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3 APartySchool The college experience often occurs as a defining event in the lives of American youth. This was perhaps even more so in the middle and late sixties for rural and small-town kids who came to large, state-supported universities. Kenny Kays’ sojourn at Southern Illinois University certainly had much to do with his own later decisions and actions regarding the war in Vietnam. Looking at this aspect of Kays’ life also brings sharper focus to our nation’s struggle at home regarding our involvement in southeast Asia. But to understand Kays’ experiences at Carbondale from 1967 to 1969, one must also examine the legend of Delyte Morris, who, like the Shelton boys and Arlie Pate, represented yet another southern Illinois original. Morris came by his southern Illinois ways naturally. His parents began their married life in a one-room log cabin with a lean-to just outside the tiny village of Xenia, a few miles northwest of Ken Kays’ community of Fairfield. Southern Illinois folklore insisted that a child named after a deceased person would die young, so when an earlier son named after a deceased relative died in an accident, the superstitions Lillie Morris made up completely one-of-a-kind names, Lossie and Delyte, for her next two children. There on a hardscrabble southern Illinois farm, the two Morris boys labored daily to feed livestock and milk fifteen cows.1 Delyte Morris’s hard upbringing eventually paid off. Though it was the middle of the Great Depression, the tough and determined young man, with strong support from his parents, earned a Ph.D. from the University of Iowa. By 1945, Morris had been considered for the presidency of Southern Illinois University, but he failed to get the approval because Chester Lay had better qualifications. Fate, however, intervened. In August of 1948, as Delyte Morris labored to build an outdoor privy at a summer cottage in Maine, he received word from Carbondale, Illinois, that President Lay had resigned. Morris accepted an invitation to take the vacated position, and he would later preside over the longest and largest expansion in the A Party School | 29 university’s history. Unfortunately, like Ken Kays, Morris was destined to become something of a tragic figure. For a brief time fate would throw the two southern Illinois natives together. The new university president clearly understood the uniqueness of “Little Egypt” and the need of the region to have a large state school. In his 1949 inaugural address, Morris noted, “In our location at the southern end of a northern state with a geography, climate, a population, a folklore, an economy, and an agriculture more South than North, there is need for the development of a program to fit the regional characteristics of the area to be served.”2 Words, however, could not conceal the daunting task the novice administrator faced. The southern part of the state had long been neglected by the political power brokers at Springfield and Chicago, especially regarding education. Morris was more than up to the task. Baker Brownell, who himself was lured away from Northwestern University in the 1950s to take a faculty position at SIU, once dubbed the Carbondale school “Delyte’s new suitcase college.” In the late fifties, Brownell noted the sudden explosive expansion of the school. “For more than eighty years the roots of Southern Illinois University have been quietly searching the stubborn soil. Now, suddenly, this state university has begun an unexampled growth. This huge educational bulge down state helps to confirm the claim that sad, burned-over, impoverished land between the rivers has vast American potentialities.” Brownell laid the reasons for the once-struggling school’s success directly at Delyte Morris’s feet. “This suitcase college,” declared Brownell, was without a doubt Morris’s doing and was “clearly the liveliest thing in southern Illinois.”3 Many now called the once-struggling institution Little Egypt’s Cinderella school. Applying what one biographer called “warm paternalism,” Morris soon became immensely popular on campus. One observer of college life in Carbondale in the 1950s remembered Morris and his wife, Dorothy, frequently walking or riding bicycles around campus in the evenings. At such times Morris stopped students and talked with them, “often not identifying himself but simply striking a conversation along some line of their reflection on their being on campus. Also, especially in these years, he frequented the halls of classroom buildings. It was not at all unusual, if one were working in a departmental...

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