to Princeton? Mr. Sheriff was candid—“I wish some way could be found to impress upon him the ridiculousness of his present attitude. He seems to be quite contented to be a featherweight and a buffoon when he might well be intellectually in the van”—and Princeton thought he’d be better off in some other college’s van.
Well, what place
would
have him? One, at least, the classic catchall for sun-struck, rich dumbbells, the University of Miami. Duke entered in the fall of 1928, Miami’s third year as an institution, and right away he was in trouble. Enrolled in seven courses his first semester—three of them in literature, the others Spanish, French, history and economics—he flunked them all—or rather he was obliged to withdraw from them “on account non-attendance classes” in the registrar’s abbreviated style. He managed to exceed even Miami’s liberal notion of fit deportment: my father and some half dozen friends occupied apartments in an off-campus building, where their activities soon scandalized community proprieties, to the extent that the college president, B. F. Ashe, afterwarning the scholars that it was “entirely improper” to entertain “young women” in their rooms, sacked my father and three of his friends on the first day of 1929.
Eight weeks later President Ashe was again at his typewriter, this time assuring Miami’s chief of police that Duke and his accomplices, “who did not conduct themselves in a proper fashion,” had no association with his college. The president had been made fretful by word that “these boys are still in town” and by “reports, which may be exaggerated, about their actions.”
The reports were not exaggerated. My father did his first overnight in jail in Miami, for setting off fire alarms, driving drunk in his Chrysler convertible (a gift from The Doctor to celebrate Duke’s admission to Miami) and being a “public nuisance.” While The Doctor and my grandmother were spending a year in Europe, my father remained in Florida. When he wasn’t up to mischief he swam with Buster Crabbe and Johnny Weismuller in an aquatic circus, playing exhibition matches of water polo. He also speculated in racing greyhounds: my father’s ran fast as dogs went, but slower than other greyhounds.
When his parents returned from Europe, Duke, twenty-one, allowed himself to be brought home to Hartford. On the night of the Wolff family reunion my father drove his Chrysler along a sidewalk, and brought it to rest with its grille poking about eighteen inches through an Elm Street shop window. He lived at home the next two years, and what that was like for his parents and for him may be imagined.
During this time Duke began to read with a consuming appetite, which he never satisfied. His first love was French and English fiction of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but he also took up the work of Joyce and Williams and Eliot and Stein and Hemingway; his sense of them as belonging to him in a comfortable way was not the least of his legacies to me.
In late 1930 he had another go at formal education. To paper over his Florida disgraces he or someone got a family friend at G. Fox & Co., Hartford’s best department store, to write
To Whom It May Concern
that during the exact period of his stay in Miami “Mr. Arthur Wolff has been in the employ of this Corporation.I am pleased to say that he has been most industrious, and shown great application to his work. He is leaving of his own accord.” This was signed, putatively, by Moses Fox, President. The letter accompanied my father’s application to the University of Pennsylvania.
He was not admitted to the university proper but to a program taught by its regular faculty called College Courses for Teachers. He matriculated in January of 1931, enrolled in seven courses. Six of these were divided between English and history, and he received credits (and mediocre grades) in four. The seventh course was in philosophy.
Well, what place
would
have him? One, at least, the classic catchall for sun-struck, rich dumbbells, the University of Miami. Duke entered in the fall of 1928, Miami’s third year as an institution, and right away he was in trouble. Enrolled in seven courses his first semester—three of them in literature, the others Spanish, French, history and economics—he flunked them all—or rather he was obliged to withdraw from them “on account non-attendance classes” in the registrar’s abbreviated style. He managed to exceed even Miami’s liberal notion of fit deportment: my father and some half dozen friends occupied apartments in an off-campus building, where their activities soon scandalized community proprieties, to the extent that the college president, B. F. Ashe, afterwarning the scholars that it was “entirely improper” to entertain “young women” in their rooms, sacked my father and three of his friends on the first day of 1929.
Eight weeks later President Ashe was again at his typewriter, this time assuring Miami’s chief of police that Duke and his accomplices, “who did not conduct themselves in a proper fashion,” had no association with his college. The president had been made fretful by word that “these boys are still in town” and by “reports, which may be exaggerated, about their actions.”
The reports were not exaggerated. My father did his first overnight in jail in Miami, for setting off fire alarms, driving drunk in his Chrysler convertible (a gift from The Doctor to celebrate Duke’s admission to Miami) and being a “public nuisance.” While The Doctor and my grandmother were spending a year in Europe, my father remained in Florida. When he wasn’t up to mischief he swam with Buster Crabbe and Johnny Weismuller in an aquatic circus, playing exhibition matches of water polo. He also speculated in racing greyhounds: my father’s ran fast as dogs went, but slower than other greyhounds.
When his parents returned from Europe, Duke, twenty-one, allowed himself to be brought home to Hartford. On the night of the Wolff family reunion my father drove his Chrysler along a sidewalk, and brought it to rest with its grille poking about eighteen inches through an Elm Street shop window. He lived at home the next two years, and what that was like for his parents and for him may be imagined.
During this time Duke began to read with a consuming appetite, which he never satisfied. His first love was French and English fiction of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but he also took up the work of Joyce and Williams and Eliot and Stein and Hemingway; his sense of them as belonging to him in a comfortable way was not the least of his legacies to me.
In late 1930 he had another go at formal education. To paper over his Florida disgraces he or someone got a family friend at G. Fox & Co., Hartford’s best department store, to write
To Whom It May Concern
that during the exact period of his stay in Miami “Mr. Arthur Wolff has been in the employ of this Corporation.I am pleased to say that he has been most industrious, and shown great application to his work. He is leaving of his own accord.” This was signed, putatively, by Moses Fox, President. The letter accompanied my father’s application to the University of Pennsylvania.
He was not admitted to the university proper but to a program taught by its regular faculty called College Courses for Teachers. He matriculated in January of 1931, enrolled in seven courses. Six of these were divided between English and history, and he received credits (and mediocre grades) in four. The seventh course was in philosophy.
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