A Split Allegiance
The last member of the Campbell-Cooke family graduates
At this moment, there are no more members of the Campbell-Cooke family in school anywhere in the world. It may not last, so embrace it while you can. As far as colleges go, the Campbell side of the family has a split allegiance. We are as aligned with the University of Mississippi as we are with Millsaps College, and it’s all due to the Russians, the Japanese, and the atomic bomb.
The University of Mississippi was founded at a time when Mississippi was one of the wealthiest and most successful places in the New World. We were still very rural, and that wealth was not very evenly distributed, so even then, there weren’t that many college students, but we had them and were proud of them.
Then the war came, the big one, the war between the states, and whatever fortunes there were in Mississippi were reversed. The town of Oxford was burned. The University itself stood, but changed hands between federal and confederate forces, at times serving as a hospital. After the war, enrollment dropped to almost nothing; what students there were had been soldiers. Mississippi would begin again, considerably humbled by our folly in war.
Reuben Webster Millsaps ran the only bank in Mississippi that remained solvent through the war. In 1890, Mississippi was still remarkably poor, and although it had been twenty-five years, we were still mired in what came to be known as “reconstruction.”
The Major put up half a million of his own dollars if the Methodist Church would match it, to start a Christian College in Central Mississippi. He had some land in West Jackson, but he had his eye on some land on the outskirts of town, owned by the Jackson College for Negros, which already had a classroom building on it, and hoped to make a trade.
Offering a larger piece of land closer to the center of town to the Jackson College for Negros (that became Jackson State University), their board accepted the deal, and the campuses of Millsaps College and Jackson State University were founded on the same day.
I always thought that was a strange deal. The Jackson State campus is beautiful. Their old campus, the new Millsaps campus, was within earshot of the state hospital for the insane. I’ve been told that the Major wanted that piece of land because it was the highest elevation in central Mississippi, and the Pearl River is known to flood. Ironically, that high elevation worked against us during the Jackson Water Crisis because pumping water uphill to us was sometimes a problem. I’ve also heard Major Millsaps was aware of the coming streetcar line that would pass the new campus as it chugged past Silk Stocking Row on its way to the Looney Bin.
My father was born with purple blood in his veins. His parents both went to Millsaps, where they met. His Aunt and Uncle Also went to Millsaps. His Uncle was the treasurer for the board of directors, the highest position a layperson could hold. Daddy’s Cousin, Robert Wingate, also went to Millsaps. If cousin Robert had said Daddy should shave his head and dance like a Can-Can girl, Daddy would have done it.
He did end up shaving his head. In those days, all freshmen boys shaved their heads. If they were athletes, they wore a beanie. If they were scholars, they wore a mortar board. Nobody wanted to wear a mortar board, so they all found a way to be considered athletes, at least for two semesters. There were great wars between Millsaps Boys and Boys from Mississippi College, where they would steal each other’s beanie cap at the cost of a few teeth if it came down to it. The rivalry between Millsaps and Mississippi College became so great that they eventually had to stop playing each other in any sport. We’ve only recently picked it back up.
As the world went to war, my Daddy wanted to play his part. Having seen movies like “God is My Co-Pilot” and “Twelve O’Clock High,” Daddy decided becoming a fighter pilot was the best possible course for him. He joined the ROTC at Central High School, where he met a cadet named Martha from West Jackson, who he took to the movies once in junior high. They were never apart after that.
Every college in Mississippi had ROTC. America needed them. Daddy signed up for ROTC at Millsaps, and they offered him a generous scholarship. He would be the commandant of the Millsaps Cadets. There was no business school in those days, so he took applied economics because his Uncle Boyd promised him a position in the family business after the war. Daddy had other plans. He wanted to fly.
The Japanese surrendered on a boat in the Pacific after we dropped one splendiferous bomb on them and then another. I don’t know if that’s actually a word. I use it, not because I love war, but because it’s part of the movie “Zorba The Greek,” and it would make sense in that context.
Since the war with the Axis powers was over, the United States Military closed its ROTC branch at Millsaps. All of the state ROTC programs would be consolidated either at the University of Mississippi or the Mississippi State University for Agriculture and Applied Science in Starkville. Daddy would either have to move or lose his scholarship. He had planned to accept a commission in the newly formed US Airforce, become a fighter pilot, and never return to Mississippi. His family wasn’t aware of it, but the lady cadet he met in Jr. High was.
At the University of Mississippi, Daddy majored in applied economics, ROTC, Football, and Kappa Alpha—not always in that order. He became the first, and for a while only, member of our family to graduate from the University of Mississippi.
From there, he joined the United States Air Force as a Junior Officer. They immediately told him he was too tall and too broad to ever be a fighter pilot, BUT since he did so well at math (economics?), he might be interested in a new division that would operate this startling new technology called “Microwave Radar” that would be used to make sure the Ruskys stayed on their side of the Berlin Wall. There were rumors that the Reds were working on their own version of The Bomb. By the time Daddy was installed in Germany, they had one.
Without his pilot’s wings, Daddy didn’t stay in the Air Force as he had planned. He returned to Mississippi like he was hoping to avoid. Robert Hearin offered him a position working directly under him at First National Bank. Daddy said “no”, he really should go to work for his father and his uncle. That position went to a friend of Daddy’s from Ole Miss named Frank Day.
Back in Jackson, Daddy and the lady Cadet had a child, then another child, then another child, and finally a girl. I suppose if she had come first, there wouldn’t have been the three other failed attempts.
As this girl child grew, she began to attract a collection of suitors. One became known as the “Prince of Darkness” by those who loved him. An Army Ranger, the Prince of Darkness, allowed me to show him how we use a Q-beam to spotlight alligators on the Pearl River at night. I can’t confirm that all those red-eyes swimming toward us were actually alligators, but that was enough for him. I drove him back from the swamp to civilized areas, like CS’s, where a six-alarm bar-room brawl broke out. He was pretty brave when half a dozen alligators were swimming towards us, but once these rednecks started throwing beer bottles at the college boys, the Prince of Darkness hid under a table. Whoever the Army Rangers had to face, they weren’t as unpleasant as Mississippi Alligators and the folks at CS’s.
Since the Prince of Darkness wasn’t working out, this girl child met a fella who liked Ole Miss so much that he graduated from there twice. I had reservations about having a lawyer around, but he seemed pleasant enough and handled himself in spots like Cherokee and CS’s better than me (except for that night when he and Larry Taylor decided to fight in the middle of Highway 51 after the St. Patrick’s Day Parade but decided to take a nap on the nice cool asphalt instead.) One day, he took me for a drink and asked if he could marry my little sister. I said, “Are ya sure?”
Several years and three children later, we’re all on the two-thirds-full side of Middle age. The last Campbell-Cook (named Collins for her maternal Grandmother) graduated from Ole Miss. She is the third generation of our family to graduate from there. As much as our family has an allegiance to Millsaps, we have an equal allegiance to Ole Miss, and now there’s a brick there with her name on it.
At some point, hopefully, not any time soon, we’ll be talking about the fifth generation of our family at Millsaps and the fourth generation at Ole Miss. And so it goes.
Daddy couldn’t be in Oxford because he died a few years back. I couldn’t because there wasn’t a hotel room to be had, and getting me there was complicated. Watching the Millsaps kids graduate, I had an earbud in, listening to the live stream of the Ole Miss Graduation from my phone. How many people do you know double dip on college graduations?
