Carol Stucky was tall, slender and gangly. He had freckles and a great sense of humor. The girls at the small Montana teacher's college seemed to like him quite a lot. Now twenty, Carol had spent a few months in Korea and Japan in the army and had stolen a few of their words to spice up his vocabulary. He spoke in simple rhymes like "I know what you mean jellybean." or, "I heard what you said knucklehead." We had learned to sing two songs for our college vaudeville show, and I did a tap dance as Carol clapped his hands to the rhythm. We wore patched trousers, red bandanas around our necks, white shirts and gloves. Our faces were painted with lamp black but not around the eyes and mouths.
We asked a girl classmate to lend us a pair of her pink panties for the show. We were embarrassed and our faces turned red, and hers turned redder when she refused. We turned red again when the sales lady in downtown Dillon, Montana sold us a pair of panties to use as a prop on the show. After the first song, I was to sneeze and ask Carol for his handkerchief. He would mistakenly pull the panties out of his pocket and hand them out to me while I looked shocked. Hopefully the audience would laugh causing him to see his mistake and try to hide the panties. Then he would say to me, "Show them your dance, the one you call the hydrophobia hop." I would say, "You mean the dance where my dogs go mad?" I would do some tap dance steps I had learned at age ten. (The steps had been taught by the great Bill Robinson who was also known as Bo Jangles.) My dance would consist of a time step, the grab-offs, a break, the double wings and the shuffle off to Buffalo. After the dance, Carol and I would sing SWING LOW, SWEET CHARIOT, take our bows and run off stage.
An hour before the show I discovered Carol drinking a pint of Four Roses whiskey. He was alone in the dorm room we shared. I didn't want him to get drunk, so I helped him by taking large gulps of the bad tasting liquid. We drank it all down in five minutes. When we went on stage, we were drunk but able to perform. We got a good laugh with the pink panties joke. As I started the tap dance, Carol surprised me by trying to tap dance too. He was a good athlete. He played college basketball. Dancing, he jumped around like a chicken with his head cut off and knocked the standing mike off the stage into the orchestra pit. We ran off stage and there was loud applause. It was the end of our second semester when Carol Stucky and I were suddenly popular at Montana State Normal College.