BOWEAVER'S DAY AT COLLEGE
© 2000 James David Pearce
Roy Parker, brother of Boweaver's boss at the print shop, graduated from college a couple of times back before the First World War. His scholarly enterprise earned him a pair of capital letters behind his name, which forever after he was wont to use when signing something because he thought they balanced well against the two initials up front.
After the trouble started again with the Germans ~ the Second World War ~ places like Roy's old alma mater gradually began to experience a shortage of brainier and physically able teachers ~ professors, they called them ~ because the intensity of the selective service system at the time wasn't making too much distinction between them and the young folks they were supposed to teach.
The situation was leaving a lot of girls and other military service-evaders hanging around campuses waiting to be educated, but the schools ~ having reached their professorial peaks in male-dominated eras ~ weren't in a position to provide a whole lot of draft-exempt gray matter to attend to the task.
North Carolina's fortunate flagship university looked around and their eyes fell on old alumnus Roy, who was piddling around at his brother's newspaper, could still walk, and was far too old for the draft.
They enlisted his services for the duration ~ to come west to UNC and teach aspiring young folks about newspaper work ~ "journalism," they called it.
After a year or so in front of the classroom, Roy began to run out of things to say.
And in early 1944, when it was nearing time for him to bid farewell to a class getting ready to turn its tassels, he hit on an idea.
He thought it would be amusing to bring Boweaver, 16 years old at the time, up from his brother's weekly newspaper shop for at least one college class, and let him tell the young journalists how things really were in newspaper offices.
Boweaver, with little choice in the matter, spent part of a day in class but didn't find it amusing.
Almost certainly, the senior journalism students didn't find it amusing, and eventually, even the substitute professor himself decided it hadn't been so amusing.
After hearing Boweaver's take on things in print, most of the graduating class started to look around for another way to make a living. Some of the males even decided to submit quietly to the draft, which they had been dodging for the past three years.
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