State

College Days With Tom Wolfe Recollections that start at a Durham print shop and continue on through Harvard. The following "memo” cover¬ ing an acquaintance of about four years was written in 1963 at the request of author Andrew Turnbull, who was preparing his notable biography of the famed Tar Heel writer (Scribner’s, 1967), and had asked Mr. Bras¬ well (a Florida attorney) and others to search their memories for details about Tom Wolfe. Much of the information here has already been published, and a number of quotes and para¬ phrases are to be found in Turnbull’s book. Nevertheless, we think many subscribers will read this first-person account with much interest, reproduced from a carbon of Mr. Braswell's original memorandum with his permission. — ED. Since I last saw and talked with him a little more than fifty years ago. it is difficult to reconstruct — even in my own mind — an entirely satisfactory image of Thomas Wolfe. Indeed, it is impossible to do so at all. apart from a certain frame of reference consisting of the time (1919-1923). which coincided with our own late teens and early twen¬ ties and the North Carolina back¬ ground that we then shared. My earliest recollection of him cen¬ ters around a printshop in Durham. N.C., called Seeman Printery. which had the distinction of producing both the “Carolina Tar Heel." weekly stu¬ dent newspaper at Chapel Hill, and the “Trinity Chronicle.” its opposite number on the campus of Trinity Col¬ lege (now Duke University) at Durham. It was in the Spring of 1919, just after War I. when Tom was. I be¬ lieve. managing editor of the “Tar Heel,'' and 1 a member of the "Chronicle" stafT. As 1 recall, we went to press a day later than the “Tar Heel." but it was pan of my job to get all of our copy in before the shop closed on the day preceding its publi¬ cation. which, of course, was the dead¬ line date for the "Tar Heel." The Tardy Editor Thus the stage is set for what came By И. A. BRASWELL to be almost a routine weekly perfor¬ mance: all is serene until suddenly the front door is flung open and a young giant strides forward into the press room, his arms full of papers of varying sizes and shapes and his pockets bulg¬ ing with more of the same. He is out of breath, for after riding a bus over the twelve miles of winding, mostly-un- paved road from "the Hill." he has walked or run at least three blocks from the bus station to the printery. Sweat pours from his head and face and mats the over-long raven-black hair. Yet he grins and produces, miraculously, from the folds of his ample garments, a large, usually soiled handkerchief, mops his streaming brow, waves a cheery greeting to his brethren of the working press and promptly starts a running line of banter as to why he is just a wee bit late with his stuff and why that "Chronic-Ill" couldn't just as well wait another week since it never contained anything worth a damn anyway: "Hi. Buck" (my nickname). "1 didn't see you over there." And so began an enjoyable ac¬ quaintance. lasting a year or so while we both completed our undergraduate Bock row, lolleil men •> Thomoi Wolfe in this group, cut from о lorger group photo of the Golden fleece — U.N.C. honor tociety — token in 1 920 by Nothon G. Gooding, of New Bern (tee "The State,” Jon. 1, 1972). The fellow directly in front of Tom, by the woy, it Fronk Porter Grohom ond the mon in the cop it univenity pretident Horry W. Chote. Token the tome year, Wolfe't tenior clatt photo ot it oppeored in "The Yockety Yock” it on the follow- mg роде. stints with the Class of ’20 at our re¬ spective schools. During that time 1 came to know him fairly well, not only from these contacts at the printshop but by reputation as well, for the two student bodies were not so large in those days, and Tom was a big man (physically and otherwise) on the Carolina campus. He had by then firmly established his fame as a writer and producer of plays (with Professor Koch’s Playmakcrs) and as a prodi¬ gious contributor of various materials, both serious and humorous, to his uni¬ versity newspaper and magazines. In short, the man was already something of a legend on the Carolina scene — a sort of Tar Heel Paul Bunyan in the realm of letters. Tarheels At Harvard Normally, this brief association would have been the end of our ac¬ quaintance. but the long arm of coinci¬ dence brought us both to Harvard in the fall of 1920. along with several of our erstwhile classmates of Chapel Hill and Durham. Those most intimate with him were Albert Coates. William Polk and T. Skinner Kittrell from "the Hill." and Ney Evans. Jack Kindley and myself from Trinity. All of us ex¬ cept Tom were enrolled in the Law School. Tom. of course, was in the Graduate School, specializing, so far as he was permitted to do. in Dr. Baker's famous 47 Workshop, where he hoped to write and produce more plays. Also in Cambridge at the same time was Clement Eaton, a former classmate of Tom's at Carolina, who. as I remember, was doing graduate work in history. Coates and Polk had rooms for a time in the same home where Tom occupied an attic cubicle during that first year. Boarding ar¬ rangements were widely diffused but practically the entire Law School dele¬ gation from North Carolina shared (with a fair sprinkling of men from other states) one of those long refec¬ tory tables in Memorial Hall, then still serving as a university dining facility. Big Fellow 1 mention these details merely to show that the North Carolina orienta- TME STATE. NOVEMBER 1976 23