Repository: UIHistories Project: Book - Banks of the Boneyard (Charles Kiler) [PAGE 23]

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The Advent of Dr. Peabody

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and while Gregory was a dreamer of great dreams for the University, Peabody was a teacher in a narrow sense; with precise traits of mind, a mathematician and a physicist, he boasted that he could teach any subject already being taught by others in any department in the University—an all-around educator, and not at all the type of executive needed at this trying period of our history. Instead of using his learning and fine traits of character in quieting disturbances among the students, Dr. Peabody joined with those of the faculty and trustees whose minds were like his, and the result was one continual round of trouble. Starting in a minor way, these troubles developed until they ended in the second military rebellion which was his undoing. The story of this second military rebellion is told in another chapter. Up to a few years before I entered the University in the fall of '88, the twin cities were lighted with kerosene street lamps, then came gas, and finally electric arc lights. Students who could afford to pay $5 a week for room and board lived a mile away from the University in either Champaign or Urbana, while those who lived for $3 a week or less stayed closer to the campus. There was a bob-tailed horse car that took fares from Champaign to Urbana for a dime, and half way, to the University, for a nickel. Only the faculty and well-to-do students used the horse car, however, and some of us walked the mile home for our mid-day meal. We thought nothing of walking from Urbana to Champaign over a two-board sidewalk where there was one, and over the terra firma where there wasn't. The front wheels of bicycles stood nearly six feet high with a little wheel about one foot high at the rear, but in my sophomore year Frank Arms and Zeke Aranda bought "safeties" much like we have today. In the wintertime we carried our lunches to school and the boys had a room assigned to them in which to eat, which was some distance from the girls' room. It was good that this was so, because there were battles in the boys' room wherein I learned that a hard-boiled egg is a deadly weapon when thrown with accuracy from a short distance; likewise a piece of pie is a messy thing when well directed. The walls of that lunchroom were marked with food of all kinds that had missed its objective. Mind you, I'm telling stories that happened in the late '8o's and the low 'go's— a lifetime before the movies and vaudevillians got to throwing pies to make us laugh.