Across the street at ACS

A small patch of property with its red earth and vines was home to a Lebanese family across from the new ACS wing. There was one tattered building with a few rooms, fabric porch shades to deflect the summer sun, and a great garden backed by the wall which separated the family plot from Prep. The wall teemed with lizards and the garden belched squash and other vined vegetables. The old patriarch tended these vines in his sagging trousers and round hat.

The new wing was not finished at the beginning of school in 1953. This affected only the male boarding students on the first and second floors; we stayed in the sun room and doubled with others. The senior men were the first to move (first floor); later the sophmores flooded into their new digs upstairs. My room overlooked the family and as I sat looking toward Prep, Henry Dorsey's end room was to my left and Bill Crays and Gary Cody were to my right. Uncle Willie was directly across the hall. He had a three room suite, as I recall. You could see the Med from his rooms. His smoldering pipe wafted across the hall frequently.

I kept a little cactus on the window sill. One weekend afternoon, while watering Albert, I heard loud snaps! and noticed lizards scurrying about the Prep wall . A senior had a pellet rifle (I was to learn later) and he was dispatching the lizards by standing on a chair in his room and sighting over the top of some stacked furniture placed just so to steady his weapon. This contrivance elevated his aim to clear the top of the ACS wall. The old man came out of the house to investigate the racket. The noise of the pellets striking the wall was a lot louder then the rifle's report. He went back inside and reappeared with a five foot walking stick. I was standing at my second floor window and he beckoned for me to come down. I waved no; then he shook his stick and I realized he was telling me I was in for a good licking.

As the old man heard more snapping! from the wall (the senior did not know the old man was on the other side of the ACS wall), a small group of Prep students launched a large aircraft from one of their dorm windows. The model had a Jet-Tex engine and it swooped from the window toward the old man. But, as it gathered speed, it climbed, passing over the old man and began to turn toward the Flea Field. The pellets kept striking the wall snap! snap! snap! The model pffffffffted over the old man. His head rotated from plane to wall, back and forth, several times. Whatever was happening, it was all too modern for him. Then the plane was gone and only the snapping was bothersome. It was obvious I was not the perpetrator of the snapping! but he shook the stick at me in his frustration just the same. I took heed of his meaning and for the next several weekends looked carefully down the street before heading for the AUB steps.

Later I met the young men from Prep who launched the plane and I was able to stand on the chair in the senior's room and see the target window of opportunity; luckily I never came face to face with the old man, even though we lived across the street from each other for that whole school year.

Rolf Christophersen