V23 #2 Spring 2002 - Archives - The Evergreen State College

THE EVERGREEN STATE COLLEGE
OLYMP1A, WASHINGTON
THE EVERGREEN MAGAZINE
FORALUMNI AND FRIENDS
Vol. 23, No. 2
Summer 2002
Vice President for College Advancement
Francis C, McGovern
Director of College Relations
Stanley Bernstein ;
Director of A!umni Affairs
Jackie Barry '89
Publications Manager/ Executive Editor
Esme Ran '95
Managing Editor
Char Simons
Contributing Writers
Kate Lykins Brown
Hannah Currey
Linda Hohman
Michael Huntsbcrger
Chuck McKinney
Mike Segawa
Contributing Photographers
Colin Berg
Stephen Cifka
Steve Davis
Martin Kane
Evergreen Photo Services • -
Graphic Design
Brian Mathis '88
Judy Nunez-Pinedo
Copy Editing
PatBarte'91
Additional Thanks
ThunderbirJ carved by
Greg Colfax (Makah)
Andy Wilbur '88 (Skokomish)
Obrador CD supplied by
Tim Russell '89/Ramy Day Records
Numerous photos, text and guidance:
Randy Stilson '74/Evergreen Archives
To submit items for Alum Notes,
contact the Office of Alumni Affairs
(360) 867-7751 ortescalum@evergreen.edu
The Evergreen Magazine accepts
paid advertising. For more information
about advertising or other items contact
Char Simons at (360)867-6710
or email simonsc@evergreen.edu.
rits
t| ("If ; ijjylls
RUDY MARTIN
TEACHING GUI
During the last of three group contracts in
African-American Literature I offered between
1997 and 2000 as part of my post-retirement
activities, it occurred to me that I had gone
through a complete cycle here: I was teaching
the children of former Evergreen
students. Not just figuratively, but
literally. Wow! Maybe I'm slow,
but I thought I had made a
powerful realization. Perhaps
other faculty members and
students were less struck by the
same insight than I was.
Regardless of the variations in
particular people's recognitions,
however, they all funnel back to
those first groups of students who
joined us here in the earliest years
of the college's life. I think of them
as "pioneer" students—pioneer
students meeting up with similarly
pioneering faculty and staff.
The students were everything
from everywhere, and I knew
a lot of them. There were black
students from Seattle and Tacoma,
Native Americans from reservations
and cities, Chicanos from
the Yakima valley, Jews from both
coasts, Asians from the islands
as well as the mainland, pink kids
from Bellevue and California.
There was a grandmother from
Centralia, shot-up Vietnam
veterans from different places,
some of Olympia's "old-growth"
hippies (to quote Paul Sparks),
military brats who had lived photo: Stephen
everywhere, timid mama's babies
leaving home for the first time. They came with
their backpacks and sleeping bags, their
slicked-back hair and unshaven chins and
underarms, their recycled outfits and doubleknit
clothes, their suits and briefcases, their
guitars and totem animals, their beads and
incense. Innocence too. They came like
a gathering of tribes.
Over the intervening decades, I've seen those
student pioneers doing all kinds of things
in all kinds of places. A few have
returned to Evergreen as faculty members—
would there were more. Doctors and lawyers,
teachers and techies, environmentalists and
writers, and multiple brands of activists have
abounded among them; business and corporate
types large and small, government workers,
officials and agency personnel of every stripe
have popped up; artists, musicians, performers
and other creative people have flourished; and,
sadly, some have died. I have run into them in
all sorts of places, from an old inn in a tiny
New England village, to Little Italy in
New York City, to a hotel in Atlanta, to
Picadilly Circus in London, to a Moroccan
restaurant in Paris. An especially noteworthy
case: In the college's very first year, one fellow
from back East had to return because of
a sudden family death after he had been here
only a few weeks, but he has maintained
annual contact with me ever since. I'm no
longer surprised wherever I am to hear,
"Hey, Rudy," yelled at me by a Greener from
what would seem to be the unlikeliest of places.
Some have made life-long friendships and
others have married and produced some of the
current generation of Evergreen students, the
latter-day pioneers.
Some parents and family members of that first
student generation shook their heads in
confused resignation, others were uptight and
afraid, still others cheered and wished
Evergreen had been around when they went
to college. Those pioneer students showed
courage and conviction. They signed on for
some of the same reasons many of us faculty
members came here. As scary and unformed
as it was, Evergreen was a new start,
Thef
another chance (sometimes a last
one), a different turning, an
opportunity to "do it right this
time." It was a situation in which
to build something—a farmhouse,
an organic garden, a sailboat,
a small Columbia River town,
a degree program, a college. Indeed,
I think it not too extreme to say
that much as Thomas Paine saw
the founding period of this nation,
those pioneer Greeners saw here
a chance to "make the world
over again."
Slowly, fitfully and often painfully,
the values, expectations and
aspirations of those pioneering
students, faculty and staff members
were realized, changed, truncated,
abandoned or refined. They melded
and coalesced into what we can
articulate today as that rocksolid
core of an Evergreen
education—interdisciplinary study,
collaborative learning, learning
across significant differences,
personal engagement, linkages
between theory and practice. Those
focal points keep appearing and reappearing in
all the various forms and permutations that we
today recognize as being "of this place."
So when I met those students who were the
children of former Evergreen students, I felt
comfortable knowing that they would come
here and likely experience much of what their
parents did. There are more bricks and mortar
on these thousand acres than there were in
1971, more people, more cars, more of most
things. But like their predecessors, the next
generation of Evergreen student pioneers, and
the faculty and staff serving them, will still find
an opportunity to try something new, the
likelihood of adventure, a chance to build their
individual worlds, and in some measure our
shared world, over again.
S. R. "Rudy" Martin, Jr.
Faculty Emeritus
American/African'American Studies
1970-1997
i I