Memoria Academia 1960 - 1976

By Lucia Adams

This memoir consists of journals and recollections of academic life during turbulent and tempestuous times. From Madison, Wisconsin, to Princeton, Paris, Cambridge, England, and the University of Lancaster near Englands Lake District, it includes political assassinations, the beginning and end of the Vietnam War, Black Power, civil rights, campus unrest, strikes, boycotts, demonstrations, occupations, student and staff rebellions, and feminism come to life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Nov 15, 2014
• ISBN: 9781496952516

Lucia Adams

Lucia Adams is the author of several biographies and memoirs including, Memoria Academia, Bird’s Custard Island, Duchamp Fell Off the Mantlpiece. She was nominated for the M.F.K.Fisher award for distinguished writing by the James Beard Foundation.

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MEMORIA

ACADEMIA

1960 - 1976

LUCIA ADAMS

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© 2014 Lucia Adams. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 11/13/2014

ISBN: 978-1-4969-5250-9 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4969-5251-6 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2014920343

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CONTENTS

The Beginning: 1960-1966

Lubbock: 1960 - 1961

Madison: 1961 - 1964

Princeton: 1964 - 1966

Paris: 1966

Cambridge: 1966 - 1967

The Middle: 1967-1972

Lancaster: 1967

1968

1969

1970

1971

1972

The End: 1973-1976

1973

1974

1975

1976

During the nineteen sixties and seventies, while dwelling in academic groves in America and England, I kept occasional journals which are quoted here in italics. This chronicle of my life at the epicenter of radical, and sometimes divinely superfluous, thought is bookended by the Vietnam War and includes many other battles fought at the time.

Lucia Adams

Chicago

October 2014

THE BEGINNING

1960-1966

LUBBOCK

1960 - 1961

In September, 1960 I flew from Idlewild Airport to Lubbock, Texas where my grandparents, cotton people, lived. At the eleventh hour, steamer trunks packed with pleated skirts and rejection letters from Pembroke and Radcliffe, I enrolled at Texas Tech College on the High Plains, a flatland of dust storms, tumble weeds, the Church of Christ and Ag students like Royce Tyler, Hey y’all. This here’s Luci Gay Adams. She’s looking for meeeeeeeannnnnning.

Freshman year was a strenuous steeplechase of parties, canyon parties, Roman toga parties, Mexican town parties, Roaring Twenties parties, Sigma Ki, SAE and Fiji parties, Red Raider parties with E.J. Holub, parties after fencing and tennis matches, parties galore at Reese Air Force Base. I recall just one class, English Composition, where Dr.Stroud, a small old man who read from yellowed notes, reminded us frequently he had gone to Dartmouth. For his course I wrote a play Iphigenia sparing the heroine from sacrifice and marrying her off to Achilles.

Lyndon Johnson was running to retain his Senate seat and as vice president in the November election and Horn Hall was plastered with Kill Johnson signs posted by the John Tower for Senate group. Blood curdling stories circulated about his heinous deeds, from murdering rivals to rigging elections. Lady Bird’s niece certainly believed the worst as we leafleted nursing homes and Piggly Wiggly here in the far reaches of the Confederacy with its blistering contempt for the Catholic Yankee from the communist college Harvard and the traitor from Stonewall, Texas.

At Easter vacation in April my roommate Kathy Gordon and I drove to Fort Benning, Georgia where her father was a high-ranking officer. While the brass and their bouffant wives wept in ecstasy at Camelot, President Kennedy was sending 400 Green Berets to train Montagnards in South Vietnam. The Bay of Pigs was just two weeks away and the CIA was probably training Cuban exiles in explosives and sabotage in the backyard.

Since I had decided to leave Tech even before arriving, I applied to the University of Wisconsin because TIME named it one of the country’s best and a boyfriend Captain John Thomas from Oconomowoc, sang On Wisconsin in his red Corvette. I had no idea Madison was a haven for left-wing New Yorkers, had never met a left-wing New Yorker, nor even knew what left wing meant, though having seen the McCarthy hearings and Fidel Castro on Dave Garroway I knew there were two sides of the fence.

MADISON

1961 - 1964

September, 1961, Madison, Wisconsin, trees in full leaf, with the hope and promise of a bustling collegiate life I pledged Delta Gamma sorority, then quit right after midterm when my grades plummeted, determined to hold my own in a new, fierce, competitive arena. When time allowed, I fraternized with New Yorkers in the Rathskellar with their familiar superiority complexes and disdain for the clueless locals. One friend, a red-diaper baby from Brooklyn, got pregnant by a black serviceman and flew to London for an abortion. The Pill was not yet in general use but another pill, LSD, lysergic acid, was readily available. I always refused the offer and never, even in all the years ahead, took any drugs but alcohol and nicotine.

I joined the Madison chapter of SNCC and was boarding a bus to Mississippi, when at the very last second, literally with my foot on the first step, I leapt off overcome with dysmenorrhea and fear, recalling the street fights, with gunshots, between whites and blacks across from P.S. 118, Queens. In 1956 the first black families moved into our neighborhood in St. Albans, the whites fled rapidly, my family the last to leave 199th Street in 1970, and I became a Catholic just to attend St. Pascal Baylon High School rather than Andrew Jackson High.

My Madison was the Memorial Library and cramming for exams where a good short-term memory and rote capitulation mastered over 12 years, were blessings. In the Modern European History final I actually scored 100% on a multiple choice exam then promptly forgot the times, dates, movements and important men memorized the night before. In lecture halls notes were furiously scribbled, no time to think, since spewing back (we called it regurgitating) the professor’s words was, as everyone knew, how you passed an exam. Helen C.White reading poetry in a flowery dress or Howard Mumford Jones singing Italian arias were a big waste of time, just the facts please in three years of joyless drudgery.

I chose an English major, the easiest to pass, and a crazy quilt of courses, Southeast Asian politics, international trade, history of science, geology, Chaucer, Shakespeare, French poetry, American limner painting, Gothic architecture, Strindberg’s drama (with the divine Richard Vowles), Italian and German. I wrote a paper justifying civil disobedience for a philosophy class and read Samuelson’s Economics in an introductory class of the same name (retaining only one powerful idea, supply and demand) but dropped both courses which required analytical skills not acquired from St. Joseph nuns. Petrovich’s Russian History course, where Alexander Kerensky occasionally lectured with great fanfair, confirmed my belief that the country of Potemkin villages was populated by madmen.

In October, 1962 during the Cuban Missile Crisis my parents called to say goodbye. Not under any circumstances was I to return to New York but to make my way in Wisconsin as best I could after the nuclear war. Fred Van der Mehden’s Southeast Asian politics course was powerful and real after the crisis passed as we studied the emerging problems in Indochina, especially Vietnam. He had just returned from a visit there, perhaps as one of Kennedy’s advisors, and in his home one evening showed the class slides of a bucolic land with tiny, smiling people. I was vaguely comforted that Diem was a Catholic and his brother an archbishop but was unaware American pilots were bombing Communist hamlets and oppressed Buddhists were self-immolating.

I signed ban the bomb petitions outside the Rat under black and yellow Civil Defense signs indicating fallout shelters. Khrushchev could after all flip the switch at any time especially after Berlin. Then Kennedy ordered the draft doubled, tripled; more boys joined ROTC, more fallout shelters were built and more frequent air raid warnings blared. The Cold War escalated dramatically and even more military advisers were flooding into South Vietnam.

In March, 1963 in Roberto Mitrotti’s Italian class I met Lee, a senior set to go on a Fulbright to Nancy, France. On our first date, at the Brathouse over a pitcher of Leinenkugel’s, he waxed lyrical about his history classes with George Mosse and William Appleman Williams and announced he had decided to become a historian. Williams had just published The Tragedy of American Diplomacy claiming the United States was more responsible for the Cold War than the Soviet Union and criticizing Kennedy for the Bay of Pigs. His attack on liberalism was the bedrock of Lee’s beliefs, which later became mine for a decade. Lee said Mosse discussed history not as narrative but a series of questions to be answered. Asking the right questions was everything.

Lee was a third or fourth generation Wisconsinite whose grandfather had been the director of a home for the feeble-minded, as these patients were then called, in Eau Claire. His disaffection had roots in the state’s liberalism but more so in anger at his father, which inflicted a wound that never healed, and giving him a visceral hatred of authority as powerful as that described in a favorite book, Erik Erikson’s Young Man Luther. He was even then in revolt against bullying, unfairness, unreasoning, authoritarianism, with a hatred of The System, and a fierce unyielding mistrust of the status quo.

His alienation and anger resonated with me, though mine originated in the sharp sting of social class devolution, feeling disenfranchised, déclassé, on the wrong side of the window looking in. My father, a refugee from the Dust Bowl to New York during the Depression, said high culture was a passport to a better life so as a teenager I frequented the Met, the Metropolitan, saw Fonteyn dance, Tebaldi sing, read Pater’s Marius the Epicurean, John Addington Symonds, Krutch, Santayana, Barzun, bent on continual self-improvement.

In June, 1963 I went to Europe with my mother, and returning on the R.M.S. Mauretania wrote of the spiritual wasteland we of the 20th century are inhabiting - everyone knows & feels it and having seen too many Renaissance paintings concluded Progress is more science – The hell with the arts! The arts, however, were where I would hang my hat because, when it came right down to it, math and science were always beyond me.

When Lee left for France in August he stayed an extra day in New York to ask for my hand in McSorley’s, in a colorful ritual in which the father claims the suitor is not worthy, removes a jacket, rolls up shirtsleeves, sweeps glasses off the bar and finally settles the matter with shots of whiskey. Lee was magnificent as a young man, calling an acid Edmund Wilson out of the blue to say hello, sending me typed love letters quoting Fitzgerald and Hemingway, with footnotes, and carbon copies. He was as improbable a person as I, and we were perfect together.

I adored his uncle Del, a psychology professor at Indiana, who lived exactly the kind of life I wanted to live. Unca Del was cultured, effervescent and sparkling, with tales of Arthur or the Peppermint Lounge or his friend the art collector Henry Hope or losing another raincoat on a trip to the Far East or Provence. It was always a pheasant-under-glass evening with Del at the Simon House or the Hoffman House and I thought this was how one lived in Academia.

I dug in for senior year exams, then, November 22nd, President John F. Kennedy our 35th president was assassinated in Dallas, Texas this afternoon. And life goes on –‘uneasy lies the head that wears the crown!’ Tremendous shock: I left class when I heard – Copernicus somehow didn’t have much relevance anymore. Things seemed very unreal today. When TA Art Donovan told us the president had just died we could leave or stay and learn more about stellar parallaxes. I ran like the wind to the Carillon hoping to hear Bach’s Requiem but it was silent as the grave. Later in a Western Union telegram Lee stated he would run for Senate, or maybe even president, someday. I decided to marry him then and there.

Devastated by the assassination, the self-styled Kennedy Man was infatuated with Jack and Jackie whom he had accompanied on the Midwest stump as a cub reporter for the Wisconsin State Journal. I liked the fact Jackie read Proust but took umbrage at her tiny deb voice and air of entitlement during the televised White House Tour. By evening the shock had waned, a party with math professor Jack Ohm proceeded as planned, and my father phoned to say it was far more far important that Aldous Huxley had died that day. His pioneer family had been in America for eleven generations, so the son of an Irish bootlegger held no sway with him.

At the Rat two days later on a sunny Sunday afternoon hundreds gathered to watch the funeral cortege, imitating Abraham Lincoln’s with a black riderless horse following the caisson, all so miniscule on the distant black and white screen. This president had not saved the nation but put it in great danger and there were some tears, but the significance of these days blossomed as the myth and legend grew.

Lee and I became engaged at Christmas in Paris, celebrating at the Ritz with Stingers served by an old bartender who remembered Fitzgerald. I may feel my personal existence to be worthless I know his is not & it shall be my mission to make his life better & fuller. Back in Madison I had more sober thoughts, So I’m engaged to be married and willing to renounce the ‘fun’ that might be still left in the world and shall settle down to serious work and mature gratification. After all there never was any true romance to be had.

In June I graduated cum laude in the football stadium, all that drudgery paying off, unaware that on May 2nd there had been a protest on campus in solidarity with the anti-Vietnam war demonstrations at Columbia and Yale. I saw Joan Baez sing in bare feet and heard Bob Dylan’s The Times They Are a-Changin’ blaring from a freshman’s room and when I learned he was really Bob Zimmerman from suburban Detroit I thought ah ha! he’s just a product of the same entertainment machine that made Rebel Without a Cause, with its manufactured, artificial youth culture. Give me the Weavers!

PRINCETON

1964 - 1966

On July 23, 1964 we got married in Borough Hall in Jamaica, Queens, had a brief honeymoon on Cape Cod, then moved to Princeton, with its Gothicesque buildings cloaked in English ivy, quaint Nassau Street, and black waiters in white jackets serving mint juleps. Lee was a graduate student in history and we named our cat Jerome after Blum the head of the department. We moved into a doctor’s imposing house at 10 Bayard Lane, drove a Mercedes 220SL and entertained with the Belgian damask and Daum crystal Lee had bought in France, then