He was the first new person I
met my first day on campus at Harrisburg Area Community College in
September of 1965. I already knew who he was. He was a member of
a local folk-singing quintet, the Metropolitans. I'd seen them perform
a few times and regarded him as something of a celebrity. On that basis
alone I'd have been reluctant to talk to him first.
I met him in the book buying line. The school, in only its second year
of operation, had no real book store, just a basement storage room in a
classroom building that opened to the outside from a subterranean door.
One clerk served one person at a time, so the line went up the steps
and along the sidewalk. He was the one I fell in line behind.
"My name's Larry," he said. "Are you a freshman?"
The conversation went from there. We exchanged the basics – where we'd
gone to high school, what we were interested in. I told him I'd seen
him perform, and that a member of the group was a girl I knew from the
city youth orchestra. He'd had some of the classes I was going to have.
He gave advice and encouragment. He waited for me while I bought my
books. I remember that the whole load, enough for five classes, cost
$58. I paid for them with a check my mother had signed. He helped me
carry them to my car and laughed when I opened what looked like the
engine hood on the front of my
1965 Corvair and
dumped the books into what was actually the trunk space. I think we
went to the student lounge area together after that.
Larry was never a boyfriend. We didn't move in the same circles nor
have the same friends. We never had a conversation away from that
student lounge (a dark,
echoing room that had once been a gymnasium – the floor suspended above
the swimming pool area sagged in the middle and vibrated during
Saturday night dances). But we did have conversations from time to
time. He had a kind of a bounce to his walk, and I'd see him come into
the lounge and scan the crowd. Sometimes he'd stop at the table where I
was sitting and say hello. He'd ask how I was doing. Once he helped me
get my car out of a pile of snow and slush. I'd backed too far into the
space, and the wheels had gone over the paved part into the soft earth
of an embankment. It was the German teacher's parking space that I'd
taken for a
minute just to run into the library and get a book, and I had to be out
before she arrived.
HACC is a two-year school, and Larry left at the end of 1966. I never
saw him again. The Metropolitans stopped performing, and I don't know
if he went to school or got a job. I don't know what his ambitions were
or if he had a girlfriend. All I know is that on the afternoon of May
13, 1967, a Saturday, he was riding his motorcycle west on Airport Road
in Hershey when he was hit head on by an eastbound station wagon that
had just been hit by a car traveling north through the intersection at
Route 743. He was pronounced dead at the scene.
Over these almost forty years I have thought of him more than one might
imagine, given how casual our relationship seemed to be. I know that I
didn't attend his funeral, although I can't think now of why I didn't.
Maybe I had an exam that day. Another member of the Metropolitans died
later in the summer in a diving accident. For a short story I wrote in
a creative writing class that fall I put both incidents together and
imagined I attended the funeral. My
instructor
disparaged the piece as sentimental slush (it probably was), and I
think that's when I stopped writing fiction, not to take it up again
for more than two decades.
About ten years ago I was doing some research in a local historical
society and came upon his high school yearbook. I opened it, and there
was he was, smiling as I remember him. I made a photocopy. I'm looking
at it now, on the anniversary of his death, and I'm remembering, with
great affection, a gentle young man whose brief care of me has never
been forgotten.
In
Memoriam