Carleton Taught Me To Think

Reunion 2003

Carleton Taught

Me To Think

Hal Higdon's keynote speech

at the 50th reunion banquet

Keynote speaker during Reunion 2003 at the Saturday night banquet in Great Hall was Hal Higdon, perhaps best known lately among runners as Senior Writer for Runner's World and the Training Consultant for The LaSalle Bank Chicago Marathon. Tens, perhaps hundreds, of thousands of runners have used Higdon's programs to train for marathons and other events. But as Higdon suggested in his talk, reprinted below, his journalism career over more than four decades has covered a variety of subjects from history to business to science to sports. In introducing the speaker, classmate Bruce Turner noted that the American Society of Journalists and Authors recently honored Higdon with a Career Achievement Award at its annual meeting in New York. Higdon has written thirty-four books, most recently Run, Dogs, Run!, designed for beginning readers. The text of Hal Higdon's speech follows:

My wife Rose and I communicate best at meals. We talk. We discuss the events of the day, or plan future events, finishing our conversation while enjoying a final sip of wine. During a lunchtime discussion last winter, Rose asked about my Saturday-night reunion speech. I had not begun to write it yet, but had thought about what I would say, particularly during runs on the beach.

I began by stating the title: "Carleton taught me to think." I told her my plan to divide the fifty years since graduation into decades, giving each decade a title. The Fifties would be the decade of Choices. The Sixties, the decade of Change. The Seventies, Chaos. The Eighties, Continuity. Finally, the Nineties was the decade of Contentment.

I continued describing my speech while we cleared dishes from the table. I kept talking as I moved to the bedroom to change into a pair of shorts, while Rose brushed her teeth. Finally, I paused and said: "If Carleton taught me to think, how come I just put my shorts on backward?"

I apologize for opening with a bathroom joke, but let me continue with my plan to divide the fifty years since graduation into decades. And as I describe events in my life-and in my career as writer and runner and husband and parent, feel free to let your mind drift loose into parallel events that happened to you, and those around you, since we parted a half century ago.

The Fifties: Choices

The first decade, the Fifties--actually the period between 1953 and 1962--was a decade of choices for all of us. Some of us had begun to make those choices even before graduation: What graduate school to enter? What job field to pursue? Who would be our spouse? Where would we live? Sometimes the choices were made for us. Males in 1953 were drafted into the Army. Females that same year certainly had fewer choices than those who graduated from Carleton last week.

"Return with us now to those thrilling days of yesteryear." Does anybody remember the source of that quote? The Lone Ranger. Using my computer, I did a Google search with the words "Lone Ranger" and "yesteryear" and came up with the exact quote. But how many of you knew that Franz von Suppe's Poet and Peasant Overture, used as background music for The Lone Ranger, contains the melody for the Carleton Alma Mater?

Google search? Could any of us in 1953 have comprehended what impact the computer would have on life fifty years later? Does the class of 2003 have any idea what technological wonders they may possess fifty years from now? Or what else will impact their lives? If we misbehave in the next fifty years, we risk destroying our civilization.

In 1953, a single computer occupied 1,800 square feet. That's the size of our condo in Florida. There were only twenty computers in the United States that year of our graduation. They weighed on average thirty tons and cost more than $100,000. The Fifties was the decade of Beatniks. Joe McCarthy. Playboy and Marilyn Monroe. Disneyland. Tailfins on cars. Gray-flannel suits. Sputnik. It was the decade of conspicuous consumption.

Talk about something that changed our lives: The National Highway Act in 1958 funded the expressways, the interstate highway system named after the president whose laid-back style seemed exactly right for the decade: Dwight D. Eisenhower. We know him because of his visit to campus our senior year. Not all of us voted for Ike, but we liked him.

Choices! How many of our choices were dictated by chance? Departing Northfield, I enrolled in graduate school at the University of Chicago: partly to postpone my life choices, partly to compete in track another season.

As an art student, I attended classes less than a block from the Administration Building. Working there was a dark-haired beauty, who actually was a student at Chicago Teachers College working her way through college. Frequently that first year away from Carleton, I would visit the Ad Building for various reasons. And there she was: this dark-haired beauty, everything any man could desire. Her name was Rose.

And we never met!

Not once--though our paths must have crossed. Our eyes may have met, our shoulders even may have brushed. After two years in the Army, I returned home the winter of 1957. A friend asked me to substitute one day in a bowling league. Bowling in the next lane was this dark-haired beauty named Rose. Fate had given us one more chance.

At the time, I worked as a freelance cartoonist, living at home. As described in Beyond the Tower, I asked Rose to marry me. She said no. I asked her again. She said no. I went out and got a job. She said yes.

That job as Assistant Editor at The Kiwanis Magazine led me into the field that would dominate my life for the next four decades. Writing rather than art. A chance meeting here. A slight sidestep there. How many of your choices similarly were dictated by chance?

After two years, I quit to become a full-time writer. That took chutzpah, because until that moment, I had not sold a single magazine article--not one! But Carleton taught me to think, and what better qualification for a career as a journalist? An ability to think!

At that time, the Chicago chapter of the Society of Magazine Writers met monthly at Riccardo's Restaurant on Rush Street. Several SMW members sold articles to Kiwanis, so I finagled an invitation. Because of my no-sell record, I was nervous about attending, until I got a call from Rose the afternoon of the meeting. Parents Magazine had accepted a humor article I had written on natural childbirth titled, "We Had Our Child-Naturally." They paid $200, big money in those days. I walked into my first writer's meeting proud as if I had a book on the bestseller list.

Let me offer an excerpt that maybe only the women in this audience can appreciate.

Rose's activities weren't limited to diaphragm-breathing. One evening she said triumphantly, "Mrs. Franklin told me I sit in the frog position better than anyone else."

Okay, it wasn't Hemingway, but it paid the rent--and my writing continues to pay the rent today, although I now write more for the Internet than for magazines.

Carleton taught me how to think. That allowed me to adapt my life: to change careers from artist to journalist and to slip seamlessly into the Sixties. Let me identify the Sixties--for us our second decade away from Carleton, from 1963 to 1972--as the decade of Change.

The Sixties: Change

Some people claim nothing good happened during what historians call The Turbulent Sixties. It was a decade of riots, assassinations and Woodstock, but also Civil Rights--and we set foot on the Moon. The Bay of Pigs. The Wall. The Pill. James Bond. The Beatles. And books that spawned movements: Silent Spring. The Feminine Mystique. Unsafe at Any Speed. Those of us who graduated in 1953 missed both the pleasure and peril of this decade. Comfortably into our thirties, we focused on families and/or careers. Regardless of your politics, you must agree that the Sixties was a decade of sound-bites:

"Ask not what your country can do for you."

"Thank God almighty, we are free at last!"

"The Eagle has landed."

This was the decade of change for many of us. In 1966, Rose and I stayed a month on campus with our three children. I had been hired by Playboy that summer to redo a badly written biography of Hugh Hefner. I spent most of the early summer hanging out at the Playboy Mansion meeting people like Don Adams, Willie Shoemaker and the Beach Boys, then came to Northfield where I hoped to work without distraction. We rented a farmhouse east of campus owned by a vacationing professor. The people next door had horses, and our kids got to ride them. We had moved from the ridiculous to the sublime.

What brought us to campus was an alumni seminar that linked art to music. Let me quote from something written in The Voice prior to that seminar:

One's undergraduate career is a very important part of one's education, but a liberal education does not end with the awarding of a BA degree. Commencement is exactly what the name implies. While four years at Carleton provide an important impetus to further study, the greatest part of our education must take place after we leave Carleton, and outside of any formal academic context.

Those words were written by our classmate David Sipfle.

The seminar brought together an art teacher, two music teachers and us, but also a math teacher who discussed how computers--which by then had been reduced to about the size of a refrigerator--would impact the arts and everything we would do. How far ahead of its time was that?

I eventually finished the Hefner biography, but as a family man felt uneasy with the connection. Several years later, we were on a trip west staying in a motel: kids in one room, parents in the other. Our second son David, age seven and obviously prodded by his older brother aged nine, came into our room and asked to borrow my copy of Playboy. "We just want to read the articles," he said. I stopped writing for the magazine soon after.

More exciting were assignments from the New York Times Magazine. For a period in the Sixties, I was their Go Guy in the Midwest. I wrote about politics, science, health. I did profiles on Mayor Daley and Johnny Bench. I wrote about the Bleacher Bums, jinxing the Cubs and allowing the New York Mets to win the pennant. I've always suspected that was the intent of the Times editors.

One article I wrote on traffic safety landed me an invitation to the White House. Lyndon Baines Johnson was signing legislation to that end. I didn't like our government's policies in Vietnam. I quietly declined. Carleton taught me to think.

In 1968, the Times asked me to cover the Indiana primary featuring Robert F. Kennedy, Gene McCarthy and a stand-in for LBJ. I trailed the candidates around my home state. The crush of fans around Bobbie was frightening. He was like a rock star. On one occasion I flew in his campaign plane from Fort Wayne to Columbus to Terre Haute for a series of speeches.

Departing Columbus, Kennedy sat in my aisle, only two seats away, talking to an aide. Several reporters passed and asked questions. He replied in a soft, low-keyed voice. I couldn't hear what he said. I wrote later:

At the end of the runway, just before the airplane took off, Kennedy rose and switched seats so he could sit with another group of his aides, including Frank Mankiewics, his press secretary, in the rear of the plane. The plane rolled down the runway its engines straining, then the plane began to brake and we slid to a halt without taking off. The pilot later explained that a red light had flashed on indicating a fire in one of the engines. There was no fire, but we taxied back to the other end of the field to check it out. "If we don't make it this next time," said Robert Kennedy, "the names of all you other fellows are going to be in the small print."

Fortunately we made it, but a month later Kennedy was dead. It would be seven more years before the last Americans were lifted out of Saigon.

The Seventies: Chaos

The malaise of The Sixties spilled over into The Seventies. This was the coming of age of the Baby Boomers, what Thomas Wolfe called the "Me Generation." Kent State. Patty Hearst. Disco. Studio 54. Busing. Abortion. Gays. Apple computers and Star Wars. Jimmy Carter and the Shah of Iran. As the Nixon presidency disintegrated in the wake of Watergate, Andy Warhol promised everybody 15 minutes of fame. We eased into middle age, our children now in high school, many of us secure in our careers and marriages. The Watergate break-in occurred on my 41st birthday. Were we really that old--once?

Call the Seventies the decade of Watergate-fueled chaos. But amid chaos, emerged a few positive signs. The environmental movement--launched by Rachel Carson with Silent Spring--had started, and I was there to report on it. Science never had been my strong suit in school, but Carleton taught me to think. The state of Michigan banned DDT, and the Times wanted an article on the subject, then a second article on what would we do without DDT?

That article on biological control of insects led later to a similar assignment for National Geographic, a reporter's dream. The Geographic offered an unlimited expense account, and I traveled from Massachusetts to Mississippi and into Mexico. High-priced cameramen traveled in my wake. When I envisioned a photo of a plane spraying boll-weevils at midnight, the magazine sent a photographer to California to capture that exact image--then never used it!

Midway through my research, I visited National Geographic headquarters in Washington. I flew first class. My seat companion was Ann Landers--although that's another story. After greetings from the editors, they ushered me upstairs for lunch.

An elegantly decorated dining room. A captivating view of the Capitol's best buildings and monuments. A long table that looked as though Louis XVI once dined on it. Smartly attired waiters pouring wine into crystal goblets. Iridescent China. Silverware that appeared to have been shined that morning. The Geographic's top editor sat at one end of the table, a line of lesser editors on each side.

And at the other end: moi! Sitting down, I knew that my chair had over the years felt the buns of: Sir Edmund Hillary, Jacques Cousteau, John Glenn, perhaps even…Laurence McKinley Gould.

Great explorers just back from the field, famous scientists with Nobel prizes on their resumes, presidents dating back to Theodore Roosevelt, all had been invited to this same dining room to provide lunchtime entertainment for the editors of this hallowed publication. And here I had come to talk about:

Screwworms!

If you live in Texas, you probably understand screwworms. During my research, I visited a screwworm factory in Brownsburg, Texas. I donned sanitary clothing and passed through an airlock to gain entry. The factory produced 190 million screwworms weekly, breeding them on hamburger meat, the most revolting smell I ever have encountered. The screwworms then were bombarded with radiation from cobalt 60, sterilizing them, after which they were loaded into cardboard boxes and into airplanes. As published in National Geographic, my article explained why:

A cardboard bomb-ripped open by the slipstream spews screwworm flies from the rear of an airplane over southern Texas. When they reach the earth the sterilized males will couple with female flies, which mate only once, dooming reproduction. Native to warm climates, the flies lay eggs in open wounds of livestock and wildlife. Flesh-eating larvae can eventually kill their hosts.

I never was invited to lunch at the National Geographic again.

The Eighties: Continuity

We slid from the Seventies into the Eighties. The Great Communicator arrived in the White House. Another decade of conspicuous consumption. Yuppies. AIDS. Glasnost. Homeless people. Golden parachutes. Apple computers. The Wall fell. Iran-Contra and Oliver North. Sometime in the decade, Al Gore invented the Internet. College students shifted their attention from Vietnam protests to Wall Street.

Let me identify this as the decade of continuity. We continued doing what we had been doing during the three decades before. Whether we all had more disposable income, it seemed that way to me. Rose wondered why? After our three children reached high school age, she had gone back to work as a teacher, offering us a second income. In 1984, our youngest child graduated from college. What was that sound-bite mentioned earlier? "Free at last. Free at last. Thank God almighty, we are free at last!"

My career continued, but moved in new directions. Running had gone mainstream, opening new markets. Icy Hot hired me as a spokesperson. Over a period of six months I gave more than two hundred radio, TV and newspaper interviews in twenty-six cities. I became a finalist to become NASA's Journalist-in-Space. Walter Cronkite and I were among forty remaining candidates, but the Challenger explosion in January 1986 that killed Christa McCauliffe and six other Astronauts also killed my dream.

Rose and I wrote a book that some of you purchased at the 40th reunion. Falconara: A Family Odyssey told a tale about the tiny mountain village in Southern Italy where her parents were born. Falconara-Albanese was settled in the fifteenth century by seven families fleeing Albania after a Turkish invasion. Remarkably, five hundred years later, people in that village continue to speak Albanian. Rose, visibly Italian, grew up speaking Albanian--actually an Albanian dialect known as Arberesh--rather than Italian.

Rose took a sabbatical from teaching to help research the book. It took ten years to complete. Americans were forbidden access into Albania. We needed to visit that Iron Curtain country for our final chapter. Then came Gorbachov, Glasnost, and the Curtain parted.

Rose and I finally visited Albania in 1991, among the first American tourists to do so. On a warm summer evening, we sat outdoors at a cafe in Saranda, across a narrow channel from Corfu, a Greek island. That afternoon, we had heard machine gun fire from guards who thought several children swimming had wandered too far off the beach. American music is everywhere in the world. I still remember sitting in that café and hearing Hotel California, as sung by the Eagles: "You can check out any time you want, but you can never leave."

Falconara was written in my wife's name. Rose wrote:

In Gjirokastra the night before, angry crowds had toppled (dictator Envar) Hoxha's statue from its pedestal. Albanians, having been given a taste of freedom, wanted more. Their leaders, it seems, had not recognized the degree of their unrest or anticipated the rush for the borders. Outside of Albania, the free world looked on in amazement as Albania literally came unglued. While our families back home saw photographs of refugees on the front page of newspapers, we saw first-hand the impoverished conditions that were compelling Albanians to leave their homeland.

It was a memorable moment in time for the two of us. When people ask which of my thirty-four books is my favorite, I answer Falconara. It helps to have a co-author you love.

The Nineties: Contentment

The Eighties became the Nineties, most of us not yet realizing that the arrival of a new decade was bringing us closer not only to the end of the century, but to the end of a millennium. YK2? We had not heard that term yet, but we would. Andy Warhol's promised 15 minutes of fame had been scaled back to 15 seconds--but it would be endlessly recycled on the Internet. Cell phones. E-mail. AOL and OJ. Smart bombs. Princess Di and Monica Lewinski. But grandchildren, blessed grandchildren. All the joys of parenthood without dirty diapers.

Ah, a decade of contentment. At an age when we all began to cash Social Security checks, I discovered a new career. The Internet opened new doors for my writing. I serve now as training consultant for The LaSalle Bank Chicago Marathon, which will limit its field to 40,000 runners this fall. There were barely 40 marathoners in America in 1953, the year of our graduation.

The archetypal runner today is a female aged 25-29, who decided last week that she wants to run a marathon next month, and how do I train, Hal? I'm here to help her through books and daily e-mail messages. Women are smarter than men; they accept instruction more readily. I wish I could have taken every woman in this room to the Arb back in 1953.

To go jogging, of course.

If I had any advice to offer this year's graduating class, it would be: Select as your hobby something that will become a national phenomenon by the time of your fiftieth class reunion in 2053.

Let me close with a story that I use often in lectures to runners, but since Carleton also taught you to think, you'll understand it too. It's about the time I beat Frank Shorter.

How do you beat an athlete the caliber of Frank Shorter? You catch him when he's injured.

Frank Shorter, of course, won the marathon at the 1972 Olympic Games, placing second in 1976. Frank often gets credit for starting the running boom, although I helped keep that boom going. Shortly after his Olympic successes, Frank and I participated in a half-marathon in Cleveland. The race was sponsored by Jess Bell, president of Bonne Bell, a women's cosmetics firm.

At the pre-race dinner, Jess talked of running the Boston Marathon, struggling up Heartbreak Hill, tired, sweaty, sunburned, head down, tongue hanging out, barely moving--and lounging on the sidewalk would be some guy cradling a beer in one hand, who would say, "You're looking good!"

For those who never have run marathons, "looking good" is something spectators shout at you. That and "one mile to go," when there's really two miles to go.

Back in the hotel, I watched a TV reporter interview Frank Shorter. He had just come from Zurich, where he had strained a hamstring muscle in a 5-K. Injured, Frank planned to run the half marathon at a gentle pace: averaging 5:30 a mile. That was my planned pace, so I figured I'd simply find Frank at the starting line and let him pull me through the 13-mile race.

Running with the leaders, we hit the first mile in 4:51, as fast as I had run a single mile my freshman year at Carleton. And it dawned on me: Frank had only said he would average 5:30 miles, not how fast he would run the first mile. So the bear jumped on my back.

That's a term used by runners. Big woolly bears often occupy the trees lining marathon courses. Go out too fast and a bear will jump out of a tree and land on your back. Booomp! Now you must carry the bear on your back the rest of the race. It's also known as getting the "Riggies," as in: rigor mortis sets in.

I slowed. The lead runners left me. Because of my dwindling pace, the bear got bored, jumped off my back and climbed another tree to await another imprudent runner. And as I passed three, four miles, I suddenly realized that I was beginning to catch Frank Shorter, the Olympic champion, finally sliding back into his promised 5:30 pace.

I couldn't pass Frank without a word of encouragement. He was a friend, had been a guest in my house, drank all my beer. So I pulled even with Frank, turned to him and said, "You're looking good!"

His response, a direct quote, was, "Oh shit!"

I pulled ahead, a mistake, because around five miles, bloomp! Another bear jumped on my back. Slowing, I began to hear footsteps. And I knew it was Frank Shorter, ready to punish me for my imprudent comment.

The footsteps drew closer, got louder. I couldn't stand it any longer. I looked over my shoulder, but it was some other runner, someone I didn't know. He pulled even and said to me:

"Frank Shorter told me to tell you that you're looking good!"

Certainly, as I stand here in front of my classmates from 1953, I can see that you're all looking good. Thank you for your attention. Thank you for returning after fifty years away from this campus. Thank you Carleton for teaching me to think.