Earthtalk

                After enduring eighteen years living in a dysfunctional family under the reign of an abusive and violence-prone father, leaving home for college after graduation was like getting out of jail.   My senior year had been difficult and by the time graduation rolled around I was, for the second time in my teens, substantially depressed.  I spent the summer working at a local paper mill, performing each task assigned like a robot.  A year later I was told that my foreman had considered me the best worker he ever had come out of the local high school.  The perfect mill worker, a barely communicative zombie.

                Miraculously the fog lifted the moment I left home to attend college out of state.  Although I would be living with my brother and his wife, whose idea it had been for me to go to the college near them, I felt free.   Perhaps I felt a little too free.  By the end of my first semester I had spent all my mill earnings and flunked out with a 0.62 GPA.   My father called for my return, saying there was work available at the mill.  Desperate to avoid going back, I sought work in Sacramento but to no avail, I had to return home broke and embarrassed.

                Back in my father’s house I was now paying a punitive $70 a month room and board which, in 1962, was a good-sized chunk of my wages.  He did promise to return it all if I ever finished college.  I went back to work at the mill , settling into a job befitting a robot, a so-called roll wrap “machine” that consisted more of flesh than of metal.    It was lonely in town with all of my friends off at college.  Eventually I worried that I might be stuck in the mill like my father and grandfather were so I enrolled in two night courses offered by Oregon State University and held at the local high school.  This meant trading shifts on the nights the classes met which resulted in me working a double shift the next day and evening.   I managed to pull it off and in the end earned an A and a B which lifted my GPA back up over a 1.50 but not high enough to get into any of the state colleges I contacted.

                At the suggestion of my night school writing instructor I applied to a community college and was accepted on probation.   After two quarters and a GPA lifted to an astronomical 2.55, I was accepted into Portland State College (now University) two years after having started out at Sacramento State.  Six months later I was married. Three years later I quit school but returned after three months and a year later graduated with a respectable but not outstanding GPA but it was good enough to earn me a teaching assistantship at a college in Ohio.

                Kent State turned out to be a perfect fit for me and I flourished until the spring of 1970 when the Ohio National Guard gunned down13 students, killing four of them.  After the last ambulance passed by me I walked back to my office in a daze.  On the way I encountered two Guardsmen who stalked me  then searched my lunch bag before letting me continue.  The university was shut down just as I had begun to write my thesis.  Once faculty was allowed back on campus my advisor smuggled my data out a window to me and I was back in business.  All I wanted was to make it out and move to Boston where a teaching job awaited.

After two years of slave wages as an instructor in Boston, I headed back west to graduate school and ran into a buzz saw, a meat grinder that used graduate students as the meat.  My research went well but the coursework was up and down and the politics were deadly.  I got on the wrong side of two faculty members who succeeded in demolishing me during my oral exams.  Two years of research and my dream of earning a PhD and landing a tenure track position went up in flames.

                As a last gasp attempt, I talked my way into a nearby university just over the border in Idaho.  It was a breath of fresh air to once again be in a department that supported its graduate students instead of attacking them.  Two years later I completed my doctorate, became a father, and landed a tenure track position back at the university in Boston I had worked at earlier.  It had taken four colleges over a period of eight years for me to complete my bachelor’s degree.  My doctorate took two universities in two states over a period of five years to complete.  This may be an endurance record of some sort.  Oh, and my father never did offer to give me my rent money back.

# posted by Rockdoc @ 4:17 PM