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Local News

Thursday, May 04, 2006 - Last
Updated: 8:50 AM

Novelist Conroy bids Citadel's The Boo a heartfelt
farewell

BY BRIAN HICKS

The Post and Courier

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Pat Conroy on Wednesday returned to The Citadel to say goodbye to his mentor,
his muse and the man who was like a second father, both to him and a generation
of the Corps of Cadets.

Many of The Boo's lambs flocked to Summerall Chapel to pay their final
respects to Lt. Col. Thomas Nugent Courvoisie, a legendary figure in the
military college's history, the man former president Maj. Gen. John S. Grinalds
called the school's patriarch.

Read
the entire eulogy

It was Conroy, best-selling Lowcountry novelist and Boo biographer, who spoke
for all the lambs and bums ? as The Boo called them ? offering both laughter and
tears in prayerful remembrance to the man who handed out the discipline to
cadets while keeping them out of trouble, scaring them and at the same time
loving them.

"It was a wonderful, distinguishing moment in a cadet's life to be called a
bum by The Boo," Conroy said. "It was a moment of arrival, a rite of passage and
the stamping of a visa attesting to the fact you were an official member of that
strange, bright country we call The Citadel."

He was a stern disciplinarian, Conroy said, freezing the entire campus like
"wildebeests on the Serengeti plains after a lion's roar" when he barked out
"Halt, Bubba," but also an enigma, the man cadets turned to when they were in
trouble. Conroy remembered The Boo as a great man, but one far from
flawless.

"I think he was a better father to the Corps of Cadets than he was to his own
children, Helen and Al, and I told him that many times," Conroy said. "He always
agreed with me."

Free to tell the rest of the story, Conroy revealed incidents The Boo had
forbidden him to use in the 1970 book, "The Boo": how Courvoisie paid for
Citadel rings for two cadets, and how he could not sleep on those nights when he
had to confiscate rings from other cadets who he was forced to kick out of the
military college.

Conroy laughed about all the times The Boo had recommended his expulsion,
once for "insulting the assistant commandant's wife," Mrs. Boo. When Conroy
asked what he'd done, The Boo said he had spoken to his wife while sporting
smudged brass, unshined shoes and untucked shirt.

"I am a senior private, Colonel," Conroy said. "That's how I am supposed to
look."

And The Boo laughed.

Conroy said The Boo also gave him the inspiration for his simple and powerful
opening to "The Lords of Discipline," his Citadel-inspired novel that had both
novelist and Courvoisie on the school's black list for years.

Conroy said he asked The Boo why he was so enamored of the school, why he
loved it so much, even though he had hated every minute he was a cadet. The Boo
said, "It's the ring, Bubba."

Conroy opened the novel with the line, "I wear the ring." When he asked
Courvoisie what he thought, The Boo offered his highest praise.

"Perfect, Bubba, just perfect."

Conroy's fellow cadets said afterward the eulogy fit that description, too.
And as the hearse pulled away, taking The Boo from The Citadel campus for the
final time on his way to the National Cemetery in Beaufort, those who wear the
ring said goodbye to the man they say will always be their commandant.

Conroy on The Boo

Excerpts from Pat Conroy's eulogy for The Boo. Read
the entire eulogy

"You have never been blessed out or bawled out or chewed out unless you got
it from The Boo in his prime. Did I say he was five times louder than God? I'm
sorry if that sounds sacrilegious and it certainly is not true. The Boo was at
least ten times louder than God and I was scared of him my entire cadet
career."

"Before the book came out he asked me if there was anything he could do for
me, and I said yes. 'Colonel, you always call me a bum. You've never called me
one of your lambs. I'd like to be a lamb now that I've written this book.'

The Boo approached me and nearly put out my left eye with one of his
nauseating cigars.

'Conroy, you were born a bum, lived like a bum, and proved to be a bum every
day of your sorry life as a cadet. You'll always be a bum to me. Never a
lamb.'

When I was writing this eulogy last night, I pulled the copy of 'The Boo'
that the Colonel had presented me on publication day 36 years ago. I was looking
for a story that summed up The Boo's character and personality and charm. I did
not know he had signed it for me that day and I did not know what he signed
until last night. He signed my copy of 'The Boo' this way: 'To the lamb who made
me. The Boo' "

Reach Brian Hicks at 937-5561 or [email-masked].

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