Nicodemus Oppie: Our Cowboy Poet

This is the true story of Nicodemus Oppie: Cowboy Poet.

Recently in describing my childhood, someone said: “Oh. You were a nerd.”

Surely this is true and one piece of this nerdishness was the humor. My brother (nerd if I am) and I once ran an experiment at school to see if we could get “telephone pole” to become a thing. We used in every situation: “Oh, telephone pole.” This worked and when a teacher said: “Oh. Telephone pole” to the class, we felt that we had learned something, though I am still not sure we were right!

Another hobby that amused us was the Tale of Nicodemus Oppie, Cowboy Poet. We listened to a good bit of NPR and All Things Considered introduced this career to us. The cowboy poet as aspiration was perfect. Who would be our cowboy poet: Nicodemus Oppie. There was no Nicodemus Oppie, but as we told tall tales of this man who defied convention and followed his dream, we had a laugh.

I told you we were nerds.

We had a friend, an awesome friend, that we suspect decided to make the dream a reality. He sent in a college application in the name of “Nicodemus Oppie” using our home address. Our house was swamped with mail from every school on the planet. We got birthday cards. My favorite letter praised Nicodemus Oppie for his many accomplishments, but went beyond this and said: “Nicodemus Oppie you are special.” 

Soon, as data will do, we were getting mail for Nick Oprah, N. Opposition, and variations too numerous to name. This went on for years, though after he graduated and grad schools got done recruiting him, the mail faded. We learned much from this experience on the perfidious nature of our friend who has not admitted to this prank to this day.

Mostly we became utterly cynical to marketing machines at colleges and universities. We got phone calls from earnest folk who appeared to know Nicodemus Oppie, had opinions about Mr. Oppie and his career aspirations, but all of this was just to get some cash. We had been blessed with outstanding professors and so knew that they would never have said “stuff” in order to get a non-existence student to come to dear old U. They would have said what they knew, not proclaimed how remarkable our undergraduate years were.

Note the original application was to undergraduate college and by the time we were hearing from graduate schools (four years or so later), the name was not even the same. Our accomplishments could not have been based even on the original prank. The schools were calling us four years later and relying on the ego of Mr. Oppie (!) to assume grad schools would find him accomplished and worthy of graduate school.

Big Education had been infected by marketing scams.

This suspicion has not yet been refuted by experience in most cases. Too often marketing replaces people. We follow a system rather than using a personal touch. We end up making up stuff or assuming facts to get the illusory Nicodemus Oppie when we reach out, talk to, listen a bit, to real people.

In good news, I have known, however, other schools and administrators who recruit and retain based on real relationships. They would have called for Mr. Oppey, but said nothing that was a guess or exaggeration. They might have applauded his (false) SAT scores, but they would not have flattered him based on extrapolations that went beyond the data.

Thank God for the good guys! And may God bless the (real) cowboy poets!