This yellow notebook, bought at the university bookstore when I was a 17-year-old college freshman in the fall of 1983, is the first journal I ever kept consistently. For years, I'd had false starts, or done my writing on loose paper. Most of those notebooks and papers are lost now, which is a mercy, given how embarrassing I still was at 17 and 18. My own angsty and anxiety-driven thoughts are excruciating to read. But fortunately, this notebook is so much more than that. I also used it to keep track of the books I read:
Interesting new words:
Striking quotes from radical writers of the 19th Century:
As well as more modern writers:
I also saved ephemera:
Tucked between the last page and the back cover is a collection of yellowed and cracked papers: a to-read list, a couple of unsent letters, some journaling I did on a typewriter (a typewriter!), and an envelope that claims to contain a poem I wrote in 1984. This can neither be opened and read, nor burnt, and will therefore live in limbo forever.
Also inside the back cover is two pages torn out of the Oakland University Honors College Newsletter. I spent my first year of college at OU, a small, mostly-commuter school outside Detroit. It was a rough year for me. I still have good friends from Oakland, and I like to pretend that they don't remember anything about me from that year. They humor me, for the most part.
Toward spring, I thought about transferring away from Oakland, but wasn't sure about it. So, when I heard about a program called National Student Exchange, I jumped on it. NSE allowed students to spend a year at a college in another state, while paying in-state tuition. I was placed at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, in Indiana, Pennsylvania, and spent my sophomore year there before transferring to Michigan in my junior year.
As a side note, although I loved both the University of Michigan and Ann Arbor, I've always also regretted not finishing at Oakland. It was a small school, built on the grounds of the Mathilda Dodge Wilson estate, and was full of good people. In particular, the Honors College was a close-knit group where strong ties were formed among both students and profs. At Michigan, I had something like that experience in the Women's Studies department, but I also had the big-university experience of taking enormous lecture classes from profs who said in so many words that they hated teaching undergrads, only did it because their contracts required them to, and hoped we would sit still and listen in class, while bothering them as little as possible outside it.
All of that is introduction to the point of my Throwback Thursday, which is that the editor of the Oakland Honors College newsletter asked me to write an article about what it was like at IUP. I did. It's not excruciating! In my year at IUP, I began my lifelong habit of writing long, chatty, detailed letters to loved ones. Those letters, and this article, were the beginning of connecting with my best gift in writing: my fascination with everything, my love of noticing what's around me, my ability to write about it with affection and humor.
So, here it is: Su Penn, age 18, reflects on life in western Pennsylvania. I have not edited any of my own awkward writing, but I have corrected a couple of bad choices made by the newsletter editor, which have rankled all these years:
Here I am at IUP. That's Indiana University of Pennsylvania, and trivia buffs will be interested to note that Jimmy Stewart went here. Since then, nobody really distinguished has matriculated. Until me. I'm an exchange student, which means I'll be back at Oakland in a year, but until then I'm having quite a time experiencing the differences between these two schools, which are essentially the same size. There, the similarities end. Oakland's heavily commuter; IUP's not. I have never seen a campus with so few parking spaces in my life. Of course, OU spoiled me for that, but there seriously is such a parking shortage here that students cannot have cars on campus. I'm quite the popular woman, what with Walter, my Monza, who spends his weeks getting dusty in a parking garage, waiting for those weekend treks to Pittsburgh.
Pittsburgh is a city not memorable for anything but its bridges and soot. It is, however, a place to go away from Indiana, where the social life consists of frat parties. I have not yet had the pleasure, but from all reports a frat party is someplace where you pay $2 to stand up to your ankles in dirty water in a fraternity's basement. The dorms are dry (a heavily enforced rule), so there are no floor parties. This makes for quiet weekends (if you really want that), since all the loud people are out seeking inebriation elsewhere.
IUP has a lot of things Oakland lacks: a football team, a marching band, a fight song, and male cheerleaders. Unfortunately, my dorm is just across from the fieldhouse and Miller Stadium, and even as I write this the marching band is playing "Flashdance" outside my window, and the cheerleaders are flipping each other in the Quad. You don't know what you're missing.
You're also missing ROTC. They march by every morning at 6:25, chanting loudly and obscenely (you all remember the marching scenes in An Officer and a Gentleman). A petition is currently circulating through the Quad requesting that they march either later or elsewhere. I signed it twice.
One of the most difficult adjustments for me to make has been back to non-refundable pop cans. Every time I pitch one, I feel like I'm throwing away money. If Michigan's bottle law has done nothing else, it has given us a new source of guilt. Of course, the difference is noticeable. There is litter here like you just don't see in Michigan.
Nobody here cares that the Tigers are having a winning season.
The girls dress very nicely. Imagine the best-dressed girl on your floor, the one who seldom wears blue jeans, and calls them "denim trousers" when she does. My roommate is that girl, but so is every other girl in my dorm, except me. I tried to stand up under the pressure, but I packed my T-shirts away a couple of days after my arrival, and I shined my penny-loafers. I go no farther than that, even if I do feel pretty toady by comparison half the time. I'll be glad when cold weather sets in, and I get to start wearing my coat, which is nicer by far than anything I ever put on under it.
The really strange thing about it is that the boys here all have multi-colored hair and dress like Billy Idol. Barring that, they wear nothing but fraternity sweatshirts and jeans. It's pretty amazing, but dating, especially going steady, is really big here between these apparent opposites. People are constantly on the prowl. Guys have asked for my phone number who don't even know my name. It doesn't really surprise me that none of them have called. Who would they ask for?
You've probably heard that IUP has the ugliest college men in America, if you read USA Today. This is true. I know a lot of guys at Oakland who would fit right in. The furor is dying down, but the last couple of weeks have produced an incredible number of "ugly men" jokes, and even some serious debates as to whether or not it's true. Last weekend the fun culminated in the crowning of "King Ugly" at Caleco's, a local bar. It was an event covered by the national media, including two of the television networks. This is quite a coup for a school nobody's ever heard of.
At IUP, we do not build lofts in our dorm rooms. Most of the dorms, mine included, don't even have bunk beds. My first week here I was directed to a room down the hall which was described as "just incredible." These two girls, in an amazing burst of initiative and decorative derring-do, had brought their own bunk beds from home. I know, I could hardly contain my excitement either.
One thing we do, which I like and am hoping to introduce to OU in a major way when I return, is write on our windows. Using masking tape or construction paper, people put up slogans which can be read from outside. They range from "Springsteen for President" to "Fresh Buns Daily," and they're a lot of fun to check out as you stroll into the Quad.
I am taking an Honors College course here, dealing with George Orwell. The class consists of ten students and two professors, and is pretty informal. I went through an intensive interrogation before they would let me in, and let me tell you, this group is the elitist, stuck-up bunch of snobs we have been accused of being. Each HC class here gets to take a weekend trip somewhere, dealing with the subject of the course, with the HC footing the bill. My class is going to a three-day international George Orwell conference on Long Island at Hofstra University, where we'll attend seminars run by professors from Oxford, Harvard, and Cambridge, to name a few. I think that's great, but I really feel the lack of an actual Honors College office and a Jan. The HC here is run by a slightly smelly criminology professor out of his cubicle, and it's just not a fun place to visit.
Dorm students: The food in the cafeteria here is worse than SAGA, much worse than SAGA. They just switched food services this year, and everyone keeps saying how much better it is now. I cannot begin to imagine what they lived on last year.
Yes, they do talk funny. Or I do, depending on your point of view. It's not just the accent, either, though that can be pretty pronounced. They call soap operas "stories" (as in, "I can't believe they killed Hillary on my story.") and pop "soda." They eat in the "caf," and to "be ignorant" to somebody is to be rude or mean. We have "I-cards" instead of IDs, and if you "scoop" that means you've brought a member of the opposite sex home for the night. Each "hall" has a "hall counselor," instead of each floor having an RA.
In the "it's a small world" department, I met the president of IUP at an exchange student shindig, and he's been to Oakland. It's been a while, though, because he remembers meeting Mrs. Wilson.
Speaking of exchange students, there are over 200 foreign exchange students here. I've met people from all over, including some Italian women, whose style of dressing we all intend to imitate as soon as possible. For me, that's been one of the best parts of being here, since I've had the chance to find out what people think of the USA from a European perspective, and what their politics really are like. The third-worlders are kind of neat, too, though they tend to be a little extreme. The exchange students are usually the ones to blame if sometning incredibly rowdy happens at the movies on a Friday night, and if you're in the right mood they're the ones to be with for a fantastically good time.
The things I miss most: Hungry Howie's pizza, the Detroit Free Press, Guindon, newspaper articles about autoworkers, and Beer Lake Bridge. And, strangely enough, since I wanted to be at a school that was surrounded by and was a part of the town it was in, I miss the open spaces, the woods, and walks to Meadow Brook Hall. I miss WRIF. Everybody who was trying to scare me was right: both the pizza and the rock-n-roll radio stations here are the pits.
I also miss HC potluck luncheons. l expect to hear soon that you've had a "Su Penn We Wish You Were Here" potluck lunch, and served excellent pizza at it while listening to truly good rock music.
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