Was the day that my first piece appeared in print. I have not been out of it since.

I won’t go into long details about the career since then. (I was particularly obtuse and didn’t fully commit to writing as a profession until the winter of 1975, but that’s another story.)

But my career begins sitting on the grass of the Brown-Lupton Student Center.

On the lower left, or the Northwest corner. There were none of those nasty chiggers that we non-native Texans only found out about the hard way. It was a lovely warm autumn afternoon in the sun.

I was seated with my then-girlfriend, her roommate Linda from Albany near Abilene, Texas, Lexi, from Colorado Springs, Colorado, and Wendy from Puerto Rico — Wendy was blessed or cursed with a sunny personality and large breasts — and Wendy’s boyfriend du jour.

Minus the frog fountain

He was of middling height, slim, but not skinny, and he had walked onto the TCU freshman basketball team and made the team. Today, I’d say that he looked like a Spanish soccer player: That build about 6-foot tall. I cannot remember his name.

I do remember a few random falling leaves. There were several trees in that area, heading up to Jarvis Hall or down to Colby Hall. The Frog Fountain had already had one incidence of someone dumping colored RIT dye and dish soap into it once in the semester, but there were no giant purple bubbles present that day.

The Frog Fountain (installed 1969 upgraded 2007) today

He had just learned that TCU had cancelled the Freshman program: “not enough prospects,” read the press release.

There was much talk about how unfair this all was and finally someone said, someone needs to write a letter to the paper.

And the conversation turned to me: “Hart’s in honors English. HE could write it!”

I still remember the strangeness of that moment, because I wasn’t talking! They were making the decision WITHOUT me.

In the face of unanimous public opinion, I agreed.

And so I began the process I still follow to this very day:

I researched the question and forgot about it. I “composted” it and a couple of days later, the “egg timer” in my brain went off and I sat down and wrote the letter.

At that time, I refused to use either the typewriter my mother sent me to college with, nor to use cursive (pushing a rope to us left-handers — unless you want to write crab-handed) and I wrote it (and subsequent letters) in my printed version of small caps.

It wasn’t until I realized that I was going to be a writer as  a profession in the winter of 1975 that I learned how to type.

The TCU DAILY SKIFF was then, in its 72nd year of publishing*, as TCU was in its hundredth year of existence. Among its first editors was one Colby Dixon Hall, of whom my girlfriend’s dormitory was named.**

* [September 1902 to October 1973.]

** [Technically it is/was Colby Hall Dormitory, but everyone just calls it Colby Hall, instead of Hall Dorm, which is kind of redundant.]

However, at the time, it was in Rogers Hall, the FURTHEST hall on campus, and it took me a couple of days to get around to slipping it through the mail slot on the Daily Skiff’s door. Longer than it took to compose.

Volume 1 no. 2. — Vol. 1 No. 1 seems to have been lost.

But I remember getting up and pulling a copy from the bin next to Reed Hall on my way across University Drive for the obligatory 9 AM 3 hours of religion course.

I opened the paper, and staring back at me, for the first time,  were my own words.

Later that day, everybody was happy to see it, but the Freshman basketball program was already cancelled and a week later, Wendy was onto a new boyfriend with a new sport.

JV* basketball’s
last bounce

* [“JV” means “Junior Varsity” at this Univarsity (sic).]

Editor:
I am deeply sorry that TCU will have no JV basketball team this year. It really is a shame that the people who went out weren’t good enough for the coach.
As a young impressionable lad, I was told that the idea of athletics was to allow people to participate in organized competition, with capable coaching. However, as a disillusioned young man, I find that this is not so. It was the same “winning is everything” attitude that caused a Watergate to happen. It was this same perverted attitude that would not allow the United States to pull out of Vietnam.
Why can’t this coach allow a few interested players to have some fun, see some scenic beauty (like the Dallas Turnpike) and enjoy playing basketball?
Is it too much to ask that sport again become fun?
I wish that [TCU Head Basketball Coach] Johnny Swaim would think about that. Sports was never meant to be “an effete corps of impudent snobs, who characterize themselves as” sportsmen.

Hart Williams*
Freshman

* [NOTE: I had a different name at that time, but no need in confusing you further.]

There it is, in all of its grandiloquent glory.

This fellow died around 1977

A sign of the times, the other, longer letter was entitled “The Press and Mr. Agnew.” (Penned by a senior, it did NOT take the press’ side.) I was a sort of refutation to it. An excerpt:

Needless to say, the press did not take kindly to this criticism and they soon began their rampage of revenge. A revenge which culminated in Agnew’s resignation two weeks ago. For no matter what Agnew said in court, or anywhere else for that matter, he was not to be believed. And the press was particularly overzealous in bringing all the unproven “facts” before the American people. The Vice President didn’t stand a chance….

Sound familiar? Could have been written today. (All going back to Nixon’s 1962 California gubernatorial concession: “ … just think how much you’re going to be missing. You won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore. Because, gentlemen, this is my last press conference.“)

In one slice of one page, TCU in a nutshell.

Anyway, here’s a bit of the culture of that moment.

According to who you read this was the same week or day that Steve Miller’s “The Joker” album was released, along with the made-up word, “Pompatus.”

And Herbie Hancock’s Headhunters was released October 26. [More here]

And Quadrophenia was released on the 26th.

The Who’s “Quadrophenia” — a rock opera composed by guitarist Pete Townshend is turning 50 years old this week. The 17-song double album, released Oct. 26, 1973  …

The Who’s Quadrophenia

An ad in that issue of the paper

At any event, I kept writing letters, for my own reasons, and I am still writing. Fifty years later.

But I do always remember that I was ASKED to write, TO PROTEST AN INJUSTICE.

That was the seed of my writing career, not some deep vanity related to recognition.

And that’s my origin story.

It might have happened sooner, but I was detoured.

Here’s a little side story: I DID once try to write a short story, at home, my senior year in high school. I wrote long hand in a spiral-bound red notebook I’d purchased at GIBSON’S in Santa Fe. I didn’t know what to do with it, but I felt an urge to do it. So I began.

It was about a prisoner escaping from a Siberian gulag. It would be about his return to basic survival mode, and eventually escaping across the Bering strait to Alaska and freedom.

Funny thing to remember fifty years and then some later.

I came home one afternoon from Santa Fe High and my mother was holding that notebook up and shrieking: “IS THIS ABOUT ME? IS THIS ABOUT ME?!??”

“No, mom,” I said. “It’s not.”  (I wondered what kind of sickness was in her mind that first she’d go through my PERSONAL PAPERS and second that she’d instantly assume that they were about HER.)

I asked for my notebook back and she grudgingly handed it to me.

It wasn’t a thick spiral-bound, and I tore it in half, easily. Then I put it in the trash.

She looked at me with a strange mixture of horror and suspicion.

I didn’t say a word. She had broken something sacred between us and it would never return.

But I never attempted to write anything on my own in that house again.  Just like a cat who, having been forced through a small cat door, will NEVER use it again in its life, I put the red notebook into the trash and never thought of it again, until I was asked to write a letter to the student paper at TCU.

Fair Use: Small version for
illustrative purposes only

In 1987, Louis L’Amour wrote that story as Last of the Breed. It was much better than I’d have written.

An ad in that issue of the paper

The next day, my girlfriend and I, who would become my first wife, would not go to TCU stadium to watch the Frogs at the beginning of their infamous 0-22 streak. They would lose to the Tennessee Volunteers at Neyland Stadium 39-7.

Or: 7-39

Given the choice between football and writing, at TCU, I like to think I made the right choice.

Johnny Swaim and TCU basketball team didn’t fare much better. He was fired, and the few games I saw, it was apparent that the SouthWest Conference had no clue as to how the game was played. It was … terrible.

It is strange to me that, after all this time, the only thing that seems to remain of the old TCU is the Frog Fountain from 1969 (replaced in 2007). Four lotus flowers to remind them of education and us of impermanence.

Frog Fountain with the old Amon G. Carter Stadium
and Daniel-Meyer Coliseum — UNT Libraries Special Collections.

As for the letter? It seemed a bit sophomoric, yes. But then, I was only a freshman.

Courage.

cross posted from his vorpal sword