“Not a common virtue, that bit of abstinence.” Koesler was impressed-for the very first time-by Krieg’s apparent thoughtfulness.
“Gotta see how the troops are doing.” Tully turned abruptly and left.
Koesler stood for several moments reflecting on all he’d just heard. Then he remembered it was time for the scheduled morning Mass. Celebrating it remained Koesler’s responsibility. He had offered the service to Father Augustine, who declined with little civility. Apparently, he was carrying a grudge from the altercation he himself had caused in the sacristy yesterday morning.
No one else was in the sacristy. By now Koesler knew where everything was, so he vested quickly. Even at that he was a few minutes late. Pretty good crowd, he thought as he entered the sanctuary to begin Mass. The congregation by no means filled the large chapel, but it was substantially more numerous than yesterday’s skeleton group. He wondered if all these pious souls would have been in attendance were it not for what had happened. There are no atheists in a Catholic college, especially with a murder investigation going on, he thought, and almost chuckled.
Mass began. Buried in one of the clusters in the congregation was Father Augustine. In black trousers and an open-neck white shirt instead of his religious habit, he went largely unrecognized. He seemed deep in thought as Koesler began the opening prayers.
Mechanically, Augustine joined the others in prayer: “I confess to Almighty God, and to you my brothers and sisters, that I have sinned through my own fault. .” For some reason, these words returned him to the present, then, like a springboard, their meaning drew him back into the past.
No longer was he a sixty-year-old man, fully formed, with most of his life behind him. In recollection, he was a young man whose future seemed limitless.
19
He was in college. If anyone had told him then that one day he would become a Trappist monk, he would have laughed himself silly.
His name was Harold May. He was the son of a career Army man, so his family had lived in many, many places, on military bases throughout the United States and many other countries. So far, it had been an interesting life, filled with excitement and adventure.
As he grew up, he watched his father climb the military ladder and he listened as his father explained to his mother, and sometimes to him privately, the carefully made plans for advancement.
Harold admired his father and was terribly proud of his accomplishments. Harold loved the dress uniforms, the decorations, each more splendid than the previous with each new promotion. Harold was determined to follow in his father’s footsteps. But not in the military. It would be a major disappointment to the father, but the son wanted wider horizons than the military could offer.
And that was why Harold May was at UCLA, achieving. He was heavily into various Liberal Arts courses, with great emphasis on Journalism and English. His goal was advertising, but not the bottom nor even the comfortable middle rungs of the business. He knew where he wanted to go and he knew what it would take.
He also knew enough not to waste time in pursuits that would prove to be dead ends. Thus, slight of build and not particularly well coordinated, he participated in no organized sports. Oh, he fooled a bit with pick-up games of Softball and touch football. But his interest in these was no more than social and, worse than being no good at them, he was likely to be injured playing them. He found he could socialize as well or better on the sidelines. For recreation, wisely, he walked, often, far, and rapidly.
There was no way he could know it then, but this era during which he was attending college would later be known as “The Golden Age of Television.” And he happened to be where the action was.
Harold was among the first to realize what television would mean to the advertising world. That TV would turn the ad business upside down and inside out.
A very quick study, he required minimum time hitting the books. He also cut as many classes as he could get away with. A good part of the time he appropriated from studies he spent at the TV studios doing anything and everything he could on the technical side of the lights. So many of the young people who worked with him planned careers in television, but not in the coolie labor demanded of them now. They were going to be dramatic or comedy stars or directors or producers, or in charge of one or another of the technical facets of the business. One day they’d have a shelf full of Emmys. Or so they dreamed. Actually, few of them would achieve any measure of success in an industry where many were called but few chosen.
Harold, on the other hand, was utterly uninterested in television as such. Although the term “commercial television” was not yet prevalent, that was precisely the designation he foresaw. In this, he was prescient.
Until the fifties, advertising was pretty well confined to the print medium: newspapers, magazines, fliers, unless one wished to count movie previews, which, then as now, were teasers luring moviegoers to a forthcoming film. And if one wished to count coming attractions as ads, they were ads created by the film industry.
Hollywood, for all practical purposes, had cornered the market in film-making. That industry knew how to make moving pictures for the big screen, It was a short step from that science to making moving pictures for a little screen. Hollywood had the skills and techniques to blend moving pictures and sound, even animation. And New York’s ad community did not. At least not in the beginning.
And there lay Harold’s genius. He knew that the two-movies and advertising-were destined to meet. Indeed, at that moment they were on a collision course. The ad community was about to be caught in an embarrassment of ignorance. Not only did they not understand the techniques of film-making, they did not even know the jargon.
That was why young Harold May spent every possible spare moment on, in, and around the sound stages of Hollywood. He fully intended to combine all that he was learning behind the camera, in the cutting rooms, in the production offices, with his university courses.
Even with this single-minded dedication to his chosen career, Harold managed to squeeze in a not inconsiderable social life. And this brought to light another of Harold’s talents that surprised him, and amazed many of his friends.
Harold could drink.
Harold could not only drink prodigious amounts of alcohol, he had an astounding ability to hold it and not become intoxicated while all about him were drinking far less yet getting falling-down drunk.
This talent did not go uncelebrated. Several of his friends, both intimate and casual, were heard to say in one way or another, “God, I wish I could drink like Harold!”
Decades before safety experts urged groups of drinkers out for a night on the town to designate a nondrinking driver, Harold was the designated drinking driver.
Actually, he was not only proud of this talent, he was even grateful to God for it. Naturally, he had heard those stories of three-martini lunches for which ad people were notorious. He knew it was no mean trick to float through liquid lunches, be a hail-fellow-well-met, and still conduct business soberly.
It was not unlike a man with a mesomorphic body excelling at a sport such as football. God had gifted such a person with an unlikely body, steroid-free, and the athlete made good use of his gift. So it was with Harold. He believed that, for His own good reasons, God had granted unto him all those special gifts that were aiding him in the preparation for a life of upward mobility in the advertising business. But was it God doing all this? In the end, that was anyone’s guess. However, Harold was a very religious young man. His mother, as often as possible, attended daily Mass. His father, and commandant, enrolled him in parochial school-or, if there were no Catholic school on the base, catechism classes.