Louis Roney: The truth will ouch

• One day after finishing my classes as a student at WPHS, I started home through Forest Hills on my bicycle. I looked up a little curve in the street and saw that a person was sitting asleep at the wheel of a car on the side of the rode just ahead. I rode over to get a better look and noticed a small black hole in his forehead. I went to the house of my classmate Boyd France, who lived nearby and called the police. They came with an ambulance a few minutes later. The body of a young man was carted away. The revolver he had used lay on the seat of the car. The police asked me to come to the station and answer a few questions. I never heard thereafter anything about this bizarre incident and never any news on the radio or in the newspaper.

• Winter Park, the town where I grew up, is graced by the presence of many beautiful lakes. And, I can tell you from experience that they are full of fish. Life was for us young people in great part, aquatic, and we usually carried our bathing suits to school for use afterwards.

At Rollins College the Florida State Swimming Championships were held every year. I remember spending an interesting time with great swimmer Katherine Rawls and her sister Evelyn both who figured in Olympic swimming competitions. To us kids, they were celebrities and we treated them as such. Our world was a small one and most of us had never been farther from home than Atlanta.

I graduated from high school in 1938 and got a scholarship to Harvard. The early chapters of my life were closed as surely as though I had closed a book on them. By September I was in Yankee land, Massachusetts, and waiting for the first harsh winter that I was yet to experience. When I found my room in Weld Hall in the Harvard yard, I met my roommate, Bob Hill from Versailles, Ky., the town that Gov. Happy Chandler came from.

Happy was interested in redheaded Bob’s education because they had both gone to the same one-room schoolhouse in Versailles. Bob’s father worked with horses on one of the great farms where the racing thoroughbreds were bred. Bob was imbued with Kentucky Derby history and could name all the winners since the race began. His goal his whole life was to own a horse that ran in the Kentucky Derby, and if I remember correctly he did just that, many decades later. All I knew about horses in Winter Park was learned at the Baby Grand Theater on Park Avenue watching Western movies. Bob was a great student and graduated magna cum laude, whereas I, with a passel of other than purely scholastic interests, coasted in with a mere cum laude. A Harvard representative who once stopped by our house in Winter Park reportedly told my parents that I was the kind of kid Harvard was seeking, someone who was good in his studies and had many “extra” scholastic interests. Harvard was clearly not specializing in what we called “meatballs”— guys who studied and did little else. Bob’s mein was serious while mine was a bit flighter.

• A dear friend and colleague of mine always looks as though she had just stepped from a bandbox. I cannot remember ever seeing her twice in the same outfit. Recently I said to her, “You must keep a couturier working full time just whipping up new frocks for you.”

“I do,” she replied. “Really?” I asked. “What’s the name of your couturier?” She looked at me sweetly, and said, “Kay Mart.”

• A late-night radio talk-show recently featured a guest who maintained that “open marriages” were the “in thing.’’ He went on to say that “married people having other partners had saved many shaky marriages,” a statement I find impossible to believe. It occurred to me that the fitting slogan for this guy’s thinking would be: “The couple that strays together stays together.”

• Mark Twain, in his near-infinite wisdom, once remarked: “Good breeding consists of concealing how much we think of ourselves, and how little we think of the other person.”

Famous English philosopher Bertrand Russell was a religious skeptic. He stated that he would complain bitterly if God ever asked him why he was skeptical right up to his last day on earth. “I would answer Him,” said Russell, “‘But, Sire, you did not give us enough information.’”

• Advice is coming in on all sides these days. Change is the big word that gets brains humming at full zoom. The Winter Park Library should stay put or move to a site where downtown is still walkable. As usual, Commissioner Carolyn Cooper was correct, the location should have been on the ballot — then people would clearly have understood what was going on.

But as usual, others didn’t want the people to know all the facts and now the city has another mess that could easily have been avoided. If “the powers that be” have to start over and this time put all their facts on the table, so be it! Suggestion: Combine City Hall with the Civic Center and use the City Hall current site for the library? I’m sure there are many other cogent ideas out there.