The Origins of Professor Xtreme

David Nemeth

CANNONballs! I’m such a lucky guy, and so very fortunate to have met more than my fair share of interesting people over the years. My father tops the list. He was a born and raised in the heart of hunkydom on steep slopes overlooking Youngstown’s vibrant valley of smokestacks and steel.

During school hours, Dad fed coal to furnaces inside a mill along the Mahoney River. He grew up as tough as the nails and rails that were forged and stamped out there beneath the billowing concrete chimneys. Youngstown was a lot like Toledo in its prime. Soot in the air and gyres of foam in the river meant another paycheck was on the way. Everyone employed breathed deeply over that and ignored the consequences.

A man of steel, my Dad was an amateur boxer, a footballer and a heck of a numbers runner -- until Pearl Harbor shuttled him far away into the South Pacific. This unexpected overseas adventure (in addition to his having met and married my Mom) likely saved him from becoming just another late-Depression Y-town mobster.

Surviving under canvas in the sweltering heat of hostile, jungle-covered islands like New Caledonia, New Guinea, Espiritu Santo and Fiji, Dad rose to every occasion and earned the rank of Captain on a field commission. I keep an old photograph of him wearing a grass skirt, holding a bottle of beer and smoking a Lucky Strike.

Dad never spoke much of his war experience other than to say he was for a time the personal bodyguard and Jeep driver for a gung-ho general named “Sandy” Patch. Eventually, I was able to piece together a patch-quilt story of him killing many enemy soldiers and suffering deep remorse. It was soon after the war that he discovered, through self-hypnosis, how to contain those ghosts of war that might otherwise have driven him crazy.

When Dad returned from the war he walked through the front door and into my life as a complete stranger. I met him then, this most interesting fellow. I was four years old. From that day forward he threw himself headlong into the American Dream. He vowed to help heal the ravages of polio and leveraged the GI Bill into a college education and a sweet career of professional physiotherapy.

It was in his spare time that he began also to study the hypnotic arts. He practiced on me throughout my childhood. In the evenings, after dinner, he would swing a ring on a string in front of my face and ask me in his sonorous voice, “What do you want out of life today, Jimmy?” and then proceed to attempt to provision me with that item or experience via his power of suggestion.

The results of his experiments were as often as not satisfying and long-lasting. To this day, for example, my glass of ordinary tap water tastes just like ice-cold Coca-Cola©. Dad eventually became a certified hypnotist. Sly Stallone was one of his classmates.

There are other folks on my list, both great and small. In 1996, while participating in a grandiose “World Philosophers Meet” convened in Poona, India, I found myself seated facing the Dalai Lama at close quarters. He borrowed my five cent Paper Mate© ball point pen to autograph some books and then returned it to me about an hour later. While I am not yet convinced the Dalai Lama is a Holy Man I can attest from this first-hand experience to his honesty. Incidentally, that nickel pen has yet to run dry of ink! Come by my office and I will show it to you.

Further down my list and less renowned (but hardly less interesting) is a pleasant fellow named Roy I met early one morning around dawn at the Baker Street Restaurant and truck stop in far eastern Indiana. That place is open around the clock and has the best biscuits, gravy and trucker toys north of the Mason-Dixon Line. He was interesting to me mainly because he conversed fluently in proverbs and nostrums (which are almost — but not quite — the same thing).

For example, on first greeting Roy he responded to my “Good morning!” with “The early bird gets the worm!” to which I replied without hesitation, “The second mouse gets the cheese.” I like proverbs, too, you see. In that way we hit it off. We shared a window booth and traded pithy wisdoms from around the world as powerful Peterbilts and classic Kenmores rolled across the parking lot outside, their chromium-covered duel exhaust stacks belching diesel and glistening in that morning’s sunshine.

By noon Roy and I had ritually bonded, finally entrusting each other with our very favorite proverbs. It was high time to cash out and seek our separate paths through Life. Who picked up the check? Roy said “He who pays the piper calls the tune,” and I countered “He who sups with the Devil should have a long spoon!” So we smiled, called it a draw and split the bill.

In case you are wondering: My favorite proverb on that day was “The sun shines even in a rat hole.” His was “There are few in the world that can resist the urge to help their rice plants grow.” Today I like his best.

Here at the University of Toledo the Jacobs Administration, capping four years of futility on the academic front, is on the verge of dismantling our venerable College of Arts and Sciences and transforming it all or part into a “School of Sustainability.” This term, “sustainability” is a euphemism for “development” and a vaguely green rationale for continued economic growth and reliance on technological fixes to remedy technological disasters. Oil spills, global warming and such are viewed by crass developers as opportunities for making more profits.

Further technological disasters are accepted by such evil clowns as collateral damage along the road of progress. Their favorite nostrum for a stalled economy is “A rising tide lifts all boats.” Thus, relentless, cancerous growth is portrayed as natural and necessary for improving the human condition.

I believe there is an ethical alternative to the instrumental/rational arguments for a sustainable future. I call it “enlightened underdevelopment” and it involves creating a world society that can “resist the urge” to pursue an economic growth model that continually depends on promoting selfishness, usury and profiteering while accepting starvation, war and poverty as business as usual.

Interested? Come by and talk to me. Don’t forget to ask to see that pen.

—David Nemeth is Professor Xtreme and can be contact at david.nemeth@utoledo.edu