Seattle University was a new environment after the seminary, but I soon gathered my buddies in the Chieftain cafeteria. My Dad would drive me to school from Queen Anne Hill on his way to work. We left early so he could attend mass at St. Joseph’s before he went to work.
I ended up in the cafeteria drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes with my new friends, Bart Irwin, Shelton Chow, Terry Whaley and Ken Crowder. We were the townies and we all grew to love Al Camus and talk about existential stuff that we had not lived, as yet.
Bart was a good old boy. I think he had an older brother. He smoked Pall Malls, was always covered in smoke, but was bright and funny. I think he ended up in Port Townsend as the town attorney and local political boss. He’d be perfect for it.
Shelton was the 2nd son of Ruby Chow, the owner of Ruby Chow’s restaurant which was close to campus. Ruby was also a leader of the Seattle area Chinese community and on the side of Chiang Kai-shek, the nationalist leader of Taiwan, who Mao kicked out of China. Shelton always seemed a bit out of favor with his Mom. Nevertheless, we could go into the restaurant’s back kitchen with his father, Ping Chow, a former actor, and drink tall glasses of scotch while wolfing down large portions of great food.
I never knew whether Shelton had a former life as a bad boy or not, but I suspected it. He was an unbelievable pool player, smooth and confident. I could believe he had been a hustler. He once took me down to Chinatown in Seattle’s international section during a Chinese festival which included gambling activities. As we went from parlor to parlor, Shelton would point his long, delicate finger to the side of his head and tell me how his Mom was so smart. Last year many of these parlors had been raided. This year his Mom had hired off-duty cops for security. No raids. Smart.
One time Shelton and I were in San Francisco and we wandered into Chinatown. Shelton seemed in his element. We passed a group of Chinese toughs hassling an old street bum, a Caucasian. Shelton approached the group and told them to leave the old man alone. They told him to fuck off. Shelton ripped off his coat, placed himself in front of the old man, drew back in a karate stance and told them to come ahead. I was standing on the side wondering what I would do if they came after Shelton. They all backed off and left the scene. Shelton told me later he had studied with Bruce Lee when he was at the University of Washington. I never knew for sure and I often wondered whether it was the Chinese respect for an elder, i.e. Shelton, or Shelton’s karate stance that got them to leave.
I connected up again with Shelton years later when I had returned to the West coast and was working at Evergreen. He was now working at Seattle City Light and living with a new wife, a Buddhist. I visited their home, but it was clear that I was someone from Shelton’s previous life and I wouldn’t be tolerated. So I left it alone.
Ken Crowder became my main buddy during my years at Seattle University. He was in the Honors Program at Seattle University. It was a program for the super bright. I wasn’t in it, but for some reason Ken and I became buddies. We became “The Binity.” I still have a beer stein with “The Binity” engraved on it. We dressed up in tails and top hats, went to proms with our girlfriends. Ken, however, would have to come over to my house, call up the girl for me, and stand there as I asked her for a date.
We were BMOCs – Big Man On Campus. Seattle University didn’t allow fraternities, like the University of Washington so we created a fraternity take-off. It might have been the creation of another classmate, Mick McHugh. The fraternity was called, “Tap a Tap a Keg.” You could tell us. We wore white jeans, ironed and creased. We had white tennis shoes with white socks, white sweat shirts with cut off sleeves. We had keg parties, went as a group to Seattle University basketball games, spiked our oranges with vodka to get liquor into the arena and acted silly.
Somehow we connected up with a group from the SAMI fraternity at UW. They were Jewish kids who had their own fraternity although I would not have known a Jew from a Mick at that point in my life. We would meet at the west end of the Lake Washington floating bridge where there was a little parking lot on the right hand side. From there, we would car-caravan into a foreign rich land near Medina to the home of Foss Radford. Foss had a home on a point of land on Lake Washington. You had to cross a small private bridge to get to his home.
Foss would have parties that you couldn’t believe. There would be a live band, all the beer you could drink and all these dark little Jewish girls for a harmless and drunk Irish-Catholic boy to rub up against. It was great, but how I got home blind drunk and hung over I will never know. One way, though, was that I had a route to get home that kept me off the main streets. If I was anywhere near downtown I would drive up Western avenue which was almost a back street to the base of Queen Anne Hill, circle up the west side of the hill and then back across the top to Crockett Street.
I did get pulled over one time by a Medina cop after I laid a good deal of rubber peeling out from a stop side. I was roaring drunk and on my way to Foss’ house. He gave me a wreckless driving ticket and sent me on my way. How times have changed.
I became Homecoming Chairman in charge of organizing all associated activities. I still have a photo of a bunch of us cleaning off Chief Seattle’s statute in what’s now known as Bell town. I also got Foss to let us come to his house to photograph all the Indian maidens, our homecoming court, getting into canoes on Foss’ lakefront.
I don’t know where my organizational notions came from, but I certainly had them at Seattle University. I was chair of University Day and Homecoming and delivered three ring binders full of assignments to all my sub-chairs. It seems to be the beginning of my life long association with three ring binders. I still remember Timmie Ruff looking up at me during one of those organizational meetings and wondering if I was completely nuts.
I also ran for ASSU Student body President against Mick McHugh. I remember AA Lemieux, the head Jesuit and President of Seattle University talking during the campaign about “our Mickey.” Mick was from Capitol Hill and a friend, although we were competitors. Mick and I competed for the 5th seat on the Seattle U Tennis team. He had a yellow pick up truck and we’d drive out to Golden Gardens to have a brew and enjoy the beach. When we needed to know how close we were to empty, Mick would slam on the brakes and we’d count the ripples in the gas tank.
Mick was a magnificent hustler. He and Kip Toner somehow got possession of a place called 92 Yesler in Pioneer Square. We called it Pigeon Square. They opened up a pizza parlor, coffee house and live entertainment place that was a successful hang out for many years after Seattle’s world’s fair. Mick had lengths of extension cord that would allow us to go out the back door of this place and into underground Seattle passed front desks of old hotels long buried over by Seattle streets. When we would get back out of that hole or when we had had too much “cold coffee”, we would stand there in those back streets and take a leak. Years later when Mick was a successful restaurateur I met Mick at his Jack O’Shauneseys joint and we drove down to old 92 just to take a ceremonial leak in the streets.
The last time I saw Mick was in Ireland. I was in the Aran Islands with my young son, JD Ross who was seven years old at the time. We were in this pub and who walks up the lane but Mick, looking as say hey as ever. Over for the horse races in Dublin, I think he said.
Mick beat me in the ASSU presidency race and Ken Crowder, my campaign manager, felt terrible, but not for long. Ken was now married to Trix Cosgriff, a great looking blond from Salt Lake City who drove a hot Ford convertible. They were living together in an apartment near campus and our lives started to separate. After graduation, Ken entered the Air Force Academy and he and Trix started to have kids. Ken sent me a tape recorder all the way to Turkey to record my thoughts. Of course, I could barely pay for the customs import fee and there was no electricity in my village.
Ken flew A-6 intruders off air craft carriers on bombing runs into North Vietnam. After a bit of that, he said he didn’t want to do it anymore. He left the service, went to law school and became an attorney who investigates plane crashes. I lost track of him after that. I hope he is still with Trix and remains that fast talking, ever confident, man about town.
I got into the Seattle University ROTC Drill Team. I would go to the gym every morning at 7:00 am and march around the floor with old Springfield rifles. I did this for two years and we entered a lot of festivals and parades around Washington State where we would show off our precision marching with those rifles. We were in uniform, of course, with spit shined shoes and white, paper thin gloves. If you didn’t wet those gloves before you started marching, the rifles would get so slippery you could hardly handle them.
I became the guide-on, the person who marched out front of the squad and carried a long pole that carried our colors. It had a sharp spike at the end. It was fun marching toward a crowd of people with that pole with its sharp spike held straight out pointing at their guts and then just before contact snapping it up and smartly shifting directions. I was on my way to becoming a first lieutenant in the US Army. After two years with the drill team, you would enter the real ROTC for your junior and senior year and end up a commissioned officer.
One morning we were all standing in the gym waiting for inspection, careful not to move in our spit shined shoes. There was a new large paper mache figure of a man in front of us. All of a sudden our drill sergeant came crashing through that paper mache figure with a rifle and fixed bayonet. He came up to each one of us, pointed his bayonet toward our gut and screamed, “The job of the soldier is to kill, kill, kill!” I walked out of the gym. That was the end of my army career. Our drill sergeant was thrilled, however. He had received his orders to go to Vietnam where he could do his job.
I became a serious student my senior year. I had lost the election and wasn’t the chairman of anything. I got into a Senior Honors Seminar that took up half my time each quarter of my senior year. It was run by a former British army officer turned Jesuit. His name was Father Bussey. I liked him even though he was a Brit. He told me once what the stiff side of your hand could do to a man’s Adam’s apple if you were ever in real trouble.
We started with the Upanishads and got to the post WWII existentialists in one year. It should have been a four year program. I still have many of the books with their careful under linings and “nota benes” in the margins.
Plato’s Euthyphro, Apology, Crito; Henri Pirenne’s The Economic and Social History of Medieval Europe; Leibniz Sections, edited by Philip P. Wiener; Locke’s The Second Treatise of Government; Hume’s An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding; William James’ Pragmatism; Thorstein Veblen’s the Theory of the Leisure Class; Hegel on Tragedy, edited by Anne and Henry Paolucci; A Kierkegaard Anthology edited by Robert Bretall; The Thought and Art of Albert Camus by Thomas Hanna; The Fall by Al himself and many more.
I got 4 points those three quarters and boosted myself up to a cum laude grade point average. I got academic and merit scholarships and won the Bill Bates trophy for public service. It was studying with the nurses that did it. Nancy Flannery, Betsy Lawler, Timmie Ruff and others. These women were serious students who did their work in the library and remained great friends throughout college.
I didn’t know what to do, though. My army career was in shatters. I took accounting, but flunked it, almost. I was supposed to be a lawyer like my Uncle Lawrence Leahy or my cousin Bernie Burke, but I couldn’t face law school. I definitely was not interested in going to Vietnam like many of my classmates and buddies from ROTC.
JFK was still in our minds. In fact, we were all sitting in the cafeteria one day when we heard the news that he was shot in Dallas. Ask not what the country should do for you, but ask what you can do for your country. I applied for the Peace Corps, but where? There was a professor at Seattle University. Her name was Mary Margaret Davies. She came from West Seattle, always wore shades and supposedly was an “alkie burner,” a term we used to describe limited hydros and alcoholics. She gave me books on economics that I didn’t read until years later in graduate school. It was then that I noticed the books were all from International Publishers, the Communist Party’s publishing arm.
Mary Margaret asked me what I wanted to be, one of many specialists in a big country like India or one of a few specialists in a small country like Afghanistan. I said Afghanistan and applied for a spot there.
