Bull Remembered

From: Jeff Smith

Robbie (I never did come round to the latter-day convention of calling him “Bully”) was truly my Oldest and Dearest friend. We met at Emory University as penny-poor students, living in a ramshackle V-12 barracks that had been converted into a makeshift dorm to accommodate the flood of veterans returning to college after the war. He was already a sophisticated graduate student while I was still working toward my first degree, but somehow we became friends despite differences in age, educational background, and academic interests. We both had funny accents, of course, that under different circumstances might have drawn us together, but no one at Emory in 1950 would have noticed that.

Our paths never crossed during the school day, but we started almost every morning together by hiking across the railroad tracks to the student cafeteria where we each unfailingly had a single Krispy Kreme donut and coffee. An important part of this ritual was the pooling of our meager resources to buy a copy of the Atlanta Constitution and working jointly to complete its daily crossword puzzle. That was well before the disciplined enlightenment brought to crosswords by Will Shortz, so we became experts on the esne, etui, erse, and erne that were the clichéd stock of the day. I’ve been hooked on crosswords ever since, and I never see a weary clue like  “Greek marketplace” or “Philippine buffalo”  without thinking about those golden mornings when they still sounded fresh to both of us.

At night after homework had run its course, we would often meet again on the wooden front steps of the barracks to escape the mind-numbing heat of our tiny cubicles and swap stories of the day. On weekends we washed our socks in adjacent basins of the bathroom. (”Must ‘Lux’ out some of my nicer things,” was the way Robbie put it.) I have no idea what we talked about. To my best recollection we never shared a serious meal, movie, concert or home visit. We never played a game of cards, double-dated or had a beer. Neither of us could have guessed that the unremarkable exchanges that did pass between us would form the basis for a lifelong, treasured friendship.

There’s a lot more to the story, but the key thing is that we did eventually end up living in nearby states with compatible spouses and children who enjoyed each others’ company. The trip from Kalamazoo to St. Charles became a familiar one for both Smiths and Bullens, and we spent many holidays together in the company of our Midwestern family. Up until his very last days, he continued to worry about our children, “the Other Andrew” and “Baby Meggie,” as if they were his own.

Like all of us visiting this site I learned a lot from Robbie over the years, but nothing more valuable than his pronouncement that every civilized family must own an unabridged dictionary and a one-volume encyclopedia. And, of course, “Always look-up!”

Goodbye, O&D. You will be missed, and I really mean it.