ARTICLES ON THIS PAGE:
(Today through March 5th)
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1. NEW article: Looking for Class of 1970 Juniors and Sophomores: Group 4, Last Group (Clinton Swift - Edgar Wood).
2. Looking for Class of 1970 Juniors and Sophomores: Group 3 (David A. Leslie - Susan Jane Smith Roman).
3. NEW article: The Historical Importance of Chris's Crier : Issue 4 (Vol. 1, No. 4, dated April 19, 1962).
4. The Historical Importance of Chris's Crier : Issue 3 (Vol. 1, No. 3, dated March 13, 1962).
5. NEW humor: Mark Twain on Whiskey and Tobacco and When to Give Them Up.
6. NEW cartoons: The Joys of Nursing.
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"Some of my fondest memories in sports were a result of failure, injuries, setbacks, or mistakes. I learned far more about myself and gained more character in those difficult times than I ever did when success came easily."
Peter Vidmar
Olympic Gold Medalist, Gymnastics
Born June 3, 1961
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If an electric train is traveling south, which way is the smoke going?
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Answer shown at the bottom of this page
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Thus far, the following Class of 1970 members in the LOOKING FOR groups have been
LOCATED:
GROUP 1: John Dee Clark III, Becky Crenshaw, Donald Hall, and Annette Hennessy.
GROUP 2: Connie Journell (now Turlington)
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Looking for
Class of 1970
Juniors and
Sophomores
by A. Jane Chambers
Group 4, Last Group
(Clinton Swift - Edgar Wood)
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Below are the last 9 the 42 members of the Class of 1970 not yet located and their 1970 Trident yearbook photos when available. Groups 1 and 2, both with 12 names and photos, are now in our website's LOOKING FOR tab (left margin), with some people marked located or deceased.
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There is no individual portrait of CLINTON SWIFT (L) in the 1970 Trident; however, he is in the group picture of the 1970 Veterans Club (photo below). The portrait of PATRICIA (PAT) THOMPSON (M) is from page 58 (Underclassmen section) so she might have been a freshman, but she is shown as a cheerleader on page 84. We have no information on MATTHEW TIERNEY (R), pictured as an upperclassman on page 38.
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All three photos here are from page 38 (Upperclassmen section) of the 1970 Trident. We have no information on TIMOTHY TOKARZ (L) other than this portrait. KAREN COLEMAN VAUGHN (M) received her BA in Psychology in 1971, and JAMES F. VINES (R) received his BS in Business Administration in 1972.
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CAROLYN BOSTA WARRICK (L) is listed as Carolyn Bosta on page 34 (Upperclassmen) so obviously married after 1970. We have no individual portrait of GEORGE WILLIAMS (M), but he is in the group photo below of the 1970 Veterans Club. We have no information about EDGAR WOOD (R) other than this photo from page 38 (Upperclassmen).
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Six of the 13 people in the photo above of the 1970 Veterans Club are on our list of class members not yet located. They are -- kneeling (L - R): BILLY NEEDHAM (2nd) and GEORGE WILLIAMS (5th) and standing (L - R) CLINTON SWIFT (3rd, in black v-neck sweater), ROBERT HUBERT (5th, head only showing), JOHN MARCHI (6th, in black v-neck sweater) and TOM HOGGE (7th). We have no individual portraits of any of these six except Billy Needham.
Please help us locate these 1970 Class members!
Contact Jane Chambers at cncmemories61_71@yahoo.com
or (757) 238-9629 OR
David Spriggs at cnc6171@cox.net.
We will update information on these members
on this website with the words
LOCATED or DECEASED
on their photos.
Published February 21, 2020
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Looking for
Class of 1970
Juniors and
Sophomores
by A. Jane Chambers
Group 3
(David A. Leslie -- Susan Jane Smith Roman)
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Here are the names of 9 more 1970 class members not yet located and their 1970 Trident yearbook photos when available. Group 1, with 12 names and photos, is now in our website's LOOKING FOR tab (left margin). Group 4 will be posted on the website February 21st.
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NO
PHOTO
AVAILABLE
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NO
PHOTO
AVAILABLE
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The photo of DAVID A. LESLIE (L) is from page 36 of the 1970 Trident (Upperclassmen section). We have no further information about him. We have no portrait of JOHN MARCHI (M), but he is in the group picture of the 1969 -70 Veterans Club on page 66 of the yearbook. We have no photo of JAMES THOMAS MINGEE (R); however, he is listed as an AA degree recipient in June 12, 1970.
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The picture of DON C. MURPHY (L) is from page 37 of the 1970 Trident (Upperclassmen section). We have no further information about him. The photo of BILLY NEEDHAM (M) is from page 52 of the 1970 Trident (Underclassmen section), so he might have been a freshman then. He is also in the group photo of the Veterans Club on page 66. The portrait of SUE ANN (SUSIE) PATRICK WHITE (R) is from page 37 (Upperclassmen). She is shown also in group pictures of the Newman Club, the Trident staff, and the Women's Basketball team.
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All three portraits in this last group are from page 37 of the 1970 Trident (Upperclassmen). SANDRA L. (SANDY) REYNOLDS (L) is also in group pictures of the Trident staff and Circle K Club. We have no further information on JAYNE ROGERS (M) and SUSAN JANE SMITH ROMAN (R).
Please help us locate these 1970 Class members!
Contact Jane Chambers at cncmemories61_71@yahoo.com
or (757) 238-9629 OR
David Spriggs at cnc6171@cox.net.
We will update information on these members
on this website with the words
LOCATED or DECEASED
on their photos.
Published February 7, 2020
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The Historical Importance of Chris's Crier :
Issue 4
(Vol. 1, No. 4, dated April 19, 1962)
by A. Jane Chambers
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Articles in this fourth issue of Chris's Crier provided some of the material used in two of my articles in our 2008 book Memories of Christopher Newport College: The First Decade (Memories) and used also with additional information in my later articles about first decade history that were published on our CNC First Decaders website and are now in the website's Archives, under the sub tab First Decade History (near the very bottom).
The Crier article "SGA OFFICERS TO BE ELECTED" (p. 1) introduces a major event that would be covered fully in subsequent Crier issues in the first and second years of the College and gives us the date of the election of the first SGA officers (May 7, 1962). My Memories book article "The First Student Organizations" includes facts about the first SGA (pp. 89-90) taken from this series of SGA articles in the Crier, and our website includes photos, officers' memories and other details about the first (1962-63), second (1963-64), and third SGAs at CNC (1964-65).
The brief article "CNC LIBRARY; BIGGER AND BETTER," also on page 1 of issue 4, provided important factual material included in the first paragraph of "From Basement Rooms to the Captain John Smith Library" (Memories, pp. 152 - 155) and later in my longer essay on the website, with photographs, "CHRIS'S CRIER: Windows into CNC's Early History (Part 3)--The Basement Library."
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The major article on page 2 of issue 4, "COAT-OF-ARMS FOR CNC," featuring the three odd sketches reproduced above, is about choosing a symbol for our college. The idea that the symbol could be "in the form of a coat-of-arms" was suggested to the students by Dr. Augustine Maissen, Assistant Professor of German and Spanish. A native of Switzerland, Dr. Maissen recommended a coat of arms because that was a European tradition followed by virtually all institutions and municipalities there.
We did not use this Crier article in Memories because the idea of a coat of arms quickly died in CNC's second year--probably because Dr. Maissen did not return to CNC. According to Professor Emeritus Barry Wood, he left because he was particularly fond of skiing but found nothing in Virginia approximating the Swiss Alps. It's probably good that he left us, however, because had he remained longer, we might have become the CNC Crocodiles!
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Dr. Maissen did leave the College something of great value, however: he designed the first CNC seal (above left), which was used until 1971, when CNC had its first baccalaureate class. Local artist Allan D. Jones Jr. gave us our symbol at the end of the second year (1962-63), when he was commissioned by the City of Newport News to create a mural in the West Avenue Library, in downtown Newport News, depicting the Jamestown Landing of 1607. Jones's sketch of the head of Captain Christopher Newport is shown above right. And the full figure of Captain Newport (with his historic hook) was quickly adopted for the masthead of The Captain's Log, the second student newspaper, in 1963-64. The name "Captains" was chosen in connection with our first intercollegiate sport in 1965, men's track.
I used the Crier article "COAT-OF-ARMS FOR CNC" extensively in the first half of my website article "The CNC Crocodiles? Selecting Our Symbol and Name."
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Page 1
Chris's Crier - 4th Edition
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Page 2
Chris's Crier - 4th Edition
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We welcome your FEEDBACK. Send to
cncmemories61_71@yahoo.com
or cnc6171@cox.net.
Published February 21, 2020.
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The Historical Importance of Chris's Crier :
Issue 3
(Vol. 1, No. 3, dated March 13, 1962)
by A. Jane Chambers
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Issue 3 of Chris's Crier was published only 18 days after issue number 2 (Feb. 23). Number 3 focused on subjects introduced in the second issue--selecting the school's colors, forming the first social club (the German Club, which would organize dances), holding a student-faculty contest (the first Bridge Tournament), and beginning the first religious organization at the new college (The Wesley Foundation, connected with the Methodist Church). Issues 2 and 3 together provided information I used in Memories of Christopher Newport College: The First Decade (2008) about CNC's school colors ("Permanent Choices," p. 92) and first social club, The German Club ("The First Student Organizations," pp. 88 - 89). No other book about CNC mentions these two topics, to my knowledge.
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| The basement lounge was a place to socialize, eat, and study. Notice the suspended lights and water pipes below the ceiling. The two photos here are from the ADS section of the 1964 Trident, CNC's first yearbook. |
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Having briefly introduced CNC's first faculty (10 members) in issue 1 of Chris's Crier, in this third issue the staff began publishing detailed articles about individual instructors. Since virtually all students were required to complete freshman English, the two English instructors, Fay Kenyon Green and Lawrence B. Wood, Jr., were the first of the ten the staff interviewed. The article on Colonel Green (U.S. Army, ret.) is on page 1 and that on very young Barry Wood is on page 2.
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| The bulk of page 2 is about the championship game in the Bridge Tournament first mentioned in Number 2 of Chris's Crier. In a parody of the well-known newspaper column "Goren on Bridge," CNC's biology instructor Georgia Hunter (the only woman on the faculty then) is humorously given the last name "Goren" and math instructor Robert (Bob) Vargas is called "Ace" Vargas. The other two bridge players were students. Why was a card game given so much attention? Partly because Bridge was the favorite card game in the 1960s, but also because CNC's temporary home (the former Daniel Elementary School building) had no gymnasium, no cafeteria--not even a lawn where students could at least toss balls back and forth.
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Shortly after classes began at the new college, the first students, with Director Cunningham's approval, had transformed a fairly large empty room in the basement of Daniel into a lounge. They had painted its walls and made curtains for its half-sized windows. It was quickly equipped with tables, chairs, a Coke machine, a snack machine, and a radio often playing popular music on local station WGH. It was the favorite place to relax and socialize before, between, and after classes. And every weekday there were students and faculty there who were playing Bridge.
We hope to get FEEDBACK from both the very earliest CNC students (those at the college in 1961-63) and the later First Decaders--or any other readers of our website. Send your comments--brief or longer, one sentence or a few paragraphs--via one of the email addresses below. Thank you!
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Page 1
Chris's Crier - 3rd Edition
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Page2
Chris's Crier - 3rd Edition
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We welcome your FEEDBACK. Send to
cncmemories61_71@yahoo.com
or cnc6171@cox.net.
Published February 7, 2020.
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Mark Twain on Whiskey and Tobacco
and When to Give Them Up
by A. Jane Chambers
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Mark Twain, born Samuel Langhorne Clemens, is one of America's most famous writers and humorists. Of his own birth and death he wrote: "I came in with Halley's Comet in 1835. It is coming again next year (1910), and I expect to go out with it ... The Almighty has said, no doubt: 'Now here are these two unaccountable freaks; they came in together, they must go out together' " (Biography). And he did, at age 74. He lived in and wrote about more parts of America--and the rest of this planet-- than most Americans, even today, have ever seen. He was a riverboat pilot on the Mississippi ("Mark Twain" means safe water, two "marks"--12 feet deep), a typesetter, journalist, popular lecturer, publisher, and creator of boys Tom Sawyer (1876) and Huckleberry Finn (1884). He also greatly enjoyed whiskey and tobacco and wrote about both.
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| Painting by Susan B. Dukee |
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ON WHISKEY
I always take Scotch whiskey at night as a preventive of toothache. I have never had the toothache; and what is more, I never intend to have it.
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| Twain agreed for his likeness to be used in advertisements like this one. |
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| Twain developed a taste for Bourbon in his riverboat days; later, in England, he also discovered Scotch. He was a regular drinker but not an alcoholic. As a single man of 30, in an 1866 letter to Will Bowen, Twain wrote, "I know better than to get tight oftener than once in 3 months. It sets a man back in the esteem of people whose opinions are worth having." He also wrote at another time, "I love a drink, but I never encouraged drunkenness by harping on the alleged funny side" (quoted in Abroad with Mark Twain and Eugene Field, by Henry W. Fisher). One of his examples of the bad side of drunkenness is in Twain's depiction of the drunken, abusive, worthless father of Huckleberry Finn, who also hates black people, unlike his young son.
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ON TOBACCO
I have made it a rule never to smoke more than one cigar at a time.
I have no other restriction as regards smoking.
As an example to others, and not that I care for moderation myself,
it has always been my rule never to smoke when asleep
and never to refrain when awake.
--70th birthday speech at a party in New York City in his honor
Twain's addiction to tobacco began in his childhood; his grandmother once threatened to use a whip on him if she ever caught him chewing tobacco again. He was smoking cigars before puberty. At age 35, in an 1870 letter to Joseph Twichell Twain wrote, "When they used to tell me I would shorten my life ten years by smoking, they little knew the devotee they were wasting their puerile word upon--they little knew how trivial and valueless I would regard a decade that had no smoking in it!"
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Twain smoked so many cigars that he purchased them by the barrel--several barrels at a time. In his non-fiction travelogue and social commentary Following the Equator: A Journey Around the World (1897), he wrote about his last failed attempt not to stop his smoking, but to limit it: "I pledged myself to smoke but one cigar a day. I kept the cigar waiting until bedtime, then I had a luxurious time with it. But desire persecuted me every day and all day long; so, within the week I found myself hunting for larger cigars ... and still larger ones ... I was getting cigars made for me ... yet larger ... Within the month my cigar had grown to such proportions that I could have used it as a crutch ... I knocked my pledge on the head and resumed my liberty. "
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| LIFE magazine illustration, Jan. 31, 1907. |
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ON ABSTINENCE
Total abstinence is so excellent a thing
that it cannot be carried to too great an extent.
In my passion for it I even carry it so far as to
totally abstain from total abstinence itself.
The above autographed declaration in an album Mark Twain gave to former First Lady Mrs. Rutherford B. Hayes was published in The Washington Post on June 11, 1881. Twain never gave up what he called his "habits," although he did at least once urge someone else to do so. In Following the Equator, he wrote about an unnamed elderly lady friend of his who was very ill.
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Original 1897 copy of Following the Equator. Notice what Twain wrote under the photograph: "Be good and you will be lonesome."
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She had run down and down and down, and had at last reached a point where medicines no longer had any helpful effect upon her. I said I knew I could put her upon her feet in a week. It brightened her up, it filled her with hope, and she said she would do everything I told her to do. So I said she must stop swearing and drinking, and smoking ... for four days, and then she would be all right again.
And it would have happened just so, I know it; but she said she could not stop swearing, and smoking and drinking, because she had never done those things. So there it was. She had neglected her habits, and hadn't any ... there were none in stock. She had nothing to fall back on. She was a sinking vessel, with no freight in her to throw overboard ...
Why, even one or two little bad habits could have saved her, but she was just a moral pauper ... it seemed such a pity; but there was no help for it. These things ought to be attended to while a person is young; otherwise, when age and disease come, there is nothing effectual to fight them with (pp. 31-33).
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We welcome your FEEDBACK. Send to
cncmemories61_71@yahoo.com
or cnc6171@cox.net.
Published February 21, 2020
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ANSWER: Electric trains do not produce smoke.
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Dr. Jane Chambers, Editor and Head Writer
Ron Lowder Sr., Webmaster
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