eventually to take it over. At the time it sounded like a good thing to do. And so I’ve been here ever since, for twenty years and more, trying once a week to get out a small-town newspaper for the edification and entertainment of the local populace, if not for the profit and remuneration of its editor and publisher: the Holt Mercury .
But that was later. In the fall of 1960 I was in college. And so was Jack Burdette. For a while yet.
After I’d arrived in Boulder and moved into the dorm I’d still see him occasionally. He’d be on campus with some of the others, big muscular kids wearing athletic tee shirts, filling up the sidewalk coming toward you or occupying a table with some of those good-looking long-legged sorority girls, all of them loud and joking, in the University Memorial Center. But I didn’t see him very often and we didn’t have much to do with one another then.
He was living in Baker, one of the other dormitories. It was like all of the buildings at the university, constructed of flagstone and brick and red tile. For it was a pretty campus, one of the most beautiful in all of this Rocky Mountain region, with the abrupt sides of the Flatirons standing up at the start of the mountains just above town, and on the campus itself the big trees and the old evergreens and all the red-tiled buildings, with still sufficient space between them so that you didn’t feel stifled or closed in by the mass of stone or the press of trees. It was a good place for someone like me to be. Boulder—and living with Fliegelman—opened my eyes.
But none of that was true for Jack. He wasn’t there long enough. Not that he would have allowed his vision to have been changed appreciably even if he had been. But he didn’t get the chance. Within a month after school started he got into trouble. The trouble had to do with a radio.
I first heard about it—or knew about it, that is—when I saw the article in the Colorado Daily . They ran it in a little box on the second page. The article said that another freshman named Curtis Harris had brought charges against Jack and that the student judiciary would convene on Friday to hear the case. The article appeared on Tuesday morning. After reading it I went over to Baker to see if I could find Jack in his dorm room. His roommate, another football player, said he didn’t know where Jack was; he was probably watching TV.
“But doesn’t he have classes?” I said. “It’s the middle of the morning.”
“What classes?” he said. “Jack doesn’t go to classes.”
“You mean today?”
“I mean any day. He hasn’t been to a class in three weeks. He’s going to get in trouble.”
“He’s already in trouble,” I said.
The guy studied me for a moment. “What’s that to you? You know him, or something?”
“I know him,” I said. “And they should have given Wanda Jo Evans a scholarship too if they expected Jack to go to class.”
“Who’s she?”
“You wouldn’t know her.”
“I know some girls.”
“But you wouldn’t know her. Anyway where’s this TV Jack might be watching?”
“Downstairs. Only I don’t know if he’s even there. I’m not his keeper.”
“I’ll go see if I can find him,” I said.
I went back downstairs.
After looking around for a few minutes I found Jack in one of the rooms next to the dormitory lounge. The door was shut. He was the only person in the room and he was lying on a sofa in his blue jeans and gray tee shirt. He was watching a game show on the black-and-white television and his feet were sticking out over the end of the sofa. When I sat down near him he looked over at me and then turned back to the TV.
“Jack,” I said. “How’s it going?”
“I can’t complain.”
“That’s good,” I said. “But what do you think will happen?”
“About what?”
“About this radio you took.”
“How’d you hear about that? You been talking to somebody?”
“It was in the student paper this morning. I came