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Chapter 14. Mission Accomplished
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C h a p t e r 14 Mission Accomplished In a ceremony at the University of North Carolina in the spring of 1955, Jack received a diploma that proclaimed he had “fulfilled the requirements ” for a doctorate in philosophy. And if it seemed too cool a declaration for so hot an achievement, if the wording seemed too official for all the drama that had gone into it, it was nonetheless imparting something meaningful. It was saying that a gauzy fantasy had become solid reality. What had been a fantasy man in a tweed jacket with patches on the sleeves was now a flesh-and-blood one wearing a black academic robe and a hood that bore the blue of the University of North Carolina and the white of literature , and his sleeves were glowing with the three velvet chevrons that signified the doctorate. And so it was fantasy fulfilled: And fantasy fulfilled meant that the GI Bill had kept its promise to Jack and that Jack had kept his promise to the GI Bill. Franklin Delano Roosevelt could not have asked for more. Epilogue Jack took a job at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, soon became chairman of the freshman English program, and in no time had published a remedial English handbook called Basic Composition, which the publisher Prentice-Hall called “an indispensable book for these times.” At NC State, what Jack had realized was that he was now in the role of teacher to country boys going to college under the GI Bill who were woefully underprepared by their rural high schools. Feeling a brotherly responsibility to do better by them, he had written the book with those freshmen in mind. 248 Mission Accomplished (Having worked on the book with a Jewish colleague, Henry Rosenberg, and sharing with Henry the same sense of the ridiculous, they were soon calling it between themselves, The Jew Book for Southern Youth.) It was a very popular handbook that went into numerous printings, and Jack would say that its success meant that many state universities, and some private ones, were feeling the obligation to educate every veteran who chose to be educated , no matter how ill educated they had been. It was while we were in Raleigh that the race issue came off the back burner. It made its move in a surprising place—Montgomery, Alabama, the very same Montgomery, Alabama, whose racial attitudes I had so deplored. When we had lived there, those attitudes seemed encased in a shell as thick as the shellbark hickory nuts on our backyard tree in Union City. But there was a difference. Inside the nut of that shellbark hickory was meat as sweet as honey, and Montgomery had seemed to me as bitter on the inside as on the out. And yet, of all the cities in the South, Montgomery was the first to take the step to desegregation. The step was all about buses, actually about a very organized boycott of them. I thought back. Hadn’t buses figured in the plans being hatched in that black church in Montgomery? Hadn’t the women been talking about how the buses were the symbol of all that was wrong in their city, and hadn’t they thought about a boycott? I seem to have remembered that they had. So when racial discrimination in the South began to lose ground, would I be wrong to say that it started in the basement of a black church in Montgomery, Alabama? * * * In the sixties, we went back to Florida but now to Boca Raton, where Jack, as a professor of English, was dean of the College of Humanities at Florida Atlantic University, a new upper-level addition to the state university system . Once back in south Florida, we were able to pick up on those other GI Bill boys who had been with us in Gainesville and/or on the Suberman porch as we waited for deliverance. The family’s GI Bill boys had done well. Jack’s brother Irwin had found that Jewish engineers could find a place in the profession and eventually became a successful building contractor. Ruth’s husband, Phil Heckerling, who had all those shiny tools on the shelf to pick from, had added one to his accounting degree and it was the law. He found a way to practice both, and to teach at the University of Miami, and to establish the prestigious [54.227.136.157] Project MUSE (2024-03-19...