Because I lived on campus my freshman year, and because everything I needed was mostly in the immediate area, I didn’t do a lot of driving during the week. A lot of that also had to do with the fact that it would take me until the following weekend to find a parking space. But when I could I liked driving around to familiarize myself with other areas of campus and the surrounding community.
And the community did surround the campus, creeping up on you like arthritis, nearsightedness, or that toothless pan-handler at the corner of Central and Olive. Gleaned from historical photographs, I learned the university’s original tract of land was atop a hill north of downtown; between the campus and downtown were houses. Naturally, as the fledgling campus grew it bought nearby land and razed those houses and constructed new academic buildings or dormitories or parking lots, or, in rare cases, green areas.
Fast forward a few decades and it looked as if the college and the city butted heads along the southeastern-most edge because the houses remained standing. Apparently the owners didn’t necessarily want their houses torn down, particularly when their homes still had a lot going for them –structurally sound, kept the cold out, and so on. Because these homeowners had rejected the college’s advances it forced the campus to build elsewhere in other directions for a few years. Then a curious thing happened. The people in the houses along Union Street moved or died and their houses were up for sale.
“Hooray,” said the university, “we can finally buy that property and do something with it!”
“But,” said the comptroller, “you’ve blown a fortnight of funds in mere days and are almost in the red, aren’t you? Without funds you can’t very well do both.”
“Oh, dear,” said the university, “I hadn’t thought of that – we have the money to buy the houses but not enough to do anything with them except let them be.”
“Ah, that was easy,” said the comptroller, and for an encore he approved the purchase and installation of a half dozen telephones booths across campus only to be later smothered to death while participating in the “stuff as many people as you can into a telephone booth” fad of the time.
So the houses didn’t go anywhere and were instead passed-off as university-owned except that they looked totally out of place and unlike any other structure belonging to the university. Nomadic departments such as University Housing, Graduate Studies, Art, and others were uprooted from their modular buildings and squeezed into one of these houses with the instruction to “make it [their] own” but then that idea lasted only for a year or so.
Enter Religious Emphasis week, a five-night (later three-night) examination and discussion of the spiritual life of students, observed from the early-50s through 1972. A religious council organized the event and welcomed leaders from various denominations to speak to smaller groups each night. Space was needed for the events and all eyes again focused on Union Street. Within a few years the houses turned into denominational student centers for the Baptists, Episcopalians, Methodists, Lutherans, and Catholics (the Presbyterians hadn’t colonized yet and the one house given over to Nontrinitarianists was never used). Inside the houses were totally remodeled, oftentimes with the addition of small chapels or sanctuaries for Sunday services; the exteriors didn’t change much except that the Catholics transformed their two-story bungalow into a squatty, dwarfish cathedral through the magic of plywood and acrylic paint.
The Religious Emphasis week coordinators thought the houses becoming student centers was a good fit, seeing how Union Street was the neighborhood that evangelist “Handsel” Monday visited during one of his small-town revivals in the late Nineteenth Century. A woman who grew up in one of the houses and later attended the university told the story of seeing Monday speaking to a small crowd that had gathered under the boughs of the willow tree across the street (“...he sounded scary,” she recalled).
But I digress...
The houses still stood during my time on campus but most of the church groups had moved on. The Methodists apparently knew a good thing when they found it and appropriated for their own use the backyard of the long-vacant Episcopalian Student Center, whose members now met at the church across town. The Catholics had moved off-campus, too, leaving behind a bizarre-looking building and their long-suffering neighbors, the Baptists.
Those houses that were unoccupied were mothballed and used for storage, though it’s anyone’s guess as to what remained within their walls.
Sunday, February 15, 2009
Sunday, February 8, 2009
the one about why we should wait more than thirty minutes for dr. blanc
Behind the Media, Culture, and Society course was a man named Dr. Fredrick Blanc, a middle-aged army brat that had never married, never had kids, and never seemed to like anyone or anything. He wasn’t as rough around the edges as that may sound, but he didn’t take a lot of crap from people for too long. He did take his work seriously, be that teaching, mentoring, or researching, which he did for hours on end (weekday or weekends) in his office. He did, after all, have one of the few Ph.D.s in the department at the time and therefore found little interest in the operation of the radio and television stations that attracted so many students to the program.
Blanc was a native of Massachusetts and had never lost his accent, but had tried, he said, during his childhood years moving with his dad from state to state and from army base to army base. From this way of life must surely have developed his well-known demeanor and temperament. This attitude wasn’t meant to scare off students, though. Far from it; in fact, more often than not students found they came to have a better appreciation for both Blanc and the course in later years. And that seems to be the core reason why Blanc taught the communication history, theory, and law courses – what the students learned would be with them long after the “button pushing” in the radio and television stations had faded.
So what of this famous Blanc attitude? Everything boiled down to respect: don’t interrupt him, don’t aggravate him, and don’t belittle him of anyone else. If you could manage that, and if you participated in class discussions, then you could probably get an A or B – depending on how well you did on his tests. But the surefire way to piss him off…the fastest way, the easiest way, as if was nine o’clock in the morning…was to yawn. Honestly, if you covered your mouth and didn’t make it obvious you might still get a glare from the hyperactive guy teaching at the front of the class. But God forbid – don’t let loose with a loud, long sigh…ouch! “Hey!” he snapped in his unmistakable New England accent, “I don’t teach in your bed, don’t sleep in my class! Stop it!”
These yawns usually came on the tail end of his “screenings” – essentially a chance to watch television in class for ten or twenty minutes. I actually think he called them “screenings” to get by with showing them in class, because I remember someone asking if we were going to “watch TV” one morning and this sort of set him off. We weren’t watching television, he’d explain, we were collectively screening a culturally significant program via television. And then he’d sort of give a half-tooth wise-ass smirk. (Yes, he did smile – he was generally well-deposed.)
Another good way to piss off Dr. Blanc was call him “Freddie,” his first name. “Hey, I’m your teachah, not your friend!” he’d snap, going as far to call it impolite and rude.
One of Blanc’s memorable moments happened a few weeks into the semester. Blanc’s class met in the same room that Propel’s Introduction class had met the previous semester and since both were geared toward freshmen the room was filled with a lot of the same people. The room was abuzz of chatter that morning in the minutes before class started and, without any interruption, we continued taking until someone pointed out it was ten minutes after the hour. Dr. Blanc was tardy. Soon the talk turned to the fifteen-minute rule: how long did students have to wait for a tardy teacher? Everyone was quoting something different: was it ten minutes for an MA or ten minutes for a Ph.D.? Maybe it was twenty minutes for a Ph.D. No one could quote the rule because there was no rule anywhere to quote. And that’s when people started leaving.
I remember being torn at what I should do? It was obvious he was late and I didn’t like wasting my time. On the other hand, Dr. Blanc did say this morning we were to expect a quiz – would he postpone it for the next class? About midway through the hour someone went to the department secretary and had her call Dr. Blanc at his house. He was not happy. Less than ten minutes later Dr. Blanc stormed into the room in one of the most memorable and unfashionably uncomfortable outfits I ever saw: a gray-yellow windbreaker thrown over a T-shirt, acid-washed jeans of some color between red and blue, and tennis shoes chewed through by Cerberus. He was pissed off because of his own tardiness and more so because more than half the class had bailed on his planned quiz.
Those of us that stayed took an abbreviated version of the quiz and, I believe, we all aced it. The next time class met the remainder of the students were told they should not ever again, under no circumstances, without penalty of death or a swift kick in the arse, desert one of Dr. Blanc’s classes.
Diligently silencing all protesters, he proceeded to dump a lengthier and more difficult quiz on those that walked out and let those that already took the first quiz go for the day.
We never saw that “outfit” again, by the way.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
Tardy
(John Shiurba)
Eskimo
From the album Some Prefer Cake
1999
Blanc was a native of Massachusetts and had never lost his accent, but had tried, he said, during his childhood years moving with his dad from state to state and from army base to army base. From this way of life must surely have developed his well-known demeanor and temperament. This attitude wasn’t meant to scare off students, though. Far from it; in fact, more often than not students found they came to have a better appreciation for both Blanc and the course in later years. And that seems to be the core reason why Blanc taught the communication history, theory, and law courses – what the students learned would be with them long after the “button pushing” in the radio and television stations had faded.
So what of this famous Blanc attitude? Everything boiled down to respect: don’t interrupt him, don’t aggravate him, and don’t belittle him of anyone else. If you could manage that, and if you participated in class discussions, then you could probably get an A or B – depending on how well you did on his tests. But the surefire way to piss him off…the fastest way, the easiest way, as if was nine o’clock in the morning…was to yawn. Honestly, if you covered your mouth and didn’t make it obvious you might still get a glare from the hyperactive guy teaching at the front of the class. But God forbid – don’t let loose with a loud, long sigh…ouch! “Hey!” he snapped in his unmistakable New England accent, “I don’t teach in your bed, don’t sleep in my class! Stop it!”
These yawns usually came on the tail end of his “screenings” – essentially a chance to watch television in class for ten or twenty minutes. I actually think he called them “screenings” to get by with showing them in class, because I remember someone asking if we were going to “watch TV” one morning and this sort of set him off. We weren’t watching television, he’d explain, we were collectively screening a culturally significant program via television. And then he’d sort of give a half-tooth wise-ass smirk. (Yes, he did smile – he was generally well-deposed.)
Another good way to piss off Dr. Blanc was call him “Freddie,” his first name. “Hey, I’m your teachah, not your friend!” he’d snap, going as far to call it impolite and rude.
One of Blanc’s memorable moments happened a few weeks into the semester. Blanc’s class met in the same room that Propel’s Introduction class had met the previous semester and since both were geared toward freshmen the room was filled with a lot of the same people. The room was abuzz of chatter that morning in the minutes before class started and, without any interruption, we continued taking until someone pointed out it was ten minutes after the hour. Dr. Blanc was tardy. Soon the talk turned to the fifteen-minute rule: how long did students have to wait for a tardy teacher? Everyone was quoting something different: was it ten minutes for an MA or ten minutes for a Ph.D.? Maybe it was twenty minutes for a Ph.D. No one could quote the rule because there was no rule anywhere to quote. And that’s when people started leaving.
I remember being torn at what I should do? It was obvious he was late and I didn’t like wasting my time. On the other hand, Dr. Blanc did say this morning we were to expect a quiz – would he postpone it for the next class? About midway through the hour someone went to the department secretary and had her call Dr. Blanc at his house. He was not happy. Less than ten minutes later Dr. Blanc stormed into the room in one of the most memorable and unfashionably uncomfortable outfits I ever saw: a gray-yellow windbreaker thrown over a T-shirt, acid-washed jeans of some color between red and blue, and tennis shoes chewed through by Cerberus. He was pissed off because of his own tardiness and more so because more than half the class had bailed on his planned quiz.
Those of us that stayed took an abbreviated version of the quiz and, I believe, we all aced it. The next time class met the remainder of the students were told they should not ever again, under no circumstances, without penalty of death or a swift kick in the arse, desert one of Dr. Blanc’s classes.
Diligently silencing all protesters, he proceeded to dump a lengthier and more difficult quiz on those that walked out and let those that already took the first quiz go for the day.
We never saw that “outfit” again, by the way.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
Tardy
(John Shiurba)
Eskimo
From the album Some Prefer Cake
1999
Sunday, February 1, 2009
the one about media, culture, society, and so on
When the spring 1995 semester began I was still classified as a freshman and still eager to work in the radio station. However, for reasons I’ve never remembered, I missed the semester kick-off meeting and therefore didn’t do anything for FM 89.3 that semester, 7 a.m. newscasts or otherwise. There’s a part of me that thinks I assumed the schedule would holdover from the previous fall semester...but then if my classes didn’t even do this why would I expect a silly part-time schedule to do the same?
But I didn’t leave the Communication Building. No, that would have probably been a dumb move on my part, not taking a course in my major. Looking back, it probably wouldn’t have hurt to take another Communication course that semester. No, I still visited the Communication Building three days a week (M-days) to take part in yet another 100-level course. This one was titled Media-Culture-Society (COM-187) and its purpose, according to the instructor, was for us students to develop a historical knowledge and appreciation of media development in America. His desire, or so he reiterated more than once, was for us to never watch television the same way again.
There was a lot of history in this class. I mean, the syllabus began with the note that in 1872 James Maxwell theorized the idea of wireless communication. From there we discussed Marconi playing the mamba and listening to the radio, the rise of someone named Kent Atwater, and the role Felix the Cat played in the early days of television (...makes you wonder if he’ll show up 80 years after his first appearance to help usher in Digital Television later this month). The rise of cable television, programming syndication, and ratings were also major talking points in this class that really took its course title seriously.
Besides reading articles from the textbook about the history of radio and television, we also viewed “screenings” from the extensive archives of Dr. Blanc. Back then – and even now as I write this – I wondered how Fred Blanc managed to track down everything he did. He had memorable episodes from classic sitcoms, samples of “old time” radio comedies, and an assortment of advertising oddities. And a little bit of everything else....
One of the more memorable items was during the discussion of tobacco on television and – whoa and behold – Blanc pulls out a series of cigarette commercials, including a bizarre one featuring Fred Flintstone. That, and a montage of Old Joe print ads (playing pool and driving cars) set to something from the Miami Vice soundtrack (this was a few years before the camel’s demise). We also got an earful of Archie Bunker spew a line of racial slurs a mile long during another program – all in the name of education.
But, word to the wise with these “screenings” – don’t yawn or you’ll face the wrath of Blanc!
- - - - - - - - - - - -
Medium Cool
(Birdsall/Detmold/Kaika/Trombley)
The Reducers
From the album Shinola
1995
But I didn’t leave the Communication Building. No, that would have probably been a dumb move on my part, not taking a course in my major. Looking back, it probably wouldn’t have hurt to take another Communication course that semester. No, I still visited the Communication Building three days a week (M-days) to take part in yet another 100-level course. This one was titled Media-Culture-Society (COM-187) and its purpose, according to the instructor, was for us students to develop a historical knowledge and appreciation of media development in America. His desire, or so he reiterated more than once, was for us to never watch television the same way again.
There was a lot of history in this class. I mean, the syllabus began with the note that in 1872 James Maxwell theorized the idea of wireless communication. From there we discussed Marconi playing the mamba and listening to the radio, the rise of someone named Kent Atwater, and the role Felix the Cat played in the early days of television (...makes you wonder if he’ll show up 80 years after his first appearance to help usher in Digital Television later this month). The rise of cable television, programming syndication, and ratings were also major talking points in this class that really took its course title seriously.
Besides reading articles from the textbook about the history of radio and television, we also viewed “screenings” from the extensive archives of Dr. Blanc. Back then – and even now as I write this – I wondered how Fred Blanc managed to track down everything he did. He had memorable episodes from classic sitcoms, samples of “old time” radio comedies, and an assortment of advertising oddities. And a little bit of everything else....
One of the more memorable items was during the discussion of tobacco on television and – whoa and behold – Blanc pulls out a series of cigarette commercials, including a bizarre one featuring Fred Flintstone. That, and a montage of Old Joe print ads (playing pool and driving cars) set to something from the Miami Vice soundtrack (this was a few years before the camel’s demise). We also got an earful of Archie Bunker spew a line of racial slurs a mile long during another program – all in the name of education.
But, word to the wise with these “screenings” – don’t yawn or you’ll face the wrath of Blanc!
- - - - - - - - - - - -
Medium Cool
(Birdsall/Detmold/Kaika/Trombley)
The Reducers
From the album Shinola
1995
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