ENGLISH MAJORING

was tough back then. Maybe it is today, too. I know it ran a friend of mine out of sticking with it. She couldn't hack the two years of foreign language requirement back then.

Symbolism almost got me. I'd see one thing, if pressed, but my profs would see other things. In those days they acted pretty aloof, pretty smug, in fact down right elite. Theirs was the only answer, and if you didn't follow, if you didn't support it, then you were an intellectual squid.

"High on a throne of his own self he sits," is a line from a poem entitled Macfleckno, if I'm correct. (And I may not be in title or in the word self.) But it's close enough for my purpose. "What is the image?" good old Dr. Bensinger posed.

Eliciting no response from his question, he waited. I volunteered, or rather hazarded a guess. "Macflecnoe rose to power by his own means. He was a self-made man," I added.

"Oh goodness, that's wrong." Macfleckno is a tragic satire about a king sitting on a toilet." That was the right answer.

While no others in the class knew either, after the revelation, most thought they were part of the inside joke and I was the dolt who thought Macfleckno a success story.

So what does that have to do with Dorothy's shoes and the yellow brick road? Well, you see, I was thinking. Oz was a movie in 1939. The war years. This Frank guy could foresee Japan with their red and yellow flag entering the war and...