University of Delaware - Blue Hen Yearbook (Newark, DE)

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Driving the twelve miles from Wilmington to Newark, one is aware first of California-like shopping centers, complete with neon signs and modernistic facades, all surrounded with' seemingly endless asphalt-paved parking lots. The Spirit of Seventy-six lives in laun- dromats, restaurants, and real estate offices decorated in variations on Independence Hall. Red brick and white steeples are juxta- posed with stainless steel diners advertising Chesapeake Bay seafood on hamburger buns. Between, behind, and surrounded by trees andfor modern buildings can be seen stately old churchyard cemetaries, powder mills, and other artifacts of Revolutionary times. Further back one can glimpse the solid and imposing walls of mansions built by the state's duPont family, small farms, and the enormous factories and office build- ings of the expanding Wilmington industrial complex. 20

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Closer to MNewark, the country almost re- asserts itself, only to give way to a modern used-car lot, a railroad trestle, and the Vic- torian frame houses of Mewark's Main Street. Frame houses gradually turn into bakeries, real estate and doctor's offices, the whole suddenly giving way to a shopping center, churches, and solid-looking red-brick com- mercial establishments, More independence halls jostle with trees, modernistic boxes, talse-front stores reminiscent of Wastern movie sets, more Victorian gingerbread, and imposing blocks of stone and brick. Main Street stretches for blocks, intersected by narrow streets linked with row houses straight from the nineteenth century, giving the impression of a community spawned from the marriages of Philadelphia, Peyton Place, and Ponopah, Nevada. Suddenly one comes to the elm-lined Georgian elegance of the main campus of the University of Delaware. Exploring randomly from this point, one can find eighteenth-century brick houses, more university, modern apartment complexes, more row houses, splitievel housing develop- ments, Cape Cod housing developments, an automobile factory, more university, truly lovely residential areas, railroad tracks, a Southern States Co-op mill, a Negro ghetto, a MNegro housing development, fraternity houses, elm trees, dogwood in season, chemical factories, more Victorian ginger- bread, supermarkets, corner grocery stores, liguor stores, modern churches, Colonial churches, elm trees and more university. This eclectic but nevertheless fascinating setting is inhabited by old white men on benches, five thousand college students, eight hundred MNegroes, foreign students, a few ltalians, but mostly blondish Americans of comparatively old stock. One can also find Cadillacs, chrome-plated Oldsmobiles, old Fords, a goodly number of pickups driven by farmers, factory workers, college professors, businessmen, bankers, clerks, engineers after 5 p.m., housewives in New York fashions, housewives in pedalpushers, and more Ph.D.'s than illiterates. The community stops just short of pro- vincialism at one pole, and just as short of cosmopolitanism at the other. One university faculty wife, seeking lox, called a delicates- sen and was told she wanted a hardware store; but that evening she attended a con- cert given by the Juilliard String Quartet. If Friday night brings out overalls, Sunday night features the latest Ingmar Bergman film. On the surface this is Newark.