I technically started college before I’d graduated high school. It wasn’t that I took dual-credit or AP classes: while the latter were an option at my high school (and I took exactly zero such classes compared to the countless AP classes L took), dual-credit wasn’t even available (that I know of). However, I took a June-term western civilization course, which began about a week before my high school graduation.
Dr. Thomas Peake, a legend in the college’s history department, taught the course. A specialist in Russian history, he would famously turn to write something on the board in Russian in this or that history course and turn back around continuing the lecture in Russian, unaware he’d switched languages until he saw the confusion in his students’ faces. (To have that kind of fluency!) He also once expressed surprise that no one in the room knew the Cyrillic alphabet. “It’s just Greek,” he exclaimed incredulously. He had that kind of mind.
We met in this classroom on the ground floor of Bristol Hall. Over the course of my years at the college, I took countless classes in this room, but I most clearly remember Dr. Peake going over Mesopotamian history at the blackboard, his tangle of hair from his comb-over dancing to one side as he wrote on the blackboard.
In later years, I would sit in various classrooms in Bristol Hall talking to this or that friend about relationships, theology, the future, music — whatever passion was then stirring us.