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I was standing by the front door to Illini Hall, my bag next to me. I had arrived earlier by train from Indianapolis and took a taxi from Urbana to report at Illini Hall as told me in a letter sent me in Baghdad. It was 2:00 p.m. Saturday afternoon. The day was September 20, 1947. I stood for an hour wondering why the door did not open, when an American boy came walking down the street and stopped to ask me what I was doing standing there with a bag by my side. I told him I was to report to Illini Hall for housing. He said to wait for a few minutes and took off. In a few minutes, two young men came, took my bag and told me to follow them. They took me around the corner to 605 Daniel Street, then better known as the Cosmopolitan fraternity. One of the young men was Bill Lewers, the President of the Fraternity. He was from Kansas City, MO. He was studying law, later becoming a priest and a professor of law at Notre Dame. At Notre Dame, Lewers was head of an office dealing with human rights or some such before he died a few years ago. The other was Glenn Arai, the Vice-President. He was an ex-GI from Los Angeles, studying architecture. Arai was a good artist and a good architect. At Illinois, he met Joy Covey, a Mayflower descendant. They married and moved to Sutton Bay, Michigan. As President, Bill Lewers had the only room on the first floor, besides
the large drawing room, the dining room, and the kitchen. Lewers took
me to his room. Moments later, a large person came in. He was Innocente
Moreno from Panama City, Panama. Innocente looked at me and said "Hi,
ya." I was astonished that he knew my name. I was not familiar with menus, let alone Chinese menus. I had come off the Marine Carp at New York harbor, a young undergraduate among a number of Iraqi graduate students, several of whom had already been to the United States. We got rooms at the International House at Columbia University, and we were famished. The Marine Carp was a converted army transport, where we slept in hammocks, three deep. It was distinguished for its food, which was neither plentiful nor appetizing. (We got to bribing the cook to do us some hard-boiled eggs.) I was not familiar with bologna and believed that I was tasting duck when it was pork. We all lost weight on the two-week trip from Beirut, and once at the International House the big boys said they would find a good restaurant nearby. We walked a few blocks and found a Chinese Restaurant. I could not make much from the menu. Finally, I discovered a familiar word—chicken. It was chicken sub gum. I ordered it. I was now introduced to the mystery of Chinese cuisine: chicken sub gum was mostly onions in some strange sauce, with a hint of strands of chicken here and there. At the Chinese Tea Garden in Champaign, I did not wish to display ignorance of Chinese menus to my new Cosmo brothers. So I again ordered a chicken dish after being quietly reassured that indeed the dish would have discernable pieces of chicken I do not remember the name of the dish, but it was mostly thick black sauce with some floating pieces of chicken. We returned to the Cosmo House at about 8:00 p.m. There in the living room I met Victor Zavarella, who had just returned to the University. Victor was fascinating. He was full of anecdotes. He talked to me of American football, of basketball, of wrestling, of track, of women. He took me to my first football game, Illinois versus Western Michigan. It was a cold afternoon. Illinois had a halfback, name of Ashenbrenner. Ashenbrenner had a good afternoon. Victor took me to basketball games and to wrestling matches. One wrestling match pitted Illinois against Minnesota. Minnesota had a hulk by the name of Leo Nomelini, who also played tackle on the football team. One basketball game was against the University of Indiana. The Indiana Coach's name was McCracken. Huff Gym was loud and crazy as Illinois won 45-44. Victor played touch football and basketball. He had lost a leg to cancer at the age of five, before he came with his family to America from Abruzzi. You couldn't tell that he had an artificial leg. He was handsome and elegant. Victor got me hooked on black coffee. It was 11:00 p.m. my freshman year and I had a paper in Rhetoric 1 due the next morning. Victor got two huge cups of black coffee from Kamerer's, a beer hall across the street. He sat with me and helped me write a paper on my boat trip across the Mediterranean. Victor was in Liberal Arts. Later on, he married Nancy Gillespie, a blonde coed from Southern Illinois, got a Ph.D. in Education, and became a school principal in a Chicago suburb. He is now nursing a broken shoulder at Asta Care in Bloomington. Victor and I parted. I was to have been his best man, but I was holed up on the Snake River in Oregon when he got married. Then in 1989 we had a Cosmo reunion at Fresco's in Chicago's Navy Pier, and Victor drove up from Mattoon. What I admire most about Victor Zavarella is his optimism, an optimism I always associate with America. I never heard him complain about anything. He was always cheerful and looked at the better side. He had a facility with the spoken and written word and a fertile imagination. He was a good singer and would entertain us with an Italian song or two during Sunday dinner. He could have been a great novelist. He is still a great person. |