Goshen College - Maple Leaf Yearbook (Goshen, IN)

Page 11 text:

yn- gj, '6vUf - :' Wgugl 'K 'Q Mu V .,'. 5 PQ N ,. 3 . x V V' 'X Having been conditioned in my teens and twenties to believe that my quietistic heritage was a cultural dead end whose main relation to me was as something to be escaped. I find in my thirties and forties that, living among a nation of frenetic escapees, there is a Chagall-like intensity in my past that lends itself to a universal vision, if the viewer is alive enough . . .An identity-giving tradition is not something one can pick up at a bargain counter later in life. john L. Ruth Letter to Dawn Ruth, student at Goshen College, Memorial Day, 1972. We'll be coming up broadside against the demonic forces that are abroad, so remember who conquered them and with whom we are allied Professor Mary Bender Twentieth Century Fiction introductory lecture, Spring. 1973

Page 13 text:

N CAMPUS We return-rusty mind-machines burping into action. Truck drivers, waitresses, followers of the wheat harvest, deep Caribbean tans, burnt-out wanderers and veterans of the rubber factory: from Europe, Korea, India, the hollers of Kentucky, the squalor of Port-au-Prince, the farm life of Harleysville and Middlebury we come. But as always, the tans fade, enthusiasm wavers and the worlds that were not Goshen don't clash anymore with Goshen. We burrow in for the winter, nurturing ourselves on bad food and hoarded summer memories, which too soon lose their power to mitigate the severity of insipid Indiana. We return-a bit wistful and not quite convinced that the shopping bag of books, with their hazy promise of spiritual and mental adventure, has the ability to sustain our senses as did the Life Adventurous, still piping and whirling in the sun. 9