In 1952, 71 years ago today, at 16, after the 11th grade, I was driven by a man who is long dead to a cavernous depot, now long demolished, in a town, Howe, Oklahoma, which no longer exists, where I bought a one-way ticket on a railroad that no longer exists, the Rock Island, to go to Oklahoma City, where I would spend the night with a man long dead before going on to Coffeyville, Kansas for a physical examination then going back to Red Rock, Oklahoma, to a depot that no longer exists, to take a job that no longer exists, that of railroad telegrapher, my job until the end of August 1959, when the Beaumont Journal, a paper that no longer exists, printed a picture of me as having graduated from Lamar State College of Technology with the highest honors in English, upon which I resigned as night telegrapher on the Kansas City Southern Railroad at Port Arthur, Texas, and drove to Evanston, Illinois, to enroll at Northwestern University, which still exists.
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