Southampton College: My Part In Its Downfall

Excuse me paraphrasing one of Spike Milligan's book titles. (That would be "Adolf Hitler, My Part in his Downfall." Spike would later write a sequel, "Mussolini, His Part In My Downfall" and "Monty: His Part In My Victory.")

Now I'll reference Tom Lehrer and his song "Bright College Days." You might remember these lines, sung drunkenly by seniors:

Oh, soon we'll be out amid the cold world's strife
Soon we'll be sliding down the razor blade of life
But as we go our sordid sep'rate ways
We shall ne'er forget thee, thou golden college days...

Let us drink a toast to all we love the best
We will sleep through all the lectures
And cheat on the exams
And we'll pass, and be forgotten with the rest

Without my college days, I might not have had the chance to write books that included Lehrer and Milligan, or had the chance to interview Tom or correspond with Spike.

I did learn some of my craft from being an English major at Southampton College, with a magna cum laude average. I spent all four years with the "underground" newspaper, the last three as the editor.

As it turns out, a sure sign of not being "forgotten with the rest" is to be immortalized in a book.

I thought maybe, on some Facebook group or at a reunion, somebody might bring up The Camel, and its funny and fearsome articles about the professors and the administration, along with its short stories, poems, and cartoons. But...to be part of a historical book??

The book is “Running on Empty,” which does have a subtitle to let you know it's about the rise and fall of Southampton College.

Southampton College had a traditional newspaper called The Windmill, cleverly named for the actual windmill that was a campus landmark. It wasn't functional, but instead served as the guest quarters for visiting lecturers and big shots.

The campus also had an "underground" newspaper, mimeographed and stapled together, using legal size paper. The paper eventually took ads, so that "electronic stencils" could be made for some pages, and photos could be added.

As you'd expect, the "underground" paper was anti-establishment, and that included the college administration.

I was influenced by the newly solo and political John Lennon (I would one day edit an entire magazine about him), along with cult favorite authors (Ginsberg, Mailer, etc., who I'd eventually meet in person) as well as the ghost of Lenny Bruce and the living presence of Mort Sahl, Dick Gregory and George Carlin.

Mort once edited an Army newspaper called "Poop from the Group," which landed him on continuous KP duty. THIS underground newspaper, which did have some rude content, could not be stopped, even if the administration sometimes tried.

After all, aside from tweaking the nose of the college president, a fiery editorial would sometimes get everyone pretty riled. As in: "they rioted and had a food fight in the cafeteria because of what YOU wrote in your paper!"

Rise and Fall of Southampton College? I can't take the blame there! While it flirted with financial problems (which the paper duly mentioned), it survived long after my cum laude graduation. No doubt, the campus was quite sedate before "The Camel" arrived. That was what everyone called the underground newspaper that was fully titled "A Christmas Camel."

Professor Strong, on page 123:

"Student protest...turned from vocal public demonstrations to caustic satire directed at those in authority...The movement found expression a bit later on the Southampton campus. Ronald Smith told a reporter for the Windmill about the origin of Southampton's first and longest surviving underground paper The Christmas Camel....he and his friend Peter Schilling decided that there should be an alternative to the Windmill. Peter got the name, Christmas Camel, from an old Procol Harum song. "He never really came up with a reason one can put on paper," said Smith. "It's a song about insanity reaching limits."

For those out of town, "The Windmill" was the official college newspaper, edited by the late Merrill Plaskow, who was more interested in the theater program. He was in several school plays, and actually got a bit part in a revival of "Fiddler on the Roof" on Broadway, and a brief scene in a phone booth in the film "Marathon Man." There was, indeed, a windmill on campus, and it was used as the guest quarters for visiting lecturers and big shots.

Merrill appointed me as the Windmill's movie critic, and did profile me in the paper once, just to show that there was no overt rivalry between Windmill and Camel. Professor Strong continues:

"Schilling and Smith had a small staff, but they did a great deal of the work on the paper themselves. They knew that as long as they did the editing, typing, stapling, and distributing of the paper themselves they could remain relatively independent from the administration."

"The issues in the first year printed poems by students, serious comments on campus issues, and enough four-letter words to upset Frank Gambacorta, the coordinator of student services...The administration backed off, probably because they knew that any attempt at censorship was unenforceable." "...The Camel now turned to satirizing the faculty and the administration, particularly the food service, with irreverent, often unfair, sometimes insightful, but always interesting commentary. Smith and Schilling and their staff went after both liberals and conservatives with their pointed barbs. They even wrote letters attacking themselves.

"Ronald Smith complained that the administration was purposely trying to undermine the paper...The administration denied the charges...it was certainly true, however, that the administration would have liked very much for the Camel to go away. Dean Burke once banned the Camel from being distributed in Southampton Hall during Parents Weekend where visitors to the admissions office might see a copy...

"After Schilling and Smith graduated, the paper struggled to survive...the paper now printed cartoons featuring genitalia along with scatological poems and letters and the standard Camel fare...The Camel was clearly on the decline...(and) appelaed to the student body for support with a message in capital letters warning that the paper "will cease to come out unless we get more support from our fellow students." There was little response...the last issue hthat has survived in the campus archievs is dated February 27, 1978...The last page of the last issue featured a caustic satire on selected faculty and administrators replete with four letter words under a cartoon showing a nude female..."

I suppose it would not have been a surprise to faculty members that the editor of The Camel in its glory years, would break into the magazine world via short stories published in such magazines as Dude, Jaguar and Hustler. BUT, a few years later, and I was the editor of ROCKET, a rock magazine and moving on to be a music editor and writer for other national publications. I even got the chance to interview and photograph members of the rock group that recorded "A Christmas Camel." A went out for beers with the lead guitarist, and the organist dropped by the apartment and I'm still in contact with him to this day.

If I could do footnotes here, I'd add as a footnote, that while editing The Camel during my Sophomore, Junior and Senior year, I was also the host of the late night radio show on the college radio station WSCR. In fact, I closed the station down each night. "The Manic Depressive Hour" could stretch for two or even three hours, depending on my mood, and the fare varied pretty crazily between Lenny Bruce routines, Frank Zappa and Yoko Ono to the slightly more normal Jethro Tull, Fanny, Kinks, Good Rats and Procol songs. One day, literally, I held a "Comedy Marathon," playing nothing but comedy records from 10am to 10am. I had never stayed up for 24 hours before, but for some reason I thought I could do it. I never did that again.

And yes, I did take a course with Professor Strong, a history teacher, but I didn’t complete my final exam. I would actually have recurrent dreams about this for several years. In my dream I'd be wondering if I had graduated, and if I was supposed to take a test in Strong’s class, but not knowing when it was going to be or how I’d get to the campus.

What happened to make me miss the test was embarrassing, because it looked like an elaborate excuse…the kind not beyond the imagination of a rebellious wiseguy underground newspaper editor. I showed up for the test with a bandage around my right hand. I said that it was impossible for me to hold a pen and write anything. Professor Strong accepted this without checking with the infirmary nurse (who would’ve backed up my story). I didn’t have to take the test at some future date, which still confuses me, and obviously led to the recurrent dream of “oh my God, I haven’t taken the final exam…did I graduate or NOT?” The reason for the bandage? I was in a bad mood over something or other, probably something gone wrong with the projection of the “movie of the week” (I was by now also head of the film committee). As I stormed up the steps to the dorm, I pushed open the door with my palm — not realizing I had hit one of the four glass panes in the door, and not the wood. My hand went right through the glass pane, with the sound of shattered glass.

This drew a mocking cheer of “Yeah!” from somebody upstairs. I think it was in extricating my hand that I did more damage, slicing my wrist on a protruding shard at the bottom of the broken pane.

The situation did nothing for my mood, and I decided I’d had enough of college life. At least, for the evening. Wrapping something or other around my wrist, I took myself, and my “Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe” for a walk down the road to the Shinnecock Motel. The owner of the place didn’t seem to question why I had no luggage, or why I signed in with a bandage on my hand. It was off-season, after all. My hand oozed blood through the night.

It was not any better in the morning, so a friend of mine advised me to visit the infirmary, where, in a state of goldfish-bowl shock, voices getting fainter and fainter, the young nurse picked at the heel of my palm, checked out some other scratches, and applied the bandages that mummified my hand.

The keloid scar would be very evident for five or ten years, but gradually flattened out with time.

And so did Southampton College, which became an ever more distant part of Long Island University, eventually being degraded to "Southampton Campus," and then to nothing at all.

I did go back a few times, the last time to deliver a lecture on the art of writing a biography, having had some success with books on Bill Cosby and Johnny Carson. The worst part was meeting with one of my old English professors, who always seemed to have some grim news that I hadn't heard about. That included a girl who wrote poetry for The Camel and who "got killed in that stupid, stupid car accident in Italy."

I suppose surviving issues of The Camel, formerly in the college library, are in some archive at L.I.U. now. The only items from my college days that the general public might have seen, were the food poems that appeared in local newspapers including the Southampton Summer Day. As I previously mentioned in an earlier blog piece, guest professor Dan Rattiner taught a class once, liked my work, and suggested I write articles and poems for the newspapers he owned. Having written a weekly food poem for several months, it dawned on me (about six years after graduation) to try and write more, and get together enough for an entire book. That turned into "Let Peas Be With You," which got published, and got some praise from Julia Child, Yoko Ono and Vincent Price.

It's a little weird when stuff you did in college actually becomes in any way, "history." But let's be a bit realistic here...the book in question is a history of a college's demise!