Silent Explosion (1965)

[Music] I saw her once a long time ago and that was the only time I saw her she was only a face in a crowd and as I recall it she had a trace of a smile she was wearing a white jersey dress and carrying a brown bag and her hair was sort of loose and wind blown and perhaps for just a fraction of a second our eyes met and then she walked past when I looked back over my shoulder or maybe half dozen steps later she was gone I never saw her again I can't tell you why but I can remember her as vividly as if it had happened a moment ago [Music] there's a lot said about this small piece of land but we'll leave it for another time another place take a long fond look and simply recall that each of us has yearned for the cabin by the Sea heard far off train whistles and Lonesome fog horns and distant laughter in the night or felt the Indian summer Enchantment of a state fair privately we side with AE Houseman when he wrote and long I used to stand and look at things I could not buy or mooned for a moment over old record they played a lot during our freshman year at College the desert island syndrome stays with us a little foolish a little afraid but forever standing there in the back of the mind like a face you can't forget or a dream you won't let go [Music] of consider that Restless streak within you you pacify it with that cheap dissatisfying bromide it might have [Music] been were all your castles made of sand your dreams as brief as summer clouds consider if you will the first eight lines of Mr housman's little verse before we go on with the story when first my way to the fair I took few pence in purse had I and long I used to stand and look at things I could not buy now times are altered if I careed to buy a thing I can the Pence are here and here's the fair but where's the Lost young man he's somewhere along these streets a dim young face in the past trudging back and forth to school and she is here too tidy and Prim and delicate as music at the edge of [Music] sound and there here their faint distant voices echoing in Hollow corridors take a long fond longing look there is a pungent pleasure roaming back in time you and I who are adults in the 1960s have many years to look back on to ponder to reconsider what was worthwhile and what was junk much as funny and frivolous and much more forgotten among these new antiques we grew up did homework avoided homework plotted and made big plans our easy childhood gave us shirely Temple mugs to help us drink our milk a big little book to read under the covers after bedtime or a souvenir of the biggest and best show of all time the Texas Centennial or a big fat radio in the living room to carry the latest Orphan Annie Cod men message who's that little chatter box the one with curly golden locks who can she be but we were soon caught up in quick and changing times and that innocent instrument that made the world bigger and brighter made it smaller and Grim his masterful musical stylings from the Meadow Brook in Cedar Grove New Jersey more music now for your late evening listening pleasure [Music] York today Mr Wallace said he would like to have the bill through Congress at this session meanwhile in Washington President Rosevelt delivered the first of his faride chats of the year [Music] you can't go home again Thomas wolf told us and we believed him though we'd never left home and we were dying to on the other hand live and learn both extremely bothersome processes at that age especially the learning part oh we'd long been wise to the ways of the world with a special kind of knowledge Richard halberton was one of the first to show how fast the Earth was shrinking it's Taj mahals and halis spants however vicariously we discovered them seemed all there was worth conquering we knew about things all right and we read that life is real life is earnest and the thoughts of Youth are long long thoughts our thoughts however long however Earnest were put to better use listening to late night radio music from the East Coast or Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy from the west or thinking up a new knock knock joke to spring on the unsuspecting knock knock who say gr gr who gr the bathtub I'm [Music] grounding the whole notion of romantic love descended Upon Us mysteriously and if our hometown was short on romantic Idols as everybody's Hometown is we had motion picture stars to show us what life was really like once you were free of the shackles of school or doing the Sunday dishes going away to college would be one long Carefree Lark with you as a part-time football hero full-time wizard in chemistry and math and Big Man on Campus after all how could you fail with funny Sidekicks like Jack Oki and Joe Penner or sweethearts like Anne Miller Betty grael or Anne Sheridan you take two parts Hollywood one part wishful thinking and you had the genial prototype of Joe college and Betty KB until one one day you did graduate from high school and one day you bought a bus ticket and one day you climbed aboard with a one-way ticket that carried with it a kind of automatic [Music] manhood it was their one big dream that the lump in their throats was big enough to fill the bus the way it is when dreams come true and knowing they would never see you in quite the same way again [Music] it seems only yesterday which was a good day that you took that big long giant step into the new nobility of the college campus and while there may have been more yesterday's than you care to count you could live to be aund or two and not find any other day to equal the Fine Frenzy of that day you arrived the air you breathed was more than air the people you met more than Mortals the whole atmosphere was electrified by some strange new Force you could neither Define or deny and you only hoped it would rub [Music] off if this was College Bring it on Bring on the savoir fair and the ca Cen and all those fine sounding phrases to be sprinkled through your speech bring on the brass bands the rallies the rooting sections bring it on and bless them all oh you may have been subjected to the subtle indignities of mailing your laundry home but you were part of a golden age a time of your life that would help sustain a lifetime you may have drawn your lot with the Greeks or with the fiercely Independents of transcending the Rivalry of classes clicks or Social Clubs was the universal Fellowship of the educated man an attitude that was to give you a certain Edge a certain indefinable something that's certain everything that college bestows upon you like an invisible mantle draped around your shoulders when you stand a little taller then something [Music] happened something you hadn't counted on it came with a sudden startling jolt like box cars connecting in a railroad yard your mind collides with ideas ideas that had lines in their faces and a way of talking that seemed to Ripple like clear water in a fresh stream ideas that sat in quiet bookline studies are dashed out on a white charger to fight for right and reason it was Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes who said a mind once expanded to the size of a new idea can never return to its original dimensions and no idea is ever so delicious as when it's shared with those who are quick Keen witted sens sensitive articulate no thought as exquisitely simple as your own when you discover it already expressed in the words of Addison or Browning Shelly or thorough it was a blaze at noon a headlong love affair with learning for its own sake how long it was before the Bubba burst was mostly a matter of months whether you were 18 or 21 whether you were a sophomore or a senior eligible or deferred [Music] you knew you'd grow old before your time would be called to leave the thing you had only recently learned to live and take part in a war that was neither your own making or really within your own understanding the world had turned upside down and in a whole new set of circumstances you realized acutely how very precious are the things we take for granted like college for one thing one very big [Music] thing they turned off the lights around the world and if there was a single Ray of Hope in all the grimness and futility it was simply to return to the world you knew back to apple pie hot dogs and pitching horseshoes for some for others back to University and college a symbol of the sane and sensible far far removed from all the madness the irrationality the brutality the interval that ended on the note that was to become the theme of the next 20 years explosion War has a way of changing perspectives altering values teaching lessons in its aftermath came a new way of looking at colleges and universities in America in a time when the essential and non-essential became sharply defined we became more aware than ever before just how indispensable higher education is not only to our way of life but our existence as a free people in a dangerous age time was not too long ago when the rich like Scott Fitzgerald's characters were different from you and me they'd been to college they could afford it it had a faint Aura of luxury wearing raccoon coats driving a stuts bearcat living John held caricatures to the hilt college students of our perfumed past were a different breed of cat but to the man returning to college or entering it for the first time after the war a degree became more than a nice thing to have or good job insurance or a harmless interlude in a very real sense college education was linked with our national survival from the moment the atom exploded we stepped into a new dimension whose scope would be determined by knowledge alone perhaps it took the shock of that explosion or simply man catching up with himself in an age that wouldn't wait but almost overnight that enormous convolution called the American public recognized what Educators had long been pleading science Humanities languages technology theology all areas of human knowledge are essential to the educated man the thinking man the free man some armed with a GI Bill others scrambling by whatever means all spurred on by a new wave of dedication to get degrees at any cost they came and came and came hundreds more more each semester thousands more each year to State universities and private schools and small colleges that sought frantically to find the space and teachers to handle them [Music] all we began to Bandy around terms like population explosion remote and Abstract when you're talking in terms of 60 million starving Indian or Chinese but recognizable firsthand when you count the number of classrooms by the number of people overflowing them now three times that many 10 years from now and we talked in fine figurative phrases like an explosion in learning Majestic sounding and meaningless until you considered that the new Mount Palomar Observatory was bringing us closer to the stars and a step nearer the Moon that men were working on lasers that rival the energy of the Sun and probing the bottom of the sea to answer some of the riddles of Earth no need to tell you that you lived in an exciting age College was close to the source of the excitement the old saw that college as an ivory Tower was wrong as it always was out of these class rooms would come ways to wipe out polio cure heart disease Conquer Cancer and mental illness and all the countless miseries of mankind plus be the Wellspring of all knowledge be the key to a fuller life there was no idle theory about racial unrest new nations going through revolutions or the ominous presence of Another War under the mushroom cloud of the atom bomb or a new device they call the hydrogen bomb a generation of boys and girls who had grown up in Wartime planned their future with uncertainty and old Statesman named Winston Churchill had introduced a new set of phrases in a speech at Fulton Missouri the Iron Curtain the Cold War and a man from Independence refused to budge an inch before a wartime Ally that had become a cold calculating and open foe the Kremlin flouted American education and the more we heard of the crisis in our schools the more we could wonder if we were lagging while they were gaining the scene shifted to Korea to the continent of Asia uneasily we became aware that somewhere East of Suz out there somewhere beyond the Setting Sun an ominous wind was rising in the east [Music] College seemed far behind us in the 50s we had tucked the sheep skin away in a bottom drawer hung out a shingle or had your name painted on a door got a car and a morgage and a couple of very good reasons for getting ahead in the world and you settled back to enjoy the new long weekends and the certain Privileges and demment that came with the office of Junior partner or a executive or supervisor or whatever the title read on that handsomely embossed business card you had tempered your thinking to believe that this may not be the best of all possible worlds but you were a little more concerned with new furniture and the crab grass in your lawn than the same old tiresome troubles you read about in the newspaper an afternoon in the warm Texas Sun helped ease the tensions the knowledge that you were putting a little money in the bank gave you a sense of security that you were on the right track after all it wouldn't be too many years before you'd have to start thinking about sending your young to college and perhaps now and then you wondered how things were getting along back at the old school and you wondered about old Professor uh oh what's his name and about um funny how time flies and you forget names and [Music] things you were never really completely out of touch the alumni magazine came regularly with perhaps a note attached requesting a donation which you may or may not have made depending on how strapped you were at the moment or how busy you were you found it increasingly difficult to get the kind of adequately trained men that you business or industry needed and you wondered what if anything they were teaching them in school these days perhaps you even found it feasible to Pirate away a professor from some struggling school that couldn't begin to meet your salary and possibly you viewed the legislative cut in educational expenditures with mixed emotions it was good to see them budget-minded but there was passing concern about uh where the money would come from you thought about it and got on to more pressing problems but outside your well organized world there's another world or two or three or four that may come home to haunt you and if not you your children whose future you've carefully planned there's a world on the other side of the tracks except the tracks aren't there anymore nor the illusion that internal Discord will straighten itself out and there's the world on the other side of the water where old Nations like red China are Reawakening with a frightening bang and new nations with strange names are emerging and big powerful Nations like Russia racist to that world on the other side of the moon to the planets and solar systems we expect to reach within our lifetime and there is that world on the other side of knowledge the vast Darkness on either side of life where men search for an answer to the age-old riddle what is what is matter what produces life and there's a world close at hand where we see our friends and members of our family cut down by cancer and heart disease and Leukemia mental illness and even the common cold The Cure or the prevention lies somewhere in the accumulated knowledge of this man or this man or one of these men it's a thrilling thought that on this campus or this one there's a single student who may put together all the pieces of the puzzle and wipe out just one of these terrible diseases [Music] it's a chilling thought that when a single qualified student is turned away from one of our colleges or universities he very well might have been the one yet our colleges and un universities face the greatest dilemma in the history of education at a time when the role of higher education becomes more crucial than ever before there are not enough classrooms to handle the students or teachers to teach the classes or money to hire the teachers and within the next 5 years the sheer weight of population increases alone will mean that half again as many students will try to enroll in these classes yet the world erupts with a new crisis day after day heedless of whether our schools keep or [Music] not our rocket and missile Industries often look in vain for qualified colleg trained scientists and Engineers racial unrest Mars many cities across our country while Restless teenagers come out of high schools to no jobs no college and poverty is a way of slow death for thousands of people in the land of the free and the cause of freedom is a way of quick Death at a place on the map that's hard to find and where do you fit into this old friend now that we've presented The Dilemma do we expect you to charge out into the streets and rally the neighbors or send a your bank balance hardly but you and I do have a stake in this college problem whether we have school-aged children or not and it isn't for the glory of old Ivy alone either if you genuinely moved to help your college or university it's very likely to be from a sense of reality and that is perhaps the first and last aptitude for maturity oh you can look around you and know if your children are to have the same or better opportunities than your own if that have the same Precious Moments you had you who have received the most already must help make it possible but it goes back farther than that and deeper to a moment in time when your heart began to yearn when first my way to the fair I took few pence in purse had I and long I used to stand and look at things I could not buy now times are altered if I care to buy a thing I can the Pence are here and here's the fair but where's the Lost young man to think that two and two are four and neither five nor three the heart of man has long been sore and long is like to [Music] be each generation is the sum total of all all its experiences and what we make of those experiences is the chief Legacy we leave to other Generations if there has been one single contribution from those who grew up before and during the second world war it is the consuming belief that we can make it a better world you will not be a generation of losers a Lost Generation but a generation of winners your Governor John finally lends his wholehearted support to this year's clasp program all of us now at the peak of our personal prosperity in usefulness have an opportunity to prove what we're made of by giving America and the state of Texas the continuing Legacy of a college education not for the privileged view but for all there are many reasons we should support a college or university perhaps some of mine are the same as yours like it's a tangible demonstration of loyalty to the alma m in return for intellectual adventure and a memorable life experience or the fees of tuitions paid fall short of paying the full cost of your college Years or the importance of young people to the future of our state and Nation demands that everything possible be done to give them a good start in Life or and this is particularly appropriate for all of the schools participating in clasp an institution of Higher Learning is without doubt the most persuasive institution in modern society you will have few opportunities in your lifetime to become a part of an Enterprise that affects so many with so modest a gesture as is a gift to any one of them the past is something you don't own but it owns a part of you and if certain things about it have been good to you as were the College Years to me you try to pay back join me in giving giving generously give now to your college [Music]