Waller's sitting in an airport between planes reading his Colby magazine when recently declared presidential candidate Senator Robert Dole swerves over.

"What can you tell me about Colby?" the senator asked. "I know you gave a damn fine commencement talk at Colby," Waller replied, "following Bill Cosby and before George Bush. I grew up with Bush," Waller goes on, explaining how Bush was the youngest commissioned Navy pilot during World War II and Waller, a pilot instructor and test pilot, was the youngest commissioned in the Air Corps.

Next thing you know, Waller's in a sailboat off Newport, R.I., with John Chaffee, former governor and senator of Rhode Island, the sails are caught in the spreaders, and they're "bearing down on this damn boat." The Coast Guard comes up "with guns drawn" demanding they get away--that's the president over there. "He knows me," said Waller. "Go back and tell him it's Ed Waller." There's signaling back and forth. "What're they saying?" Waller asked. The Coast Guard tells him Bush's answer: "Ed, stick to flying."

Waller's a ring-tailed roarer straight out of the hyperbolic tall-tale tradition, complete with gargantuan enjoyment of all varmints, complications and digressions.

"Passion makes you live," said Waller, who says he flew up to Colby after the war to see about getting admitted in March 1947. He saw a shed on campus with some stuff stored in it and told Dean George Nickerson '24, "I'll take these things out, fix it up, and you can let thirty more people in." The dean said, "Room, board and fifty dollars. How's it sound?"

Waller, an economics major, was president of the International Relations Club and on the golf team, and he's still on the Colby admissions team. A charter member of the Colby Eight and member of the Glee Club, he still plays a mean gutbucket at local gigs in his hometown of Columbus, Ohio. His father was a geneticist who wanted him to be a doctor, and his mother was a concert pianist, so, says Waller, he "just naturally grew up with the arts and sciences." Even when he was out on a North Sea oil rig, he recalls, savoring the irony, he corresponded with President Seelye Bixler, who always said, "To nurture the intellect. That's why we're here."

Like his stories, Ed Waller has leapt with gusto from place to place, from traffic manager with Eastern Airlines to deputy assistant secretary of the Air Force to district sales manager for Raytheon Co. in Pennsylvania to marine contracting to marketing for an engineering company to sales executive with Waller-McClendon Corp., his own company.

He's hard to catch up to even now, being late for a golf date. But not too late for one more story about Dole, who, Waller says, came over to introduce his wife. Elizabeth Dole, the senator let it be known, went to Harvard Law School. "I also went to Harvard. I guess I have the best of both worlds," replied Waller, who earned an M.P.A. in 1953. "Experience and hard work are the most important things. On that scale," he said, "I'd give them a twelve, Colby an eleven and Harvard a ten!"

Waller explodes with delight. "You can't beat Colby with a stick," he said.