Flashback: Lake Forest College, 1978-79

Son Steve at 10 Campus Circle
Lake Forest College
Lake Forest, IL
40 years later ...

Yesterday, just before supper, Joyce and I got a FaceTime call from our son, Steve, who had been in Chicago for a meeting. A gust of nostalgia, it seems, had billowed his sails and sent him zooming up the Lake Michigan shore to Lake Forest College (Lake Forest, IL--up the North Shore), where Joyce and I had lived and taught in 1978-79. Steve had been six when we arrived, seven when we moved back to Ohio.

Via FaceTime he "drove" us around the campus--his opening shot (where he subsequently took a selfie--see above) was the campus house where we lived that year--still about the nicest place we ever lived. 10 Campus Circle. There were other kids his age in that faculty-housing circle, and they were all running around dressed as Star Wars characters, and, with their childhood voices, making sound effects of light-saber battles. Steve was invariably Luke Skywalker--earlier, we'd had a parakeet named ... Skywalker. (RIP)

I had been teaching at the Aurora Middle School (and, later, in its new facility--Harmon) between 1966-78, the final year featuring a long teachers' strike in the spring. Joyce and I had just recently finished our doctoral work at Kent State (where we'd met in a summer school class in 1969--the same year we married!), and we were looking to "move up."

Lake Forest had hired me to be the Chair of the Education Department (a position my father had held at Hiram College, 1956-66)--a small department: I was the only full-time member! Joyce was teaching part-time--both at Lake Forest and at the College of Lake County. We made great friends and are still in touch with one whose husband had taught in the biology department.

But ...

I didn't like my job. I was supposedly teaching people how to teach--and running around supervising student teachers. But I learned something very quickly: I would far prefer to teach than to teach how to teach. I missed the middle school kids in Aurora, and by October I'd decided I wanted to go back.

Fat chance.

There were no openings back at Harmon. So, I applied a few other places, and Western Reserve Academy hired both Joyce and me for the 1979-80 school year. Joyce would stay until 1990 (the year Steve graduated from the school), then move to Hiram College to head the writing program--a position she held until she retired a few years ago.

I stayed only two years. I got in a salary snit with the Headmaster, quit in a huff, worked part-time for a year (1981-82) at Kent State and at the Learned Owl Book Shop in Hudson--and in their satellite store down in the Cuyahoga Valley called Valley Books. It's fair to say that money that year was ... scarce.

But in the fall of 1982 there was an opening back in Aurora. I leapt at the chance and stayed until I retired in 1997, loving it all--the kids, my colleagues, doing the school plays, etc. Some of the very happiest years of my life.

I thought I was done with teaching then--but a friend at WRA in 2001 said they had an opening ... I snapped at it like a hungry crocodile and ended up teaching ten more years--and loving it, as well. (Except, of course, for the essay-grading!)

Anyway, 1978-79 was an important year for us--and (except for my job) we had a wonderful time there. I had learned that "moving up" meant going to a job you love--and that, for me, meant Harmon Middle School in Aurora, Ohio.

Steve started first grade in Lake Forest--but had a horrific teacher: At an early assembly--some kind of "welcome-back" event--I saw her pull him by the ear into the gym.

That ended that.

We enrolled him in a private school, where he flourished--where his ears were safe.

He played T-ball there, too, and made some wonderful friends--Star Wars freaks all. (As his sons are now!)

And, yesterday, he gave us a fabulous gift--a look back at an important, mostly happy time in our lives. Joyce and I were deeply moved--and want nothing else for Christmas.