It was conducted in the Show and Tell Room of MSU’s Media Centre, which doubles as a nondenominational campus chapel until the enormous projected new Hall of All Faiths shall have been raised. So declared the nervous young university chaplain, a new appointee, over the newly installed super-quadraphonic public-address system, out from which the new audiovisual crew had not yet got all the bugs. It also served, he said, this sad convocation, as mournful prelude to a more positive spiritual programme: the new series of “Sunday Raps” to be held every Sabbath morn of the regular semester, commencing with a jazz-rock orientation rap a week hence (tomorrow). Marshyhope’s first president, he was (wrongly) confident, would be pleased. And now, himself not having been fortunate enough to know President Morgan personally, he would relinquish the mike to our current chief executive, who would, so to speak, emcee the rest of the show.
I had slipped in intentionally late, not to have to suffer the condolences of John Schott & Co. or to deal, if I could avoid dealing, with Marsha Blank Mensch Horner, who I feared might be present. From a back seat in the S & T Room I saw that she was: as whacked-out-appearing as her bridegroom, but with a restored grimness of eye and jaw that evoked my image of the Marsha Primordial — and gave me to wonder once again why A. had ever married her. Horner looked paralysed with terror at being off the premises of the Remobilisation Farm; very possibly he was. There were two long-haired, grave-faced young men I took to be Joe’s sons; there was Jane Mack, impassive and apparently alone, her son Drew likewise, and Todd Andrews, looking utterly spent; there was A. B. Cook, who managed an expression somehow both grave and whimsical. Many strangers to me were present as well — representatives, I learned after, of Wicomico State College and the Maryland Historical Society.
Oh, John. Chaplain Beille wound up his introduction with an uncertain comparison of Joe Morgan to the late Bishop James Pike, whose body had that day been found in the desert near the Dead Sea: both men were, well, Seekers, whose Search, um, had led them down Unconventional and Uncharted Paths, but, uh. John Schott took the podium, to Miss Stickles’s scarcely suppressed applause. With what my fiancé would later describe as Extreme Unctuousness, he spoke of having first hired Young Morgan at Wicomico in 1952; of having watched him “make a comeback” from the tragic loss of his wife in ’53 to his brilliant directorship of the historical society, thence to the first presidency of Tidewater Technical College and the supervision of its growth to Marshyhope State College and Marshyhope State
Now Schott’s tone grew solemn. It was no secret that he and “Joe” had differed on many issues. But no one had regretted more than himself his worthy adversary’s departure from MSUC, on the very eve of its becoming MSU! It was a tragedy that the final year in the life of his protégé, as one might well call Morgan, had been as cloaked in obscurity as Bishop Pike’s: both of them, in Schott’s view, Casualties of Our Times! But whatever the contents of that tragic last chapter, it was ended: Joe was with his beloved wife now, on the Eastern Shore he cared so much for; and Schott knew in his heart that whatever his predecessor’s reservations about the Tower of Truth, there was no better loser than Joseph Patterson Morgan! He Schott had wanted him with us at the tower’s dedication, three weeks hence; he knew that Joe would give that edifice and Marshyhope his blessing, from Heaven!
He closed with an equally exclamatory and unbecoming pitch for his own administration: skyrocketing enrollment figures, the massive building program, the great news (which he had been saving for the first university convocation on Monday the 15th, but could not resist leaking to us now) that approval was “all but finalized” in Annapolis for a seven-year plan to make MSU a proper City of Learning by 1976, perhaps even larger than the state’s current main campus at College Park! Morgan had hoped for 7,000 students: how gratified he would be at the prospect of 17,000, 27,000, eventually perhaps twice that number!
