SO ENTER, SO DEPART
Speech given by Dr. Layne Longfellow
www.laynelongfellow.com
Ohio University Class of 1959 Golden Reunion, April 24, 2009
I’m really glad to be with you tonight, and I’m honored to be standing up here.
Yesterday, lost in my rental car, I asked a student how to find the OU Inn. He directed me, I thanked him, and he said, respectfully, “You’re welcome, Sir.”
I mean, hey, I was wearing jeans and sneakers; I’m cool. Sir?!?!
I mean, why not, “No problem, man.”
After the realization of my age, came another – we’re the same, really, he and I. 50 years earlier, I was a boy crossing a street. In another half century, he’ll be a man of some history, looping back around an area that was once familiar.
And I have a first question for everyone --Why is it that at class reunions, you feel younger than everyone else looks?
As Cher says, “After 50, nobody says ‘You look great.’ They say ‘You look great – for your age.’”
But think about this, people – 50 years from NOW, from THIS 50th reunion, this room will be filled with little old ladies with tattoos!
I’ve made my living talking about changes in American society. Here’s what I believe about us:
When writers or commentators speak of “The 50s” it is us of whom they speak.
Thanks to post-WWII optimism, affluence, and growth, we were the first generation to have an extended adolescence. We permanently changed adolescence.
We invented the American ideal of what high school and college are.
We are the only people in history to have lived our entire high school and college lives in the 1950s.
There has never been a better time, before or since, to be in school. It was a golden era.
We are the generation who changed the world – no, let me say that differently: we are the generation
who reflected a changing world.
Cultural change takes a while to accumulate, and it took ten years for the Baby Boom to combine with
affluence and technology and really go BOOM!
WWII America did not end with the end of the war -- it ended in 1955, with our high school graduation.
It is no historical accident that Elvis Presley, Marlon Brando, Marilyn Monroe and James Dean appeared simultaneously, and that all that happened in 1955, just as we left high school for Ohio University. America began a process of change in 1945; ten years later, it changed us.
Those were our years; it was a precious opportunity to be nearly adult yet still innocent. Six months after
we left the idyllic innocence of Ohio University, look what came next - THE 60S.
We were the last college students in history to have gone thru college with no influence from the 60s. That may not sound like much to you, but it blows my mind.
But this is my point – the 60s could not have happened were it not for the last half of the 50s. The emergence of those rebellious antiheroes in the mid-50s set the stage for the anti-institutional activism of the 60s.
I have to interrupt myself here – in 1955, I heard a song on the radio that is still my favorite Elvis Presley
song – Mystery Train. My mother, when she died, still had the letter that I wrote home asking her to buy it for me. It says, “Please go up to Summers and Son and buy the song Mystery Train, by that new singer Aldous Huxley.”
I still have the 78 record – after all, rock and roll by Aldous Huxley?!?.
The times they were a’changin’, as the song says. I wrote a paper about what it was like in the ‘50s in my hometown, just down the road from here -- there were two blacks, one Jew, and Jews outnumbered Democrats!
But WE elected Phil Saunders to be President of our Senior Class. We elected the first African-American Class President in the history of the University and, I’d guess, among the first in the nation.
We were 50 years ahead of the National electorate!
Now let me tell you another Class President story:
Some of you remember that I was President of our class in our Sophomore year, 1956-57. I was elected for one reason, really – I was the kid who first figured out how to play three-chord rock and roll. I was the big rock and roller on campus, which qualified me to be Class President.
So, one evening after Student Council meeting, I was lying around on tables in the Student Government Room of the Union with George Voinovich, Student Body President.
I will never forget it. Youthful George, already a deal making politician, said, "One day I'm going to be Mayor of Cleveland!!" I was impressed, ‘cause it was pretty clear that he meant it.
When he became LT. Gov. of Ohio, I figured he'd passed up the mayoralty. But no! He ran to replace Dennis Kucinich as Mayor of Cleveland, moved on to become Governor, and has been the senior senator for some years now.
I was the major campus entertainer, the first kid to master three-chord rock and roll. George was completely unhip, straight, square; as he has described it himself, he was the "polka king."
Now fast forward to the 1990's, to the opening of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. I was there for the opening night concert, for the opening of the doors of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. I stood on the street to observe the opening dedication ceremony, knowing that it was Sen. George Voinovich, the polka king, who, as Mayor, had brought the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame to Cleveland.
I, the big rock and roller, stood anonymously among the huddled masses on the street, straining upward to see the polka king on the stage.
He was seated next to Yoko Ono.
She’s the widow of another big rock and roller.......
Ah, the fickle finger of fate.
While I’m here, I'm gonna visit the George Voinovich School of Public Policy, and lie around on the tables...
That was a singular event in my life – it was both a highlight and a rude awakening of the ups and downs of life. My life has been a series of ups and downs, just like every other life in this room.
No two of us have led the same life, but every life in this room is the same -– joys, sorrows, successes,
failures, old friends, new friends, loved ones lost and gained, sometimes getting what you worked for and
deserved and sometimes not.
I’ve heard it said that after 50 you get the face you deserve; as I look around, I wouldn’t dare say whether that’s true.
But this, I think, is true – after 60, you’ve got the life you deserve. Maybe not the life you wanted, but you have the life you chose. Life at our age is the result of choices we made, each one following from all the ones before it.
If you’re really lucky, or really good, you look back at a lifetime of choices and you’d make them all again.
If you’re not so lucky, there are some clunkers of decisions that make you wish your life were on videotape, so you could hit the erase button.
The catch is, those decisions you’d like to change are usually the ones you learned from most.
The first major life decision from which I learned a lot was the divorce from my college sweetheart. I
wouldn’t make that one again.
That decision is why I look poignantly at those of you who have the comfort of grandchildren.
Think about your own life; think back on what that first HUGE decision was, a good one or a bad one,
for better or for worse, that shaped your life, made you who you are today, and brings you back here to US.
US. We and your high school classmates are the only people who knew you when you weren’t a father or a mother; when you didn’t have a profession or a career. The people in this room are irreplaceable in the lives of the others here. We know each other in a way that nobody else does, because we knew each other when we weren’t whatever we’ve worked so hard to become.
You just can’t make new old friends.
And by now, nearly every person in this room has some story of grit and survival. We are Depression
Babies. It’s in our bones; it’s what we learned from the world around us.
You just keep on keepin’ on, doing whatever it is that you’re supposed to do. But it grows you up. Growing older just happens by itself along the way.
And this I know - aging does not change you; aging distills you. Aging distills you to your essence. You
become more like yourSELF with every passing decade.
Think about that process; use this Golden Reunion to share those life stories with the others here, whether or not you knew them back in the day.
Because, and NOTE THIS CAREFULLY: Not all members of the Class of ’59 chose to come to this reunion. Those of us who are here did choose it; we have something in common, some ineffable similarity, some set of reasons for making this pilgrimage to the places and people of our youth.
Know that about each other, and explore what it means. Maybe your old best friends – the ones you had a lot in common with when you were on campus – aren’t here. But you have something major in common with those who are here – they’re here, and so are you.
Here’s one of my own stories:
May I see the hands of those of you who had a literature class from Professor Edgar Whan? Ed Whan was a great teacher, a fine man, and a recipient of a Distinguished Professor Award from this University. For me, he was all that and more.
On my first day as a student at Ohio University, September 1955, my first class was Honors English. Professor Edgar Whan began by calling roll. He came to my name, stopped, pulled down his glasses [in those days, HE was the one who wore glasses like these] and said “Longfellow! Are you related to the poet?”
Well, to tell you the truth, I didn’t know in those days whether I was or not, but it was my first day of college and I was not about to disappoint the prof, so I said, brightly and proudly as a 17-yr. old could, “Yes, I am!”
He paused weightily, then said, “Pity he wasn’t a better poet.” He nudged his glasses back up his nose and went on calling roll, leaving me with a memory so indelible that I bring it to you half a century later!!
Well, that moment was prophetic - it turns out that I am related to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and the most meaningful work of my life has been my recordings of his poetry. I’ll close with a Longfellow poem so appropriate for our occasion that it might have been written especially for us.
I offer this in special memory of Bill Lewis, Don Becker, and Bob Moore, fraternity brothers, ushers in my 1958 wedding, and closest OU friends. And for Phil Saunders, President of the Class of 1959:
THE MEETING
After so long an absence we meet again;
The Tree of Life has been shaken,
And few of us linger now,
Like the two or three cherries
In the uppermost bough.
We greet each other in the old, familiar tone;
We think, though we do not say it,
“How old, how gray HE has grown.”
We wish a fond reunion,
And many a happy year;
While each, in his heart, is thinking
Of those who are not here.
We speak of those friends and their fortunes,
And what they did and said,
Till the dead alone seem living.
And in time we hardly distinguish
Between the ghosts and the guests;
And a mist of yearning
Settles over our merriest jests.
I thank you for your yearning and your merry jests, for the opportunity to stand here before you, and for BEING my sweet, innocent memories of the idyllic ‘50s.
It was a time when, with no self-consciousness or cynicism, we read the campus gate:
So enter that daily thou may grow in knowledge, wisdom, and love.
50 years later, I send us off with a gentle reminder of the other side of the gate:
So depart that daily thou may serve thy God, thy country, and thy fellow man.