Monday, May 6, 2019

Memories of a Misspent Youth in Charlottesville

Via Billy

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Charlottesville is an enchanting Virginia college town graced by the neoclassical architecture of the university’s founder, Thomas Jefferson. I flew there with two friends, the talented photographer Jonathan Becker and the Vietnam Special Forces Silver Star winner Chuck Pfeifer, all of us close buddies of the deceased. It was the memorial service for Willy von Raab, scourge of drug dealers and illegal immigrants while commissioner of customs for eight years under Reagan. The humorist P.J. O’Rourke and I were the two speakers, and after a rousing ‘America the Beautiful’ we retired for an afternoon of southern hospitality and University of Virginia co-ed watching.

This is not woke, I know, but neither are heterosexuality, beauty or grace — or Christianity, for that matter. Charlottesville brought back memories of careless sunlit days lounging around the frat house drinking mint juleps and writing love letters to *Sweet Briar girls: Mary Blair Scott, Ellen Hurst, Natalie Farrar, three beguiling sultry southern belles, now in their late seventies or even early eighties. Believe you me, as they say in the Bronx, jejune Oxford evenings à la Sebastian Flyte had nothing on us — zero, zilch.

More @ LRC

*USARV Headquarters, Long Binh, RVN
At any rate, after about a week I went for an interview and the man who interviewed me was Dudley, who just happened to be from Virginia. After a few questions, he asked me if I knew what Weejuns were, and, of course, I told him that I did, so we had a conversation about the different girl's colleges in Virginia. After that, he took me to the Colonel and simply said, "He'll do!"

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