Alva Review-Courier -

Joe Budney was a happy-go-lucky student at Northwestern during the 1960’s, and generous to a fault. He always paid more than his share of school expenses despite having to live a very Spartan existence to make ends meet. At the end of each school year in the spring, he gave most of his belongings away to lighten the load on his aging Chevrolet Malibu convertible while making the trip back home to South Bend, Indiana.

It was not at all unusual for Budney to drop by a group at the student union and pick up the tab for everyone’s coffee. In the period of the '60s and '70s, NWOSU went through several periods of financial belt tightening, and he delighted in making jokes about how the school could save money. One of these finance saving spoofs became his favorite – it generally concerned how a university band could cut costs by downsizing to a “one-man marching band.”

When describing his idea, he would frequently stand and overly dramatize how one person could manage to play multiple imaginary horns and drums. Percussion instruments were of course his favorite, and during elaborations of his ideas, he would thrash around wildly on non-existent drums with a delighted grin on his face.

But then he came up with an idea that would save an even larger imaginary amount by doing away with even one of the costly band instruments, by forming “a one-man precision walking team.” In his words, “And now the walking team goes into its famed ‘i formation,’ after which it will complete the dotting of its i.” When Budney described this, with his unbounded enthusiasm and dramatic gestures, it didn’t sound so utterly absurd.

After four years, Joe decided to become a graduate student and pursue his masters’ degree. In the process, he became a very popular assistant instructor at NWOSU, and taught a couple of classes each semester. For guidance for beginning instructors, we teachers had a manual of instruction. But of course no manual can cover everything – like the finer points of student/instructor relations and just how dangerous late nighttime “mixed socializing” could become.

For instance, Joe once called to invite me to a Thursday night group outing to an Alva nightclub. The prospective group would consist of Joe – himself an Air Force veteran, myself, another Northwestern instructor who was single and had been a tank driver in Europe during the early 1960s, and two other students who were former Vietnam veterans. Joe and the two other student vets were taking a Friday morning class taught by the tank veteran at 8 a.m. With a group makeup like this, and a stated ending time for the Thursday evening outing of 11 p.m. pray tell, what could possibly go wrong?

Our evening was filled with good natured revelry, and our conversation centered around military service related stories. At 11, I left the group to touch up my preparation for my own 8 class the following Friday morning. When I left, the other members of the group were further engaged in service-related story telling. I only later learned that the group had closed down the nightclub that evening, and continued their story telling all night at the instructor’s apartment.

Early at school the next morning I saw the same instructor coming slowly across campus. But instead of being his customary immaculately attired self and greeting everyone as he passed them, he was wearing Bermuda shorts, sandals, had on very dark glasses, and was staring straight ahead as he walked, acknowledging no one. He entered my building and trudged up the stairs.

I updated a few notes for my own 8 class, and began my lecture. About 10 minutes into the class period I heard the loudest burst of laughter I ever heard during my tenure Northwestern. Joe Budney later told me what had happened.

Joe and the two other students in their class had gotten no sleep during Thursday night, arrived late and took seats in three vacant chairs on the back row of the large classroom, which seated about 80 students. The instructor, who had also gotten no sleep, had arrived late, and had begun his lecture by keeping on his dark glasses as he drew tiny graphs on the blackboard. The squeaky noises made by the chalk was clearly bothering him considerably (leading some present to conclude he might have a tiny bit of a hangover).

Before long, one of the two Vietnam vets loudly interrupted from the back row, saying “Professor, if you’re (bleep bleep) going to draw graphs on the blackboard, would you (bleep bleep) draw them big enough so that we can see them?” The instructor hesitated, then turned slowly to face the class, and pushed up his dark glasses to see where the comment came from. Then he merely said, “Yes sir,” turned back to the board, and began erasing his graphs.

The student who had made the request then said, “(Bleep bleep), Do you think he heard me?” Like I previously said, the class response to his latter comment was the loudest burst of laughter I ever heard during my 40 years at the university.

Joe left the university in the early ‘70s, and called early one morning to say that he’d taken a job in the Chicago area, and was working as a manager in a toilet seat factory. He called periodically for several years afterwards, and then in the early 80s, the phone calls stopped coming. Sometime afterwards Joe’s son called to say Joe had died of a heart attack. All things considered, Joe Budney was indeed a most unforgettable character.