The Late, Great Arnie Draper

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WE HAD ALL GOTTEN THE NEWS by seven o’clock. I’d heard it first on the early news, and rushed to tell the other kids. We somehow wound up at the Campus Malt Shop, about twenty of us, all sitting around gloomy and sick and miserable about it.

Charlie Draper was dead. He had cracked up in his Valiant, on the highway. Charles Arnold Draper, whom some called Charlie and some called Arnie. Funny about that: the girls all called him Arnie, I was one of them, and the guys all called him Charlie. Funny about that, but just typical of Arnie Draper. Friendliest guy in the wide world. Number-one man on campus, with everybody. Not stuck up or self-centered, though God knows he could have been, what with being star quarterback on State’s Big Ten championship team, a brilliant student, head of the Jazz Committee, president of his fraternity, and a dozen other accomplishments. He could have been the most egotistical slob in the world, but he wasn’t. Wanted everybody to call him Arnie, as though he’d known them all his life. Just like that; Arnie. Or Charlie.

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