Sidetracked Charley

The only reason I entered college was because I was suppose to. It is what my senior class did. Or at least my special class of the senior class: the college bound. I took the obligatory tests for college entry, received higher than adequate scores, even got a scholarship offer or two, but it was my mother who filled out my college application to the University of New Mexico, told me of my acceptance, and made sure I got up and out the door at the appropriate time to register. She did that, I now believe, because she knew how dangerously close I was to losing it. Losing me. Mother and I were not close. And maybe at that time when she pushed me out the door further apart than we had ever been. But she made the right decision for me. I had always been a bookworm, and college was full of books, and people who loved books, people who debated books and authors and meanings. And on November 22, 1963 I was going to the SUB, student union building, to meet some of those bookish friends...

I and 599 other students sat in complete silence in the largest University of New Mexico lecture room the afternoon of November 22, 1963. We had just heard that President John F. Kennedy was dead. Shot in Dallas, Texas. Most of us had spent our lunch break watching the live news on TV's in the dorms or the Student Union Building. We had come to Sociology 101 not just because it was the next class on our schedule but because it was something to do besides watch the horrid images. And we figured if anyone could say something to make it all go away it would be Professor Varley. He walked up on to the stage into the silence and wrote with chalk on the black board, Class Dismissed. And he walked off. We sat. Without words. As we rose to leave a student behind me loudly said, "At least the man who should be president will be now." I slugged her. I would probably have faced a week long suspension except that all classes were suspended for all of us so that we could obser...