PART I: SCENES AND STORIES FROM SHREVEPORT, 1964-1969

▲ About two months after my arrival at Centenary in August 1964, at age 18 — as I describe in early chapters of Betting on Bernie — I was a pre-med major struggling with both Calculus and the college dating scene.

The photo above is not one I’m delighted to display here. The original (which I’ve scanned) is a badly over-exposed print with intrusively frayed edges (which I’ve cropped out). I believe my roommate at the time took it with her Brownie camera as I was leaving on a date to a party.

What you see here is the best result of my recent attempts to improve the shot in Photoshop, to make it acceptable for public viewing. My hair was dark brown, not the harsh black it looks here, and the rest of me wasn’t nearly so pale. Also, I never again wore my hair with a center part, because I thought it gave me a “moon face” and my widow’s peak messed it up.

But still… this is the only image of the first-semester freshman version of me at Centenary that I have on hand as I build this website in 2024, SIXTY (!!!) years later.

And as such, it will just have to do.

From the start of my time at Centenary, I knew and appreciated its history. At first, it had been two tiny private — and presumably competitor — liberal arts institutions, one called “The College of Louisiana” and the other “Centenary College” (because of its deliberate founding on the centennial of John Wesley’s organization of the Methodist Church in England). In 1845, the two merged with a new blended name. Although the tag “of Louisiana” makes it sound like a public, state-run school, Centenary always has been private.

I remember being especially moved in learning that the original campus in the hamlet of Jackson, Louisiana had shut down on October 7, 1861, as noted in the minutes of a faculty meeting: “Students have all gone to war. College suspended, and God help the right!” Six of its ten seniors died.

Those Civil War-era students were all white men, of course. No women were lucky enough to study at Centenary until 1895, and desegregation didn’t happen until my junior and senior years, 1966-68. I could be wrong about this, but in my memory that was a period of gentle transition and mostly amicable adjustments on our campus, despite the upheavals happening elsewhere in the Deep South.

I loved being a student at Centenary, which had moved to its permanent location in Shreveport in 1908. It provided my first taste of personal freedom and wide-open opportunities for humanistic exploration… the courses I most enjoyed while preparing for the college-teaching career that, by then, I knew I wanted.

Despite a disastrous freshman-year encounter with Calculus, I proudly graduated in June 1968 as a multi-year “Dean’s List” honoree with a perfect-for-me double major in German and Spanish.

▲ That’s me second in line — alphabetically, of course — behind the dean as he led our Class of ’68 in the graduation procession down the stairs toward “the Shell,” aka the Hargrove Memorial Amphitheater, an outdoor spot that has been significantly renovated since then but is still affectionately known as “the Shell.”

▼ Daddy took this photo of Bernie and me with Mama and her half-brother, whom I had grown up calling “Uncle Brother.” (My mother, Margaret Alford, took all the other graduation-day photos, as she usually did on important days in my life.)

▼ Bernie and I relax with my father, Truman Alford, in our Shreveport apartment after the graduation ceremony.