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Anita Harris Speaks to Cornell Reunion Class

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On June 12, 2021, I had the privilege of introducing the class of 1970 happy hour at our 51st reunion. I talked about my published and forthcoming books and the idea of historical and individual spirals in history and in life.
Link to video.

Here’s the script, which may not be exactly what’s on the video, but all-in-all, I was glad to see so many friends!

Hi, I’m so glad to see everyone here, and especially that we’re all still here after this difficult year. I know that some of us are disappointed not to be in Ithaca—but the good part is that friends from far away can be with us.  One such friend said he would join in if I provided free drinks…which I am…in my living room.  CHEERS!

51st ANNIVERSARY OF GRADUATION 1970
 I’m sure you know that this is the 51st anniversary week of our crazy graduation. With those three walkouts, and the demonstration on stage where Morris Bishop, the distinguished historian and leader of the processional hit someone over the head with the baton he was carrying… Many people think that it was Dave Burack—my gov instructor—who got hit over the head …Burack swears it was his roommate…In any case, the demonstrators got hauled off stage and into a cop car…The bear at the top of the mace got bent and has never been the same—nor, I think,  have we.

 I remember that really well…which is amazing because people were  passing a JOINT when we were standing in the graduation processional…and I was definitely stoned.

I WROTE ABOUT THAT IN MY BOOK, ITHACA DIARIES which is based on the journals I kept as an undergraduate: it starts with me arriving at Cornell freshman year carrying the pink suitcase my uncle leon gave me for my bat mitzvah—goes through draft card burnings, demonstrations against the war,  the straight takeover,  MY LOVE LIFE, WHAT WAS I THINKING Kent State…and  ends on graduation day….when, to my amazement,  I even led a demonstration.

I WAS ORIGINALLY SUPPOSED TO TALK ABOUT ITHACA DIARIES LAST YEAR, AT OUR FIFTIETH but with the pandemic that really didn’t work out. So this year, Sally and Kathy asked me to introduce the social hour– they told me several times to be brief and to keep in mind that this is supposed to be a HAPPY hour. So I’m not going to reminisce a whole lot…I will just move the story ahead a little, wax a bit historical and philosophical, and then we’ll breakout out the drinks.  I mean..join the breakout sessions.

                                                                                    *

SINCE ITHACA DIARIES CAME OUT, I”VE BEEN WORKING ON TWO SEQUELS.

THE FIRST SEQUEL IS ABOUT MY FIRST YEAR OUT OF CORNELL— and I imagine that many of us went through similar experiences.   After all the turmoil on campus, and changes in the late sixties, I had no idea what to do with myself. (And of course, I was an English major…need I say more?) But as a fledgling feminist, I wanted to prove that I could do things: that anything a guy could do, I could do, too.  I got a bunch of short-term jobs.

WEST VIRGINIA First I got a job with the ILR School that took me traveling around the country to several hospitals,; in West Birginia, I had my first look at coal miners with black lung disease.

I WORKED IN A  POLITICAL CAMPAIGN  where one of the pols spent his days pretending to read the newspaper while staring at my legs…

THEN I WENT ON A ROAD TRIP cross country with two Brits I didn’t know, whose names I found on a bulletin board. They were both named John John, John, and I  drove cross country in a big black buick =–u drive it—and picked up every derelict and druggie, all the way from Miami to San Francisco.

AFTER THAT, I WORKED WITH DISADVANTAGED TEENS IN THE PHILADELPHIA GHETTO…AND FINALLY, I WOUND UP IN HARRISBURG, PENNSYLVANIA.  

That’s where the first sequel, which I’m CALLING PHILADELPHIA STORIES  ENDS.

HARRISBURG

SO, THEN, THE SEQUEL TO THE SEQUEL:  HARRISBURG
IT TURNED OUT THAT THREE OF OUR CLASSMATES, ED ZUCKERMAN, FRED SOLOWEY, AND VINCENT BLOCKER, WERE ALSO IN HARRISBURG, EACH FOR HIS OWN REASONS. WE AND SOME OTHER PEOPLE ENDED UP STARTING A NEWSPAPER THERE, IN CONNECTION TO A MAJOR POLITICAL TRIAL— IT WAS THE TRIAL OF THE HARRISBURG 8., WHICH HAD AN INTERESTING CORNELL CONNECTION. 

HARRISBURG 8 TRIAL
BERRIGAN: You may remember Dan Berrigan the anti war Priest, and poet who was deputy director of  Cornell United religious work. Anyway, while Dan Berrigan was in prison, Nixon’s FBI Director J EDGAR HOOVER ACCUSED DANIEL’s brother  Philip , who was also in prison, of conspiring to kidnap Henry Kissinger and blow up underground heating tunnels in Washington DC.  Also accused were  former ILR Professor Eqbal Ahmad, and six others—mostly nuns and priests. I’m not kidding, I’m not kidding.

So, Ed, Fred, Vincent and I started a newspaper called the Harrisburg Independent Press—or—HIP- around the trial of the Harrisburg 8. That was how I became a journalist, the paper was amazing.

And, for the last few years I’ve been working on a book on my experiences at HIP.

A FEW WEEKS AGO, I WAS WORKING ON THE CONCLUSION. And I started wondering what the heck am I doing, why am I time traveling, going back into the past all the time?  

ONE REASON IS PERSONAL : AS WITH Ithaca diaries, I needed to understand on a personal level, just what had gone down, to get things straight in my head, this was such a formative period, in order to figure out what to do next.  

BUT ANOTHER REASON IS HISTORICAL/SOCIETAL.

WHEN I FIRST STARTED WORKING ON THE HARRISBURG BOOK, TRUMP WAS JUST COMING INTO OFFICE, AND I FELT THE COUNTRY WAS DIVIDED, much as it was in the late 60s and early 70s.  I thought it might be interesting to draw some parallels between the present day divisiveness along the lines of  race, poverty, ethnicity, and corruption… and what was going on back then, under the Nixon administration, with race relations, the Vietnam War, dirty tricks and such.

SPIRALS: BROKEN PATTERNS:
 Then I thought about my first book, it’s called Broken patterns, and it’s about our generation of professional women in relation to our own mothers and grandmothers. It describes a spiral pattern in history—a spiral pattern that I think holds true for Individuals as well.

WHAT DO I MEANBY SPIRALS?  HERE I’d LIKE TO PONTIFICATE, A BIT, IF YOU WILL INDULGE ME…

Many of us—myself included—tend to think about progress in a linear way. That is, that to progress, we move forward in a straightforward path toward a goal.  But the older I get, the more I see that life sort of emerges in a series of starts and stops—that we get just so far, in moving toward a goal—maybe we reach it; maybe we get blocked… and then, as a society or as individuals, we tend to pull back to reassess, to reintegrate our own pasts, our country’s past, in order to move forward, once again.  

TODAY A TURNING POINT IN A SPIRAL
I think that now as a society we’re at a turning point in a spiral that’s kind of similar to where we were. 50 years ago. Now, as then, society is divided. Many have moved toward equality but others have been left behind.   As you know, there are issues of race, poverty, war, environment, how government should work, what kind of nation we want to be.  BUT despite all of the disruptions, the divisiveness, the protests,  the violence, I feel heartened that many of us are looking back historically, to understand how we got to this place so that we can regroup to find new ways of doing things.  I know that I’m painting with a rather broad brush—but I believe that==or I HOPE that– retreating a bit to reassess, will allow us move forward as individuals, and as a society, once again. END PONTIFICATION

COMING TOGETHER FOR OUR 51st
 In the same way, coming together for our 50th, or 51st reunion, gives us the chance to look back, to heal, to understand, to figure out where we’re at in order to find new ways to move forward in our own lives. I’m hoping that in our social… er happy hour, we’ll have a chance to catch up, figure out where we’ve been, where we are now, and  what adventures come  next as we enter this new phase in our lives.  TOAST WITH GLASS

One quick reminder—please use chat to catch up/share info or addresses with anyone you want to stay in touch with after the social.  

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Cornell author and professor emeritus James McConkey dies at 99

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Jim McConkey & Anita Harris, Cornell Booksigning, 6/6/2015
Jim McConkey & Anita Harris, Cornell Booksigning, 6/6/2015

It is with great sadness that I share the news that my beloved mentor and freshman writing instructor, the acclaimed writer and professor James McConkey died in his home on Oct. 24, 2019 at the age of 98. He was buried at Greensprings Natural Cemetery on October 28, next to his late wife Gladys and son Cris.  

I had the good fortune to join Jim, his son Larry and Daughter-in Law Diana for dinner in Sturbridge, MA, just a few weeks before his passing. He was in good spirits but seemed tired…but, then, they had just driven 7 hours on their way back from visiting another one of his students in norther Maine!

McConkey was my freshman writing instructor in 1967–I used to go out to his farm to exercise his horses–and he helped me through the Straight Takeover and such. (He told me recently that he sat with Dan Berrigan during the Barton Hall Takeover; also counselled President Perkins–and tried to be a voice of reason throughout all of that). We stayed in touch for some 50 years– He and I held a joint book-signing in the Cornell Store during my 45th reunion…and I am glad I got to seem him just before he passed away. 

Jim, his son Larry and daughter-in-law Diane McConkey were on their way back from visiting another of Jim’s former students on Northern Maine (9 hours from Ithaca?) and invited me to dinner at the Publick House, near Boston, where I live, and where they were spending the night. At 98, he told a few funny stories about his mother, who lived to 100 at least…and I  joked that his social life was better than mine. He was still driving–and told us that he would be driving the ten miles from his farm to lunch with friends several times the next week. He seemed frail–but sounded fine when I called to thank him a few days after that dinner.

Goldwin Smith Professor of English Literature Emeritus at Cornell University until he retired in 1992, McConkey was a beloved teacher and mentor for more than four decades.  He fostered many gifted writers who flourished under his keen and kind tutelage.  His own career as a writer spanned almost 50 years encompassing 15 published books as well as numerous essays in The New Yorker and The American Scholar.  He was a critic, biographer, scholar, editor, short story writer, essayist, and novelist.  

But James McConkey will be best remembered as the creator of a unique form of writing, what he at one point called “autobiographical fiction,” and later “life writing,” a magical, almost mystical weaving of his memories into transcendent truths.  In 1960 he experienced an epiphany that was “the basis for the kind of writer and person I became. It really changed me.”  That moment was precipitated by the sense of desperation he felt at the resumption of nuclear testing by first the Soviet Union and then the United States.  Abandoning conventional third-person narratives, he began searching for intuitive relationships between “intimate experiences, through memory, and personal observation.”  “

Whatever my wish,” he wrote, “I had not escaped fiction; I had simply made myself the central character of a story, finding in my own experiences and dreams a greater authenticity than I could in those of any character I might invent.”  Through the years he built a personal and powerful narrative of his life and of those around him.  It is a legacy within which his voice remains sharp and clear.  What shines through is the man himself:  kind, generous, witty, thoughtful, modest, humane.  An exemplary teacher, he maintained personal and creative relationships with many grateful students until the day he died.

Born in Lakewood, Ohio in 1921, McConkey attended Cleveland College and served as a U.S. Army infantryman during World War II.  Injured during the war, he was discharged in November 1945 and earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Western Reserve University (later Case Western Reserve) in 1946 and a Ph.D. from the University of Iowa in 1950. Before coming to Cornell, he taught at Morehead State College in Kentucky, where he founded and directed the Morehead Writers Workshop.  After arriving in Ithaca in 1956, he became instrumentally involved with the new creative writing program and Epoch magazine, as well as the English department at large, where he taught courses in modern fiction and nonfiction.  In 1965, McConkey founded the Cornell Council of the Arts and initiated the popular Mind and Memory course and its related lecture series in 1996, exploring creativity across various disciplines. In the late 1970s, he organized one of the most memorable cultural events in Cornell history, the Chekhov Festival.

McConkey was the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in fiction and a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship award in 1969, and an American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters award in literature in 1979.  A former student established the McConkey Master of Fine Arts Creative Writing Award in 2008.  His collected papers (1948-90) are housed in Cornell University Library’s Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections.

James McConkey was predeceased by his wife of 68 years, Gladys McConkey, a former research chemist and editor of The Engineering Quarterly at Cornell, who died in 2013.  His second son, Cris McConkey, a passionate advocate for social justice and environmental causes, died in 2015. His nephew Dale Steigerwald, who lived with James, died in 2018.  Survivors include his son Larry McConkey and wife Diana, son Jim McConkey and wife Kristin, grandchildren Katie and Braeden, several nieces, a cousin and countless friends including Mike DeMunn, who lives on the property, and his beloved dogs, Buddy and Bernie.

The Cornell Department of English is planning a memorial service on May 2, 2020.   Contributions in his name can be made to: Greensprings Natural Cemetery Preserve, PO Box #415, Newfield, NY 14867, or online at www.naturalburial.org.

–Anita M. Harris

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Cornell 1967 Res Club Fire Survivors Seek Info, Redress after 50+ Years

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In a letter to the editor of the Cornell Daily Sun, (January 24, 2019) 26 survivors of the 1967 Res Club fire and family members of those who perished call for the university to openly acknowledge the University’s mishandling of the situation some 52 years ago.


They suggest that such acknowledgement–which does seem to be under way given the leadership of Cornell President Martha Pollack– will decrease the likelihood of another such tragedy occurring, at Cornell or elsewhere, in the future.

The fire, along with two subsequent fires at locations where Phud survivors were living and an investigation that never identified the perpetrator of what was apparently arson, were reviewed in the New York Times on April 13, 2018.

After the article came out, 13 survivors of the fire from the classes of 1967, 1969 and 1970, along with three relatives of one of the deceased students, met with President Pollack. They requested a public apology on behalf of Cornell for the institution’s actions (and lack thereof) before and after the fire.

Their actions, the letter points out, ” included housing students in a dormitory that did not meet fire codes of the day, lacking sprinklers, multiple exits and fire doors.

“There was also a shocking lack of support offered by the University to the fire survivors, their families and the families of the dead, in sharp contrast to the outpouring of support from the Cornell and Ithaca communities.”

In researching Ithaca Diaries, I was told that information about the fire could be found “somewhere in the [University] archives,” which seemed utterly daunting to me.

The group seeks the opening of all the Cornell archives related to the fire, including but going beyond the material supplied to the New York Times. This would include records of the Cornell Police Department, which was involved in the investigation along with the Cayuga Heights Police Department (which had primary responsibility), the Ithaca P.D., the New York State Police and the Tompkins County District Attorney.

In the letter, the group also requested both a permanent physical memorial to be located in a prominent site on campus (such as a “reflection garden”) and “living memorials” in the form of scholarships named for each of those who died to be awarded to students pursuing degrees in the victims’ areas of study.

President Pollack has suggested a lecture series named, each year, for one of those victims, according to the letter.

Here’s a link to the letter: https://cornellsun.com/2019/01/22/letter-to-the-editor-cornell-must-do-more-to-remember-res-club-fire/

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Cornell’s Steve Ludsin: “The Graduate” and the end of youthful optimism

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Last week,  the New York Times ran an opinion piece entitled “Why the Graduate is a Vietnam Movie. ”

In the piece, author Beverly Gray explains that  “in June 1967, while the film was still in production, President Lyndon Johnson signed a revamped Military Selective Service Act, signaling that within the year deferments for most graduate students would come to an end,” making them  “draft fodder. ”

“On its surface, ”  Gray writes,  “The Graduate  seemed to be an escapist film about love, sex and the potential for happily-ever-after.
“Its story, of how a new college graduate is seduced by the wife of his father’s partner and then runs off with …her pretty daughter, makes no claim to profundity. Still, it spoke loudly to a demographic that found itself embroiled in a war mandated by a previous generation.”

Many found the film a  ” perfect illustration of a young man struggling to cope with a social landscape over which he had no control…”  Clergymen, politicians,  pundits and military brass found it “subversive.”  Soldiers “embraced it as a comic howl against a status quo they were risking their lives to preserve.”

For my  classmate Steve  Ludsin (ILR 1970) of East Hampton,  New York, who saw the film as a Cornell undergrad, the film  provided  a new perspective on the era–opening his  eyes to the complacency of his upbringing and to the contrast of values once he entered college.

As he writes:

I was traveling on a winter break in Florida with upperclassmen and fraternity brothers from Cornell when I saw the film.

There were rumblings on campus about Vietnam along with our fears about the war and when we might be drafted. Nevertheless I did not perceive the movie to be about Vietnam. It was about being something other than the generation that raised us.

We didn’t know what that other was but we knew we were searching. Just hearing the soundtrack by Simon and Garfunkel still brings deep nostalgic feelings.

Perhaps the movie was the end of youthful optimism that was part of the baby boomer outlook.

We managed to get front row seats at the Supremes’ nightclub act during that trip.The picture of our smiles and clean cut Ivy League look is a time piece. Vietnam was on our minds but there was something bigger than that: an admission that our lives were not going to conform to the previous script. We didn’t know what the plot was but we knew we were going to Scarborough Fair. 

I also saw the film when it first came out and understood  it as a  commentary on a shallow,  materialistic society….but would never have imagined that people would still be talking about it 50 years later!

–Anita M. Harris