Fight Songs by Ed Southern

Author:Ed Southern
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Blair
Published: 2021-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

PART FOUR

THE GLORIES OF OUR HOUSE

12

BARBECUE WITH MISTER WAKE FOREST

THE UNIVERSITY POLICE STOPPED me at the gate, and asked me my business on campus. The college had shut down the week before, suspending in-person classes on all its sundry campuses, bringing students and faculty home from overseas. Over the weekend they had shut the gates that used to go down only overnight and posted guards in the gatehouses.

Wake Forest gated its Reynolda campus in 1996, the climax and culmination of a mid-decade safety campaign that began while I’d been a student. I had friends who were robbed, mugged, and in one case beaten badly enough to visit the emergency room, in the shady cut-throughs and late-night sidewalks of the campus we thought of as a cloister. The school added digital keycards to get into the residence halls, security lighting and emergency phones, a shuttle bus for a campus you could walk clean across in fifteen minutes, the gates and gatehouses.

Who could have imagined they’d someday use the gates against not pillagers, but a plague?

When the campus policeman asked me why I sought to pass through those gates, I told him I was taking lunch to a retired professor who lived off Faculty Drive, on one of the residential blocks adjacent to the academic campus. I could have told him I was taking barbecue to Mister Wake Forest, but he’d have thought I was either pranking him or bragging.

Edwin G. Wilson came to Wake Forest College, back when it was a little Baptist school north of Raleigh, in 1939, a sixteen-year-old freshman from Leaksville, North Carolina, a town now part of the larger town of Eden. Since then he’s left only to serve as a U.S. Navy officer in World War II and to earn his advanced degrees at Harvard. He’d followed the school west to Winston-Salem in 1956, served Wake Forest as professor of English, dean, and—when it became a university in 1967—its first and so far longest-serving provost. At ninety-seven he still possessed a remarkable memory for most every student he’d encountered, though a few years before he’d lamented to me that some names and faces were starting to slip from his grasp. I confessed my amazement at how many he’d always remembered, and he looked at me as if I’d suggested palming a few coins from the collection plate.

“If you can do it, you should,” he said, still teaching me lessons I long since should have learned, still summing up and embodying what was and always should be best about little ol’ Wake Forest.

He’d served for years as Wake Forest’s faculty representative both to the ACC and the NCAA, which delighted him, and even served a term as ACC president. He’d been on the court at the Greensboro Coliseum just after the Deacons beat Carolina in overtime to win the 1995 ACC Tournament. When Wake’s football team beat Georgia Tech in Charlotte for the 2006 ACC championship, he was there rolling the Quad with all the kids and local alums who hadn’t made it to the game.

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