Free Green Thumb by Ralph McInerny

journal of record. Among its contributors had been numbered faculty of repute as well as gifted students. Through many permutations from the nineteenth into the twentieth century it had recorded and chronicled the doings of the legendary South Bend campus. In the turbulent sixties of the twentieth century—harbinger of many other changes to come, some representing progress, others mere change—a campus publication had been founded to contest the hegemony of The Scholastic . A product of antinomian times, inspired by the tiresome liberalism of the day, it had been rapidly transformed from an underground publication, a kind of samizdat of dissent, into the accepted daily newspaper of the university. ( The Scholastic, bereft of its former greatness, continued as a badly printed weekly whose ineffectual sensationalism did not offset the fact that it, was merely a relic of a forgotten past.)
    The Observer, still in the first feisty days of its antiestablishmentarianism, had provided a platform for the crusade that Mortimer Sadler, hardly the most effective pen on campus, launched against the novelty of coeducation at Notre Dame. The day after Sadler’s death Greg Whelan searched out and photocopied the lengthy series of diatribes Mortimer Sadler had penned. Letters of protest and contention filled the paper whenever he appeared. His was not a position universally accepted. At the outset, the male population of Notre Dame had apparently thought that coeducation was a device meant to provide each of them with a suitable object of affection. But the manner of accepting women students, concentrating exclusively on talent and test scores, insured that Mortimer Sadler’s campaign had adherents as well as dissenters. At that time, the female population of the student body was outnumbered by males in a massive manner. For all that, some males and those females who sought to counter the Sadler campaign were eloquent, however insignificant their actual numbers. Among them was Maureen Jensen, destined to be the valedictorian of the class of 1977.
    Her pithy and deadly responses to Sadler provided a literate and delightful counterpoint to his campaign, and Greg Whelan dutifully photocopied them all. The results, abstracted from their provenance, suggested a pointed and lively debate on an issue that only a chauvinist could deny Maureen had won.
    â€œWhatever became of her?” Roger asked.
    â€œShe married an internist named O’Kelly.”
    â€œO’Kelly?”
    â€œYes,” Greg said, correctly reading Roger’s reaction. “The very woman who is registered at the Morris Inn. If Sadler was her nemesis, she was his Waterloo.”
    â€œTo mix a metaphor.”
    â€œA metaphor is already a mixture.”
    â€œTouché. Are these all the articles?” Roger ruffled the bundle of sheets Greg had given him.
    â€œAll.”
    â€œThere are other items in which the two figure, but unrelated to this controversy.”
    â€œSuch as?”
    Greg combed his beard with his fingers. “She seems to have won every academic prize offered, even a poetry prize.”
    â€œReally?”
    â€œA villanelle called ‘Why a Good Man Is Hard to Find.’”
    â€œWhat is the answer?”
    â€œYou have to lose him first.”
    â€œShe does sound the feminine counterpart of the youthful Mortimer Sadler.”
    â€œAnd she won the Midland Naturalist prize for breeding a new species of tulip.”
    â€œA veritable Renaissance woman. I should like to meet her.”
    â€œPerhaps she has mellowed with age.”
    â€œShe certainly has a lovely daughter.”
    â€œIndeed.”
    â€œYou know her?”
    â€œRoger, I met her at your semester-end party.”
    â€œOf course.”
    Roger had given the party for his students of both the fall and spring semesters, renting a large room at the university club for the purpose. Of course he had invited Greg as well, but in such a crowd