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University Daily Kansan Wednesday. Feb. 8, 1961
Spectrum's Guilt
In what looked like Perry Mason's courtroom on Saturday nights, Spectrum Magazine and the men who ran it perspired in the witness chair for an hour and a half last night. The men absolved themselves of all responsibility for the $1,350 deficit and were discharged. The magazine was temporarily jailed.
The representatives from the twice published literary-academic magazine were grilled by ASC members to try to determine who was to blame for the financial failure of the literary success. The business manager of the magazine, Jerry Andre, finally solved the problem in an impassioned prepared statement. The answer was simple: the magazine failed because KU students didn't buy it.
Not because the 52 page second issue had only a nominal amount of advertising, the backbone and money-maker of any publication.
Not because Mr. Andre ordered 2,500 copies of the second issue he published when the first issue sold only 1,200 copies in an exhaustive sales drive last spring.
And not because $400 in accounts receivable were never collected due to the inability of "mere college students" to collect from those indomitable ogres of the business-world: advertisers.
But because it was pretty obvious, as Mr. Andre told it, that the content of the magazine was such so as to make it impossible to appeal to the masses.
Why did he then order 2,500 copies?
This is pretty risky business; gambling when the odds based on past results were too high against succeeding. As it was mentioned in the "trial," whether KU students bought the magazine or not, they ended up paying for it.
Partly on the hope that the magazine would fare better and partly because it was a test to see if it would be better, he said.
KU needs, and ought to have, a campus magazine and the ASC acted wisely in resolving to investigate why this one failed, instead of abolishing it. The financial records and organization of the magazine will be checked and recommendations made to help guide the success of any further publication.
The debt is being settled today by the University through an overdraft of funds on Spectrum, but the problem will be brought before the ASC again. It's now their debt, and they have to decide how to pay it.
Perhaps much is to be gained from this experience, but it's an expensive lesson.
Frank Morgan
Thomas Wolfe, that giant of a man, filled the University Theatre stage last night as the players made a living, breathing thing of the play adapted from his autobiographical novel, "Look Homeward. Angel."
At the Theater
This was no small task, for this play is an extremely difficult one to present. When Wolfe wrote, he was a man obsessed. He felt he had to get all of himself, all his surging passions and feelings for the human animal, onto paper. This novel is a dramatized account of the search of the young Thomas Wolfe for the great expansive world outside the limits of his knowledge and experience.
WHEN WOLFE is so concerned with himself, the characters he draws are many-sided and so complex that they almost defy interpretation. Ketti Frings, Wolfe's biographer and the author of the adaptation from the novel, does for Wolfe what he could never have accomplished himself. She pares his magnificent prose down to its core of meaning without unduly damaging it. The cast completed the interpretation beautifully, with only a few rough spots to mar the finish.
Unfortunately, many of these
rough spots cropped in the portrath of Eugene Gant, who is the young Tom Wolfe. This role is the most difficult of all, for it calls for an emotional pitch that can easily subside into duliness or be carried to the opposite emotional pole. Ken Hill was guilty of the latter. He was too coltish, too agonized. He overplayed the tortured, so-to-be-a-man adolescent whose great hunger for knowledge and experience, for life itself, is stifled by a possessive, materialistic mother and sealed in tightly behind the grimy walls of a cheap boarding house.
THIS PLAY is the story of Eugene's desperate efforts to escape his environment and the shabby little people who inhabit it, people who have chained his soul too long.
His mother Eliza is a central character. As soon as the play begins, she is established as the moneychanger in the temple, the practical, hard-fisted soul in a family of dreamers. Her thoughts revolve about the material aspects of life. She is utterly incapable of understanding her sons or her husband, who sums her up by saying, "Whenever you touch the breast of Miss Eliza, you feel the
sharp crackle of bills of sale."
Eliza, played well by Sharon Barlow, conflicts at every turn with the men of the family. She is forced by necessity to run a rooming house, but in the end the house, the boarders, and her passion of acquisition are of greater importance to her than her own family. Her husband despises her, and asks, in despair, "Why am I here, now, at the rag end of my life?"
HER HUSBAND, W. O. Gant, is played superbly by Jim Hawes. His vigorous, tragico-comic rendition of a man whose physical and temperamental appetites have been denied for 31 years by his wife is the most outstanding performance in a show studded with excellent acting. His drunken entrance in the first act was a masterpiece; the audience could almost smell the liquor on his breath and feel the red rage and despair in his heart.
LITTLE MAN ON CAMPUS
Gant understands his son Eugene, but is unlike him in many ways. The Eugene Gant that could have been is played with sensitivity and maturity by John Welz as Ben Gant, Eugene's older brother. Ben is the play's interpreter; his voice is the most articulate voice, and his wasted life and shattered dreams are phantoms that warn Eugene that he must escape this life and free his soul or suffer as Ben suffers.
IT'S A SPECIAL BUILT DOOR- IT MAKES IT HARDER FOR THEM TO RAID TH' ICE BOX."
Ben can explain in a phrase the larger meanings of the play, and is called on often to do so. "It's like your face is in a photograph, see? And how are you ever gonna step out of a photograph?" he says, explaining to Eugene the reason for their father's frustrations in life.
THE PLAY MOVES on a current of tension and frustration to its final act. Here Eugene's resolve to escape the boarding house and his mother hardens after the death of Ben. Shown a larger world by Laura James, played by Mary Ann Harris, Eugene falls in love with her and proposes marriage. But she is already engaged to another man; besides, she knows that Eugene Gant needs more thinking and living room than domesticity could ever provide. So she breaks his heart to give him the opportunity to go to the university where he belongs. As he leaves home, Eugene confronts a vision of his dead brother and begs guidance of him. How can he ease the hunger within him to know, to understand? Where will he find happiness? But Ben is wise. He says, "There is no end to hunger. There is no happy land." Surely no one could ever summarize Tom Wolfe's life more succinctly. —Bill Blundell
International Jayhawker
By Augustine G. Kyei Ghana senior
Asked which direction is North in Lawrence, my good friend from Hong Kong took up his position and cheered up: "Let's go South, let's go South. . . ," his arms and hands pointing and jesticing like the KU cheer leaders in action. Then he paused and said to me: "That way is North." In fact, that is one clever way my friend takes to locate the cardinal points. KU cheer leaders, the foreigners watch you!
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Two Americans sought the opinion and comment of a foreigner in their argument over what constitutes the shape of a full moon. Said he: "Sorry, I don't come from this country."
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A friend from Nigeria, used to closing doors after opening them, back home, had to wrestle a number of times with automatic doors. Finally he had to agree that American doors desire and appreciate that they be left alone after opening them.
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A student from Morocco, not well versed in the paradigms of the English language, was asked how he came to this country.
"Did you come by 'plane'
"No." he answered.
"Did you come by ship?"
"No." he said.
"Did you come by jet?"
"No." he said.
"You couldn't have come by train or car. How the hell did you come here then?" demanded the inquirer.
. . .
"I flew," said the Moroccan, flapping his arms like a bird.
A young boy kept making inroads on my native garb, as I walked along a street in New York City. At one time he nearly stripped me of the garb. Said he as he pulled away: "I wanted to see what you wore underneath."
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Yes, I have over twenty dimes locked up and still unretrieved from some slot machines that have preferred to cheat me. The only consolation I have taken so far is that sometimes I gave those machines some dirty slaps.
And so, here briefly is the story of my life: always trying to open 7-Up bottles in the coin return!
Daily Hansan UNIT NETT
University of Kansas student newspaper
Founded 1889, became biweekly 1904, triweekly 1908, daily Jan. 16, 1912.
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NEWS DEPARTMENT
John Peterson ... Managing Editor
EDITORIAL DEPARTMENT
Frank Morgan and Dan Felger ... Co-Editorial Editors
BUSINESS DEPARTMENT
John Massa Business Manager