Among the giants of our class none stood taller in my estimation than “Digme the Pygmy.” Known to most of us as the Phillipian’s cartoonist, “Digger” would also have been known to many of us as a friend because that was who he was and wanted to be. A friend. True blue for being there for you. True blue for loyalty to the royal blue, Andover.
Meeting me in Omaha to relieve me at the wheel of my U-Haul moving me from Morgantown to Boulder, in August 1995. Where he lived, a far piece from Omaha, but nothing if it was for a friend and especially for an Andover friend. Family and community were the beacons he navigated by and Andover to him was both. Hard to believe that anyone could put the stamp of the common man on a campus full of preppies but he did. Little in physical stature but hardly so as a man of the people.
The little people who weren’t putting up with it anymore in the 60s and 70s. The predatory manipulations of authority that Mike thought unworthy of integrity, human decency, and goodwill — the signatures of his character. His passions were folklore and folk music, his role models standups like Joan Baez and legends like Lead Belly. Whose talents he made a career of broadcasting through college and community radio.
Like KGNU, Boulder’s voice of the common man. He named his program of folk music and blues “Highway 322,” probably more known in its day for Burma Shave ads than for going anywhere. But it brushed by his beloved State College and family farm, and that was somewhere for him. It put him on the map too. When I informed my fiancé, a Boulder resident, that he’d been my roommate at Andover, she exclaimed, “You mean THE Mike Bell?”
THE Mike Bell was what I came to think Andover wanted all its sons in those boys’ school days to be: an original. Taking family genetics from Penn State faculty through Andover and Harvard all the way to a career in Icelandic philology. To become fluent in Icelandic and an authority on Old Norse history and mythology and the Icelandic Sagas.
And proud recipient of an authentic Viking helmet bestowed upon him by his appreciative subjects. A symbol of brute strength that met its match in the untamed clutter of his office on the campus of Colorado University. Where from 1974 until his retirement in 2008 he taught car lore in addition to folk lore and folk music. Conventional stuff compared to his habit, when we bussed home from Rockies games at Coors Field, of dropping by Penny Lane to buy a single cigarette. They don’t make them like this anymore. He’s truly missed.