Kenyon College - Reveille Yearbook (Gambier, OH)

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I.iz Hutchins 9

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H,rb.ua Hosteller Steven Killpack I960 was a lime of great excitement, still fresh from childhood memories, when older brothers and sisters might have joined the Peace Corps, when “civil rights was something every decent human being could embrace without the ambivalence that busing would later bring, when neatly dressed col- lege students would march to Alabama in the name of brotherhood. (Ten years later students would march for sisterhood, and perhaps in the messianic future they would march for pcoplehood and then finally there will be no more need for marching any- more.) It was a time when everyone was called and many responded. This is not nostalgia, but the emo- tional responses remembered. But then things went awry. The center, perhaps based on false premises from the start, would not hold; things fell apart. The President, the secular Christ who bears our responsibilities like the Lamb of God, was crucified on the cross-hairs of an Italian rifle. Malcom X. Martin Luther King, and Bobby Kennedy would follow. Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Brian Jones. Pig Pen. ad infinitum, until the whole decade seemed like a dance of death. Mark Rerek, a friend, would turn to me in the middle of Peirce Hall and mumble. Our heroes aren’t old. They’re just dead. It was a weird time in which to have grown up, groping for self-definition in a world that couldn’t decide itself what it wanted to be, and so instead of choosing it was everything at once. That was the horror and the terror. Kent State, Attica. Wounded Knee. Watergate. Woodstock. Altamont, Haight- Ashbury. These were some of the scenes that struck us in our childhood adolescence, and young adulthood. So we journeyed from public and prep school, sub- urb and inner city. Shaker Heights and downtown Detroit — to Kenyon. Some blown out by the previ- ous decades chaos, others hardly affected.

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And now I sit here in the library, suspending for a moment these recollections, and gaze at the graffi- ti on the wall next to me. One pundit has written There are only forty people in the world and eight of them arc hamburgers. and another has scrawled Earthquakes cannot be held morally responsible for their actions. Finally, the graffitists have turned their talents to Kenyon and concluded that Dumb as a McKean is a tautology and We must accept the Givens in life. It is all there on the walls, I guess. Someone in twenty years will ask me what being a Kenyon un- dergraduate was like and 1 11 laugh. It was like a lot of things. I’ll probably say and then stop, unable to say much more. Because, after all, it was a lot of things, most of which might resist description. One calls to mind the lookout — perched above Route 229 where countless Kenyon students have come to lose themselves in reveries, chemical or oth- erwise. and the long walks or bicycle rides taken in Ganibier countryside, accompanied by a book or a friend, returning wearily back to the campus. Each will remember his or her favorite class, w here the professor told jokes or made a remark so telling it rose above the significance of taking it down in notes. And each will remember the nuance of a day. perhaps in spring, walking back from the Post Office of the Village Market, hearing the stereos that celebrate good weather. 10