Dropping a friend off at Belmont’s basketball camp, I circled over a block to drive by the last rent house Sharon and I occupied during our Vanderbilt days. By the time we’d moved there, I’d finished the PhD and was working jointly for the school in the National Endowment for the Humanities.

On a summer night in 1975, we were packing to move to my new job in philosophy at Wheaton College, west of Chicago. Going through our stuff, I found a red smoke grenade in a duffel bag, one I mistakenly brought home from field exercises at Fort Hood. My Tennessee National Guard (3/117 Mechanized Infantry Battalion) was part of the 2nd Armored Division, and we trained with them each summer. We officers were issued those grenades to guide in medevac helicopters in case troops were injured grievously.

When I came upon it, I thought it best that I not retain possession, so, at about eleven, I took it out to the sidewalk in front of our house and popped it. (I chose the sidewalk since these grenades burn hot and I didn’t want to set the house or neighborhood on fire.)

I didn’t allow for two things: 1. It was a muggy night, and the dye which dissipated quickly on a breezy sunny day in central Texas spread out and lingered low throughout the neighborhood; 2. A permanent red stain the size of a pie plate was burned into the sidewalk.  I figured any cop driving by our house that evening would have no trouble tracing it back to the source, and I would be hauled before some magistrate, causing Wheaton to reconsider my employment. Fortunately, we got out of Dodge before they figured things out.

Two other memories stand out in particular: In my philosophy of man class, I hosted a lecture by Josh McDowell, who was on campus at the behest of Campus Crusade for Christ. They’d asked us profs to use him, and I was happy to oblige. He spoke that day against Communism, drawing on some experience he’d had in Latin America. To balance things out, I invited a colleague and my students over to the house to hear a more favorable take on the ideology. So far as I know, the FBI didn’t open a file on me because of this.

Then there was a yogurt experiment. The doctors at Vanderbilt Medical School were always looking for guinea pigs. One day, a representative stopped me on the sidewalk by the library and offered me over $200 to spend a weekend in the hospital, receive a full physical, and let them run a wire from a vein in my leg up into my liver. I declined.

But then the word got out that a Dr. Mann was offering $100 to folks agreeing to give him six weeks of consuming yogurt. He’d been working with the Masai in Africa, and, as a cardiac physician, he was particularly interested in their low incidence of heart attack. He was working on the theory that their taste for soured cow’s milk was a big factor in their health, and he was tying it to cholesterol reduction. (Incidentally, our test results were inconclusive.)

Anyway, those of us who signed on consumed (mainly drank, not ate) ascending and descending quantities of yogurt (with a half-gallon a day in the middle) and came in to give a weekly blood sample. He gave us starter cultures, and we made our own. Sometimes the brew misfired, and we got curds and whey. Aaaack! Even the proper batches were hard to take straight, so I spent a fair amount of money making them more palatable with Comstock pie filling (usually cherry). 

Some quit, but most of us stayed till the end. There was some shouting and weeping at our weekly gatherings—not from Sharon and me, but I think murder crossed our minds. 

So, regarding 1. the misuse of government property and the possible imperiling of neighbors with respiratory problems; 2. our hosting a speaker with kind words for the Marxist perspective; and 3. dark contemplation of crimes of violence against a man in the healing profession, I have this to say to the authorities: “Nothing to see here, officer.”  (Besides, there’s got to be a statute of limitations.)