The Oldest Living Graduate by Preston Jones

First published: 1976, in A Texas Trilogy

First produced: 1974, at the Dallas Theater Center, Dallas, Texas

Type of plot: Psychological

Time of work: Summer, 1962

Locale: West Texas

Principal Characters:

• Colonel J. C. Kinkaid, a World War I veteran
• Floyd Kinkaid, his son
• Maureen Kinkaid, Floyd’s wife
• Clarence Sickenger, Floyd’s new business partner
• Martha Ann Sickenger, Clarence’s wife
• Mike Tremaine, a handyman

The Play

The Oldest Living Graduate concerns an important week near the end of Colonel J. C. Kinkaid’s life. The audience is immediately introduced to him in the first scene through his exchange (“conversation” is hardly the word) with his daughter-in-law, Maureen Kinkaid, and their neighbor Martha Ann Sickenger. The setting, as it remains throughout the play, is the den of his son’s ranch-style house on the outskirts of Bradleyville, Texas. This dialogue is important not so much for the information it conveys as for the personalities it reveals. The colonel is seventy-five, wheelchair bound, cantankerous, and more than a bit dotty, his mind often moving through a series of associations to the most comical conclusions. However, he still has drive and spunk, along with an indomitable will that he tries to impose on others. Even in his dotage, his insights are often keen. Both likable and irritating, he is by turns admired and merely tolerated by Maureen, whose own personality at times resembles his.

Martha Ann is an empty-headed chatterbox who perpetually annoys Maureen. A few nuggets of information important to the development of the plot do appear among the humorous arguments and misunderstandings that ensue. The audience learns that the colonel was shell-shocked during the trench warfare of World War I; there is also mention of the Genet farm, which is dear to his heart. After he has left to have a look at this property, Martha Ann lets slip that her husband and Floyd Kinkaid, the colonel’s son, hope to capitalize on the farm as part of a lakeside development.

The husbands return, there is more banter revealing the essential barrenness of small-town life, and finally Maureen and Floyd are alone. Wealthy, childless, they have few aims. Maureen realizes that Floyd needs a challenge, but she is taken aback by his callous plans not only to develop his father’s cherished property but also to manipulate to his advantage the fact (it is now revealed) that his father is “the oldest livin’ graduate” of the Mirabeau B. Lamar Military Academy in Galveston. The school is moving to a new location, and its officials have decided to use the occasion to honor Colonel Kinkaid. Since the latter cannot make the trip to Galveston, the ceremony will be held in Bradleyville. Floyd envisions the sudden influx of government officials, businessmen, and military dignitaries as the perfect springboard to launch his lakeside development.

Act 1, scene 2, is decidedly different in tone. The first part is a conversation between Colonel Kinkaid and Mike Tremaine, a hired hand who occasionally looks after the colonel and takes him for drives. The colonel reveals the accumulating sense of loss that time has brought him: his present immobility, the death of his older (and favorite) son, what in his eyes amounts to the destruction of the land under the barrage of development, and the end of his first romance. Now the audience discovers the reason for the colonel’s attachment to the Genet farm: It was there that a group of French settlers had come, and the colonel had fallen in love with Suzanne Genet. Forced by drought to move on, the Genet family, including Suzanne, disappeared. The colonel keeps the property untouched “for rememberin’.” Thus, the audience is prepared for the second part of the scene: a confrontation between Floyd and the colonel, during which Floyd asks for permission to develop the farm, and the colonel refuses.

The arrival in act 2, scene 1, of two representatives of the military academy sharply focuses the conflicts that have been building within the colonel’s mind and between him and his son. Colonel Kinkaid graphically disabuses the young cadet who has accompanied the school commandant of any notions about the romantic nature of his military career. Filled with sorrow when he learns how each of his classmates has died, the colonel abruptly declines any part in the school’s ceremonies: “It ain’t no honor to be the oldest livin’ anything. Oldest living graduate, oldest living Indian, oldest living armadillo, oldest living nuthin’, ’cause that means that you’re all alone!” Floyd wheels angrily on his father. In the dispute that follows, Floyd reveals, among other matters, the bitterness and the pain that he has felt from having his dead brother constantly idealized as a paragon of filial behavior. Even Maureen, much as she admires the colonel’s feisty independence, begs him this once to show his love for Floyd by giving his son what he wants. The scene ends inconclusively, however, with Floyd driving his father to a lodge meeting.

The Sickengers return in scene 2. Clarence reveals that actually Floyd does not need permission from his father to develop the farm, for a week earlier Floyd has had his father declared incompetent and has received power of attorney over his affairs. Maureen can comprehend neither Floyd’s motives nor the elaborate game that he has played with his father trying to secure permission. Floyd attempts to explain that just once he wanted his father to show tangibly that he recognizes his son’s worth. Maureen, however, insists that Floyd be honest with his father. Just as Floyd agrees, a telephone call comes announcing that Colonel Kinkaid has suffered a stroke during his lodge meeting.

A short scene concludes the play. The colonel has refused to stay in the hospital. He reminisces with Mike about his vanished past and the changed West. Facing the imminence of his death and the uselessness of clinging to the past, he gives Floyd the land.

Dramatic Devices

The story line of The Oldest Living Graduate constantly skirts sentimentality, which Preston Jones avoids through generous doses of comedy. The colonel is the primary source of much of the humor. One of Jones’s favorite devices is to let the colonel start an incongruous chain of associations that leads him further and further into fantasy, only to pull up short and shoot off again in a totally unexpected direction. For example, early in the play Maureen receives a telephone call from a preacher involved in the planned ceremony. Colonel Kinkaid intercepts the call on the den’s extension and decides, for some obscure reason, that it is an obscene call, whereupon he informs the caller that he has wasted a dime if he thinks that Maureen is sexually attractive. When Maureen finally makes the colonel realize that it is the preacher on the telephone, the colonel proceeds to denounce him for losing his religious calling. By the time Maureen finally grabs the receiver from the colonel’s hand, the minister has hung up. The colonel takes full credit for having shamed him, then declares, “Don’t like preachers anyway.” When Maureen demands to know why, however, Colonel Kinkaid denies having made such a statement and accuses Maureen of trying to get him into trouble with God in order to keep him out of Heaven.

Another comic device that Jones uses with both the colonel and Maureen is allowing them to tell the truth about a social situation when politeness would call for keeping quiet. For example, the colonel cannot understand why Martha Ann has married such an unattractive man as Clarence. He demands to know if she had become pregnant before the wedding and then, when she reacts in shock, blurts out the probable truth: “Must have been the money then.” Though never obscene, some of the humor is sexual.

Many lines in the play are almost throwaway zingers that crisply reveal the area’s cultural barrenness, its racial and ethnic prejudices, and its closed-mindedness. In particular, the Sickengers are vehicles for Jones’s satire against small-town mentalities. Martha Ann is close to being a caricature of a young, empty-headed woman whose only interests are clothes, her new sports car, and gossip. Clarence is the stolid, unimaginative businessman who prefers women who do not talk back. Dramatically, they both function to make Maureen more understandable and even likable for her cattiness, for the Sickengers represent personality types and attitudes that both the Kinkaids have managed to avoid. In total contrast to the Sickengers’ Babbittry stands the handyman Mike. Dramatically, he represents the values of the Old West, based on a closeness to the land, a closeness that the Sickengers and the younger Kinkaids have lost. It is between these two poles that the Kinkaids battle toward some sense of community within the family.

Critical Context

In centering his plot on a conflict between father and son, Preston Jones placed The Oldest Living Graduate squarely in one of the great American dramatic traditions. Plays such as Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman (pr., pb. 1949), Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (pr., pb. 1955), and Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night (pr., pb. 1956) come instantly to mind as examples of this tradition. Jones’s satiric exploration of small-town values is also part of a long American literary tradition dating from Edgar Lee Masters’s Spoon River Anthology (1915) and Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio (1919). Examination of an old person’s confrontation with his own mortality is a universal theme, but it is particularly instructive to compare Jones’s play with Flannery O’Connor’s short story about the death of a Civil War veteran while attending his granddaughter’s graduation, “A Late Encounter with the Enemy” (1953).

In Jones’s own development, The Oldest Living Graduate is the third play of A Texas Trilogy, his first works to be presented to the public. Each play stands alone dramatically, but each becomes richer when seen in relationship to the other two. All are set in the same locale (an imaginary town modeled on Colorado City, Texas), and names dropped casually in one play become full-fledged characters in another. Thus, the practical nurse who accompanies Colonel Kinkaid home from the hospital in The Oldest Living Graduate is the offstage mother of a character in the first play, The Last Meeting of the Knights of the White Magnolia (pr. 1973, pb. 1976) and a prominent character in the second play, Lu Ann Hampton Laverty Oberlander (pr. 1974, pb. 1976). The former takes place during the time of act 2, scene 2 of The Oldest Living Graduate; in it the colonel suffers his stroke. In Lu Ann Hampton Laverty Oberlander it is revealed that the town erects a statue to the colonel after his death (a statue so ugly that even the pigeons will not defile it) and that Floyd and Clarence are successful with their lakeside development (though they have trouble getting the grass to grow on the golf course).

Jones’s reputation rests entirely on this trilogy. It has received public acclaim in regional theaters and at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. Critical reviews were decidedly mixed when the trilogy opened on Broadway in September, 1976, and it closed there after a brief run. Still, Otis L. Guernsey, Jr., chose both The Oldest Living Graduate and The Last Meeting of the Knights of the White Magnolia for inclusion in The Best Plays of 1976-1977. The Oldest Living Graduate was televised in 1980 with Henry Fonda as Colonel Kinkaid. Jones returned to a West Texas setting for a one-act play examining racial attitudes, Juneteenth (pr. 1979), but the other three full-length plays that he completed before his death were all set in his natal state of New Mexico: A Place on the Magdalena Flats (pr. 1976, pb. 1984), Santa Fe Sunshine (pr., pb. 1977), and Remember (pr. 1979). None of the four received much attention, though they reflect Jones’s continued interest in the themes he had developed in The Oldest Living Graduate and the other plays of A Texas Trilogy.

Sources for Further Study

Anthony, Ole. “The Long Nights of Preston Jones.” Texas Monthly 7 (December, 1979): 180-189.

Bennett, Patrick. Talking with Texas Writers: Twelve Interviews. College Station: Texas A&M Press, 1980.

Busby, Mark. Preston Jones. Boise, Idaho: Boise State University Press, 1983.

Cook, Bruce. “Preston Jones: Playwright on the Range.” Saturday Review 3 (May 15, 1976): 40-42.

Kerr, Walter. “The Buildup (and Letdown) of Texas Trilogy.” New York Times, October 3, 1976, p. D3, D6.

Prideux, Tom. “The Classic Family Drama Is Revived in A Texas Trilogy.” Smithsonian 7 (October, 1976).

Reynolds, R. C. “Humor, Dreams, and the Human Condition in Preston Jones’s A Texas Trilogy.” Southern Quarterly 24, no. 3 (1986): 14-24.