AC_1965_Web

116 AN T I OC H CO L L E G E C L A S S O F 19 6 5 5 0 t h A N N I V E R S A R Y B O O K A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z M U S K A MUSKA NICK Nick and Susan Muska. FAMI LY 4 Wife, Susan 4 Son, Samuel ADDRESS 4 534 Nesslewood Ave. Toledo, OH 43610 CONTACT 419 246-1249 nikimu@buckeye-express.com L I K E M A N Y O F my classmates, I arrived atAntioch on what I believed to be a fluke. I was one of the many unworthy who somehow struggled through five years of hi-test educa- tion and managed to survive. A kid from Lorain, a smoke-dank ethnic steeltown, I was taught to write a correct English sentence by my three roommates so I could manage a passing grade in Milton Goldberg’s The Novel in the Modern World. A fool for punishment, I signed on as a Lit Major. After an initial fresh- man heartbreak, I had my first co-op as a night clerk at UPS in Chicago and met Susan Hartman at a student party in late April 1961. Susan was a tour guide at the Museum of Science and Industry and I’m a sucker for a woman in uniform.We lived on chicken soup made of backs and necks bought for nine cents a pound. (A carton of cig- arettes was $2.50—essential student fare in those days.) Because of Susan’s alertness as she prepared for a work/study year in France, Lou Gerteis and I were asked by AEA if we’d like to teach school in the Netherlands. My year in Holland—with a side trip to Hungary to visit relatives—attuned me to living in another culture where I made European friends who remain so today. Susan and I were married in the Glen just after finals and, our mar- riage being “one long, cool drink of water,” we’ll have had our Golden Anniversary in May. We moved to the west coast for graduate school at UC Santa Barbara where I studied the poetry of Ezra Pound with Hugh Kenner and Basil Bunting while Susan studied romance languages and French linguistics. In 1967–68 I was awarded a UC Regents Fellow and studied in Paris and Bordeaux while Susan taught there at the Université. After grad school in 1971 Susan, very pregnant, was hired as the en- tire French Department at Eastern Montana in Billings. Our son, Sam, now 43, was born a day before Halloween—a dozen inches of snow on the ground! In 1972–74 I taught American literature at Wabash College—a great ivy-covered time of my life. We moved to Toledo in 1974 where Susan attended UT law school and I worked for three years as an industrial warehouse manager/ fork- lift operator. I came out as a poet at age 33 and crafted my first book of poems on an old office Royal used for bills of lading and manifests. With lifelong friend and liter- ary colleague Joel Lipman, I helped shape theToledo Poets Center (TPC) which promoted the literary arts and “raised the artistic profile” of north- west Ohio from 1976–2000 through community writing workshops, liter- ary programs, readings and festivals which engaged a huge variety of lo- cal, regional and nationally known writers. I also had the enviable experi- ence of working as an artist in edu- cation for the Ohio Arts Council.As a resident poet I’m sure I corrupted at least three generations of school kids with the mysteries of poesie. As part of my work with the TPC, I managed an inmate arts pro- gram and taught creative writing at our county jail and prison farm from 1979–1994. Along with awards for Community Impact and Community Achievement in theArts (1983,1986) by the Arts Commission of Greater Toledo, Joel and I were chosen to re- ceive a 1985 Governor’s Award for the Arts in Ohio. I consider this my victory for humanity and credited Antioch College in my statehouse acceptance speech.Of course, as we well know, the albatross of Horace Mann’s charge can never be fully re- moved from an Antiochian’s neck. During the course of my 40 years in Toledo, I organized and “choreographed” several readers’ theater productions: An Evening of Translytics (poems from unknown