I was on the pressbox side of KSU Stadium last Saturday.
I don't get to go over there often, so it was a novel experience. Consequently, it was the first time I had the chance to see the statue of Ernie Barrett, the man they call "Mr. K-State," poised in front of Bramlage Coliseum.
Barrett has been the most outspoken supporter for K-State athletics for a long time, having dispatched himself across the state as an ambassador for the university. He always is ready to drop whatever he's doing to shake the hand of a fellow K-Stater.
Well, perhaps "embrace" is a better word for what Barrett will do to your hand. He doesn't "shake" at all. Barrett's arm functionally serves to connect you to his heart, and he puts the weight of that heavy muscle into his grip.
The effect is naturally a little disabling, but as your hand is released and Barrett turns to embrace the hand of somebody else, the blood returns to the veins in your palm, and you get a peculiar feeling of warmth.
It is the unmistakable trait of Mr. K-State.
The statue in his honor stands in permanent tableau, arm extended, waiting for someone to return the gesture with a reach of an arm and a grasp of a hand - to spend a minute with the image of the man who helped sculpt K-State pride.
Indeed, the brass is a little more polished in the palm of the outstretched arm.
In a way, Barrett gives us a direct connection to the past, a tie-in to the K-State of the 1950s, when the post-war era held the promise of campus construction projects and new possibilities for academic and athletic development. Plans existed for a new student health center, a brand-new student union, the completion of Memorial Stadium's horseshoe, and a bigger, better veterinary medical center.
We lack a certain connection to the past at K-State. It isn't anyone's fault in particular - we've been rather busy trying to save the school from the shadow of the twenty years between 1965 and 1985.
In the years following the time Barrett went to school here Nichols Hall burned down, rising enrollment took a sharp turn southward, the stadium was never completed, and athletics lost the edge it once had - particularly in the basketball arena.
So we had to fight to recover. It was an uphill battle. We had to forget the past to move forward.
Sometimes life is like that. I watched an uphill battle the other day.
It was almost comical, really.
Someone was trying to bicycle up the hill of North Manhattan Avenue. It was clear he was coming from campus - his remarkably cumbersome bookbag slowly was sliding off sweaty shoulders.
To tackle the hill he had down-shifted to the point where his legs were moving at a blinding pace to keep him from rolling backwards. Despite the effort, he began to loose more and more momentum until he was spinning furiously just to keep the same place.
The hill prevailed, and red-faced, the young man was forced to hop off his bike and walk it to the top.
Our reversal over the past 10 years is reminiscent of us stepping off the bike.
Now we're at the top of the hill, and it has provided us with a renaissance of sorts. We have time to get back on our bike and start the ride again. The building and rebuilding of campus has mirrored a proverbial search for identity, and I think for many K-Staters, the search is beginning to turn its gaze backwards.
I am normally not an advocate of reactionary-ism.
Hell, I'm like Ferris Bueller, I'm not fond of any '-ism,' but there are K-Staters out there - and I'm among them - who are hungry for the past. We're people who would be interested in knowing that the alma mater used to have other verses, or that we once made freshmen wear beanies on campus, or that we had a campus dog named Boscoe who used to run around in a cape.
I think, like Boscoe, the identity we're looking for is running around in the past somewhere.
To find it, we need to teach ourselves about the way things were, and we need to embrace some of the traditions we once had.
We also need to make sure we take a good, hard look at our memorials and don't get so caught up in building new things that we get ahead of ourselves.
Memorial Stadium, for instance, is a memorial to the soldiers who fought in World War I and, by default, to those who fought in World War II. It's slated to receive some attention as one of the crumbling classrooms projects, but rumor has it that refurbishment will be limited solely to the interior. For a structure that sits at a main entrance to campus, we should be paying better attention to the appearance of its exterior, but as the great exodus of K-State sports was led on the long march north, we forgot about our old athletic centers.
That includes Ward Haylett track, the northerly home of K-State's Olympian-filled track team. Haylett was an assistant on the 1948 Olympic team and coached at K-State for 35 years. Unfortunately, the university seems to have forgotten him, much as we have forgotten the track that bears his name. The status of that facility is so poor we can't sponsor large meets, while the castles of other sports loom increasingly larger.
The plan, then, is really quite simple. Build tributes to the past and don't let them become history, too.
That way, we can all take the same pride in K-State Barrett does.