Re: [Mgdln] you have got to be kidding

[Louie Crew <lcrew@andromeda.rutgers.edu>]

> If I had a child considering Baylor, they would no longer
> be considering that institution. Thank God I do not.

While I was at Baylor (B.A. class of 1958), Baylor gave an honorary
doctorate to Cecil B. DeMille for his movie "Ten Commandments."   Some of us
speculated that next Baylor would honor Liberace with one in music.

In the 1930s, Sinclair Lewis was a guest speaker at Baylor.   Afterwards, he
described Waco as "a totem pole surrounded by Baptists."  The town had only
one tall building then.

When Amy Lowell spoke there, trustees busily rearranged the chairs so that
the trustees could not see her smoking a cigar.  Few heard what she had to
say.

William Cowper Brann (1855-1898), a Waco journalist "known for the
articulate savagery of his writing" (Wikipedia)  once said, "It takes a
Baylor professor more effort to write a sentence than it takes most farmers
to plow an acre of corn" (quoted in BRANN THE ICONOCLAST).   Brann
frequently earned the scorn of Baylor loyalists by attacking the promiscuity
of the students.  Brann's tombstone in one of the local cemeteries, is
marred a bullet hole.  A few of us dissident English majors occasionally
gathered at that site to read Shelley and Keats.

The Dean of Women during my time at Baylor had gone to another Baptist
college with my mother.    She told Mother that Baylor led the nation in the
number of females sent home pregnant.   Chaucer would have had a field day
telling how young ministerial students persuaded their dates that they were
the Holy Ghost.    They came from sheltered homes and were especially
vulnerable to believe whatever ministers said.

I attended a confirmation class at Grace in Newark today just to sample what
the rector is teaching them.   One of the members of the class described
himself as a "recovering Baptist."   He's 30 years younger than I, and
survived growing up gay in  First Baptist in Dallas, where he came out at
14.  Whew!   I remember as a Baylor freshman driving to Dallas to hear W. A.
Criswell, a legendary preacher (and bigot) in the 1954.      Meeting this
man in the confirmation class lifted my heart knowing that we both  escaped
the Baptists with so great a salvation!

Louie


Louie Crew, 377 S. Harrison St., 12D, East Orange, NJ 07018 973-395-1068
http://queereye4lectionary.blogspot.com/  Queer Eye for the Lectionary

    We make his love too narrow
    By false limits of our own
    And we magnify his strictness
    With zeal he will not own.

         -- Frederick William Faber