The Nelson Eight

By Kevin C. McLeod MD

It was the early 1970s during a tumultuous time in American history when Kevin McLeod first entered the halls of Abilene Christian College. It was there that he and his friends would learn a lodestone of things about themselves, each other, Wildcat football, and the college itself—all while being influenced by coaches, professors, teammates, dormmates, and the female cohabitants just across campus.

In an amusing retelling of one week of campus life, McLeod, who was a sophomore in 1973, shares a glimpse into the gears and spiritual machinery of a college in crisis. After he and seven other young men formed a squad with an important mission, they soon realized that there was not a prayer in heaven or on Earth that could save fate from their date with destiny. As he details how he and the Nelson Eight planned and then carried out a raid on a girls’ dormitory, McLeod reveals how even a group of very determined young men could not escape the consequences of their actions.

The Nelson Eight shares the humorous retelling of the unchristian actions of immature men attending a Christian college in the early 1970s.

• Language: English
• Publisher: WestBow Press
• Release date: Dec 29, 2022
• ISBN: 9781664272989

Kevin C. McLeod MD

Kevin McLeod is a physician who attended Abilene Christian College in the 1970s. The Nelson Eight is his first book.

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Copyright © 2022 Kevin C. McLeod, MD.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

This book is a work of non-fiction. Unless otherwise noted, the author and the publisher make no explicit guarantees as to the accuracy of the information contained in this book and in some cases, names of people and places have been altered to protect their privacy.

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Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

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Scripture taken from the King James Version of the Bible.

ISBN: 978-1-6642-7300-9 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-6642-7299-6 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-6642-7298-9 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2022913427

WestBow Press rev. date: 2/2/2022

CONTENTS

Foreword

Introduction

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

Epilogue

FOREWORD

Right off, I will admit that it is a shade forward for the author to write his own foreword in such a backwards story that began nearly fifty years ago. Just as it is with any man-made plans, there are rails, and then there are derailments. The original idea was to employ the sagacity of one Garry Moore. Unfortunately, that opportunity was taken from us in 1998.

I would like to dedicate this tome posthumously to my first college roommate at Abilene Christian, who I first met in the fall 1971. He was from the champion all-state football team of Brownwood. He did not show for the first part of two-a-day practices in mid-August because he was healing a big gash on his forehead. It had been a work accident in a greenhouse. He was rushing over wet floors, trying to wave goodbye to friends in the parking lot, when he slipped and dove headfirst into an open window fan.

So, when he did finally arrive at our Mabee Dorm first-floor room 103, he had his Italian looks and fresh sutures in his forehead. He looked the part of a mobster from the soon-to-be-released blockbuster movie, The Godfather.

We would both soon learn a lodestone of things about ourselves, Wildcat football, and Abilene Christian College. They were just beginning the name change to University. The major influences would come from the powers provided: coaches, professors, teammates, dormmates, employees, and the coinhabitants just across the hill on campus—the girls! They would be our flirts, friends, cohorts, sweethearts, and, for a lot of us, eventually, our wives—but not just yet. It is impossible to enumerate the blessings. O, the promise of great things to come! I did come away with this: when you graft into your heart a piece of his—Garry Moore—and I have never regretted this acknowledgment—that of the two of us, he was the better man. Here’s to you, Buck, the White-Winged Warrior!

INTRODUCTION

Soft cords rippled over the streaming soul. The song stabbed, the music bleds, a rhythm was released into warm beats of measure. The great song was being sung. Its rolling drum struck and proclaimed vibrant hope, and the tune would flow and fly and fantail, lest they ever forget these eight men from Mabee Hall. Oh, oh, oh …

1

Kevin lay on his jungle-print sheets on his bed in his dorm room, reading the beginning chapters of For Whom the Bell Tolls. His breathing was shortening rapidly, and his stomach shrank to find an inner sanctum in a rambling abdomen. He looked at the dial on his dorm desk clock. It was 10:10 p.m. He pretended to read, running his eyes down the lines of words, knowing they would come for him soon. He wondered if he failed to show, would they come and get him anyway? Boys had already popped their heads in his room, questioning, Are you going? He could hear them in the hall, quick, anxious, high-pitched utterances and whispering voices to be heard over a gale. They were gathering and forging courage as the ranks of young men in hats and masks swelled. He could feel their hunger, their thirst, as they gnashed their teeth against the looming prey before them.

Excitement sparked through the air like a voltage meter gone haywire; electricity was releasing, and there was no breaker. Kevin was ready. He had prepared an old black-and-white-striped T-shirt he’d found discarded in the bathroom, ripping holes across the shoulders that he could pull over his head. Yet he still sat reading. Blue jeans clad his legs and work boots his feet. It’s a mistake, he said to himself, and this brought to him all the protection of an umbrella against the twirl of an Oz-like tornado.

His brother, Kelly, wearing a T-shirt over his head, came questioning. Are you going? And then he was off to get more siege gear. He was actually running down the hall, and Kevin could hear his steps as they echoed back.

Kevin had already remembered this same time last year when they’d had the outdoor picnic beside the Bean, the local cafeteria. There had been a cookout and an evening picnic, and some anonymous bands and a few vocal groups had played on a makeshift stage.

They had just been in Professor Welden Bennett’s Old Testament Studies class covering the Israelites’ siege of Jericho. They’d discussed how priests trumpeting on long horns had walked around the walled city. On the seventh day, they’d circled seven times before rushing in as the movements of the Lord crashed the walls down, all except for the small, safe rampart where the harlot, Rahab, kept the Jewish spies.

Kevin and Garry had then talked about Zellner Hall, the closest girls’ dorm to the cafeteria. This old dorm had even housed Kevin’s mother, Burnya Mae Mcham, in the early 1940s, when a lanky young man from Trent, Texas, N. L. Tim McLeod, would sneak through her window, bringing cartons of ice cream from his work at a soda shop.

So the question had arisen, why not get a troop of guys—the girls would be curfewed on the weekdays at ten p.m.—and march around the dorm? Not once, not twice, not thrice, but the seven biblical times. Who knew that the Lord might recreate a fall of crumbling walls and reveal what the boys so righteously wondered about therein? And if the miracle occurred, there would be ladies who needed rescuing, transport to safety, maybe even resuscitation. They envisioned mouth-to-mouth maneuvers and chest compressions (with delicate hand placement, of course). The gathering was occurring. Volunteers were coming from all sides, and the plan was quickly broadcast. Enthusiasm swelled in a small group that appeared to add cohorts at every step. In fact, they were singing the hymn: Onward, Christian soldiers, marching as to war, with the cross of Jesus, going on before.

The dastardly, deceptive issue about this whole arrangement was that sure, there was a front door opening to the small lobby and the dorm mother’s office, a stairwell, and a nearby elevator, but beyond that was the mystery of the floors that branched off like a labyrinth. There was a real, yet-unseen moat of morality that guarded these walls, laced with spiritual spikes.

Where else in all the world was there such a bastion for beauty? Three stories stacked with mystery! Secured by the Lord and claimed in the Irish-Scotch maighdean and the French virginité. The very word could not even be spoken on the Holy Hill. To write it, one would have to put down one’s common pen, employ parchment paper, find India ink, and then, with feathered quill, tenderly write out that one word that better not be spoken, that could not be spoken, and that should not be spoken.

In this abbey, there had to be a cloister protecting the holy of holies, a chalice of universal heft that no man could hoist to drink. In a deep core, there had to be a hydra-serpent snarling head that would freeze any man’s gaze into stone, and he would become but a smoldering pile of saltpeter.