Town and Gown

    “With their exotic culture, strange ways of behaving, and general arrogance, students did not make many friends with townspeople.” Matthew Harris, “The Divide: Town versus Gown”

During the Middle Ages students in English towns such as Oxford often wore gowns for comfort and warmth in poorly heated buildings, clothing that set them apart from local residents. Disturbances at local pubs sometimes escalated into full-scale riots, as students had a tendency to look down on “townies,” who in turn resented the snobbish interlopers.  This “divide” between town and gown continued into modern times although experts have found evidence that divisions are fading as higher education has become available to larger percentages of the populace.

When I attended Bucknell University in Lewisburg, PA, in the 1960s, some students referred to local residents as townies and retained a condescending attitude toward them. Though the fraternity I joined and the house where I boarded junior year were off campus, I had little contact with neighborhood residents.  The only time I visited a local bar was to buy a six-pack to carry out. Sundays at the Bucknell Women’s cafeteria where I worked, numerous townspeople would arrive in their Sunday best for the dinner served at midday.  I certainly didn’t look down on them, I just didn’t think much about them.

Meeting with Valparaiso University professors Liz Wuerffl and Allison Schuette at Hunter’s brewery in Chesterton, I offered to interview seniors living at the Pines retirement village as part of their Welcome Project. Since several emeritus VU professors reside there, as well as other longtime Valpo residents, I suggested that the project be called Town and Gown. I added that the oral histories might also pertain to the Flight Paths initiative that I have been a part of for the past couple years and that I could publish excerpts in a forthcoming Steel Shavings issue. In the Editor’s Note to my volume on “Life in Northwest Indiana during the Plague Year, 2020,” I wrote that the year began with high hopes for interviewing Valpo residents that wer e soon dashed by the pandemic.  Since then, I have been itching to get back to doing oral histories.  Liz and Allison liked the idea, so I plan to scout out a room at the Pines where we could videotape the interviews. I noted that during the 1970s I was oral history interviewer for Sandy Appleby’s Tri-Cities Mental Health Center grant funded project on active seniors and that, with so many Baby Boomers reaching retirement age, gerontology has become a hot topic, and there could well be grant possibilities for funding. I often refer to my Life Review interview with Texas Slim, which I had to do a second time due to a videotape breakdown. It was nowhere as rich as the first time because he knew I already had heard the stories. Object lesson: never talk in detail beforehand to interviewees.

It was great seeing Liz and Allison after many long months.  I ordered a pale ale evidently brewed on site by Hunter’s, advertised as made with flaked oats, cascade, amarillo, and mosaic hops, and named “Perhaps Perhaps Perhaps,”  which Allison found appropriate, given the uncertainty of the coming months, given the Delta variant. We sat at a table outside until it started raining.  Inside, we thought the rain had died down but when we make a break to our cars, it came down full force.  As I emailed Liz and Allison afterwards, I was really hoofing it and hadn’t moved that quickly in months, if not years. They replied that I should give them a couple weeks to get ready for Fall semester but then we could set up shop at the Pines, perhaps in the residents’ apartments if no common room was available.

Among those who replied to my Facebook post about “Town and Gown” was Sandy Appleby, who offered to help with the project, and Anne Balay, whose books about gay and lesbian steelworkes and transgender long haul truckers are oral history classics.  Former IUN professor Don Coffin wrote:     

    Interestingly, when I was a student at DePauw, I had a fair amount of contact with a couple of locals—Terry and Eddie, who ran Romilda Printing. And did the typesetting for the student-run newspaper.(This was, obviously, before offset printing took over.). Those of us who worked on the paper knew how crucial they were to our work, and they got a kick out of us. Had the aspiring journalists pursued other interests, things might have been much less interesting.

I replied to Coffin: “Stereotypes about townies tend to break down if one gets to know the community where the college is located.”

Belt magazine editor Sandi Wisenberg belatedly mailed my review copy of Samuel Love’s “The Gary Anthology,” which contained these nice words in the editor’s introduction by my former student: “Since 1975, the Steel Shavings oral history series, the lifework of Indiana University Northwest emeritus professor of history “Jimbo” Lane, has chronicled the everyday life of Gary and Calumet Region residents.” Belt’s latest online memoir is “My Summer of Steel” by Bob Zeni. In 1972, before his son started a summer job at his old man’s plant, Bruno Zeni (below) told him, “Remember two things, lift with your legs and steel don’t bleed.” After day one, still in his work clothes, Bob (left, in 1971) fell asleep on the front stoop; after day 2 he conked out at the kitchen table, most of his beer still undrunk. Referring to the “debilitating grind of manual labor,” Zeni had a new appreciation for his father, “caught in its maelstrom for three decades . . . so our family would have a better life.”