When I first attended USF as an undergraduate in 1962, the weekend before start of classes we were treated one evening to a free movie: Bell, Book and Candle staring James Stewart and Kim Novak. It’s difficult to exaggerate how foreign this movie was to anything that I had ever experienced. The movie took place in New York (I came from a small town in Florida), the theme was black magic (my background was four-square Methodist), the characters were sophisticated (I had only known the culturally unassuming), they drank scotch and bourbon often, (I was a teetotaler), they frequented the Zodiac, a night spot, (the only thing I regularly attended at night was prayer meeting), it was a love story with a designing woman (my reference point would have been my mother who tended to be shy and modest). In short, the movie introduced me to college life—sophisticated, uptown, irreverent, worldly, hip, and forward. I have come to think that college has great value, but not in the life it sometimes purports. Like so many other human efforts, it attains value despite its pretensions.
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