The anthropology department at Miami University was holding a two-day program celebrating their 20th anniversary of emancipation from the sociology/anthropology department. I received an invitation to the event. This is the kind of program that I had been avoiding at Miami for decades. When my mentor, Dr. George Fathauer, was still teaching, he would ask me to come to Oxford to speak to his cultural anthropology classes about my fieldwork experience, and what I was doing for employment outside of academia. As cultural anthropology faculty positions were disappearing, he was ever more sensitive to what his majors were going to be doing after they graduated. I made several trips to Oxford for Dr. Fathauer. Those experiences ended when he retired from teaching and moved to Florida. Dr. Fathauer has since passed away. His memory should be a blessing.
I never attended any of the alumni weekends. I did make the trip to Oxford with Pauline, my parents, and David, Aaron and Hanni in 2003, when I was awarded the Bishop Medal.
That was a very weird experience and very humbling. While my family was in Oxford, the Alumni Association treated us like royalty. Pauline and I were treated to a buffet luncheon at a football game. This was the senior year of Ben Roethlisberger as quarterback for Miami. We had lunch with Dr. Phillip Shriver who was the president of the university when I was a student. President Shriver also attended the Alumni Award dinner. I apologized to Dr. Shriver in my speech for the flush-in stunt we pulled off in the spring of my freshman year. We did some important stuff during the anti-war demonstrations, and we did some really stupid stuff. This stupid thing was covered in the national news.
According to the University:
Established in 1936, the Bishop Distinguished Achievement Medal is given to an alumna or alumnus who has made contributions in service to humanity or who has reached the pinnacle in a field of endeavor. The award is named in honor of Robert Hamilton Bishop, Miami’s first president.
A dear friend, Eric Arnold, pestered the crap out of the Alumni Association to give me the honor. Eric was able to collect letters from The Transverse Myelitis Association community to support my candidacy for the award. My take on the experience is that the Alumni Association gave me the Bishop Medal to make Eric go away. One of these days, I'll have to write a blog about my relationship with Eric. We've been close friends for 68 years.
The alumni association asked me to speak for 15 minutes. I spoke for a half hour. The current president of Miami, Dr. Garland, conferred my award. My excursion to Oxford this year was also my 20th anniversary of receiving the Bishop Medal.
Mike DeWine and Ara Parseghian, both Miami Alumni, also received the Bishop Medal. Do with that what you will.
I had no idea at all what was going on in anthropology and I thought this might be a good way to find out. I participated in the first day of the program on zoom. I made the trip to Oxford for the second day. I made a reservation at the Miami hotel and conference center and planned to spend Friday night and Saturday in Oxford doing some very serious time-travel.
As I was driving to Oxford it dawned on me that this was my 50th anniversary of graduating from Miami with my major in anthropology. Cosmic. It was very strange to be making this trip alone. I did text Eric about 100 times with photographs.
The program I was participating in was a roundtable conversation between alumni anthropology majors and current students majoring in anthropology. There were four faculty members who attended, including the acting chairman. Five alumni anthropology majors attended the program and about 20 students. I believe I was the only cultural anthropologist among the alumni. The rest were archeologists. One of the other alumni received his PhD from Ohio State in archeology. He was a few years behind me and I had never met him before. Most of the students were either specializing in archeology or biological anthropology. When I was at Miami, most of the majors were in cultural and we didn’t have a physical anthropology faculty member. A lot had changed.
It was an interesting conversation and I enjoyed meeting all of the participants. One of my goals was to figure out the differences between cultural anthropology and sociology. In the olden days, cultural anthropology was the study of non-western, small scale, isolated societies using participant-observation as the primary research methodology. Sociologists studied large-scale, industrialized societies employing lots of sciencey methods that involved statistics that cultural anthropologists generally feared. My guess was that cultural anthropology couldn’t possibly exist as it had in the past because most non-western, small-scale, isolated societies aren’t tolerating westerners showing up to ‘live with them’ and then to return home to write a few fascinating books about their adventure. The good old days of colonialism are trying to come to an end. I had a fellow graduate student in the 1970s go to Afghanistan to study the Taliban. His stories from fieldwork were other-worldly. If he tried to perform this research today, the odds of him returning alive would probably not be great. And so goes cultural anthropology.
I returned home with memories of an interesting experience, but no more clarity about the differences between sociology and cultural anthropology.
The program ended at around 2:00 Friday afternoon, and I began my personal journey through Oxford and Miami. It was February and it was really windy and cold. The last time I had walked around the university and the town, I had knees. The hike I took around campus was much slower and more painful than in the past.
After I received the Bishop Medal at the Alumni dinner, Aaron, Hanni and I walked uptown to one of my old haunts, Mac and Joe's, for a drink. It was a Friday and Pauline had taught that day. She was exhausted and went back to our hotel to crash.
When I was in school, this was the bar where freaks, gays, students not in fraternities or sororities and other normal people hung out.
As we were walking into the bar, a woman approached me and said that she was at the award dinner and really loved my speech. After thanking her, Aaron turned to me with rolling eyeballs and said, oh, great; now you have fucking groupies.
Over 50 years, the bar had not changed at all. I had.
After finishing a delicious hamburger with tater tots at Mac and Joe's, I set off for a walk around uptown Oxford. I was totally bummed that one of my favorite places was no longer in existence. Warm blueberry donuts at Beasley's in the middle of the night.
At the time of my trip to Oxford, I was taking a photography class at Columbus State. I had an assignment to shoot motion, and the following two images were taken to show the streaming car lights during a long exposure. So many of the stores have changed over 50 years, but the town looked the same as it did when I was in Oxford.
I next headed onto campus on slant walk.
The most beautiful campus that ever there was.
Robert Frost, the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet who made numerous visits to Miami.
All of the buildings are Georgian architecture and the grounds are fastidious. I can't believe they let a lightbulb burn out.
The area to the left in this photograph is the location of the first earth day that was held on campus in the spring of 1973. I don't know why, but I remember it clearly.
This was me in front of Harrison Hall in 2003. Hanni took this photograph while I was taking her for a tour of campus.
The anthropology department was located in the basement and the first floor of Harrison Hall. Not only was I a major in anthropology, I was also the president of the Anthropology-Sociology Honor Society and I was the student representative to the faculty committee. I was at Miami between 1969 and 1973. These were incredibly tumultuous times. Miami was such a conservative school. The changes that were going on in society and on campuses across the country were not easy for Miami to manage. Putting a student representative on faculty committees was one of the accommodations Miami was making to quiet the storms of change.
I took this photograph of Harrison Hall as I passed it on slant walk.
I also took this photograph of King Library. While I was in school, you could see students streaming like lemmings into the library after dinner. I did my studying every evening in the Zebra Room at the Student Union. It was quiet, coffee and food were nearby, and the people watching was spectacular. The library was just way too formal for my liking.
Miami was and remains an excellent school with very competitive students. I'm not sure what is going on today, but 50 years ago, they had an excellent faculty that was focused on undergraduate education. Our classes, including, all of the introductory classes, were taught by full professors. I think the student population in those days was around 14,000. Part of my speech for the Bishop Medal noted that today there would be no way I would be accepted into Miami. They wouldn't have looked at my application. I graduated from high school with a low B average and my SAT scores were the equivalent of a semi epsilon moron. I graduated from Miami with a 3.6 average and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. My GRE scores were the equivalent of a semi epsilon moron.
Interestingly, in the olden days, men were able to get into Miami with less than a 3.0 average. Women needed better than a 3.0 average. Miami was an incredibly conservative school and consequently experienced some seismic changes during the 60s and 70s as a result. All of the movements and demonstrations taking place on college campuses during those times became an integral part of our experience at Miami.
I also took this photograph from slant walk. This was Nancy's dorm. She was my girlfriend for a significant part of the time I was at Miami. Nancy was getting a degree in speech therapy. She was a wonderful person and we had a great time together. So many awesome memories.
As I was leaving the campus on Friday evening to return to the hotel, I stopped at the courtyard at Irvin Hall. The Spanish and Portuguese Departments were located in Irvin. I came to pay my respects to my dear friend, Bob Phillips. I met Bob at the beginning of my junior year. I moved into a house that had five apartments. There were three apartments downstairs and two upstairs. Bob lived in an upstairs apartment on one side of the house and I lived on the other side. Through my last two years at Miami and for many years after I left Oxford, Bob and I were very close friends. He was brilliant and a character. Bob came out as gay in the early 70s. Coming out in those days took a lot of guts, and particularly at a school as conservative as Miami. The gay community had no rights, and he was risking his job.
In addition to being an exceptional Spanish teacher, Bob also served as the advisor to one of the Jewish fraternities. Bob was not Jewish. He also volunteered with a group he called the Queer Club. The Queer Club was held at The Together House. I have no idea who ran this place, but in addition to Bob's group, this was the place you went to if you were having a bad trip, and needed help achieving a soft landing.
Bob met John in our senior year and they lived together next door. I had invited them both to Aaron's bar mitzvah, and they responded that they couldn't make it. I knew something was wrong because Bob was always there for me. I later heard from John that Bob had cancer. I didn't know that Bob had passed away until after the funeral. I was crushed.
Bob and John were wonderful gardeners. To honor Bob, the Spanish Department created this garden and memorial in the Irvin Courtyard.
John invited me to the garden dedication, and of course, I attended. Bob's sister came to the dedication from Los Angeles. I had heard about his sister for years, but this was the first time I was meeting her. For me, this dedication was Bob's funeral and my time to say good-bye. I was a mess. I approached her to introduce myself and then stood in front of her and balled uncontrollably. I couldn't speak. I felt horribly for her. I'm sure I totally freaked her out. John saw what was going on and he saved her by retrieving me.
There are two places where I can go to remember Bob - 402 East Church Street and his garden in the courtyard. I'm grateful that there are places for me to reflect on such an exceptional human being. May his memory be a blessing.
I woke up on Saturday morning to a sunny and much warmer day. I walked out of the hotel and stepped into the Formal Gardens. These were located behind my freshman dorm. It is a beautifully sculpted garden that has bushes creating sectioned squares. As girls were not permitted in our all-boys dormitory, the Formal Gardens often looked a lot like a Holiday Inn Hotel during the spring and fall when it was warm enough to spend the night outdoors.
I took this photograph of the Miami Seal inside of the hotel.
This is a photograph of me and Pauline at this same hotel when I received the Bishop Medal.
And this is a photograph of me standing next to Symmes Hall, my freshman dorm. Hanni also took this picture in 2003. I could write a book about my experiences in this dorm. There was a guy named George who was black, gay and Jewish. We called him Minority George.
The conveniences of this dormitory were exceptional. It was one of the few dorms that had a cafeteria next door, so we could get our meals without having to walk outside. And, by the way, the meals were excellent. We were also buying our dope from the resident advisor. Thus, we were also able to purchase our dope without having to leave the building.
I had good friends who lived in Symmes. Eric and I were both on the second floor. Eric managed to live alone. I had two roommates. One of them was a physics major from Cincinnati. We didn't have much to say to each other, but he was a good guy and an easy roommate. My other roommate was from Detroit and was recruited to play basketball. I felt horrible for him. The student body at Miami in those days looked a lot like the audience at a Billy Joel concert. Most of the Black students were recruited as athletes. My roommate was friends with all of them. He was also a good guy and an easy roommate. We shared a bathroom with all of the guys who were located in our hallway. It had to have been more than 20 people. Looking back on this whole gig as a 72 year old, I haven't the slightest idea how I managed to live with two strangers and share a bathroom with 20 guys. Oh, yeah, we were able to get our dope without leaving the building.
We had such a good time in this place. So many great memories.
This is Symmes Hall 20 years later. I'm pretty sure we didn't appreciate just how beautiful our surroundings were while we were in school. Ok, I'm sure we didn't.
This is the legendary 402 East Church Street in 1973. That is Nancy and I standing on the front lawn with a stray dog that the guys in one of the apartments downstairs adopted. They also adopted a young woman who had run away from home and was living in their closet. What we just accepted as a matter of course in those days. Yikes and yikes. Clearly, Mother Miami was convulsing and losing a grip in the 1970s.
I lived upstairs on the right side of the house with my roommate, Mark. Mark and I grew up together in Cleveland Heights. He lived around the block from me and we shared all of the same friends. Mark was a psychology major and a drummer. Today he is a social worker and a drummer. Bob and John lived upstairs on the left side of the house. Eric lived in one of the downstairs apartments just below me and Mark. After I graduated, Nancy moved into my apartment.
We were in this house during both our junior and senior years. It was such a great place. We were just one block from campus and I was just a hop, skip and a jump from Harrison Hall, where most of my classes were located. There were parties going on all the time. Bob had taco parties for everyone in the house on a regular basis. He also sewed dashikis for everyone in the house, because who doesn't need a dashiki.
This is a photograph of me and Mark from 1972. I still have that shirt. It had been my father's.
This is 402 East Church Street in 2023. The new owners of the house figured out that they could save a dollar and a quarter by not having to paint the shutters. Otherwise, same house.
I took these photographs during my personal 50 year reunion. This is the guy who currently lives in my apartment. We visited for a while before he got into his car to go somewhere. I told him that while we were in school, Miami didn't allow us to have cars. If you drove to school from outside Oxford, the school impounded your car, and you could only get it back if you were leaving Oxford for an approved reason. Did I mention that Miami was a very conservative school in my day. Mother Miami.
My apartment was just amazing. My bedroom was small but it had six windows. It also had three doors - one went out to the back porch and steps, one went into the kitchen and the other into the living room. The other bedroom was in the front of the house. With the trees just outside of the windows, it was one really beautiful place.
This first photo is Eric, Nancy and Bob in our living room. I love this picture. Such awesome memories. The second photograph is me and Nancy in our kitchen. It looks like I'm making potato salad for one of our parties. The last image is of me on my bed next to one of those windows. I'm looking very pensive and I can't sit with my legs crossed like that anymore. And my hair is very brown.
Our house was next to this fraternity. They were generally very loud and obnoxious and we didn't get along with them very well ... or at all.
After paying homage to 402 East Church Street, I made my way through campus and went to Western College. At the time I was in school, Western was an independent women's college. Shortly after I graduated, they ran into financial problems and were purchased by Miami. The agreement was that Miami was going to keep Western as an independent study program. After I received my doctorate, I applied for an opening at Western, but the job was withdrawn because the university decided that they needed another anthropologist like they needed a hole in their heads.
Kim was a student at Western College. She was my girlfriend during high school and through most of the first two years I was at Miami.
This is Kim and I headed to our prom in 1969. I was obviously adept at taking direction, even at a very young age. I'm pretty sure this was the first and last time that I wore anything yellow.
Thomson Hall was Kim's freshman dorm. Kim was a wonderful artist. She welded me some really awesome large, iron ash trays.
During her sophomore and junior years, Kim lived in this spectacular building - Peabody Hall. I think she was on the third floor. Tapestry. John Barleycorn Must Die. Those will always be the background music for my memories of this time with Kim in Peabody. I'm assuming that Kim lived there her senior year also. Our relationship so seriously crashed and burned that we never saw each other again after our junior years; even though she lived across the street.
When I look back on those days, both Nancy and Kim had such profound and positive influences on my life. They were my first loves. I have nothing but the sweetest and fondest memories of our relationships and our times together. Every decade or so, I send a note thanking them for all of the wonderful stuff they brought into my life. I think about both of them often and hope they're doing okay.
This is the front door of Peabody. I opened it after taking the photograph and set off a very loud alarm. We didn't have any alarms when I was a student. People must set them off regularly because no one came to arrest me.
Across from Peabody is a memorial to the Freedom Summer that was held at Western in 1964. All pretty remarkable. There is a sign below that explains what this is all about.
This is Kumler Chapel on Western Campus. Another beautiful building. Not Georgian architecture. During my sophomore year, friends of mine were married there. Another good friend, Calvin, officiated at the wedding. Calvin was a character. He grew up in a very small, one stop sign farming town in Ohio. I didn't know from chip beef in the early 1970s. I was introduced to this totally not kosher dish on a weekend visit to his home to meet his family. We got there on Calvin's vespa that he managed to keep out of the impounding lot.
Calvin was born with webbed fingers. When the physicians did the surgery to separate his fingers, Calvin ended up with hair growing out of his palms from the graft. Calvin wore his hairy palms as a badge of honor. I have no idea what happened to Calvin, but I hope it was all good. I have no doubt that his life involved lots of interesting adventures.
I took this photograph of the Western pond for my photography class. The assignment was to shoot a landscape. Western campus was and is really beautiful. I don't know what Robert Frost thought about it.
I took this photograph of Hanni in 2003 sitting behind the sun dial on south campus. I lived on south campus my sophomore year. This large grassy area was a hot spot for demonstrations during the Vietnam War.
Twenty years down the line, south campus hadn't changed. This photograph was taken from the other side of the sun dial.
I walked through the student union. The Zebra Room is no more. That was sad. So many memories from the Zebra Room. I was there about every night studying and visiting with friends. This sign was up next to a bathroom in the student union. It sort of says it all about the amount of change that has occurred at Miami over 50 years; an all-gender bathroom, no Beasley's Bakery and no green shutters on 402 East Church Street.
I stopped in the Miami Art Museum on the way out of Western Campus.
The museum had a special exhibit about religious art and artifacts.
This was my last stop before leaving Oxford and Miami; Scott Hall, my sophomore year dorm. I had so many life altering experiences at Miami. One of the most impactful was having Dennis Cordan as a roommate.
Miami required students to live in a dorm the first two years of school. Access to unfettered debauchery wasn't possible until your junior year. Mother Miami tried to keep a firm grasp on it's parenting responsibilities for as long as possible. Miami was dry. The closest liquor store was in Indiana. Students weren't allowed to have cars. Fortunately for me, I was not a drinker and marijuana was pretty easy to come by, i.e., ask your resident advisor.
Freshman year, you got the roommates the university gave you. Sophomore year you were permitted to select a roommate and a dorm. I made arrangements with a friend from Symmes Hall to live together on the South Quad our sophomore year. He dropped out of school over the summer. So, when I moved into my room fall quarter, I was alone. I loved it, but I also knew that there was no way Miami was going to allow me to live this way all year. One evening a few weeks into the quarter, there was a knock on my door. The gentleman at the door was Dennis. He told me that he wasn't getting along with his roommate and heard from the resident advisor that I was alone. Dennis wanted to know if he could move in. As I understood that I was eventually going to get someone, I told Dennis that it was fine to do so.
Miami University has a campus in Luxembourg. Juniors at the university were able to apply for a year abroad to take classes on this campus. Dennis' mother worked at Miami Luxembourg. His mother was American and his father was German. Dennis came to Oxford from Luxembourg to study in the US. Dennis spoke English, German, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian and I don't know how many more languages ... fluently. He was taking exams and testing out of all of these languages, racking up credit hours. It was pretty amazing. Dennis was also a brilliant artist. He did pen and ink drawings with incredible detail. On a visit with me to meet my parents, he gave them a beautiful drawing he did of Luxembourg. I have it hanging on my wall and I think about him every time I look at it. I also think of Dennis whenever I listen to the Moody Blues. He loved this group and we listened to them all the time in the evenings while we were going to sleep. When they were finally inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, I actually cried thinking about Dennis.
A few weeks after Dennis moved in, we were in bed with the lights off and Dennis told me he had something to share with me. Dennis was in the top bunk. He said that the reason he had to move out of his room was that he told his roommate that he was gay and the guy told him he wasn't okay with that, and asked to have Dennis moved out. In the early 1970s, I didn't know from gay. That situation would change for me both quickly and dramatically as my life sort of became immersed in gay. Living in the house with Bob for two years, many friendships and family members ... I was evolving at an alarming rate.
I was a bit anxious about what Dennis was sharing with me, because I just didn't know anything at all about it. But as a minority who gets the whole accept the stranger thing, I was game for the experience. I told Dennis I was fine with him being my roommate. I learned so much about these complicated identity issues, the prejudices in our society, much of it based on ignorance, and the unique subculture that exists in that very diverse community. So much of this lifestyle in the early 1970s lived underground or in a different closet from the one the runaway lived in. It also lived in my room in Scott Hall.
I never had any issues with Dennis or anyone else in this arena. I'm comfortable enough with my gender identity and with who and what I am that I can pull off wearing a purse.
In my entire life, I've never lived with anyone who was an easier roommate than Dennis. He was about as neurotically organized, neat and clean as me. It was heaven. Everything in our room was lined up with the true meridian. He was an excellent student and he became a really dear friend.
This is Scott Hall in 2023. It looked exactly the same in 1971. Georgian architecture. No litter. No weeds. Wispy clouds. The most beautiful campus that ever there was.
After graduating from Miami, Dennis would come to Columbus to visit me while I was a graduate student at Ohio State. On one of our visits, Dennis told me that he'd fallen in love and that he and his partner were going to be moving to Florida. I asked Dennis to send me an address once he was settled. That was the last I heard from Dennis.
For many years, I tried unsuccessfully to find him. After the internet was invented, I did all sorts of searches for him, including trying to find his mother at Miami Luxembourg. No luck. After I was awarded the Bishop Medal, I asked the Alumni Association if they could help me find Dennis. As I was still emitting a glow from the award, they were more than happy to provide me with the help.
One morning, while I was at work, I received a phone call from the Alumni Association. I was told that sadly, Dennis had passed away in the late 1970s. They didn't have any details about what had happened to him. I thanked them, and then I cried for three weeks. The news hit me like a ton of bricks and I felt such a profound and horrible loss.
I have always believed that Dennis was most likely a victim at the very front end of the AIDS crisis in the United States. I think of Dennis all the time and I miss him. I love you, Dennis.
May his memory be a blessing.
And this is me walking in South Quad in 1971. Not a weed or litter anywhere to be seen.
