University of Rhode Island - Renaissance / Grist Yearbook (Kingston, RI)

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A -b-c-d ... an apple red. a bright green tree. E-F-G ... the colors are so pretty, h-i-j-k . . . I let no one show my mind the way. K-M-N . . . let ' s begin again! a-b-c-d ... I’m filled with creativity. E-F-G ... I do what- ever pleases me. h-i-j-k ... I only care ' bout this sunny day! B eing a kid. Electric trains and Bugs Bunny. Tiny Tears and Dra- cula. Crayola Crayons and finger paints. Skipping rope to rhym- ing tunes, punch ball and movies on Saturday afternoon. There was “Andy’s Gang” and “Dennis the Menace”: Victory at Sea” and “Dr. Seuss”: “Salty Brian’s Shack” and the “Three Stooges”; “Leave it to Beaver” and the “Little Rascals”: “American Bandstand” and Ozzie and Harriet”. And of course, we joined our parents every Sunday night for the “Ed Sullivan Show.” C hildren. We were free-thinking creators of nonsense rhymes and construction-paper drawings, scotch tape ring trains and silly songs. Our minds were fertile beds that incessantly sprouted with curiosity and imagination. Our lives were unpatterned, unscheduled (disregarding our three meals a day. our favorite TV shows and bedtime). We were secure within our families, secure within the prospects of an optimistic life ahead, secure within our happy selves. What we knew of the world came with kindergarten and first grade: a dynamic exposure to the Cold War. Canaveral and Eisenhower. They were good, free times, influenced by our parents, our friendships, our television sets. We inherited the true American way through Ozzie and Harriet” learned of parental respect through “Leave It To Beaver”, realized that the good guys always win from Raw- hide . and experienced our first smacking of culture on “Ed Sullivan . Everything always has a happy ending, or so we thought, from the hundreds of serials we watched. Happiness was having your own hula hoop and racing cars, or so we believed, from the thousands of tempting commercials we watched. “Ma! I want that toy!” We gained an insight on materialism at a very early age.

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PREFACE ... So where are we now? Products of a civilization we inherited, a history we tried to shape, a system that molded our lives ... as we attempt to put the finishing touches on our self definition. As children we lived in the serenity of Disneyland and the bewilderment of air raid shelters. In those timeless years, when black was black and there were no shades inbetween, we found our heroes in the Lone Ranger, Superman, our parents, and Mickey Mouse. The future was non-existent and the past meant yesterday. The United States was the best country in the world, and while we hid beneath our desks when those four alarming bells resounded in the school corridors, we shivered with fear at the thought of the atomic war they were telling us about. One day, way off in the distance, we would venture through the endless years of text books and history exams, promotions and diplomas, and eventually come out of it all as school teachers or fire chiefs, secure within a family of our own. While we watched those first few rocket ships blast off, we realized the fruition of technological progress, and we were content and happy to let our own free minds explode with individual creativity and imagination. As our daily lives in school proved their effects upon our increasingly more patterned and structured selves, we suddenly found a new hero to worship. John Kennedy represented youth, and we could now identify with the world outside our own heads. But our itensified belief in America one day shattered. November 22 will forever bring vivid images to our minds: “where were you when it happened?” we still ask each other. So our hero was gone for good, and we eventually placed our hope and faith in four long-haired musicians from Liverpool. Soon we found ourselves no longer the carefree children we once were and peer presure pushed us to identify with the older kids who were now growing their hair like the Beatles and wearing Carnaby Street clothes and tom dung- arees. Youth was quickly emerging as a powerful political force, or so we imagined, and while Vietnam and race riots intensified, so did our concern for the reality outside the high school. Life at home was starting to become stifling, and we longed for independence and freedom. Parental rebellion they called it: smoking pot at your friends house when no one was home, bleaching your jeans so they’d look old and faded, growing your hair long despite your parents constant promises that they’d cut off your allowance. The hippies were still alive and well once we got to college, and it was easy for us to fit in. We suddenly found ourselves living with the freedom we’d for years wished to have, and slowly we endured the painful process of discov- ering ourselves. We experienced intellectualism, ventured through various moralities, drifted complacently and secu- rely from one day to the next. We’ll never forget our first real live campus protest, and the feeling of community and brotherhood on the quad- rangle. It was easy to venture out of the college womb for a little while and voice our protests against the world outside. It was a time when “all you need is love,” man, and a little dope, a little peace, and the world would be just fine. It was essentially the next spring’s festivities against the war and finals which brought us to realize that placing flowers on a National Guardsman’s rifle just doesn’t work anymore. The flower childr en quietly filtered out of the mainstream and disappeared, although so many of us drifted through the transition without realizing the demise of our once glorious hippie culture. Things generally became too ‘heavy’ for us to cope with. As we watched the helicopters descend with U.S. troops over the Lincoln Memorial on May Day, as more and more of our friends got busted, as we finally learned that protests were no longer the time and place for scoring and smok- ing pot, we succumbed. The establishment, which we once put all our faith into, which we once tried to influence, finally defeated us. “Peace” the word we once thought could solve everything, was now becoming a cliche and the system succeeded in squashing our idealism to an ash. So where are we now? A bit bewildered, let down, somewhat depressed, and overall apathetic, as we watch the world powerlessly behind our Providence Journals. With no more heroes to put our faith into, no more Bobby Ken- nedys, Eugene Me Carthys and Mark Rudds, we find ourselves thrust from our four year old security blanket and into a system we have no choice but to contend with. Graduation has swept us up and out of the Kingston Fantasy. We’ll try to acclimate ourselves to the prevailing mode of life out there, while we gradually force ourselves to depart from the college generation. And as the umbilical cord severs itself, Renaissance will serve as a tool for remembering what we were, what we’ve become and how we arrived at our present situation in this stage of the game. -Shelley Zuckerman H. Leibowitz

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D -e-f-g . . . Today I learnt to climb a tree. H-I-J-K ... I need a band-aid right away! j-m-n-o ... To the zoo today 1 want to go! P-Q-R-S . . . Spilled my milk and made a mess, t-u-v . . . Let me stay up to watch TV! W-X-Y and Z . . . Give me, give me, give me! Dr.-Grat-had-a-cat-who-once-ate-a-rat . . Look, Ma! I made it up! Dr.-Grat-had-a-Fat-cat-who-once-ate-a-rat-with-a-bat-on-a-mat-that-was-fat . . .Look Ma! 1 made it up! All by myself, Ma, I made it up! Two plus two is channel four, and four plus four equals more. Huh, Ma, doesn’t it? It’s NBC isn’t it, huh? E ver suddenly I was thrust into a square little brown wooden thing they told me was a desk. A big lady in front of the room handed out paper and said. “Draw a circle. F or six whole years I had learned plenty. I could draw green grass and big mountains, chimneys and houses and flowers a-bloom in May. And sky- scrapers and horses and oceans . . . “Draw a circle.” I sat at this square little thing, they told me was my desk, with a blank sheet of grainy-white rectangular construction paper right in front of me. 1 had my own box of 64 Crayola crayons and lots of ideas stored in my head and “Draw a circle I drew a circle, I did. and the circle looked empty. I made it into a small red sun. and drew hills, a house and a hundred flowers and . . . (The big lady walked over to my desk, and seeing my colorful creation of a house on a hill, blooming flowers and a happy sky. she broke my red crayon in half.) “Draw a circle!”