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The Incredible Shrinking Tournament
by Ed Mauget
It was late winter, 1957, my freshman year at Rogers, and it was
state basketball tournament time. The Rogers varsity was to play in
Seattle. Two busloads of student fans would accompany them. I'd
never been anywhere. Seattle was fiction to me. The cost of a seat
on the bus was cheap, but what about lodgings? Ron Waldo, my Cooper
and Rogers classmate, said that his aunt would put up the two of us.
She lived near Lake Union and the University of Washington.
We rode all night on a bus that dumped us into downtown Seattle. We
walked to Waldos' aunt's house, carrying suitcases in the rain. If
you know Seattle geography, the district just south of the
university is a good drive from downtown, so schlepping suitcases in
the rain on foot was a rainy safari without the bearers.
We trespassed into the U of W stadium and ran the UW track that
night. We skipped rocks from the houseboat docks on Lake Union. The
next day we learned to take the bus downtown instead of hiking.
There, we saw "The Incredible Shrinking Man", a low-budget
black-and-white science fiction film about a man who becomes
contaminated by a radioactive cloud and starts to shrink. His normal
home environment becomes increasingly threatening as he continues to
shrink over some length of time. My main mental outtake is a shot of
him holding a phone receiver about the size of a shovel. There is
apparent sexual antagonism as his wife looms large above him and
begins to patronize him. His cat becomes a monster. He escapes into
the surreal jungle that his basement has become. Eventually he
disappears completely as the stars glitter above and wind blows
autumn leaves. I guess the moral of this story is to stay away from
radioactivity (but I'm going to Chernobyl May 1st).
Somewhere in all of our Seattle adventures, Ronnie Waldo and I even
managed to catch a couple of Rogers games at the tournament. This
was the purpose of the trip you remember. It was the first time in
my life that I was dead tired. I kept falling asleep at a raucous
basketball game. I was not to be so tired again until army basic
training.
An image of the guy in the movie holding the five-foot phone looms
large, but I cannot remember how Rogers placed in the tournament,
nor can I remember why Ron Waldo was no longer at Rogers when we
graduated. Where's Waldo?
- Ed Mauget |
