Out in Greene County, Iowa

Ol' ''Sewanee'' is indeed right, especially if you're one for college spirit and tradition

By CHUCK OFFENBURGER
November 3, 2003
STORM LAKE, IOWA

It was “All Saints Day” on Sunday at St. Mary’s Catholic Church here on the lakeshore, and probably at your church, too. It’s a tradition that runs through most of Christianity.

We closed mass with the congregation singing the old hymn “For All the Saints,” which was the perfect musical selection for the day. But this time it hit me like it’s never hit me before.

In fact, it yanked me mentally right back to a mountaintop in southeastern Tennessee.

That’s where, one weekend earlier, I’d heard that same song performed in about as perfect a setting for it as you could find anywhere.

I was fulfilling my ambition of more than 30 years to stroll the campus and see a football game at the historic University of the South in Sewanee, Tenn. Southerners unanimously and fondly call the school “Sewanee,” which is appropriate since there’s really no town beyond the campus. It’s a place with a special hold on a lot of hearts, as I’ll explain later here.

The private university, which today has 1,300 students, has an excellent academic reputation. It has produced 23 Rhodes Scholars. English is the most popular major. Total costs for a year there are about $26,000, and that seems a bargain to me.

It’s an unusual, perhaps odd, college in many ways, particularly in comparison to the small colleges I know well in the Midwest.

Sewanee’s professors all wear academic gowns when they teach. The top-ranking students do, too. The “OGs,” as they call those students, are the ones who have qualified for the “Order of the Gowns.” Most of the male students opt for coats and ties for class, and the female students typically choose skirts and blouses, or dresses.

But don’t get the idea the students are overly straight-laced. There are at least two “drinking societies” for the men and one or more for the women. Members of one of the men’s societies, the “Highlanders,” wear kilts when they’re socializing. Members of the other, the “Wellingtons,” wear full capes. And they had those on when they led the student body over to the football game, fashionably late – at halftime!

NOW, BACK TO HYMN TIME. The school was founded in 1857 by, and is still affiliated with, the Episcopal Church.

The centerpiece of the campus is the inspiring All Saints Chapel, which is more the size of a cathedral than any chapel. It is built with the same limestone blocks, native to the mountain, used for nearly all other buildings on the campus. Its stained glass windows are spectacular, and they tell the stories not only of the Episcopal Church, with its roots in the Church of England, but also of this university.

Actually, the chapel was locked up tight the day we visited it. Signs explained that an extensive renovation is scheduled for completion later this fall, but trying a side door, we found two members of the Altar Society preparing flowers for Sunday services, which were to be held amidst the construction clutter. Our Tennessee friend and guide, Douglas T. Bates III, convinced the Altar Society members it’d be awful if his friends “who came all the way from Iowa to see Sewanee” were to be denied an opportunity to see the chapel.

So our little group, and four visitors from Georgia who’d also happened in, were led through a back cloister and into the sanctuary. It was breathtakingly beautiful and inspiring, even with drop cloths covering some of its grandeur.

We were all meandering through the chapel in quiet reverence, until suddenly one of the visitors from Georgia clapped his hands twice, cocked his head and listened to the slight echo coming back from the soaring ceiling. He seemed to be measuring the accoustics. Then, just as unexpectedly, he began singing in a beautiful chant. It reminded me of the devotionals I’ve heard the monks sing at New Melleray Abbey, the Trappist monastery that has long been my favorite spot in Iowa.

I meandered right over and introduced myself to him. George Chesnut, it turns out, is the choirmaster and organist for the Ascension Episcopal Church in Cartersville, Ga. The other three people with him – Rae Teague, John Blankenship and Corinne Scott – are members of Chesnut’s choir.

Their visit to Sewanee, a first for three of them, was like a pilgrimage to the epicenter of the Episcopal faith in the South, if not in all of America. Their awe and respect made our visit for a football game seem just a little shabby.

So tell me, I said to the choirmaster, is there one great Episcopal hymn that I should hear? Something that would be the Episcopal equivalent of the Lutherans’ “A Mighty Fortress”?

“Oh, there are a couple, but I suppose the one that’s closest to being our anthem is ‘For All the Saints’,” Chesnut said.

Would he and his three choir members consider singing it for us?

“We’d be honored,” he said.

So there we were, standing in the vast All Saints Chapel at Sewanee, hearing four Episcopalians with beautiful voices sing “For All the Saints.” It was a holy moment, one I’ll never forget.

I FIRST HEARD ABOUT SEWANEE IN THE 1960s during my own student years at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, but it never occurred to me back then to visit the campus “on the mountain,” as many refer to it.

I heard about it again about 1970 when I first met Johnny Majors, then the young coach of the Iowa State University football team. I was back in my old hometown of Shenandoah, Iowa, as a newspaper reporter then, and I interviewed Majors when he spoke at the high school football banquet. I knew, of course, that he had been an All-American player at the University of Tennessee.

But he started telling me about how he’d learned a lot of his football philosophy from his father, Shirley Majors, who was coaching then at “Sewanee.” Johnny told me about the mountain, the beautiful campus carved from a 10,000-acre forest and that the school had a strong football tradition.

For all I knew then, his father with the odd first name was probably responsible for that tradition. And, in fact, Coach Shirley Majors had two undefeated teams and six conference championships with the Tigers in his 21-year tenure, which ended in 1977.

But not until 1999 did I come to understand the football tradition Johnny Majors had really been talking about.

That’s when several stories were aired and published, including in Sports Illustrated, about the 100th anniversary of Sewanee’s legendary season of 1899. The stories told about how way back then in college football’s early era, there were no classes or divisions for the college teams. Sometimes players were hired. Some played until they were almost 30 years old. And Sewanee became one of the real football powers in the South.

In that 1899 season, Sewanee went 12-0-0 and outscored opponents 322-10, with mighty Auburn scoring all 10 of those points in an 11-10 slug out.

But the most amazing part of that season – it’d be unbelievable if it wasn’t fully documented today – was how the team won five of those games in a six-day barnstorming trip by train across the South!

In those five games, the Tigers beat Texas 12-0, Texas A&M 10-0, then-powerful Tulane 23-0, LSU 34-0 and Ole Miss 12-0. All on the road! All in less than a week!

Remember the glorious stained glass windows I told you about in All Saints Chapel, the ones that so elegantly tell the story of the development of the Anglican and Episcopal Churches and the history of the university? One of those windows, in the chapel’s lobby, includes a commemoration of that 1899 football season, with a glass depiction of three or four football players and an inscription: “Sewanee Athletics, 12-0-0 & 5 in 6.”

Notre Dame may have the famous mosaic “Touchdown Jesus” on the face of its library, but Irish football still hasn’t gotten big enough to warrant a stained glass window in the chapel!

Oh, yes, that 1899 season really put little Sewanee on the football map, and the students back on the mountain were wild with excitement. Sometime in that era, a great Sewanee cheer was born, and more than a century later, the cheerleaders still lead the crowd in it after every Tiger touchdown:

Tigers! Tigers!
Leave ’em in the lurch,
Down with the heathen
Up with the church!
Yea, Sewanee’s Right!

That last line, “Yea, Sewanee’s Right!” is painted across the face of the press box at McGee Field, the oldest football field in the South.

Once I learned all that, I had to visit.

WE HEARD THE FAMOUS CHEER A LOT ON THE SATURDAY WE WERE THERE, as Sewanee ran up a 29-0 halftime lead over Huntingdon College of Montgomery, Alabama, and cruised to an easy victory.

Incidentally, the Tigers now play NCAA Division III football, the same classification as Buena Vista University and the other schools in the Iowa Conference. The athletic directors at our Iowa colleges should be having a telephone race to reach Sewanee’s A.D. Mark Webb, trying to get a home & home scheduled.

It’d be one of the best educational experiences of our Iowa student-athletes’ careers, and the games would be competitive. Despite all the tradition, the Tigers now generally play about .500 football, and this year’s team is currently 3-6.

When we walked out of the football stadium, we took the same path the players use when they head to the showers in the Fieldhouse.

It’s through the woods, and across a creek bed, and there under tall oaks and evergreens, you connect with “Abbo’s Alley.” That’s a three-block long walk, dedicated to the memory of English professor Abbott Cotten Martin, through gardens, across footbridges and then up stone steps to the campus proper.

We’d been told we should go take a walk through the Sewanee cemetery, where we bowed at the graves of two Southern literary greats, Allen Tate and Andrew Lytle. We also couldn’t help but smile at the epitaph on the tombstone of Mary Phillips Kirby-Smith, who died in 1996: “May she bend the ear of God with one more good story.” I never knew her, of course, but I sure wish I had!

We drove past the headquarters of the Sewanee Volunteer Fire Department and Rescue. That is staffed by the Sewanee students, as well as a few faculty and staff members. Training for those fire and rescue jobs is rigorous, and “is taken very seriously,” one Sewanee student told me.

A “REAL SENSE OF PLACE.” Our last stop was at the elegant home of John and Elise Spainhour, who are Sewanee alums (’73 and ’74) and now partners in a family law practice based in Shepherdsville, Kentucky, near Louisville. My buddy Doug Bates, an attorney, met the couple through some legal work.

In trips back for Sewanee Homecoming, the Spainhours discovered their affection for their alma mater was still so strong that they decided to buy a home on the mountain 17 years ago. They now use it as their summer home and weekend get-away, enthusiastically making the five-hour drive from Kentucky.

John played on Shirley Majors’ last two Tiger football teams. Elise was in the second class of women when the school went co-ed. Their son Christian graduated in 2002 from Sewanee and is headed to graduate school, as more than 40 percent of the alumni now do.

The Spainhours explain that the unusual feel of the university can be traced to the decision of the founding Episcopal bishops to travel to Oxford in England and Princeton in New England to see what colleges should be like.

Then they brought that back to the mountain near Chattanooga, a part of the “Cumberland Plateau.” They’d received a donation of the 10,000 acres of forest from the Sewanee Mining Company, which had called the site “The Domain.” There at an elevation of 2,800 feet, or about 1,000 feet above the valleys around it, the bishops started the liberal arts college which thrives today.

The Episcopal Church operates a seminary on the campus. A prep school, filled with children of Sewanee faculty and some other students who come from around the region as boarders, operates nearby.

Oh, what a hold Sewanee seems to have on people!

The playwright Tennessee Williams did not go to the university, but his family has deep roots in the area, and he made Sewanee repository for his papers, owner of the publishing rights of all he wrote and recipient of half his estate. That built the Tennessee Williams Center for the performing arts. Theatrical performances and orchestra concerts happen almost weekly, and there is an annual writer’s conference that brings in the biggest names in literature and poetry.

The famous financier Sir John Marks Templeton, who grew up in nearby Winchester, Tenn., has built an ostentatious library across the mountaintop from the university, and it’s to be the repository of his personal records.

Heck, the students told me they seldom ever go home on weekends.

“Sewanee,” said John Spainhour, “develops a real sense of place in people.”

After our quick visit, I can understand why. At the football game, we chanced to meet two of our Vanderbilt classmates, Dr. Bob and Sarah Thompson, who live in Columbia, Tenn., and whose son is a recent Sewanee graduate. “If there’s one downside to Sewanee,” Sarah told me, “it’s that at the end of four years, a lot of the students just don’t want to leave.”

When it was our time to leave, Elise Spainhour told us to be sure to tap the visor or the windows in our car as we were driving away.

Huh?

“The old story,” she said, “is that when you enter ‘The Domain,’ your guardian angel leaves you for a little bit ‘because you don’t need one here.’ Some people say the guardian angels all hang out together at an angels’ pub somewhere here on the mountain and enjoy a little down time. So when you drive out, you touch the visor or your windows to call your guardian angel back to duty.”

Silly as it seemed, we did just that.

Sewanee doesn’t seem like the kind of place where you want to be caught on the wrong side of a tradition.