The founding-era blizzard: Schtitt leads the roped players to the Lung with a highway flare

texture · B.S. 1998, March (recalled)

• When: March, B.S. 1998 (E.T.A. "open for only a few months")
• What: In the March-B.S.-1998 blizzard that hit the newly opened Academy, "Dwight Flechette and Orin and the other players had had to be led to the Lung roped together, single file, Schtitt in the lead carrying a highway flare," the last boy vanishing "into a forlorn gray whirl." A small vivid image of Schtitt's front-line, deprivation-tested leadership. (Hal elsewhere records that JOI's neck-smell, from being carried up to bed as a child, "I now for some reason associate it with the odor of Coach Schtitt's pipe" — a stray affective link between the two founding men.)