Bats In The Theater

College: Take One

In a humorously bizarre film that features the stylings of the great costume designer Edith Head, Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid blends classic film noir clips with twentieth-century Steve Martin antics.  The story line, while sometimes challenging to follow in order to tie together the old and new, climaxes with the destruction of key US cities, and the first to fall is Terre Haute, Indiana.  Poor Terre Haute, the protagonist muses, and they were just about to get a public library.  So what does Terre Haute have?  A prison, a couple post-secondary schools, yucky tap water, and a funky smell – at least it did a couple decades ago when I first went to college.

Admittedly, I began my college career on three simple premises: my college did not require math to graduate, my college offered me a little scholarship, and my college hosted Florida-based corporations offering internships and a ticket out of the Midwest.  I have select memories about my year and a half along the western edge of the Hoosier State, most of them dull and lifeless.  I remember the names of no one with whom I went to school, I remember skipping class if it was snowing too hard, and I remember living in a ground-floor dorm next to the railroad track.  I remember hating it (see “Conan the Hoosier” from February 2012).

Into The Darkness

In the heart of the city, just a few blocks from the campus, stood the Indiana Theater – a 1922 throwback to the classic movie houses where the silent films illuminated the cinema bringing it to life, where Movietone News had brought the War to the American Heartland, and where the motion pictures of the waning decades of the previous century allowed me a brief escape from my studies and the miserable dorm life that accompanied my collegiate experience.  If one arrived in time for the early show, the second show would be free to those who stayed; of course, the second film was a repeat of the first film.  Nevertheless, my dorm mates spent nearly two weeks at the old building watching Patrick Swayze sweep an average-looking girl off her feet in the Catskills twice a night.

This theater, which I remembered being larger than its current photo suggests, lifted upward into the heights of the first balcony, and onward into the darkness of the second balcony.  I never recall getting a good look at the ceiling, nor did I ever venture into the first balcony.  I vaguely recall dark cloths stretched over walls and seats to keep patrons out of the upper reaches of the now historic landmark. The structure, like my first college experience, draped its shadowy, gloomy pallor over what ought to have been an energizing time of my life.  The coeds generally believed that bats lived in the upper levels, despite the obvious absence of guano and my never seeing them, but its dark mystique made the building perfect for such tales and the ideal space to watch a scary movie.  Maybe we’d even stay beyond the bewitching hour to be scared again during its encore performance, although looking back, my life in Terre Haute may have been its own horror story.

An Education at Gettysburg

Phases of a Degree

When I began college, I knew the most basic commands of MS-DOS, but everyday life involved card catalogs, typewriters, spiral notebooks and correction fluid.  During my second stint in the post-secondary world, I utilized floppy discs in a clunky desktop PC to compose my term papers, but the printed dot-matrix results are barely legible and research still entirely occurred within the four walls of a library.  During the third, and successfully final, home stretch towards my twenty-year bachelor’s degree, my pretty yellow laptop and the world wide web allowed me to understand cloud formations, examine the nuances of the Second World War, recreate the development of Latin America, follow the expansion of the America West, and peek inside the history of a national park from my own home.  Now that’s progress.

I never understood the passion college graduates retain for their alma maters.  Paying for college always registered to me as a business transaction: my money for an education.  The schools I attended never stirred my enthusiasm for any given mascot or fight song or athletic conference affiliation.  When life would get off track, I’d splash water on my face and get myself back in school, whatever school best suited my academic needs.  My focus had always been on the obtainment of knowledge, the securing of a degree, and moving on to the next great adventure, not celebrating the four-year experience, but the four-year achievement.  It just took eighteen years longer than I expected, and when the diploma arrived in the mail, neither the school nor I owed each other anything more.

Offline Classes

In my academic pursuits, the last thirty semester hours brought me the most joy.  My age, my motivation, my determination, and my discipline had all seen noted increases.  Taking classes online felt supremely comfortable, and I paced myself so the final semester ended with my diploma being awarded less than twenty-fours before my first-born graduated high school.  My self-propelled race to the finish line kept my class loads, my evenings and weekends, and my daily schedule full.  For the final five semesters, I never spoke in person to my classmates, I never visited the campus library, and only once did I meet one of my professors.  So for that one occasion, a class that could easily be considered the high-water mark of my degree, I met my professor at a small copse of trees on a historic battlefield in Pennsylvania.

For one semester hour, or one Remembrance Day weekend, I bundle up in my warmest winter wear, avoid any measurable snowfall and walk in the footsteps of the soldiers who spent the first three days of July 1863 fighting for the future of the United States.  On the tranquil hills that now remain, with monuments and markers across every sightline, I emerge from my laptop education and absorb the stories, the strategic decisions, the advances and retreats, and the fight for the rumored depot of shoes that were said to have been stored somewhere near this conflux south of Carlisle.  But neither the Southern Rebels nor the Northern Yankees found this to be a place to rest their weary feet, this place instead burst alive with combat and cannon fire, smoke and sacrifice.  I may have only needed one hour of academic credit to complete my online degree, and despite the distant travel, the cost, and the commitment, I still believe I have it far easier at this national battlefield than the combatants who came before me.  The tiniest fragment of my lengthy degree pursuits could not have been complete, or as meaningful, without the short time I spent on Little Round Top viewing the entire placid fields to the north, which meant so much to our nation nearly 150 years ago.  I guess I owe my academic institution a debt of gratitude for my one day of education at Gettysburg.

Crossing the Mississippi

End of the Semester

For sixteen weeks, I focused on my academics, and by “focused,” I mean mostly focused on my academics.  The second half of freshmen year, quite possibly the most worthless of my college studies, became an exercise in minimalism: what was the absolute least I could possibly do to get fifteen more credits under my belt?  Of course, I sometimes missed class for unusual circumstances, like it was snowing, or it was Tuesday.  Three of my classes met just once a week.  My strongest effort for the duration, an entire term paper in one week, happened to be completed during spring break, and then I just hung on to it until the semester ended.  And on top of everything else, I saved money by not buying any text books.  The semester ended when my father drove the three hours to the campus to pick me up.  I had a mega-fun summer job lined up in a sunny, warm climate, and I was delighted to put the monotonous semester behind me.

Parents can be tedious (I know, I am one) so taking the time to stop at the Decatur Public Library on the way home from college to do research sounds like the continuation of my academic nightmare that I thought had passed.  Yes, after sixteen repetitively dull weeks, I had the privilege of beginning my summer in a library in Central Illinois with my father researching a distant grandfather in the Army of the Republic and his regional regiments.  And as an added bonus, we routed through a small town near the heart of the Land of Lincoln – a town with a coincidentally identical last name to ours – to check on any connection to that same relative who may have marched through Atlanta with Sherman.  Welcome to summer break.

When History Wakes Up

As we decelerate to the posted, ridiculously low speed limit, we pass the miniature community church bearing the town’s name.  (For months thereafter, my father jokes that he started his own religion.)  But the dearth of residents slows our progress in learning more about the history of the town, so when we spy an elderly gentleman tending to his garden, we pull into his dirt driveway.  And like most small towns, the man warmly welcomes us to his little hamlet.  Within moments, he erases any possible notion that the town’s founders have a connection to our ancestors.

But then he shares a story about his family’s history in the region.  As a small boy he recalls his grandparents describing their journey crossing the nearby Mississippi River with their wagons, horses and livestock.  As he describes their passage through waist-high water, I think of the current breadth of the dammed Mighty Mississip, making a comparable modern-day voyage completely impossible.  Considering this storyteller dates back two generations, and his river-crossing family members two more generations beyond that, his story nears the middle of the 1800s, the Civil War, and the very timeframe of my ancestors, which my father and I searched for in the library.  And in this simple recollection of an old man, for the first time, history wakes up, leaps to life, and sparks an entirely new academic interest for me.  If only college proved as interesting as this senior citizen in dirty overalls.

Conan the Hoosier

Get Out

If I could write one redeeming quality about my first college, it would be this: nothing.  Admittedly, I did not make the most of my college experience, and leaving after three semesters seemed to be the highlight.  One semester, finding myself short of funds, I opted against buying any text books; fifteen semester hours later, I only had one C, and simply because the professor graded on attendance (which I found ironic since he skipped class more often than me, sending his undeservingly pretentious grad student in his place to turn on the projector).  Sorry, but if the snow was falling, I would not be in class.  I lacked passion for my alma mater so I gladly packed up my 45 hours of credit and took them elsewhere.

For Thanksgiving break of my first semester, my family insists on driving over and picking me up late Wednesday night.  The outstanding post-secondary institution shuttered its dorms well before the family station wagon arrives on campus, so I drag four days of clothes across campus.  I recall thinking how clever it would be if in the future all suitcases come with wheels.  One building remains open for the students, like me, who choose to spend Thanksgiving on the Island of Misfit Coeds, so after an exhausting trek across the deserted sidewalks, I settle into the lobby of the dimly-lit building for a five-hour wait.

Just Me and Arnold

Thankfully, I find myself alone with a television so no one stops me from getting up and changing the channel.  I recall thinking how clever it would be if in the future all televisions come with remote controls.  Growing up, we did not enjoy a wide selection of viewing opportunities, and our living room

rabbit ears received five stations: 3 (ABC), 5 (independent), 8 (PBS), 10 (CBS), and 12 (NBC).  If Disney re-released a movie in theaters, we would go see it.  Two years prior to college, my father splurged and bought our family a video-recording device, but not a VCR.  He felt the Beta format would be the future of home video technology.  So for the next five hours, I delight in possessing full reign of the wide selection of cable channels.

At the top of the 8:00 hour, after flipping through random programming that adequately passes time, I stumble across a jewel, a film completely out of all categories of television and movie programming to which I had been subjected in my youth and adolescence: Conan the Barbarian.  Dark and dismal, much like the university environment in which I sit, this film sings of forced subjugation in deplorable conditions, just like college life in the Midwest.  James Earl Jones transforms himself into a snake and slithers away.  I can get onboard with that; at least if I had slithering abilities, I wouldn’t have to wait five hours for someone to arrive to pick me up.  I don’t recall anything from my long holiday weekend with my family, but I remember those two hours passed the fastest of the entire lost weekend.  While certainly not a crowd favorite, to this day I still believe that quirky introduction of Arnold Schwarzenegger into American culture beats the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade anytime.