Dear George,
Recently Katja and I took
an overnight camping trip to Yellow Springs, and we spent some time there
walking around the campus of our alma mater, Antioch College. We visit
Antioch every now and then, and we’re always filled with nostalgia. Katja and I were students at Antioch
from 1955 to 1960, a time period that’s often viewed as part of the
institution’s “golden age.” Along with Oberlin, Reed, Bard, and a few
others, Antioch was widely regarded as one of the most innovative liberal arts
colleges in the nation. It was also known as a bastion of left-wing
politics and was soon to become a center for student activism and the
counterculture revolution in the 1960’s.
Having grown up in a staunch Republican family in a small Upper
Peninsula Michigan town, it was a transformational experience for me.
Intellectually exciting, sometimes mind-blowing, confusing, engaging,
challenging. It’s nearly five and a half decades since we graduated from
Antioch, and I still have a firm sense of identity as an “Antiochian”.
Main
Hall
Main Hall is the college’s
administration building and constitutes its iconic visual image. Along
with the North and South Hall dorms, it’s one of Antioch’s three original
buildings. The college was founded
in 1852. It was the first coed college in the nation to offer the same
educational opportunities to women and men and the first to appoint a woman
professor to its faculty. Its first president was Horace Mann, an
abolitionist and educational reformer who was known for founding the American
public school system. Mann gave
Antioch its college motto: “Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory
for humanity.”
South
Hall
When I arrived in 1955,
South Hall was the men’s freshmen dorm. I was assigned to Viking Hall,
located on the west half of the third floor. My classmates were mainly
from big cities, mainly on the east coast. My freshman roommates, Les S., Bob P., and Ted R., were from
New York and greater Chicago. The
campus was filled with bright and gifted students. Our Viking Hall bunch came to be the most cohesive group of
which I’ve ever been a part. Members ate their meals together at the
cafeteria, drank 3.2 beer at a local tavern, played pranks in the dorm, talked
philosophy and politics, and stayed up all hours of the night playing poker for
cafeteria meal tickets. As the end of our first year approached we swore
that we would reconvene for a twenty-fifth reunion, but, alas, that never
happened.
North
Hall
North Hall, the freshmen
women’s dorm, was right across the quadrangle. Katja lived on one of the
floors there. I’d seen her from a distance on the first day that we’d
arrived on campus and fell in love at first sight, but I didn’t possess the
courage to actually speak to her. When I walked into a common room area
in North Hall one evening that first year, Katja was alone there, playing a
mournful song on the piano. I listened for a moment, then passed on
through. It would be a year and a
half before we met through mutual friends while we were on coop jobs in Madison
and Milwaukee.
The
Science Building
My high school math teacher
had strongly urged me to become an engineer, and I started Antioch as an
engineering major. That was a major mistake. I shirked my studies in calculus, had trouble working the
instruments in my surveying class, and stopped attending Engineering Mechanics
because it was at 8 a.m., an impossible time for a late night poker
player. Worst of all, I mixed the wrong chemicals together in my Organic
Chemistry class, and a mixture containing sulfuric acid exploded and scalded
the corneas of both my eyes.
The
Infirmary
I spent ten days in the
infirmary after my chemistry accident. The blisters eventually peeled off
my eyes, and, much to everyone’s relief, my vision was still intact.
Horace
Mann Hall
I’d enjoyed creative
writing throughout high school and, after my engineering fiasco, I declared
Literature as my new major. Faculty offices and classrooms were in Horace
Mann Hall. My teachers included
Nolan Miller, Judson Jerome, and Bob Maurer. Nolan Miller had coined the phrase “beat generation” in one
of his novels. I enjoyed his fiction writing courses the best, but,
after submitting 27 short stories to various pulp magazines for publication and
getting 27 rejection form letters, I began rethinking my career choice.
Professor Jerome, a nationally prominent poet, despaired the lack of social and
financial support for the literary arts in our society and suggested that Psychology
or Sociology would be better majors for aspiring writers. I followed his
advice and promptly changed my major to Psychology, a decision that would shape
my adult life and career. My
psychology profs included Clarence Leuba (a post-Watsonian behaviorist), Bill
John (a cognitive social psychologist from Harvard), and Erling Eng (who drew
from Jungian psychoanalysis, Zen Buddhism, and experiential learning
techniques). I became an Eng
groupie.
The
Antioch Library
Antioch’s library, like the
rest of the campus, operated on an honor system where you checked out your own
books. I spent a lot of time browsing in the stacks and doing homework at
the library’s tables. One of my best Viking Hall friends liked to read
the newspaper there. He’d cut a small hole in the center of the paper so
that he could look unobtrusively at the girls walking by.
The
College Gym
The Gym was close to South
Hall, and I spent a lot of time there during my freshman year. Physical
Education was required of first-year-students, and I took tennis, basketball,
and boxing (in the latter, most of my opponents were 3 or 4 inches taller and
40 pounds heavier). Antioch didn’t have any intercollegiate varsity
sports but instead supported an active intramural system. Viking Hall
sponsored touch football and basketball teams. I and Bob P. were the shooting guards on our basketball
team, and we were runners-up for the intramural championship.
Greywood
Hall
In my third year I lived in
Greywood Hall, a small dorm on the edge of campus. I shared a room with
my Viking Hall friend John N. and an acquaintance from California whose hobby
was making keys. The grinding of the key machine was difficult to study
by, but we eventually got used to it.
Most nights John and I would go out at midnight to the 68 drive-in at
the north edge of town and enjoy pie and a cup of coffee.
Corry
Hall
I lived in Corry Hall for a
couple of years, including 1958-59 when Katja was in France and Austria on a
year abroad program. The
upperclass hall members had less to do with one another than had been the case
in my freshman year. In my fourth
year I was a freshman hall advisor in Corry. I was too quiet and shy for the role and did a half-baked
job.
Birch
Hall
Birch Hall, the main
upperclass women’s dorm, was designed by renowned architect Eero Saarinen and
constructed in 1943. After she came back from Europe, Katja lived here
with her best friend, Judy F. Unlike most schools in the 1950’s, men and
women were welcome to hang out in one another’s dorm rooms until curfew time at
10 p.m. on weekdays or midnight on weekends, so I was a regular visitor to
Birch Hall.
Student
Union
When we arrived at Antioch
in 1955 the college cafeteria was housed in a pair of quonset huts that had
been built on campus during World War II for military purposes. The new
student union building was completed during our third year, and it housed the
cafeteria, bookstore, coffee shop (C-shop, a popular evening hangout), student
government offices, and the Antioch News Record. Sitting on the Student
Union steps and shooting the breeze was a favorite pastime.
Antioch
Inn
The Antioch Inn occupied
the west end of the Student Union Building. It offered a restaurant
geared to adult visitors to the campus and several hotel rooms upstairs.
Katja worked as a waitress in the restaurant, and sometimes my first-year
roommate Ted R. and I would have supper there, getting deluxe service.
Katja and I got married at Antioch after our graduation in 1960, and our parents
and siblings (Steve, Peter, Vicki, Ami, David) stayed at the Antioch Inn. We had our wedding reception there in a
big upstairs room.
When we drove into Yellow
Springs on our recent trip, Katja remarked that we’d spent the most significant
years of our lives at Antioch. I’d
have to agree. My memories are of
phenomenal friends, errant ways (e.g., smoking, drinking too much beer),
co-oping in New York City and San Francisco, existentialism, psychoanalysis,
Kerouac and Ferlinghetti, Com’s Tavern, late night intellectual conversations,
romance, jazz, anti-conformity of all sorts. I made my long-term career choice while at Antioch (social
psychology), found and married my life partner, and gained credentials for
admission to graduate study at the University of Michigan. We even chose to live in Cincinnati
years later partly because of its proximity to Antioch and Yellow Springs. I had some of my most rewarding life
experiences at Antioch, as well as some of my most personally difficult and
painful experiences. I did some of
the stupidest things in my life there, and some of the most adventurous. A lot of these memories came back into
mind during our visit. We’ll have
to go back again soon.
Love
Dave
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