Lawrence Block - Step by Step

Well, you get the idea.

I’d never heard of Antioch, but then I’d never heard of any colleges except the ones that fielded a football team. My parents learned about it from Ruth and Jimmy Gitlitz. Jimmy, a lawyer in Binghamton, was my dad’s closest friend from Cornell, and the Gitlitzes knew about Antioch because the son of friends of theirs — I believe the family name was Singer — had gone there and liked the place. So had another Jewish boy from Binghamton, Rod Serling, who went on to be the host and creator of the TV show The Twilight Zone .

The salient fact about Antioch was that it had a work-study program — not so that students could earn money, as it was a rare student indeed who finished a co-op job with more money than he’d had when he started it — but to provide Antiochians with practical experience in their chosen field, and indeed to help them toward an informed vocational choice. Students spent half the year at jobs the college found for them and the other half in classrooms (except for freshmen, who had the option of spending the entire year on campus, as about half of each entering class chose to do).

The other significant fact about Antioch, although I never knew it until I got there, was that it tended to draw nonconformists. Maybe that’s why my parents thought I’d be happy there. They were sold on the work-study program, but part of their enthusiasm may have stemmed from the notion that this might be a place where I’d actually fit in, and feel at home.

I applied to both schools and was accepted right away at each. I’m sure we would have been eligible for some sort of financial aid package, my dad wasn’t making much money, but he was unwilling to fill out the requisite forms, so we never applied for scholarships. I did take the New York State Regents exam, and scored high enough to qualify for $600 a year toward tuition at any school in the state; additionally, my placement was close enough to the top to earn me an additional $200 annually as a specific Cornell scholarship.

Eight hundred dollars a year was substantial. Antioch, not an inexpensive institution, charged an annual unit fee of $1400, which covered room and board as well as tuition. It represented a certain financial sacrifice for my parents to send me to Antioch, and God knows I’d have gone off to Cornell willingly enough, but there was never any question. “You’d rather go to Antioch, wouldn’t you?” Well, uh, yeah, I guess. “Then that’s where you’re going. It’s the right place for you.”

It’s an interesting time to be writing about Antioch, as the school has been much in the news lately. The board of trustees has announced that the school will not reopen for at least four years, because applications for admission are insufficient to allow the school to function. How closing for four years will increase applications is something no one has managed to explain, and it looks as though the old school is going out of business.

I think my parents were right, I think it was indeed the right place for me, though I sometimes wonder what course my life might have taken if I’d gone to Cornell instead. (Such speculation, I should point out, has precious little to do with Antioch or Cornell, and more with my state of mind at the moment. A couple of years ago I was at Avery Fisher Hall for a concert of the New York Philharmonic. From our seats I had a good view of Philip Myers, the principal French horn player, and I had the following extraordinary thought: Maybe I should have studied the French horn, maybe that would have made all the difference .)

I spent three of the next four years at Antioch. I spent all of my first year in Yellow Springs. In the summer I went off to New York for three months in the mailroom at Pines Publications. I shared an apartment on Barrow Street in Greenwich Village, not five minutes from where I live now. I went back to school for a semester, then took a job my father got for me at the Erie County Comptroller’s Office — the idea was I could live at home and save money, but anything I put aside I spent on a weekend trip to New York. In the spring I returned for the second semester of my sophomore year, and come summer I again passed up the school’s job offerings, worked briefly in restaurants on Cape Cod, and then went to New York, where I was lucky enough to land an editorial position at the Scott Meredith literary agency.

It was the best possible opportunity for someone who wanted to be a writer, and I dropped out of school to keep it. I’d already placed a story with a crime fiction magazine, and I wrote and sold many more stories during the year I worked there; more to the point, I learned a tremendous amount about writing, and about the business of being a writer.

A year was enough, and at the end of it I quit the agency — though I remained a client — and went back to Antioch for a third year. But it was the farm, and I’d seen Paree. I’d caught on with a paperback publisher and was able to write novels and get paid for them, and that made it very hard for me to assign a very high priority to classes in the eighteenth-century English novel.

The drinking and dope-smoking may have had something to do with it, too.

I withdrew after a month or two, then rescinded my withdrawal under emotional blackmail from my parents. I stayed in Yellow Springs for the rest of that academic year, spending my work period on campus as the editor of the college paper, and in the summer of 1959 I went to New York to devote my next job period to writing books. I was living in the Hotel Rio, on West Forty-seventh Street, and that’s where I was when I got a letter from the Student Personnel Committee. They had concluded, they wrote, that I would be happier elsewhere. It was the sort of expulsion notice one could probably talk one’s way out of, with only the occasional mouthful of crow, but I found nothing in their words to argue with. I agreed with them entirely, I would indeed be happier elsewhere, and I’ve been elsewhere ever since.

Antioch was a hotbed of a number of things, but athletic activity was not among them. There was no intercollegiate competition, in football or anything else, and thus few occasions for the singing of “ A Is for the A in Dear Old Antioch.” In my first semester, my freshman dorm fielded a team to play two-handed tag football against other dorms, and in the appropriate semesters we did the same with basketball and football.

Every spring there was an event held called the Beer Ball Game, a baseball contest in which the pitcher drank a beer before delivering the ball, the batter drank a beer before running to first base, the infielder drank a beer before throwing to first, and so on. I suppose most schools have an event of this sort, and I suppose few of them get beyond the first inning. Ours never did.

My alma mater has a distinguished alumni roster for a college with an average total enrollment of a thousand. We’ve turned out leaders in public service and the arts, and for years produced a wildly disproportionate number of Woodrow Wilson scholars. But as far as I know we’ve never graduated a future Olympian, and it’s not hard to understand why.

My walking at Antioch was just a way to get from one place to another. It was a small campus in a small town, and there was no place one couldn’t walk to in ten or fifteen minutes at the most. Still, when I returned for my final year, the first thing I did was buy a car. It was a deep blue 195 °Chevrolet coupe, and it had a lot of things wrong with it, but I was uncommonly fond of it. I named it Pamela, for Samuel Richardson’s epistolary novel, which was assigned reading in my eighteenth-century novel class. I never actually read the book, but naming my car after it seemed the next best thing.