Free piling: Verb. Going through every house’s pile of free things that people get rid of at the end of the term and obtaining a new wardrobe and/or face paint.
Welling’s current hot mess free pile:
Houses from which I pulled the greatest things: Swan, Bingham, and Sawtell.
Free-pileless…
My best ever free pile find was a bright orange polyester dress that fit me perfectly. When our time together ended, back into the free pile it went.
Me, my pool noodle, my foot. Krause Springs (Taken with Instagram at Krause Springs)
Who remembers MAN GRAMS?
Photo by Briee Della Rocca
One of my favorite college admissions party tricks is to open any of our materials and name every person, then talk about them. From left to right:
Adam got a Master’s in Psychodynamic Developmental Neuroscience. He’s already gotten a second Master’s after that one and serves in the Fighting 69th.
Andrew is a preschool teacher and helps at the Independent Publishing Resource Center in Portland. He helps run the Secret Restaurant Portland supper club and plays music & records as ADVRB.
Ryan got his MFA in Poetry in 2011 and has been a professor of English since then. He curates Uncanny ValleyGirl and is getting married this year. I think at least a quarter of Bennington 2007-2010 grads are already psyched about going.
Kirk has lived in China for just over 5 years. He teaches English at a school in Beijing and is an active participant in the Americana/roots music scene there. He plays a million instruments and everyone from Bennington wants him to come back to the States because we miss him.
Induction ceremony, Moose Lodge #393. Clyde, Ohio.
By the time Alec and I left Minneapolis for Ohio last Wednesday morning we had put together an exhaustive (and exhausting) itinerary that would take us to Toledo, Cleveland, Akron, Canton, Athens, and Dayton, with stops in all sorts of in-between places along the way. Since early winter we had been talking and thinking about community and people’s search for real-world connection in a country where loneliness seems increasingly to be an epidemic more corrosive than the popular culture that fuels it.
Long before the Ohio trip started to take shape (and this whole thing came together very quickly) we’d been mulling Sherwood Anderson’s “Winesburg, Ohio,” but also other books that addressed the sorts of things we were interested in for this project; books like Robert D. Putnam’s “Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community” (2000). I don’t think that either of us were convinced about the revival part of that sub-title, but we wanted to have a look for ourselves anyway. We wanted to see how folks were faring outside the ersatz, isolating communities of office hives and cyberspace.
I think it’s fair to say that our first days on the road pretty much confirmed many of our preconceived notions. It’s probably also fair to say that neither of us has made an entirely comfortable peace with the social contract as any sort of insurance against the “solitary, nasty, brutish, and short” life that Thomas Hobbes posited as the alternative to such a contract.
In the early going, everywhere we went we seemed to encounter older solitaries hunched alone in some glaring and antiseptic place and drinking coffee. We met soup kitchen volunteers in Fremont, and talked to the people they served. We visited a beleaguered American Legion Post in Toledo, and at midday found two Ohio veterans drinking in the aquatic murk at the bar. We talked to bored and inarticulate teenagers. I began to wonder if we were falling into a familiar trap; were we, in fact, looking for what we expected to find? I am drawn, I’ll admit, to the posture of the abject, and to those made fragile by their circumstances or loneliness,
Regardless, we were not finding much joy in the heart of the country.
Clyde, Ohio was on our itinerary precisely because it had been Sherwood Anderson’s hometown and the glum inspiration for the “grotesques” of Winesburg. These days Clyde is home to a Whirlpool factory, and civic boosters tout their little town as “The Washing Machine Capital of America.” At a diner in Clyde we spoke with and photographed a woman who was having breakfast with her ex-husband after putting her 12-year-old toy poodle to sleep.
On our schedule in Clyde was a visit to the local Moose Lodge. Such fraternal organizations were something we were particularly curious about. Statistics showed that these groups —the Moose, Elks, Eagles, Owls, Shriners, Masons, Kiwanis, etc.— were being carved away by dwindling membership and aging rosters. Such organizations dominated the cultural landscape of my childhood in a small town in Minnesota, but their members tended to be buffo characters, and my impressions of the groups they belonged to were heavily influenced by the comic stereotypes of Fred Flintstone’s Royal Order of the Buffalo and, before that, Ralph Kramden’s Raccoon Lodge.
The doors at the Clyde Moose Lodge, we were told, open at 6:30 in the morning to accomodate the third shift Whirlpool workers. We were there in the parking lot when the sun came up. Among the morning crowd were Whirlpool lifers, roofers, retirees, volunteer firemen, a morning bartender at the VFW, and the night janitor at the Eagles Club.
The Moose is a private club, and a key card is required for entry. I expected xenophobia and a desultory tableau of hard-bitten morning drinkers. What we encountered instead was a lively and welcoming group of characters who seemed genuinely pleased to have us there.
“Right now I’m one of the coffee people,” a Whirlpool employee everyone called Slime said. “But come back later and I’ll be one of the beer people.”
We did come back later in the afternoon, and by that time we were having such a good time that we decided to scratch our other plans and spend the night with the Moose of Clyde, Ohio. We were there in the parking lot when the sun set. We watched karaoke singers, played tabletop shuffleboard, and listened to the stories of men and women who had spent their entire lives in and around Clyde. Many of those lives, it seemed, orbited around Moose Lodge 393. The same cast of characters reappeared time and again.
“You don’t have to look over your shoulder in here,” a roofer named Mike said. “This is our place, and it’s like a family. If there’s any trouble we nip it in the bud, but there’s no place for brawling or riff raff.”
Which isn’t to say there aren’t occasional breaches of decorum; an officer’s wife, for instance, once urinated on a bar stool, but was promptly written up by the Lodge committee and slapped with a 30-day suspension.
At nine o’clock every night, in every Moose Lodge in the world, everyone stops what they’re doing, faces the west wall, and says a prayer to a painting of a little boy kneeling beside his bed and saying his goodnight prayers. This child is representative of all the children at Mooseheart, “Children’s City,” a 1000-acre boarding community outside Chicago that serves children in need. Mooseheart —along with Moosehaven, a retirement home in Florida— is the main charitable thrust of the Moose Lodges.
The prayer dispatched with, I settled into intense negotiations with Clark Orwig, one of the senior Lodge members and one of only two Clyde Moose to wear the coveted blue jacket. The Moose jacket system rewards members for service and recruitment; only the yellow jacket ranks the blue, and if Clark could rope in two more Lodge members he would at last wear the yellow jacket. There is only one living Clyde Moose member in possession of a yellow jacket. A deal was eventually struck involving a wager on a doubles game of tabletop shuffleboard —Clark would pair with Alec, and I would partner with Galen Fletcher, our first-rate and unflappable assistant and ass-kicking driver. If Galen and I triumphed, Clark would pay my Moose Club dues; if we lost, I would have to eat the $35 membership fee.
We hunkered down at the table. In the room behind us a middle-aged couple was destroying “Leather and Lace.” The game was a seesaw affair. Alec is a fierce competitor, as am I. I was, however, spastic after a very long day. Clark was a slow, deliberate player, sort of like a sea tortoise with hands. Galen was a study in cool intensity. Tabletop shuffleboard is played to 15, and our game went down to the wire. Alec feathered a killer shot to the back lip of the table to make it 15-13, and I had one chance to answer but winged it in the gutter.
I sat down with Lois Bentz, the Lodge secretary, filled out my application, and paid up. In a back meeting room Clark led me through an initiation ceremony of my own devising. I had lost the bet, but I still felt oddly, exultantly triumphant. I was, contingent on approval, a member of Moose Lodge 393, in Clyde, Ohio.
This morning I received an email from the offices of Moose International. Last night, I was informed, my membership application was unanimously approved at a meeting of my Moose brethren in Clyde.
Scroll back up and read this.
(via ortrybooks)
above: Carolyn in her incoming class photo from 1933; Crossett Library today; the original announcement about Crossett Library from the November 1959 alumni mag
Carolyn Crossett Rowland, mother of photography at Bennington and part of the namesake of our library, passed away yesterday.
Affectionately known in our community as Crossie, she attended Bennington in the 1930s as one of the first incoming classes. In the 1950s, she donated the money for Bennignton to build Crossett Library and it opened in 1959. She named it after her father, and a drawing of him with a plaque still hangs in the library now.
Carolyn was one of the first photo students at Bennington College. She set up the first darkroom the school ever had. She also had many amusing and fascinating anecdotes from her connection to the photo world outside of Bennington. Oceana Wilson, our current director of the library, tells me this: “She knew Ansel Adams and even had some of his prints. She also went to Stieglitz’s photo studio when she was on Field Work Term in NYC and boldly asked him to look at her work. After answering the door in a cape, he critiqued her work for an hour and a half.”
Through perseverance, Carolyn was able to create an interest for photography on campus and give the option of studying it to others. As a photography student, I feel like I owe many parts of my life here to her. When I walk down the photo and darkroom hallways in our art building, I pass a sign on the front of the darkroom doors that says “The Carolyn Crossett Rowland Black and White Darkroom.” She is definitely on our minds.
Taking action, getting things done for herself, and pioneering uncharted grounds in her education: a true Bennington girl! She will be greatly missed.
-India K, ‘12
with much help from Oceana Wilson, Joe Tucker, and Kathy Williams of the amazing Crossett Library
Twin Jack-in-the-Pulpits found on a campus after-lunch walk. (Taken with instagram)
In celebration of their two-hundredth issue, The Paris Review presents a spread of paint chips drawn from the most colorful descriptions in literature.
Admissions lyfe (Taken with instagram)
Cooperative admissions crossword of the day. Seth started it, Ellie continued it, I helped, and Ken and Ellie figured out the last few. Ken’s good with the wordplay clues— “canine on a feline” was “fang.”
Bennington people can take crosswordin’ pretty seriously.
Taken with instagram
