(This story originally appeared in the December 1972 issue of the Wake Forest Magazine and was reprinted in The Wake Weekly a month later.)
There is a soft spot in Archie Bunker’s heart, and nestled there are memories of an adorable young Wake Forest coed.
The truth emerged when Carroll O’Connor, the real-life name for television’s most famous bigot, replied recently to a Wake Forest student’s invitation to participate in next spring’s Challenge symposium. O’Connor spent a year and part of another semester as a student on the old campus, back before World War II.
In his letter, O’Connor regretted his professional life makes such engagements impossible, and then, duty discharged, proceeded to fill the remainder of the two pages with delightful reminiscences of his stay at Wake Forest.
“I am delighted that some of your colleagues remember me from the days [three wars ago] of the old magnolia campus at Wake Forest, though I was seen far less on campus than in ‘Shorty’ Joyner’s pool hall in the town,” he wrote.
“I came to Wake Forest in a funny way. A close friend of mine in New York was planning to go there and I wanted to go where he went, so knowing nothing about the college, I applied and was accepted. My friend then changed his mind, but my mother refused to let me follow suit a second time. Off I went in September 1941 to meet ‘Shorty’ Joyner and became a truly dangerous nine-ball player. I was a wretched student — utterly disinterested in the classroom learning situation — and when I resumed college in 1947 at the University of Montana, I could transfer only one semester’s credit in English gleaned at Wake.
“There were few girls at the old man’s college, just the daughters of the faculty, and with the most adorable of these, Elizabeth Jones. I naturally fell in love. This was sheer futility. Between Miss Jones and any new admirer was a scrambling horde of old admirers, so my ardour was expressed merely in distant looks, of which Miss Jones was not aware.”
Miss Jones, who now lives on Faculty Drive and works with her husband, Russell Brantley, in the University’s News Bureau, agrees with a touch of embarrassment, that she, indeed, was not aware.
In 1941, she was 17, a sophomore, the daughter of Dr. H.B. Jones, English professor, and involved in just about everything going on on campus. She remembers Carroll O’Connor as a “very bright boy, intelligent, but as he said, he just didn’t like school very well.”
O’Connor’s description of her, she protests, is “very exaggerated.”
“But,” she adds, “it is very nice to be remembered in such a glamorous light.”
Thwarted he may have been, but the young O’Connor was not the kind to languish. The remainder of his letter includes some of the decidedly un-Bunkerish observations:
“… My frustration caused me to explore the state. I was a frequent traveler [via thumb] to Raleigh, Durham and Greensboro, and though the goal was girls, I learned a great deal en route about Carolina and its people. Believe it or not, one heard many, many whites even then expressing a certainty — yes, and an anxious wish — that the segregationist culture would soon wither away.
“I knew only one violent Klan type and I knew a few brooding reactionaries who could sound sinister on occasion. I knew a number of racists of the birdbrained windbag type, but my larger impression of Carolinians [forgive me, but I am not fond of ‘Tarheels’] was not at all of a hard people, but of a very sweet people — probably trapped and confused, as James Baldwin believes, in their own incomprehensible American History.
“I last saw Wake in 1945. I was a merchant seaman then — a fireman on an oil tanker, and we were lying useless in Miami with a broken boiler when Truman dropped his persuaders on the Japanese. I quit my ship and found a fellow who was driving to New York, and when we came through Wake Forest we stopped at Mrs. Wooten’s guest house on Route One. I roamed around the town that evening saying hello here and there, and I was touched and surprised almost to the point of disbelief that so many people remembered me — and not only remembered me, but welcomed me back, welcomed me home with love.”
Afternote:
Carroll O’Connor, the actor most famous for his curmudgeonly character Archie Bunker in TV’s All in the Family, died in 2001. The object of his college affection died in 2000 and her husband Russell, director emeritus of Wake Forest University communications, passed away in 2005. But the Joneses do have surviving children, Robin Brantley, assistant to the president of Wake Forest University Health Sciences and Benjamin Brantley, chief drama critic of the New York Times.
