Remember When--August of 1971

Author’s note: Recently friends and I have been working together to welcome an exchange student from Europe to the Indiana University Campus for a semester abroad. Many memories flooded back into my mind as we worked to offer an experience that would be as remarkable as mine was.

Oh, they were heady days. We still had troops in Vietnam, but President Nixon had pulled troop numbers way down. The drawings for the first lottery draft had come and gone and I had a very high number. I had finished high school that year with improving grades, but a very good thing had happened when I finally had a history class during my senior year that was taught well. It was a first for me. I wanted to know more.

There were the assassinations and the fighting in Vietnam, the Summer of Love, and so many already lost in the growing drug culture. They were tumultuous times

The summer before that Fall of ’71 had been spent working a construction job for a builder who had previously employed both of my older brothers. I learned a great deal, like how to paint a hot metal surface in the sun, the basics of framing, handling a circular saw, the proper white knuckle grip on tall scaffolding, and clinging for dear life at the top of a swaying television antenna post. The last few weeks were much better as a finalé. I spent time with a Pearl Harbor veteran named Woody building concrete forms for an REMC electrical substation. When the Japanese attack was over, Woody was trapped underwater in an air pocket in the hull of the battleship USS California. I’ll never forget him or his fear and courage. I got to work early on many days and without being asked, I walked the nearby soybean rows with a hoe chopping weeds. It’s a country tradition, and the farmer who owned the fields came by later and thanked me.

I had been accepted at Indiana University the previous winter. I had decent SAT scores, but they weren’t spectacular. In those days, residence in the state meant that I could get into any of the state schools. I didn’t have to produce a list of sports accomplishments or proof of any charity or volunteer work. That was a good thing because I had none of those. What I had was a background with sensible Depression parents and a keen interest in history and current events. We had just come out of the 1960s, so I had seen quite a bit and there was much that I did not understand. There had been so much unrest and rioting and turmoil in that decade. There were the assassinations and the fighting in Vietnam, the Summer of Love, and so many already lost in the growing drug culture. They were tumultuous times.

I had grown up in that decade understanding more and more that something very wrong had festered and grown across the country, something that was troubling and disorienting, but nothing I could quite name. I knew that many public figures were not good people and I knew that the drugs and the leftist movements and the protests and the debauchery I could see in places like Haight-Ashbury and Chicago and LA and New York were not for me. Riots in Watts, Detroit, and Harlem and the riots all through the Summer of Love in 1967 were followed by the assassination of Dr. King in ’68 and more riots. It sickened me. What was wrong with people? That other political side thought that drugs and free love and what we saw at Woodstock in ’69 was exactly what we needed, only we needed lots more of it, baby! Seeing those events and following them in the news convinced me that I must be on the other side. I’ve been here ever since.

Born in the early 1950s, for long after those years I would still be thinking that I should follow in the pattern of work and family life that my parents and grandparents had followed. My older brothers were the first in our family to go beyond high school. We were only the second generation to even attend school after 8^th grade. Three of my grandparents went only that far in little country schoolhouses in the upper South. One grandfather finished high school before going to France in the Great War, then went to work in the industrial Midwest. The other one came to the same small town after a stint in the Navy. They wound up in the little town in Indiana where I was born 32 years later.

Support Canada Free Press

What to make of all of that? How would I make my way in a sea of 30,000 students centered on my record Baby Boom cohort? 

It slowly began to dawn on me that I would have the great privilege of attending college, as my older brothers had done. College! It made chills run down my back just to think about it. I might actually graduate from college if I applied myself properly. I didn’t know what it required except to take classes. I pledged to myself to work hard and try to make it. Lots of people I knew were going, too.

What to do for a major? I loved history already, so I chose to be a history major, later expanded to a double major. I knew that in addition to classes for a history major, I must also come out of the experience with some kind of preparation to allow me to make a living. My upbringing would never allow a life of idleness or sloth. I would have to make a living. So I added an education minor that would equip me to teach school if all worked well. I had had mostly awful history teachers, which gave me confidence that I could do better. I was a history major because I liked it. Teaching would let me use it as a career path. I had chosen a course of college study because I loved the subject. I was incredibly lucky to be there at that place and at that time.

So with a plan in place, I got a ride to Bloomington and a drop at my new home, Teter Quadrangle, the middle of August, 1971. IU was a big place as campuses go, and I was from a small place. The place of my birth had fewer residents than IU had students, and my new hometown had only a few more. Combining the town and college populations, it was the biggest place I had ever lived, by far. What to make of all of that? How would I make my way in a sea of 30,000 students centered on my record Baby Boom cohort? I resolved to work through this time at college as I had worked through everything else, alone. I would keep my own counsel and stay out of the hubbub and the crush of crowds. I would definitely not be joining the crazies and the druggies. I would study and learn and try to make sense of it all. Who was ever as lucky as I was that August of 1971?

The very atmosphere of those days was remarkable

It was partly cloudy and warm when I arrived in the curved driveway that served both the main quad building and my dorm, Thompson Hall. I got my room assignment on the top floor and moved my few things up there, and I was at college. I had been given no last words of caution or wisdom. I had not been pushed to apply to colleges, but somewhere along the way I accepted the idea that I would go. Although unspoken, the folks had faith in me. Many things were left unspoken in my upbringing because I came from quiet, non-demonstrative people. I had worked hard to earn that faith and trust during high school. There was no need to say more about it. I would either sort it out and succeed or fail and find a different way, but it was my way to find.

Thompson Hall was five stories tall and had no air conditioning, only heaters in each room under the single window. The heaters were off, but that didn’t make it cool. I had a window fan and, unlike others on the floor, I knew how to use it to pull or occasionally push the coolest air to where I was. The room faced east, and that was good, because the west side was much hotter in the afternoon. For the fan to do any good, the window and the door had to be open. That meant more comfort but a loss of privacy and quiet. There was a sun deck on top of the building, and I quickly began to block that door open so heat could escape the building. There was a lounge at the south end of my floor. I would close the windows and draw the drapes in the lounge when it was hot and open them at night when it cooled off. Nobody ever questioned me or stopped me. I hadn’t been there a week when I saw a maintenance man open the main third floor door on the driveway side with an Allen wrench. I soon had one the same size in my pocket. I unlocked that door and the others when it was good to do so, and locked them shut when I wanted to. Even as a first semester freshman I had a good deal of influence on my personal comfort and the comfort of others. I used it to full advantage.

The very atmosphere of those days was remarkable. It seemed like every evening the sun would get low in the western sky in the hazy days of August and hang dull orange in the heavy afternoon air. I could look right at it because it was filtered enough to permit that. It was humid. It was often sunny and quite hot during the days, then after 5 PM it would begin to moderate a bit. Noises and traffic patterns would change. There were cicadas buzzing in the trees in the daytime, and at night the crickets would chirp and the katydids would saw away at their rhythms, just like they had done on those summer nights back home, or when visiting the grandparents in Henry County.

The Indiana University campus is a rolling woodland 

The Midwest has its share of thunderstorms in the summer time. The Indiana University campus is a rolling woodland and my dorm was near one of the higher points on campus. One evening, as a thunderstorm approached from the southwest just at dusk, I went up onto the sun deck to see it coming. Looking west beyond Ballantine Hall the near-constant flickering of cloud-to-cloud lightning showed its progress silently. The wind picked up out of the south as the darkness closed in. The majesty and danger of nature was coming straight for me, and I was the only guy on earth with that exact view. Just as the storm arrived I went down to my room to hear it pounding on the roof just above. I can hear it now.

It was crowded on campus. So far as I could tell every dorm and every rental apartment around campus was filled with students of every kind. In the courtyards there were always Frisbees in the air and someone sunbathing. Others sat under trees or sat in big chairs on the walkways between the residence halls that made up my quad and others. There were plenty of cars on campus, and steady traffic and people walking everywhere. If I wanted to cross a street, I would move to the curb as cars kept moving. I learned to time my crossings perfectly with the flowing traffic. Drivers and pedestrians trusted each other not to do anything stupid. It was a different time.

Coming from a small place, I had to learn when to look at oncoming people and when to look straight ahead without looking into eyes. In high school I had always looked at the oncoming foot traffic in the crowded halls between classes, hoping to recognize someone. It was important there to acknowledge those you knew so as not to be taken for a snob or stuck up. On the IU campus I learned to look further ahead down the path to scope people coming toward me. If it was no one to notice, I would look beyond them as they approached. I often looked to the sides and tried to learn all the tree species I didn’t recognize. There were lots of those. All that first year I walked from Teter down across Seventh Street and across Jordan Avenue in front of the Delta Gamma house toward the IMU and Ballantine Hall and the center of campus. From Jordan Avenue until I arrived at the foot of Ballantine Hall, the path wove back and forth across the Jordan River and up onto and down off of beautiful wood foot bridges that seemed to be quite new at the time. They admitted one person walking each way, or three people walking one way if close together. Foot traffic always moved steadily on the bridges. At every opportunity I would look to see the water level in the Jordan River and check for any minnows in a pool or other creatures of interest. There were a few places where the water made a little noise, and those were nice to visit or admire if the traffic were not too heavy. The pathway along the Jordan River passed underneath beautiful mature trees. It was pleasant and cool in the Summer time, glorious and colorful in the Fall, serious and somber in the winter time, and vibrant with bright greens and abundant redbud blooms in the Spring.

It felt so grown up, almost British, to carry a proper black umbrella with a steam-bent wood handle. I made a point of knowing how to use it and take care of it. The wind never caught me by surprise to turn it inside out. I was already good at forecasting the weather, so I rarely got even a little wet walking back and forth to classes. I learned how to keep from hitting others with it when it was deployed. I tried picking it up and pointing ahead with it between steps like a British MP would do, but that seemed contrived, so I usually just carried it opposite my notebook. When I needed a free hand, it would hang it on a back pocket until I could hold it again.

I had landed at a place that turned out to be wonderful, and I had only just arrived. I thought from time to time that I should pinch myself to be sure it was not just a dream. I could get used to a place like this, I thought to myself.

VIEW Comments