"In 1973, The Boo had a heart attack that almost killed him. I drove down from Atlanta to visit him at the naval hospital, and he did not look that day like a man who would survive to see the dedication of the Courvoisie Room in September of 2001. When I left to return to Atlanta the next day, Elizabeth Courvoisie wept at my departure and told me she did not ever think I would see her husband again. Two weeks later, he returned to his quarters in The Citadel campus, bedridden and despondent. For a month, he did not leave his house. Only a few cadets came to visit him because The Boo had become invisible to the Corps of Cadets, or so The Citadel thought. So The Boo thought. Nothing on earth thinks or moves or acts or responds like The Citadel Corps of Cadets. The Corps of Cadets is a sovereign nation unto itself, a country that fashions its own rules, a strange entity that makes up its own mind in its own good time. The Citadel thought the Corps of Cadets had forgotten the legend of The Boo. But it was the Corps who had made that legend and the Corps who would keep it alive. Word spread that The Boo was critically ill. A rumor had it that he was dying. Along the galleries, cadets gathered to talk, and the rumors began to fly, and nowhere does rumor travel faster than the Corps. Because they are cadets, there is always mischief and always daring, always a sense of humor that is deeper than anything else. A plan was hatched in secret."