 8 pm till 4 am, and went to school at Lamar in Beaumont. Trepidatious, I signed up for only 10 units for Fall 1957, but later one semester Celeste K. let me take 22 units. Then for the Fall Quarter 1959 I was at Northwestern University on a Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship studying Swift with the great Phillip Harth and Wordsworth with Zera Fink. In Evanston I locked up Scott Hall at night to earn my food, but I never once had to go out to whorehouses looking for a brakeman at 2 or 3 in the morning, as I had routinely done in Port Arthur. So I look at this photograph and wonder when I got a necktie and where the jacket was from and what 60 years has done.
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