Perhaps it was because he had a name that has been applied to males in only 6.7 percent of all cases of babynaming since the 1880s. Perhaps it is because he had the reputation as a peacemaker, a conciliator, a pragmatic philosopher, that my friend was known mostly to his circle of friends as Gandhi. He drove an old 40s Chevy Fleetline nicknamed The Camel, as an obscure and rather meaningless memory.
Gail/Gandhi was probably my best friend of that particular college year. During the appropriate seasons, the two of us would often cut our afternoon classes, playing tennis until we were near exhaustion, then we would head to either Moon’s Saloon, Warren’s or the Beehive to drink beer, joining a certain class of students who gathered for merriment and discussion of literature and politics and of Sartre, Nietzsche, et. al. until dinnertime at our dormitory. Or we might occasionally skip the meal in favor of happy hour offerings. Under these circumstances, I met some unforgettable characters like Yovanovich, Preacherman, Long John Silver, the Great Hardon, the Owl, Darrelsy (I was Hath or Hather) and others who formed our group of mixed race (and this was in a Southern Border State — Missouri, to be exact, a slave state that did not secede from the Union in the Civil War era — campus), mixed sexual orientation, and mixed political view holding friends, including a couple of like-minded faculty members. Wildness ensued, of which I will refrain from disclosing more.
Here is Gail/Gandhi as we were about to enter the Beehive. (This was about the time that he was engaged in a research project with the local police department to statistically measure and report sociologic and other factors associated with the jail population and crime over time.)
Gandhi at the Beehive, Warrensburg, Missouri – 1962 (Kodak Brownie Hawkeye photo)
UPDATE 3/25/2022: Today I learned that Gail passed in 2012, apparently a victim of cancer. And I find that he went into military service after college, played football in the Marine Corps, and raised a family. So far, I have found no evidence that he continued in his political science interests that I had known.