AC_1965_Web

175 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 T R E I C H L E R Max, a lifelong ladykiller (to put it nicely) who was then 88 years old, put his hand down my blouse while I was typing. I called it quits and fled to Jemi’s apartment in Boston. I knew that somewhere in New York City people were meeting, courting, falling in love,having sex— but it wasn’t me or any of my friends. I won’t bore you with the succes- sion of weirdos, losers, Reichians, communists, fanatics, glue-sniffers, lecherous oldsters, closet-dwellers, sports freaks, and quasi-psychotics who came my way.Then I met Cary Nelson, an Antiochian in New York on an NSF-funded co-op to study alchemy (thanks to Dick Meisler). Within fifteen seconds of meeting him, I knew he was for me and used my pathetically few feminine wiles to get him to walk me back to East 12th St. That was in October 1966 and now, nearly fifty years later, we’re still here (though not there). Cary knew all about graduate school, having planned to be an English pro- fessor since he was eight. I by now had settled on the field of psycho- linguistics so we ended up in doc- toral programs at the University of Rochester in the fall of 1967—by no means a great school in the liberal arts (though science and medicine were outstanding) but one that of- fered the best support to both of us in the form of NDEA fellowships (thank you, Sputnik). Cary’s department was stuffy and tweedy and the typical wild party ended with the professor- host carefully doling out sherry or dry white wine and reading his own original poetry. In contrast, the lin- guistics department, in which psy- cholinguistics was housed, favored vaguely ribald gatherings involving tumblers of bourbon straight up (a practice adopted of necessity in“the field” to kill the amoebas) and puns in Sanskrit. Nevertheless we both ended up with dissertation directors who were good for us and the dis- sertations we produced. Cary got a job starting in the fall of 1970 at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (about a two- hour drive from south side Chicago, if you speed). I used my remaining fellowship year to finish my disserta- tion just as the bottom dropped out of the job market. Given how versa- tile and interesting I was, we had as- sumed I would be readily hired at the U of I as well.We knew nothing of the brutal politics and hiring prac- tices of big research universities (“If we can get you,we don’t want you”), especially with regard to women, couples,and disciplinary boundaries. I won’t rehearse my humiliating year of job-seeking; you can read my es- say “How Dick and Jane Got Tenure” (in Women in the Linguistics Profession: The Cornell Lectures , ed. Alice Davison and Penelope Eckert, 1989). During my year of unemployment and job- seeking, I trained my cat Lion (dis- sertation defense present from Cary) to do a series of impressive tricks. I sent photos to President Richard Nixon showing him the value of an NDEA Fellowship in a bad job mar- ket; Lion and I were given a full page spread in the local paper. As it’s turned out, the U of I is an extraordinary institution where we have spent our entire careers and have each been able to do research and teaching of our choosing prob- ably impossible anywhere else. My first position (starting fall 1972) was with the Unit One Program, an ex- perimental living-learning program based in a residence hall and offer- ing a series of interesting courses. It wasn’t anything like Antioch but the closest a huge conservative research university like the U of I could come. I taught courses in women’s stud- ies (among the first in the U.S.), ani- mal behavior, and women and lan- guage; the subtitle of all my courses Brush with fame: Max Eastman (foreground) and Bosley Crowther playing bocce on Martha’s Vineyard, 1966. Cary and Paula, New York City, 1966. 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