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battered Ford, and when we returned the house was dark. He could study. And passed, despite the curve. Frank's father was an economist at Fairleigh Dickinson University and had served as a Fulbright Professor in West Africa; Frank accidentally shot a youngster when he himself was but fifteen and avoided scandal, in part, because of diplomatic immunity. He was also a brainy guy who felt a compulsion to entertain his classmates and fellow teammates with minstrel antics of the worst kind, and I reminded him I would not go out in public with him if he didn't change his demeanor. And Frank from New Jersey, shaming his ancestors. I left Iowa City by train in freezing rain with a paid ticket to fly to L.A. unused in my pocket. I left as soon as I could gather my effects, give away blankets to Oliver Jackson, send home my records and books. I was sick with the flu but I had learned legions of what the anthropologists called the Useless Curiosity, the gathering ofmeaningless facts for future application. What were these? I knew I had missed much by not investigating Mrs. Lemme's. I knew I had learned very little in L.A. during the early 195os. In civics class, in 1954, at Dorsey High, I remember no discussion of the Supreme Court decision of Earl Warren; in Latin, the teacher forbade me reading aloud. At L.A. City College, a Dr. Bell had whispered to me I should not try to master the microscope - we were studying nematodes - I was not going to be admitted to medical school, this by a Ph.D. from Berkeley. When you are surrounded by Ph.D.'s in airmail in the post office, unable to find jobs except working for the government, you alter your expectation, or you bide your time. I saw the best football game of my youth on television, with Calvin Jones from Iowa beating Jim Parker from Ohio State. I was a senior in high school and this was the first football game which focused my attention exclusively on line play. Jones was a threetime All American at Iowa, a legend among the black recruits in the 1950S as Emlen Tunnell had been a legend in the 1940s. This tradition was important to me, workshop or no workshop. Jones was later killed in a plane crash en route to an all-star game in Canada, and the black players took his loss personally, particularly 84 P A U LEN G L E, IMP RES A RIO Al Hinton, who later went on welfare in Iowa before graduating. Hinton hosted my return to complete my master's while living in Black's Paradise, a set of rooms owned by the largest landlord in Iowa City. Welfare, Iowa-style, was one hundred pounds of sugar, one hundred pounds of flour. Hinton was also a painter. Hinton would whisper to me, at 20 W. Harrison, that he needed someone to teach him to draw, that no one took him seriously as an artist, that he wanted to go to graduate school in painting. So I spoke to Oliver Jackson, from St. Louis, whom I'd met late in August 1961. I was returning from my lifeguard duty in L.A. and was strolling down Iowa Avenue trying to find an apartment when a figure came into view on the opposite side of the street; the figure crossed to my side in midblock, and before I could ignore him he chanted, "Don't ignore me; I've been waiting for you all summer; where you from?" Two grown black men, on the streets of Iowa City, both graduate students-Jackson was in the M.F.A. painting program-was a public event at the time. Jackson and I became fast friends. Jackson was a draftsman who painted on a huge scale; I helped carry his canvases to student exhibitions. We were almost stopped once in broad daylight for stealing. We went to free movies on Sunday night on the campus, and the best movie I saw in that year was A Raisin in the Sun, which catapulted our spirits beyond the possible . Jackson's expertise ran the gamut from Beethoven to Charlie Parker, and he would drag me along to the art library where he would peruse the oversized art books of the masters, turning the pages so quickly they were a blur. He had total photographic recall of these plates...

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