The Spirit of the School

by Ralph Henry Barbour

“He was a smart scholar; did all kinds of things in his last year, and graduated with honors. But that isn’t what I started out to tell about. There used to be lots of stories around Cambridge in those days about Mort. Some of them were true, I guess, and a good many of them weren’t. One of them was about Mort and his school club.”

“Tell it, sir, please,” said Harry Folsom.

“Well, at Harvard we had a good many clubs and societies, you know. If you were from the South, you joined the Southern Club; if from California, you joined the California Club. If you went to school at Exeter, you belonged to the Exeter Club; and so on. Every school, pretty near, was represented by a club, which met once a month or once a fortnight, as the case might be. I think Mort belonged to the Southern Club, but that wasn’t enough for him. His friends all had their school societies, and so Mort thought he ought to have his. It seems that he was prepared for college—or so he said; I have my doubts—at Turkey Creek Academy. I suppose it was some little village school in the backwoods of Mort’s native State. Wherever it was, it soon began to become celebrated. One day there was a notice in the Crimson—that’s the college daily, you know—saying that it was proposed to start a social club of Harvard men who had attended Turkey Creek Academy, and that a meeting for that purpose would be held that evening in Parlor A of one of the hotels in town. Well, for a couple of days everybody was talking and joking about Turkey Creek Academy; it got to be a byword. A week later there was another notice in the Crimson announcing a meeting of the Turkey Creek Club in Mort’s room. Then came the announcement the next day—of course it was a paid advertisement—that at a meeting of the Turkey Creek Club Mortimer Higgins had been elected president, Mort Higgins secretary, and M. Higgins treasurer. And then Mort appeared, wearing a green, yellow, and purple hatband on his old gray felt hat, and a pin about as big as a half dollar on the front of his vest. He said they were the insignia of the Turkey Creek Club. He had a grip, too, and he’d show it to you by shaking hands with himself. For, of course, Mort was the only member.

“Well, he had lots of fun, and so did everyone else. ‘Turkey Creek’ spread through college until you heard it everywhere. The principal drug store got up a ‘Turkey Creek College Ice,’ and a quick-lunch place advertised a ‘Turkey Creek Egg Sandwich.’ Mort got the name of ‘Turkey’ for a while, but it didn’t stick, probably because ‘Mort’ was shorter. He kept up the Turkey Creek game all the rest of the year. Every now and then there’d be a notice in the Crimson; and everyone used to watch for them. Finally, though, it dawned on the Crimson that it was being used to perpetrate a joke, and it turned Mort down; the Crimson, you know, is the most serious paper in the world outside of the Congressional Record! After that he used to post his notices up on the notice board in the union and the gym. One day there was a notice saying that at half-past twelve the Turkey Creek Club would have its photograph taken on the steps of Matthews Hall. Of course everyone who could get there was on hand, and sure enough there was the photographer waiting. And pretty soon Mort steps up, dressed in his best clothes and wearing his green and yellow and purple hatband and his club pin, and stands on the top step and folds his arms. You can imagine the howl that went up as Mort faced the camera as serious as a judge!”

“I thought you said it wasn’t a funny story!” gurgled one of the audience when the laughter had died down.

“That’s so, but that wasn’t the story I started out to tell,” answered Mr. Ames. “I was going to tell about Mort’s baseball experience, but I guess I’ve wasted too much time and we’ll have to let that go until another day.”

“Oh, go ahead, sir! It isn’t late!” The instructor looked at his watch.

“Well, maybe there’s time if I hurry up with it. When Mort came to Harvard he’d never seen a game of baseball played, and he fell in love with it right away and went out to try for his freshman team. He didn’t make it, but he wasn’t discouraged, and the next year he made the sophomore team; they let him play at right field, I think. The next year he went out for the varsity nine. He slipped up on that, but he made the second. And somehow he began to get a reputation as a heavy hitter, and, as the varsity was weak at batting, they nabbed Mort and took him to the varsity training table. But he spent most of that spring on the bench, for while at times he’d just about knock the cover off the ball, he wasn’t a bit certain, and there was no telling whether he’d make a home run or strike out; and usually it was a case of strike out with Mort. And in the field—they tried him at left and then at right, and it didn’t seem to make any difference to Mort—he was a good deal of a failure. If he ever got his mitten on the ball he clung to it, but he didn’t seem to be able to judge the direction of flies, and like as not would be four or five yards out of the way when the ball came down. But he tried terribly hard, and everyone liked him, and so he stayed with the team, even though he didn’t get into any of the big games.

“In his senior year he was out again, and the coach, who was a new man, got it into his head that Mort could be taught to field. And he was taught, after a fashion. At least, he did a whole lot better that spring and only disgraced himself a couple of times. But those times were enough to queer him, and back to the bench he went. Now and then, when the varsity was up against a weak team, they’d let Mort take a hand, and it was a pretty sure thing that he’d stir up some excitement by getting a couple of two-baggers or a home run before he was through with the enemy’s pitcher. We used to laugh and cheer like anything when Mort went to bat. But the real fun came when he got to base. At base running he was like an elephant in a forty-yards sprint. To see him try to steal was more fun than a circus. He’d get the signal and start off at a lope for second. The batsman would strike at the ball without hitting it, the catcher would throw down to second, and second baseman would stand there with the ball in his hand and wait for Mort to come galloping up to be tagged out. Oh, it was beautiful! And Mort would come ambling back to the bench smiling and unruffled.

“Well, that’s the way things stood when the team went to New Haven for the second Yale game. We’d won the first at Cambridge, and if we could get this one we had the series. I was playing short. It was a pitchers’ battle all through. We managed to get two runs in the second inning, and after that there was nothing doing until the sixth, when Yale’s first man was hit with the ball and stole second on a bad throw down. The second man went out on a pop fly, and the third struck out. The next man got his base on balls, and then there was a three-bagger that brought in two runs. So the score stood two to two until the last of the eighth. Then came a bunch of errors—I had a hand in it myself—and finally a squeeze that brought in another run. We settled down then and our pitcher struck out the next two men, and we went to bat in the first of the ninth with the score three to two against us.