Girard College

Well I was once again working in the world of art. The last time I’d seen the boss, was at Mo’s funeral. He had told me at the time, to get in touch if I needed to be busy. The past few months I had been spinning, bitter over the events, that led to my old friends death. By this time he had given me the label, “a loose canon”, mind you, a label given by the man who smacked that thief up side the head with his Glock. He was careful with me, he knew what I was about, we were the same. Being blunt, not always works to ones advantage, in this business, it can cause some serious problems. He had hired some art students, just out of college, looking to make a career. I had no patience with there nonsense. Clients observing interactions between us, was not always good, The boss kept us apart, when we were out in the field. Most of the crew were working in the galleries at Princeton, when a nice little installation job for Girard College, was scheduled to start. There had been a competition for the design of these buildings on campus, about one hundred years before. The details of what had been submitted, were discovered within the archives, and a decision was made, to exhibit these documents in Founders Hall. My friend George had gone to this school, a boarding school for orphaned boys, it was not a college. The school was built with the fortune of Stephen Girard, probably the richest man in America, at the time of his death. This was the largest private charitable donation ever, in the history of America at that time. What was important to Girard, was the campus to be safe for the boys. What was required of the buildings on campus, was for them to be built with materials that would not burn, lots of stone and iron, no wood. George and I hadn’t seen a lot of each other after Mo’s death, we were both trying to sort it out on our own. I called George, when I found out I’d be doing some work, at his old school. He sized the opportunity to visit his old digs,a visit he had avoid for years. He knew things about this place, even the director was surprised to hear. The campus is surrounded by large stone walls, an insular environment for the boys that were sent there. He told me of the tension, when Martin Luther King, stood on the other side of that wall, in protest of the policies of the school. It brought him back the memories of secret tunnels, that honeycomb underground throughout the campus, he thought he might have keys, that would still fit the locks. What was truly great about doing this job, was George and I, were hanging out again. We had both been destroyed, when Mo chose to go, and this started us to heal. My boss had learned to love Mo as well, so the three of us, spent a lot of time with a bottle of Powers, toasting the man.