VII
Also, I remember vividly Professor Hunt, who taught us freehand drawing, mechanical drawing, and perspective. A lean gentleman with a black mustache and a fierce tongue, he suffered agonies from bores. You may believe that in our class we had many; and foreigners struggling with English were also a trial to him. I recall a dumb Russian by the name of Vilkomirsson; he would gaze long and yearningly, and at last blurt out some question that would cause the class to titter. In perspective it is customary to indicate certain points by their initials; the only one I recall now is “V.P.,” which means “vanishing point.” The poor foreigner could never get these abbreviations straight, and he would take a seat right in front of the professor in the hope of being able to ask help without disturbing the rest of the class. “Professor, I don’t understand what you mean when you say that the V.P. is six inches away.” “Mr. Vilkomirsson,” demanded the exasperated teacher, “if I were to tell you that the D.F. is six feet away, what would you understand me to mean?”
Our freehand drawing was done in a large studio with plaster casts all around the room. We took a drawing board and fastened a sheet of paper to it, and with a piece of charcoal proceeded to make the best possible representation of one of the casts; Professor Hunt in the meantime roamed about the room like a tiger at large, taking a swipe with his sharp claws at this or that helpless victim. That our efforts at “free” art were not uniformly successful you may judge from verses that I contributed to our college paper portraying the agony of mind of a subfreshman who, forgetting what he was drawing, took his partly completed work from the rack and wandered up and down in front of a row of plaster casts, exclaiming: “Good gracious, is it Juno, or King Henry of Navarre?”
I contributed a number of verses and jokes to this college paper and to a class annual that we got up. I have some of them still in my head, and will set down the sad story of “an imaginative poet” who
Came to C.C.N.Y.
Dreaming of nature’s beauty
And the glories of the sky.
He learned that stars are hydrogen,
The comets made of gas;
That Jupiter and Venus
In elliptic orbits pass.
He learned that the painted rainbow,
God’s promise, as poets feign,
Is transverse oscillations
Turning somersaults in rain.
And so on to the sorrowful climax:
His poetry now is ruined,
His metaphors, of course;
He’s trying to square the circle
And to find the five-toed horse.
I will relate one other incident of these early days, in which you may see how the child is father to the man. The crowding in our ramshackle old school building had become a scandal, and an effort was under way to persuade the legislature to vote funds for new buildings uptown. No easy matter to persuade politicians to take an interest in anything so remote as higher education! We students were asked to circulate petitions, to be signed by voters; and I, in an excess of loyalty to my alma mater, gave my afternoons and Saturdays to the task for a month or two, and went the rounds of department stores and business houses. Not many of the persons invited to sign had ever heard of the matter, but it cost them nothing, and they were willing to take the word of a nice jolly lad that a free college was a good thing. I brought in some six or eight hundred signatures, and got my name in the college paper for my zeal. You see here the future socialist, distributing leaflets and making soapbox speeches—to the same ill-informed and indifferent crowd.