Bill Davis
By: Eureka College
Tags: Short Story, Fiction

Bill Davis

My Early Years at Eureka

My memories go back to those early years when I first came to Eureka. It started on one of those summer days when the chairman of my department at Western Illinois University said, “There’s a job opening at Eureka, and I think you would be good for this.” So I put on my best white suit and left Macomb. We had just gotten across the railroad tracks when the axle in the car broke. We made a mad dash to the Ford dealership and explained the situation that I had a job interview and had to get there. They put a new axle in the car quicker than you can imagine and we made it to Eureka.

I remember pulling up College Avenue, and there was a whole bunch of African-American students. Not knowing Eureka very well, I thought it was surely an African-American college. It turned out to be students in the Upward Bound Program which was meeting for lunch in the Commons. At any rate, I met with Clarence Noe and Don Littlejohn and we interviewed and they gave me a tour of the campus. I remember meeting Dan Cobb, who was coming back from the tennis courts. A few days later they offered me the job.

The theater at that time was in Burgess, which was far from ideal in terms of audience access. So having been rushed through the interview, I figured out why that was. The theater was a disaster with platforms piled up all around the building. So there I was with a whole bunch of new courses to teach and my first production to direct, which was The Glass Menagerie. There are stories related to that because I had more of a technical background than my predecessor. There was a lot of rebuilding I had to do. One of the important needs was lumber. With the configuration of the stairways in Burgess there was no way to carry 16-foot lengths of lumber up to the third floor. So we tried to figure out how we could get materials up there. We thought we might just build things in the parking lot, but that wouldn’t work. We noticed there was a pulley outside one of the windows on the third floor. We figured we could put a rope through that and hoist the lumber up from the outside. The problem was that we did this during the day time when classes were being held on the first and second floors. So students in the classes could see a rope dangling down by the window. On the ground the students or I would attach it to some lumber to then it would be hauled up. Whoever was in the classroom would see this length of lumber creeping upward to the top floor, where it would be leveraged in. So that’s how we were able to get materials up to the third floor. That was one of the first problems we had.

Once we had the materials, we started building. One of the methods we used was a frame for flats which was held together with plywood plates riveted together with something called a clout nail. We would drive the nail through the wood and it would hit the metal plate and it would bend the tip of the nail back so there would be a very firm connection. So we started building new flats for the production. You put the two pieces of lumber with the plate on top and just started whaling away. So we were building flats, and there were something like twelve or sixteen nails in each corner. There was BAM, BAM, BAM, all this noise. The kids are all excited because they are doing something different.

Suddenly this short guy comes up from the second floor — it was Rudy Eichenberger, who taught math — and he says, “Excuse me, but you’re knocking the ceiling down in the classroom.” We discovered that we were literally knocking the ceiling down in the classroom below when we were hammering on the flats.

The rehearsal process was also fun up there because the attic of the building was inhabited by bats and pigeons, and so some of the students felt that the place was haunted. So we conducted rehearsals for The Glass Menagerie and you could hear this constant noise from the attic. One night we were in there and we could hear this rustling sound, and suddenly a squirrel comes crashing through the ceiling and falls on the set, kind of dazed. Again, the students think the place is haunted, but it’s just a squirrel. He recovers from the fall and just dashed off somewhere, and we never found it. We don’t know where it went or what happened to it. I remember there was access to the attic through old heating channels in the building. You could get up there by climbing this old, shaky wooden ladder that had been nailed to the wall. You could go up there and see this layer of bat and pigeon droppings. And the disturbing thing was they were eating some of the wiring. So that became part of a legend from my early days at Burgess Theater.

Another thing I remember about that first production was there were four large posts in the theater, making it almost impossible to work there. So I finally decided in the first production to incorporate the posts into the set and surround the stage with seats for the audience. That worked pretty well for us too. I would sit in the audience in a director’s desk. Bill Thomas remembers that when I was taking notes I had a light on my desk. I would turn the light off so I could see the lighting during rehearsals. When I would take a note, I would turn the light on. And Bill remembers thinking, “Oh, my God, what did I do wrong?” when he would see my light go on. This was kind of a running joke with us. The Glass Menagerie went well. It was a different kind of a show than my predecessor had been doing — it was a small cast of four people.

Jerry Kline was a reviewer for the Peoria Journal Star. He was a very good reviewer, but I didn’t know what to expect when he came to review the production. And he sat behind one of the posts. My wife Carol remembers that I was in a panic because I was sure that he couldn’t see what was happening on stage. But he wrote a very kind and considerate review of the play. His one criticism was that in the set of the play there was a picture of the absent father. The picture that we had was an old one, possibly one of the founders of Eureka College with his beard; we were hoping that he looked like an old sailor who had left the family. There were very few items on stage. Jerry Kline said he liked the stage but that the picture of the father was representing a person who was just too old. So we took a little bit of offense to that remark, and what we did in the next dozen or so shows was to include that portrait somewhere on the set. I don’t know if Jerry Kline ever caught up with that. It became a running joke with us. If there was a hallway, there was a picture of that man; if there was a library setting his picture was there. That picture became a legend and a tradition in my early years at Eureka College.