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Don Ferguson's Feller Memories |
August 18, 2003
As is obvious to anyone who has read the various sites, I have opinions, and I am willing to express them, controversial or otherwise. I will do my utmost to refrain from using these pages to put forward a personal agenda. However, from time to time I will be commenting on the complexity of the human condition from my own unique, some would say warped, viewpoint. If I offend anyone, I apologize and urge you to write to me and comment and with permission I'll post anything that seems interesting.
I've been telling all these wonderful Feller anecdotes over the last 30+ years to anyone who I could get to listen, and since many of us have joined up on-line, I had a good excuse to begin writing some of them down. As is obvious by even a casual reading of the pages on this site, many of us were so affected by the experience that we are still drawn back to those times. In my own case, the rose coloured glasses of time have me reminiscing with much more fondness than I suspect I felt as I lived through it.These are going to be personal memories from 1957-1964, and while I will try to be as accurate as the passage of 35+ years will allow, these stories should not be taken as historical fact. In most cases the names will be left out to protect the guilty, but for those involved, you know who you are! As for the rest who shared this strange universe, I hope that you will remember the event, or something like it, and recognize the culprits. I probably will use mostly the first person, although I must admit that after all this time I cannot always remember if I was actually a participant, or whether I simply remember the incidents from being told about them. Notwithstanding this, I promise never to let the actual truth get in the way of a good story, as the saying goes (I seem to have read this somewhere else, all I can say is that the document file of this narrative contained this statement at least as early as 3/27/00. I don't claim the phrase as original to me anyway, so I guess I can leave it in). If I make errors, perhaps some of the rest of you will be goaded into giving another version or filling in the gaps. Which is to say, if you don't like my stuff get your own site.
Elsewhere in the proliferation of Feller-related pages someone makes the point about the perspective of the day students being different from that of the boarders. Since my parents, Peter and Marjorie Ferguson, were both on staff and we lived in an apartment in Massey Hall, I guess my experiences fall somewhere between the two cases. I was encouraged to participate as much as possible in school activities, but there's no denying that, except for a few months in grade 10 when my parents were recuperating from a car accident, I got to go home at the end of the day and did not have as much at stake as the boarders. On the other hand, I was sometimes privy to more information than the average student because I got something of the teacher's perspective.
I'm going to be re-working this collection of my musings over the course of the next few months. I'll try to get something new up every so often, so check back. I'm going to start by posting the previous installments of my reminiscences as they were on the now departed fellercollege.com site. Please use the index to access the files; as I add new files, I will update the index and put a notice on the What's New page (on the off chance that you plan to visit this site more than once, you'll likely want to bookmark that page to save yourself some time).
