One of the most unusual friends I’ve known in a long lifetime of friends. He was a true eccentric. Some would call him a character. He was thus by choice, and played it up, to the hilt.

I first encountered him at UCR in the Poetry Group. He was a staff member, a lecturer in classics. I think he was not a full professor. I suspect that he may not have had the degrees, but he filled a need, taught Greek and Latin, and wrote poetry that reflected previous centuries at the same time comfortable with the “advances” of our own, T.S. Eliot and the gang. He wrote as if he knew them. Ezra Pound spoke his language.

He was a kind and gentle man, more of that anon.

He looked, acted, dressed and spoke like a Victorian gentleman. He stepped from a Dickens novel, but he drove a car.

In the Poetry Group, when William Elton, Bill, the renowned Shakespeare scholar whose book, King Lear and the Gods, still makes waves in the Literary Critics circles, when Bill led the group he founded and edited the magazine, he presented Chapman to us as a great poet of insufficient renown. We published and printed his works in every issue.

When Elton left to go back east to research and teach at the Ivy Leagues, the Poetry Group languished.

Chapman revived it, led it, I became the President, and more of my own poems were included in those issues of Poetry UCR.

So Shirley and I became friends of the faculty. We gathered for meals and increasingly became friends.

We recognized ourselves instantly, our common love of the same literature, our respect for the written and spoken word, the upper reaches of world culture which we continued to explore, even in little tucked away Riverside.

The University was a draw, and siphoned quality. We were there at just the right moment, the inception of expansion.

The University wanted to do everything right, and so did we.

Chapman needed a place to live, but he didn’t want to live in the ordinary.

He found an historical adobe, a relic with I think registered protection, in the middle of a large empty field. Passing roads outlined the property, and an access road led to his door.

The house was laid out with wings around a courtyard. The semi-vast property held the memory of former trees, but was heavily planted with palm trees of significance collected from around the world by the former historic owner. The palm trees came up to the house and surrounded it.

There Chapman lived alone, but he needed a servant, for company as well as servitude, because he gave the impression that too many things requiring the expertise to produce domestic comfort were beyond his own experience or ability.

Some time later, years, Loren, his colleague in establishing and running the Chapman School, a private school for those in Riverside who could afford a classical education for their upwardly mobile children, Loren asked me, “How old do you think Chapman is?”

We all called him Chapman, not Bill, or William, or Mister, or Doctor. He was Chapman, I think at his request.

I looked at the Victorian Dickensian, a hat perhaps to cover impending baldness, spectacles, the long loose trousers, the meticulous shirt, the cane which he sported, not for walking, but to complete the picture, and I said, generously, “Maybe 65…?”

Loren laughed and said, “He’s 40.”

If you can’t live in the previous century, at least you can look like it.

Anyway, as the story goes, one dark and stormy night, around midnight, the winds howling, the rain downpouring, the power out, there came a knocking at the adobe’s door.

Chapman, pure Dickens, in his long nightgown, slippers, and stocking cap, carrying a candle in a holder, approached the door where the knocking continued unabated.

He opened the door and each started back in fright, the visitor retreating from the apparition, Chapman stepping back from the door before which stood a black man in worn clothes, dripping from the rain.

Chapman recovered himself and ushered the man in at that ungodly hour, the storm still raging.

“Who pray tell might you be, what name do you bear, who thus inauspiciously do appear so unexpectedly upon my doorstep?”

[I think I’m overdoing the rhetoric, but it sets the scene.]

The man replied, “I’m from Baltimore, on the road, lookin’ for a place to stay the night out of the storm.”

Chapman said, “I shall call you Baltimore and you will be my servant. You can sleep on the couch.”

Thus began a series.

We encountered Baltimore when we came for dinner. We could see right away that the relationship would not last.

We pieced together bits of the picture. Baltimore was not an ideal servant. He was not born to nor trained for it. Chapman’s guidance fell on deaf ears.

“Baltimore, be sure to wash the dishes before the guests arrive.”

“Why? They’ll just get dirty again.”

“Baltimore, dust the chairs.”

“Why? When they sit down, they won’t notice.”

Baltimore moved on, and Chapman kept looking.

He had taken custody of the Olivewood School, a private academy in Riverside that catered to the exclusive but fell on hard times as the exclusive diminished in number and withered away.

Chapman started his own school, named after himself, The Chapman School, of which he was the Headmaster, concurrent I think with his duties at UCR teaching the classics.

He hired us. Shirley taught ballet. I taught English.

Loren, as Vice Principal, chose as the school play The Squire’s Masque. His research concluded that this would be the first time the masque was performed in the U. S.

Thomas Campion wrote The Squire’s Masque, sometimes also called The Somerset Masque for the wedding of Robert Carr and Frances Howard, and I was appointed advisor, because my English major had an emphasis on the Elizabethan and Jacobean eras and my thesis covered the Somerset Epithalamions for that marriage. But our Squire’s Masque was John Coprarios’ written between 1606 and 1614, Loren had things well in hand, and I really wasn’t needed.

Those were the days of the early Renaissance Pleasure Faire. Shirley assembled costumes and we took friends and some of the students to the Faire for an incredibly enriching experience.

The Chapman School provided lunch for its students, and when it was our turn, Shirley made the famous disastrous dolmathes which you can read about in the blog “Cooking Disasters,” 12/4/24.

We frequently had dinner with Chapman, Loren and his wife Geri, a party of five that ate well and spent the evening. We loved reading plays together, sometimes acting them out. Most memorable is our full scale “production” of Oscar Wilde’s “The Importance of Being Earnest.” We employed limited but “authentic” costumes. I was Earnest, Ernest Worthing, doubling as John or Jack. Loren was Algernon Moncrieff in his flat in Half Moon Street. Shirley was his young ward and my object of desire, Cecily Cardew. Geri was her bosom friend Gwendolen. Chapman played all the other parts. He was Merriam, butler to Mr. Worthing. And Lane, Mr. Moncrieff’s servant. And the fussy governess Miss Prism. And the scholarly Rector Canon Chasuble. And memorably, Gwendolen’s formidable mother, Lady Bracknell. It was a hoot! We should have taken it on tour.

Chapman came from money. That’s why he didn’t have to work full time to support himself. His mother owned property and a big house on Wilshire Boulevard. Chapman took Shirley there for tea. I couldn’t go, but heard about it as a lovely affair.

We rubbed elbows with the upper class.

Chapman had a big black limousine that I think had been a hearse in former days, with lots of room in the back. He loved to play chauffeur. Shirley and I would sit in the back seat and tell him where to go. He would say, “Yes, ma’am,” and off we went.

He was like an uncle to us and we were his children.

He took us on a picnic once. He had discovered a little grassy dell. We brought the obligatory blanket, there was a lavish picnic basket, I think wine, maybe champagne, fine china, silver cutlery, an appropriate dessert.

We were in the midst of the meal when we heard sudden reports, explosions, and something whizzing overhead.

Apparently we were at the far end of a firing range. Chapman had chosen the spot because of the grass.

We hunkered down, but he raised his cane, then stood up and yelled, “I say there! Desist! We’re having a picnic!”

We heard voices conferring, but Shirley and I gathered our picnic and we all retired to some place safer.

Chapman seemed to think the world would take care of itself. He didn’t bother himself with the quotidities of everyday existence. Which is why one day he asked us if we wanted his car, the big black limousine. It was parked on the street in downtown Riverside. Apparently it needed oil and had stopped running.

Chapman walked away and left it there.

We said, “Sorry, but we can’t afford the upkeep or the problem of finding oversize parking.”

So he bought another car. Someone must have come by and taken his old limousine off the street. We never knew what happened to it.

Chapman changed living locations. His historic adobe had been sold and bulldozed for a strip mall and parking lot. The historic palm trees were removed to a historic park where they now function as a tourist attraction.

There was a small street through the orange groves that dead ended at the Gage Canal. His was the last house on the left.

He had a new servant, Joseph, who kept the house clean and did the dishes. To give Joseph some entertainment to occupy his free time, Chapman bought a bow and arrow, and a target which he hung on the outside wall of the garage. When Joseph shot his arrows and missed the target, they went through the wall and jeopardized the car inside. Chapman retired that activity.

There was that night, at a Christmas party at his friend and colleague’s house on Mockingbird Road. Good food, good company, the way holidays always should be celebrated.

Shirley, nine months pregnant, and I were in the back seat being chauffered home by careful-driving Chapman. A small bump in the road, Shirley said, “Ouff,” felt a twinge, said, “It must be the rum ball,” but a quick calculation steered us immediately to Riverside Hospital.

I don’t know if her water broke in the car, but admitted on Friday, baby born on Sunday. A longer time period than usual. Shirley refused pain killers to protect the baby. Her ballet training allowed her to remain stubbornly silent while up and down the hall other mothers were screaming as they gave birth.

Chapman went to the go-to gift shop in the Brockton Arcade and upon recommendation bought a little baby cup, pewter like silver. I still have it.

Chapman changed living locations again. I don’t have all the chronology in order in memory, but he took a large two story house like a mansion in one of the upscale neighborhoods in Riverside, maybe on Magnolia Avenue, or Brockton. This was the new home of The Chapman School, and classes were held in the rooms.

As I said, upper class Riverside and the UCR faculty sent their children to the Chapman School. It was the scene of the incident I’m reluctant to include.

It seems at a party at his mansion, where parents and children were celebrating, Joseph had taken one of the girls into the basement and exposed himself. The girl was distraught.

There was the possibility of calling the police. The girl’s father, a professor of mine whose name I withhold, argued for non-involvement, which Chapman went along with, because otherwise that would result in legal action and negative publicity and probably close the school.

The father revealed a side of himself that I would not have expected and for which I can never forgive him. He tried to brush it away, under the carpet, and said, “Let’s not make a big deal about this. Besides, she has to learn someday.”

I was shocked. I’m usually shy and non-assertive, but I talked tough to Chapman, my friend and employer.

“You can’t just brush this aside. Harm has been done, right has been violated. There needs to be intervention. If you do nothing, I cannot accept that. Without any other action on your part, if you don’t call the police, I will.”

I surprise myself by remembering how uncharacteristically fierce I was, like a tiger.

I felt I should not have to be the one to demand justice, and I acted like a judge as Chapman paid for psychiatric therapy, and mandated behavior modification for Joseph. I don’t remember details after that.

We lost touch with Chapman. Our lives took other directions, as we moved into our 3rd Street house, I was teaching in Corona, and Shirley was seriously studying ballet, for weeks at a time staying with her parents who baby sat while she was in class.

The memories of Chapman are mostly good ones. We spent so much time together.

We all can be caught in the web of circumstance which needs not define who we are.

Chapman was trying to live in the modern century while he felt he belonged in the past.

He had a good but bruised heart, a lonely prematurely aging man who could not understand why the world was not better than it is.

I read his poetry and it challenges me.

He was part of our family, a father uncle. He loved us and we loved him.

Eccentric, he remains one of the most unusual and memorable people I have ever known.