A passage from "Memory Traces"
by Irving Luban, published in 2001
A college prankster
Over the years, those farmlands at Flint Hill were passed from father to son until they were about to rest on the shoulders of my friend Gilbert, or Hall, as he was known to his friends, who, after tasting the glories of farm work for his first eighteen years, decided he wanted no part of it and departed from the land of his ancestors to attend college. Along with his deeply inherited sense of puritanical humor, he landed on the same campus I had chosen. We met, became friends, and bunked in the same house; his room was directly above mine.
Those were hard years. However, we did not know that we were poor and we felt very fortunate to have had a bed to sleep in, work, and enough energy to squeeze through our exams. In order to survive, we each had to hold down two or three jobs, working in between classes and on weekends. Seven days a week I had the additional problem of fending off Yankee skullduggery when, frequently, Hall would get into his periodic prankish moods.
Both of us in my room were cramming for the following day’s heavy exam, late into the night, when Hall called it quits and left for his room upstairs. All was quiet during my attempts to decipher some complicated formulas in Chemistry I when a light tap on the window snapped my attention from the books. The tapping noise continued and it broke my concentration, enough to force me to proceed to the window and investigate. At that late hour, I wondered who the devil it could be. It was when I pulled the window up to peer outside that I realized I was caught in a trap - again. But by then it was too late; the waterfall had already drenched me, body and soul. The Yankee rogue had struck again! A dangling broom did the tapping, and a pail of water did the rest.
I called Mrs. Truax, our landlady, to witness this abomination. We climbed the stairs rapidly to the room above mine. There lay Gilbert Hall Flint, under his blanket, sound asleep. Only when I ripped the blanket off and exposed a fully-clothed sleeper, did a smile escape his angelic composure. Well not exactly a smile, more of a Yankee inner chuckle.
Gilbert Hall Flint was born August 14, 1918 and raised on Flint Hill Farm in Amenia, New York. His formal education began in a one-room schoolhouse in Smithfield. He graduated from Amenia High School in 1936 and from the Cornell University College of Agriculture in 1940. He taught high school agriculture from 1940 to 1944, served in the U.S. Army from 1944 to 1946, taught high school agriculture from 1946 to 1963, and finished his career as a school principal from 1963 to 1975.
Gilbert Hall Flint passed away on December 16, 2009. The letters are published in his memory. To view the letters in chronological order, please click a timeline label from the side bar menu, scroll to the bottom, and read up.
Gilbert Hall Flint passed away on December 16, 2009. The letters are published in his memory. To view the letters in chronological order, please click a timeline label from the side bar menu, scroll to the bottom, and read up.