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000 Widening Horizons ONE 0 F my high school teachers had sold me on the idea of going to a business school. Business schools were in their first flush of popularity then; they were new. As the University of Illinois had the outstanding one in the Midwest at that time, I chose to go to Champaign. Other considerations such as fees and transportation did not loom large. Out-of-state fees were low enough to be of little comparative consequence in those days, and I could go by train to Champaign from either Crawfordsville or Jamestown. The summer before I left for college I had traveled to Whitestown daily to run a little country bank that had been organized there in opposition to the established bank. My income was rather good for a teenager, and in four months I had saved quite a bit of money for college. Later, at the end of my sophomore year in college, the bank offered me a permanent job at two-hundred dollars a month, which to me seemed like so much money that I tried to persuade my father to let me leave college to accept the job. In those days even college graduates were not being paid as much as that on their first jobs. My father was unyielding. A friend from Lebanon, Paul Fletcher, went to Illinois with me. We found a room with a family named Keller. There were few if any dormitories then, and people with large houses and a spare room or two customarily rented their extra space to students. The Kellers had a daughter and two sons, one of whom later became a prominent judge, following in his father's footsteps, but when we lived with them Mr. Keller was a court reporter. The Kellers treated Paul and me and another freshman roomer, from Illinois, like members of their family. Even so, I was wretchedly homesick. The campus was large, impersonal, and a little stifling to me. Social life was dominated by the Chicago crowd. Paul and I knew [29] 30 PREPARATION FOR THE PRESIDENCY no one at Illinois when we went there, we ate in student hangouts and restaurants bordering the campus, and the friendships we made were with students in our classes, as lost as we were. My circle of acquaintances was somewhat enlarged by two activities I entered: I tried out successfully for the concert band, and I served on the staff of the Daily Illini, in time being placed in charge of its advertising copy desk. The director of the band, A. A. Harding, . had already won recognition for his masterly direction and later he became famous. I valued my work with him and maintained contact with him for many years afterward. In midyear I was invited to join a fraternity, but by that time I had determined to leave Illinois and I thought it inappropriate to pledge there. Paul and I rather regularly attended programs and meetings at the Wesley Foundation. It was the leading campus religious group at Illinois and was the most successful of the Wesley Foundations nationally. The Foundation and the Methodist church are located right on the campus. It was very much a university church, a beautiful structure, and later attracted the fine young minister, Benjamin Garrison, to it from the Methodist church here in Bloomington. Athletics were an important part of campus life-football games attracted huge crowds-but my participation was limited to the band. I had come to Illinois with keen awareness of the longtime effort my parents had made to enable me to have a college education and of the high expectations my father held for my success. The desire not to disappoint him and to prove worthy of their struggle for me, intensified by freshman qualms, probably made me a more serious student than some who came to the university with the idea that football was inseparable from collegiate life. I was extraordinarily lucky to have, as a mere freshman, four professors who were among the most noted Illinois had in its commerce college. Charles Thompson, the dean, was a dynamic, driving individual who brought the college along rapidly and demonstrated his business skills by amassing large landholdings on the side. Ernest L. Bogart, a Princeton man who had taught at Indiana University at the turn of the century, was my teacher in beginning economics. He was distinguished in appearance, sported" a goatee, and dressed rather formally in the manner of professors of...

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