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7 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 B A L D W I N BALDWIN LAWRENCE M. THEN AND NOW 4 B.A. Sociology & Anthropology Cornell 4 Ph.D., Human Development, Harvard FAMI LY � 4 Wife, Jane � 4 Daughter, Kathryn Mederos Syssoyeva � 4 Grandson, Grisha ADDRESS 4 2 Everett St. Sherborn, MA 01770 CONTACT Lawrence.baldwin@verizon.net I WA S B O R N three weeks after Pearl Harbor and nine months to the day after my father turned in his Ph.D. dissertation. He had just started his career as a developmen- tal psychologist at Fels Institute and consequently, I spent my early child- hood inYellow Springs (with a break of a couple of years while my father was stationed in Florida during the war). Both parents were at Fels; my mother taught in the nursery school which I attended; my father was a researcher and taught occasional courses at the college. We lived next door to Morgan House across the street from the Antioch School at which I completed first and sec- ond grade. I have spotty memories of my childhood in those years: go- ing to the Glen, watching my father playing intramural softball, sledding down Suicide Hill on the edge of the Glen, being at a birthday party when Franklin Roosevelt’s death was an- nounced. We moved to Lawrence, KS in 1947, and then Ithaca, NY in 1953. I grew up listening to my parents’ stories about Antioch and Yellow Springs, but we returned to visit only once when I was in fourth or fifth grade. In 1958, when I started look- ing at colleges, I had the vaguest of plans for the future. I wanted to go to a small school without fra- ternities. I was interested in lots of things, but definitely not in study- ing English. I was a good student, but shy and had grown up in small academic towns where most of the kids I knew were also children of academics. I applied to three col- leges and decided on Antioch, in part, because I had heard so much about it, but also because one of my father’s students, a recent graduate, took it upon himself to recruit me. At my parents’ urging, I postponed my matriculation and took what is now called a “break year” in France. My father had a sabbatical leave in 1959/60 and my family was going to spend it in Oslo. I accompanied them to Norway, and then traveled on my own by boat and train down to Tours where I attended an insti- tute for foreign students. My friends were other foreign students, mostly Scandinavian and English, with a sprinkling of Americans, other Europeans,Africans andAsians. It was not an academically stressful year, al- though I acquired enough French to pass required exams in college and graduate school. I learned to live in- dependently, spent a lot of time in cafés and played bridge in three lan- guages. In retrospect, I see that I also became aware of how much more difficult life was in Europe in 1959. Fifteen years after the war, France was said to have more cafés than bathtubs; some of my British friends wore the same tweed coat every day; hot water for showers was turned on only once a week in the room- ing house where I lived; the police carried machine guns. (This was the time the French were pulling out of Algeria).There was a U.S.Army base nearby and I saw that U.S. soldiers on leave were not always the best ambassadors of American culture. I was thrown into a new envi- ronment when I arrived in Yellow Springs in the fall of 1960. My ex- periences at Antioch over the next five years had a tremendous effect on shaping me for my future life. One of the first “differences” I en- countered was the Honor System, which was immediately made real when placement exams were point- edly unsupervised.The college com- munity, with its diversity of views and insistence on discussion of po- litical issues, was an education in itself. Perhaps because they were more distinct one from another, I re- member more about my co-op jobs than I do about my academic expe- riences. My first job was at the of- fice of Anthropometric Project and computing center on the fourth floor of the Science Building where, what would now be called admin-