Section 4 of 14
Reporter Berneta Peeples of the Belton Journal said Henry was a "sweet, little oddball" when he attended Belton High. His hair was the shortest she had ever seen when he began classes, but it was almost shoulder-length when he graduated. He had a reputation for being neat and clean, and his narrow frame showed clothes to his advantage. Peeples said he wore the same outfit every day. He had to wash it frequently.
"By the time school was out, that blue shirt and those coveralls that had been brand new were washed white," Peeples said.49
Henry became president of his class and of the student council. He earned the class's top grades. His grasp of algebra was keen enough that he once taught the class for a week when the regular teacher was sick.50
Ignorance had always been his enemy. He argued and fought with the children who made fun of classmates who couldn't afford decent clothes. He tore through history books and novels and pondered the mysteries of the Bible. He tried to live a life of service, and wrote, "take it from me, you can get happiness out of that, more than anything in life."51
He preached what he practiced.
After his graduation in 1935, while training to be a high school teacher, he became a lay minister at Taylor's Valley Baptist Church on the outskirts of Temple. He preached a few sermons to the congregation of fifty or sixty who gathered every Sunday under the church's simple white spire surrounded by pasture land.52
In the fall of 1935, Waskow received a scholarship and began attending Temple Junior College, which served a few dozen students in classrooms that had been set up in the basement of the Temple High School building. Sometimes he stayed in town, but other times, his classmates said, he walked the eight or so miles to the Waskow farm. Freddie Lee Simmons, his junior college chemistry partner, said she remembers Waskow bringing his lunch in a paper sack; she does not recall him spending a nickel for a half-sandwich as she sometimes did at the diner across the street from school.53
The students at Temple Junior College "were not people of means," Simmons said. "We just managed to eke out this education we got in those two years."
The college expected Waskow to help earn his keep by sweeping, cleaning and doing other custodial chores. He arrived at 4:30 or 5 a.m. to build the fires in the fumace.54
Freddie Lee Simmons ran the combined junior college-high school library and earned extra money by keeping the library open an hour after classes ended.55 She spent a lot of time in the cafeteria with Waskow between classes, but she characterized their relationship as one of friendship and conversation. The two of them worked together in chemistry class, with each doing what he or she did best, but Waskow was willing to help her if she needed it.
"The classwork came easy for me," Simmons said. "Lab work was kind of hard for me to understand. You know, to write up the experiments. But he told me what to write. And then, he would brief me on tests, and then I would make just about as good a grade as he did."56
Waskow was popular with his teachers, which is to be expected of a student who works and studies hard. Besides chemistry, he studied Spanish, English, history and oratory. He took second place in a statewide oratory contest.
The caption under his 1937 Junior college graduation photograph in the Templar, the school's yearbook, lists his participation in the Luncheon Club, the Foreign Language Club, Dramateurs, the Social Science Club and Oratory. The Luncheon Club, the college's most prestigious gathering, met monthly at the Kyle Hotel in Temple for a cultural program such as a speech or book review, plus dinner. The Social Science Club met in the basement of the high school building to talk politics and other social issues, such as the New Deal—extremely popular among the farm communities of Texas and the rise of fascism in Europe.57
Simmons said Waskow was bright yet shy about speaking out. In discussion groups such as the social clubs, however, he felt comfortable offering opinions and leading discussions.
She did not recall him dancing after the Luncheon Club programs at the Kyle, or going out on dates. Nevertheless, she said women liked Waskow. She punctuated a description of his manners by declaring him "just about the nicest young man I ever knew."58
Waskow did go out on dates. Arden Siler, who joined Waskow in the Luncheon Club, remembered not only that he had a double date with his friend and two young women from Mary Hardin-Baylor, but that Waskow made the arrangements.
Siler drove his parents' car to the Leon River near the Waskow farm, and the four of them spent an evening in the spring of 1936 rowing the Waskow family's rowboat slowly up and down the channel.59
Both Simmons and Siler remembered Waskow as weaning the same spotless clothes over and over; his wardrobe had expanded to include brown corduroy pants. Although he had a job at the college. Waskow still didn't have much money and cut expenses where he could. With his teacher's permission, he and Siler shared a biology textbook, Man and the Nature of His Biological World, with each paying half of the purchase price. The two of them sat side by side in class and put the book on the desk between them. After class, they took turns studying from the book.60
At the conclusion of his studies at Temple Junior College in 1937, Waskow received state certification to teach elementary school. He decided not to do so. Rather, he put his ambitions on hold and continued his education at Trinity University, a four-year institution founded in 1869 as a training ground for Presbyterian ministers. The college sat on the ten-acre University Hill at the edge of Waxahachie, a town of gingerbread Victorian homes and 10,000 residents about twenty miles south of Dallas. Taking classes there required Waskow to live away from his family for the first time.
Waxahachie was a cotton town, from its cotton mill to its cotton gins to the cotton fields surrounding Trinity University—best seen from the top of the eighty-four-foot Gothic tower of the pressed-brick and terra cotta administration building. Tied so closely to one crop, Waxahachie and its university saw their fortunes fall and rise with the cotton market.
About 80 percent of Trinity's students had gone to high schools within 100 miles of the university, and many of their parents were cotton farmers. The drop in cotton prices had made it difficult for many of the students to afford college, even if, like most Trinity students, they received an offer of financial aid. Trinity's student body fell from 518 in 1929-30 to 289 just four years later.61 To balance the budget in the early 1930s, the faculty accepted a 10 percent pay cut and the college's governing board voted to eliminate all physical improvements, such as fixing gutters, repainting buildings and adding books to the library. While these measures brought the university's bleeding under control, they also brought sanctions in 1936 from the Southern Association of Colleges and Secondary Schools.
The accrediting body placed the university on probation for its low faculty salaries and inadequate library of 6,600 volumes. A committee appointed by the board of trustees examined college conditions and found that repairs were needed to the homes off campus where the male students had lived since a fire had destroyed the men's dorm.62
There was little the university could do except try to rebuild by drumming up students and donations. Presbyterian pastors in North Texas did their part by encouraging parishioners to attend, but enrollment had reached only a bit above 400 by the time Waskow arrived in 1937. Only a third of the students at the time were Presbyterians, but many of the others, like Waskow, found Trinity's religious and moral tone appealing.
Every Wednesday, the students were called to assembly in the administration building to hear a program of religious instruction or preaching. Students who missed the assembly had to report to the dean's office.63 Sometimes Presbyterian ministers from nearby Dallas and Fort Worth came to call the students to a life of Christian service.
Waskow didn't preach at Trinity, but he did join a brand-new campus organization that aimed to prepare students for the ministry. It was called Life Work Recruits. The Trinity yearbook, the Mirage, described its purpose as "a deepening of Christian experience and enrichment of Christian fellowship. The membership is made up of recruits for Christian leadership as a life work or vocation."64
About twenty students joined the group and took it upon themselves to sing, preach and pray every Sunday afternoon at what everyone called "the poor farm," where Ellis County housed the elderly and the unfortunate. The students' program included popular and religious songs by the Trinity Trio, three young women who represented the university around the state, as well as scripture readings or Sunday school lessons. Waskow wasn't much for making music, but a classmate, Charles T. Bitters, recalled him teaching from the New Testament, which Waskow read regularly.65
Another Trinity classmate, Elizabeth Watson, never knew Henry socially or outside school, and recalled few specific memories of the shy and serious student. Yet an image of his character remained clear nearly sixty years later.
"I've just never forgotten him," she said. "I've often wondered if there was depth that you saw even then, or if the war brought it out in him.
"He was the nicest and most courteous . . . and never had much to say unless you initiated the conversation. I often wished afterward that I had initiated conversation."66
Beneath Waskow's class picture in the Mirage, the caption read, "Serious. Reliable. Earnest."67
Waskow spent much of his time outside the classroom in student organizations. He belonged to Trinity's history club, social science club and Spanish club. He joined Script Crafters, which had been set up for students who loved literature and creative writing, and the debate club, for those who loved intellectual argument.
He excelled at both. Bitters heard him from the gallery during debates held in the Trinity administration building's auditorium. Listening was a form of cheap entertainment, he said, There wasn't much else to do. Nevertheless, he found himself admiring what Waskow had to say—"he was a good, realistic debater."68
A touch of Waskow's sincerity and skill with words survived in the inscription he wrote in Bitters' yearbook in 1939:
Since the first time I saw you, I have admired you, and I think you are one of the swellest fellows I have ever known. I am sorry that I have not been able to know you as well as I would like to . . . . You are tops as a student and a friend. I wish you all the success and happiness in all that you undertake. And may life bring you all of the good things that you deserve. (Signed) Henry Waskow.69
He graduated from Trinity with a bachelor of arts degree on June 5, 1939, one of forty-nine students attending commencement ceremonies in the R.O. Watkins Gymnasium. It was a properly religious occasion, with an invocation by Presbyterian minister Joe N. Everheart of Kerens, Texas, the "Gloria" anthem from Mozart's Twelfth Mass by the university choir, a benediction by another pastor and the recessional God of Our Fathers by the university band.70 Henry left with a B.A. in his pocket, a certificate enabling him to teach at the high school level as well as lower grades, and an offer of full-time employment at Belton High School.
He turned the offer down. According to his younger sister, Waskow thought it would not be fair to the school district if he accepted a contract that he could not fulfill. He expected that military duty would call him away.71
