Apocalypse Then

In the autumn of 1957 Jim Dodd began his second year at Cragmont College under a cloud of his own suspicion and portent. His freshman year he’d been accepted by a Greek fraternity, very important at Cragmont, and he’d done well enough in algebra and chemistry and analytic geometry and English. As a commuter from nearby Johnstown, and still living at home, he’d been on the periphery of socializing.

In other words, he’d escaped the notice of his peers. That relieved him because he’d begun to feel fundamentally different from them in ways more profound and more ominous than just being too poor to afford campus housing. What those ways were he wasn’t sure. But he was becoming anxious about it. More and more anxious.

The world around him, near and far, looked dangerous. He’d turned eighteen and had to register for the draft. In high school, just after reading Battle Cry, a novel by Leon Uris about the Marines in World War II, he was gung ho to be a warrior. But after high school, while his classmates had enlisted in the Navy or the Marines, he stayed home that summer, with not even a job.

He and his older brother Tom instead watched the Democratic National Convention from gavel to gavel. Jim really felt ashamed and worthless when he stopped to think about this summer of idleness. But during that one week, lying on the couch in the dark, humid living room, smoking cigarettes and drinking iced tea, listening to Huntley and Brinkley and seeing Jack Kennedy and Estes Kefauver, Jim forgot about the Protestant work ethic for a while.

Jim did well enough the first school year and then had a fun summer painting an elementary school with Phil and Dusty, upperclassmen at Indiana University. Their tales of the Big Ten campus with Alfred Kinsey and a cyclotron and pre-med and pre-law students and ROTC and Big Ten basketball and the school of music made Cragmont seem small and boring here in the backwaters.

One of the things Jim and Phil and Dusty talked about was geopolitics. The United States and the Soviet Union were in a cold war, a war of nerves in which one side tried to bluff the other with brinksmanship. When would we step off the brink? It didn’t matter who was first. The brink was so close and the chasm -- bottomless.

And then in October the Soviets thrust Sputnik into the sky, beating us up there with their rockets. Our boasts of military superiority turned out to be hollow after all. Here was proof, coursing across the nighttime sky! Jim was sure that Sputnik meant that the Russians would any day shoot nuclear missiles at us, and we would respond feebly -- and too late.

To add to the malaise, Jim’s dad, a lay preacher who labored by day, was on a tirade about Armageddon. He preached at night at revivals in the country churches around Johnstown and he preached at home to whatever audience he could capture there. Jim would have trouble concentrating on differential calculus after a suppertime harangue of dire prophecies from the Book of Revelation.

Especially grisly was the Rapture, in which the righteous would be caught up in the sky and the damned would stay earthbound, in an act of selective damnation -- and of selective gravity (not likely, by the laws of the physics Jim was now studying, but Dad’s omnipotent and thaumaturgic God transcended those laws).

Dad had damned as unfaithful the whole college in one breath, a school where the Bible professors who wore mustaches and smoked cigarettes taught the Revised Standard Version of the Holy Bible -- which in one place had translated a reference to Jesus’ mother as a “young woman” instead of as a “virgin,” as the King James had properly designated her.

Jim was torn between the college view and the lay preacher’s view. In Revelation, the church at Laodicea is told, “Since you are neither hot nor cold, I will spew you out of my mouth.” Those professors, who Jim liked for their refined and gentle ways, frankly, certainly did seem lukewarm. Given to soft-spoken abstractions.

The nukes and missiles of the Russians, in contrast, were red hot. And so was Dad’s hellfire. Hellfire and A-bombs aren’t abstract. They are as concrete as it gets.


Somehow it all came down to Jim’s stomach growling in chapel.

In the presence of Paula Taylor!

She sat in the row in front of him. His stomach gave a roar one morning during silent prayer and -- did she turn her head slightly to him and smirk? -- yes! She did. He reddened all over from the betrayal of his shameless howling gut. He might as well have farted. Oh God! What if he did? They do slip out. An actual fart would be social suicide.

And in front of Paula. He’d had ambitions of asking her for a date. She was a doll. Green eyes and a wide, pretty mouth and ash-blonde hair. And a great figure. She’d bundle up there in her camel-colored coat, and she wore penny loafers or black-and-white saddle oxfords. Her feet were sort of big, actually, but he liked that. He liked everything about her. And now she would never take him seriously because of his bodily functions.

One morning in chapel a churlish minister said, “I’m not much one for levity. If you want chapel humor, I recommend Catcher in the Rye.” Several students, Paula and the English majors, laughed. Jim didn’t get it. He didn’t know the book. (He would read the book with the curious title years later, when this crisis had past, and laugh heartily over the kid who had deliberately committed the gaffe he feared “letting slip” right then, especially when he made the connection between now and then.)

Right now he was in agony. The problem was, chapel was compulsory. They seated the student body alphabetically in the auditorium and took attendance by marking you absent if your seat was empty. After six absences in a semester, they started deducting .05 for each absence from your grade point average. You could get all A’s and land on probation because of chapel absences. It wasn’t fair, Jim thought, and you couldn’t do a damn thing about it.

Jim became so obsessed that he dropped courses so that, relegated to a part-time status, he did not have to go to chapel. He was then upset with himself because he was no longer perfect (“Be ye perfect, even as your father in heaven is perfect”). He also tangled with his physics professor, a bilious old tyrant, so that one of the two courses he kept ended up with his getting a D. Jim dropped out, and he was on probation if he chose to go back.

As for Paula -- ha! She was going with a Big Man on Campus by the middle of the semester, and she had never known Jim was alive.

All the news, all the talk, all the time now, or so it seemed, was about the threat of nuclear war. Jim was afraid to hear the news on the radio, to see it on TV, to hear people talk about it. He wanted to stuff cotton in his ears, to hum and sing while the fearsome words were bandied. He also was defying his dad’s command to come back to church and be saved before the Rapture and the Second Coming and before all that “tribulation” was upon us all. He was in agony.

One respite from Jim’s pain came in a part-time job he got for the late autumn. He learned bookkeeping from a Johnstown CPA and kept the payroll for a tobacco warehouse. The CPA, Fred Burley, elevated Jim’s frail ego by trusting him with the payroll and not treating him like an idiot, which he certainly was not.

Jim was glad he smoked the same brand of cigarettes as Fred, Camels, and Fred even offered him a Christmas drink, which he declined. Besides being exposed to the manly pleasures of conventional drugs, Jim enjoyed Fred’s sexy secretary who, although several years older than he was, flirted aggressively with him, including once exposing her pretty legs almost up to her waist. He forgot all about Paula in the presence of Martha.

When the job was over, after Christmas, Jim was lost. He lay around his parent’s house for a month, World War Three and Biblical calamities on his mind.


The solution was obvious. Tom had been closer to the draft age and had already taken advantage of the option of six months’ active duty in the Army with a reserve obligation of six years afterward. Jim decided to do the same.

He went to Indianapolis on a cold day in early February of 1958 and undressed for a physical exam in a cold, cold room with other naked males, some of whom stank, and a doctor told him to cough while he fingered Jim’s scrotum, which hurt, and another inserted a finger in his rectum and that hurt too, and they listened to his heart and pronounced him fit and he was fingerprinted and photographed and he signed documents and an officer in new Class-A greens swore him in to the United States Army.

He went to a couple of drills in the local armory in civilian clothes and it was cold there too. The guys who’d been on active duty hazed him about the hell he was about to face. Tom said, “It won’t be bad. Just keep quiet and do what they tell you and you’ll be all right.”

Then one gray, chilly April morning he got on a sooty black B & O train in North Vernon, Indiana and rode it to St. Louis; from there he took an Ozark Lines “motor coach” to Rolla, Missouri. Then an olive-drab school bus with “U.S. Army” and a white star and a stenciled ID number on its body driven by a silent, solemn Spec-E4 in bleached, starched green fatigues and a Fidel Castro blocked cap and bloused black boots drove him and the other recruits the rest of the way.

It was a dull day. On his journey he saw not one pretty girl. Only males rode this bus, young and anxious as he was. And it occurred to him that he wouldn’t see a female, pretty or otherwise, for the next eight weeks at Fort Leonard Wood.

The landscape was filled with plain wooden frame buildings -- at least they were white, not olive drab -- and paved roads and new green shoots of grass. The air was acrid with a smell Jim had once known well -- coal smoke. Every line was on the square, everything had a sign (assumption: you were literate but an idiot), and the grounds were spotless.

Yellow diamond-shaped road signs with the words “Caution: Troops Marching” were present and soon the bus riders saw several platoons of the green-clad troops, in step, more or less, and saw their rifles at 45-degree angles on their shoulders and heard the cadence of their black boots on the pavement, each with a noncom singing “Hut! Tupe! Threp! Fo’! Yo’ lep! Yo’ lep! Yo’ lep, right, lep,” Clop! Clop! Clop!, the boots in unison. More or less. The marchers regarded the recruits with weary, grim indifference.

When Jim and his hapless band got out of the bus, starched sergeants and corporals started hollering at them and never stopped. They bellowed and barked a bewildering number of instructions. They chewed out some of the boys for talking in ranks, sloppiness, and visible lack of fear of the macho, blustering men.

At last the newcomers were in the mess hall. The food was surprisingly good and filling: tender beef and potatoes and cauliflower and bread baked right there on post served with real butter and peach pie for dessert. A day of travel had made them hungry. After the meal the troops were allowed to smoke and gab at leisure a while and then with the ever-present noncoms supervising tended to the business of bunk assignments.

In the top bunk of a big barracks with forty strange young men, between two white sheets and covered with a brown wool blanket, Jim went to sleep soon. He had only fleeting thoughts of Armageddon and the cold war, and remembered that, yes, there was one good-looking girl in the St. Louis bus station. Too bad she went to Memphis and not Rolla.

But there would be more, more girls. How would he look in uniform?