I went to school in Evanston, the town/suburb directly north of Chicago. Evanston was dry at the time, so if you wanted to drink, you had to take the ‘el to Howard Street, the border between Chicago and Evanston. (You also needed a fake ID, as the drinking age was 21 in Chicago, although it has been 18 back in my home state of Maryland.)
Howard Street was also where you changed to catch trains downtown. But during rush hours, you could get lucky and catch something called the Evanston Express, which took you all the way to the Loop without having to change trains.
Last night, I went to the station at Lake and something. The Evanston Express is now the “purple line” and is marked simply “Linden,” the very last northbound stop. My traveling companion, who had to speak at Northwestern, was a little leery of my plan, but I swore it was the best way to travel north at this time of day. After all, Northwestern — which was paying for the trip — had wanted us to stay in Evanston proper, but allowed us to pick a hotel in downtown Chicago. It seemed only fair of us to arrange our own transportation to campus.
It’s a trip I made so many times. I remembered that Harry S Truman College was at the Wilson stop, that I had gotten off at Lawrence to see the Ramones at the old Argyle Ballroom. I remembered the night that a friend and I combined Mexican food and dancing at a punk bar with interesting, um, consequences. Let’s just say she grabbed my sleeve and pulled me off at the Berwyn stop (or was it Bryn Mawr) and did a neat re-enactment of The Exorcist. We then had to wait what seemed like hours for another train.
The Evanston Express also marked my first experience with public exposure, all the way from Belmont to Howard Street, in a packed and VERY quiet car.
I also remembered how smugly stupid I had been at 21 — the places I’d gone, the risks I’d taken, without knowing for years how risky they were. “Is that a rite of passage?” I asked my companion. “Does it have to be that way?” “I hope not,” he said, concerned about his 12-year-old son.
It was dark by the time we got to Northwestern. The lake was just an abyss to the east, the building where my companion was to speak was new to me, but it was near the University Center, where I worked at the information desk, and just beyond the journalism school. “That’s where they tortured me for four years,” I said. (I loved Northwestern, but have NO affection for the Medill School of Journalism, whose main function seemed to be to take gobs of my parents’ money while making me feel like a bad smell in the room, a presumptuous would-be boil on the ass of the Fourth Estate.)
Take me on a trip — on a train, on a bus, in a car, on foot — that you’ve taken many times. What would be different? What would be the same? Were you smugly stupid at 21? (And, please, if anyone under 21 is posting here, at least get your mom’s permission.)
Geeze,I was smugly stupid at 31! I was dating a guy who was an actor in New York and travelled from Philly to NYC almost every weekend. Your story of the excorsist thing I can relate to. I had a friend who lived on 93rd street, she was much older than me and after dinner we went back to her house to have a nightcap. “Do you like scotch?” she asked. When I told her that I’d never really tried it, she said something to the effect of having to try it at least once. We drank quite a lot and it didn’t hit me until I went underground to the subway. On the train I was having hot flashes and when I got off at Union Square to change lines I could barely walk straight. I successfully made it to the yellow train which took me to 8th street where my actor boyfriend was finishing rehearsal at NYU. He called to say he finished early and was at his apartment in the financial district. I went into a store, bought gum and water, threw up in an alley, somehow got a cab and staggered into his building. When I read stories about these young girls who end up missing after nights like that it just gives me chills to think what could have happened…
I went to graduate school in Phoenix and regularly traveled the 120 miles south to Tucson for the weekend. It’s a straight shot, with a dog leg left at Casa Grande, just to make sure you’re still awake.
Back then, there wasn’t much between the two cities: tumbleweeds the size of VWs and dust devils strong enough to blow a train off the track.
Today, subdivisions have spread north and south, erasing much of the desert in between. Picacho Peak — the westernmost site of a Civil War Battle — still boasts a rest stop with pecan pie and a view of “The Thing,” to spook the kids in the car. But there’s also a discount outlet mall and a commercial ostrich farm not far away, and Indian casinos outnumber the sagebrush now.
I guess you really CAN go home again. But sometimes it feels like, when you get there, they’ve changed everything but the address.
Interesting that you should mention your alma mater. I happen to be staying right now in the town where I did most of my growing up, about 30 miles from my own university. (And tomorrow I’m watching them play football. Wonder what it’ll be like to attend one of their games on the alumni side of the stadium – and sober
Anyway, both as a child and as a college student I made the 30-mile drive from home town to college town many, many times. Back in the day, you’d leave Lewiston and climb about 10 miles north out of the valley on a road that was nothing but hairpin turns and switchbacks -you could almost have a head-on collision with yourself, it was so twisty. Then there was a 20 mile drive through the wheat fields of the Palouse country to get to Pullman, which is the prototypical college town – about 6,000 full time residents to about 15,000 students when I was there.
In the intervening years, what’s changed is the road out of the valley. The old road has been replaced by a very simple four-lane affair that climbs straight for about 4 miles east, makes a sharp turn, then another straight 4 miles west to the top of the hill. It’s much safer, but has sort of taken all the fun out of the drive – I sometimes use the old road just for the nostalgia of it all.
What hasn’t changed is the feeling I get looking down on Lewiston from the top of that hill. It’s a beautiful vista, looking south into Idaho and Washington – and I always feel such a strong sense of homecoming when I see the lights of the town twinkling as I begin the descent.
And yeah, I was pretty invincibly dumb when I was 21. I think it’s a rule.
I went to college in southwestern Virginia and my best friend lived for years in Hagerstown, Maryland, which is on the way to Roanoke on I-81. I made that lonely drive so many times. When I was in college, there was no straight shot to 81 from Connecticut, had to go 34 out of New Haven to 84 over to Scranton and then down 81 through Harrisburg. Hagerstown was about six hours, and I’d count down the hours from there: Harrisonburg meant just another two hours; Lexington, another hour. Now there’s a shortcut that cuts two hours off the trip through New Jersey, but it isn’t nearly as pretty a drive.
Funny thing: I was cleaning out a binder of keepsakes and found the program for the 1971 Confirmation Class of Temple Sinai in Silver Spring and saw that Laura Lippman was one of the confirmands. It turns out that she’s not you, but the search led me to this post.
Funny thing: I went to Northwestern (Speech 1977), too. I have forgtotten much of my 4 years there. My mother saved all my letters home and returned them to me when I got married. I opened a few of them recently and realized (1) how pathetically dumb and naive I was; and (2) that I don’t remember 90% of what I reported home in the letters. I don’t know if it was all so very unimportant or the human animal presevation instinct has fortunately erased most of the crap from my memory.
My husband and I drove my 16 year old up to NU last summer, hoping he’d be interested enough to apply when the time came (I am not quite sure that even with a legacy he could get in, but it was worth giving him a goal to shoot for). As we hit the spot where Lake Shore Drive turns into Sheridan Road, where the Gold Coast ends, more memories came bubbling up – the kind I never would have reported home in letters to mom and dad. It’s the spot where my best friend puked her guts out of a car window after an evening in Greektown and too much retsina. It’s where my boyfriend (and now my husband of almost 30 years) and I realized that our weekends together in his ancient dorm room at UC were almost at an end.
During this particular trip, we stayed at the Orrington, where I used to catch the bus to O’Hare every Christmas and summer — I was too poor to fly home at Thanksgiving or over spring break. It’s gotten a face lift on the inside, but looks pretty much the same outside. Sadly, around the corner, there’s an Einsteins where Hoos Drug Store used to be — how ever do the students get checks cashed without the friendly folks at Hoos when it’s too cold to struggle against the wind to the bank? I guess there are probably ATMs in the dorms now. Banking law in the 70s prohibited ATMs except in banks — they were considered branch banks, which weren’t allowed. On the positive side, you could get funds in denominations of $1.00 at the bank ATMs — a boon when your balance was just about 3 times that amount.
We went out to Norris Center and discovered that the lakefill had been extended and that we could actually see a fabulous view of the skyline of Chicago — and there was a bike and jogging path, to boot. The new communications center. built by funds donated by Garry Marshall and spouse put to shame the wretched TV and radio production facilities in the old School of Speech building (Kresge Hall?). I felt robbed — but I guess that’s what $7000 in tuition bought in 1973. Seeing the building reminded me that it was there that I learned that the Speech School Dean had been thrown out of a window by two lowlifes he had picked up at a gay bar while his wife and family were out of town — I’m still trying to remember how Dr. May, the new dean, explained that to us. I do remember that the actual facts were hushed up — not ready for prime time reading even in the Sun Times or Trib in the mid-70s.
The secondary purpose of our trip was to attend a commercial interior design show at the Merchandise Mart, so we also took what was once the Evanston Express to Howard and then the red line on to the Mart. I used to take that trip by myself twice a week in my third year because the lousy 8mm film stock I shot for my film production class always required forced processing at a 24 hour photo place. I also changed trains at Howard for the train to Channel 2 where I had an internship in the editorial department during the age of the Walter Jacobson/Bill Kurtis news duo. Howard was not the best place for a 20 year old to wait for a train — it was ethnically poor or poorly ethnic even then. The fact that I regularly took my life in my hands at age 20 or 21 is somewhat daunting at the age of 51.
Now that I’ve hopped on board the nostalgia train, I could keep riding forever — but I’ll end the post because I KNOW no one has gotten this far…
Rae, I remember the Lewiston Grade well and I am sorry to hear the road has been straightened. And, yes, we were invincibly dumb when we were 21, driving up the Grade with lots of alcohol in our systems on the way back to Wilmer Hall at WSU. The view was beautiful, as you say, but the smell from the paper mill was nose holding.
The roads I recall have been so vastly improved that I cannot complain. We describe my home town by saying it is the bottom of a bowl situated in the mountains. To get into Asheville, NC means climbing higher mountains and then dropping down those mountains into town,and mostly vice versa to go elsewhere. In the 50′s, this meant two-lane roads along paths probably forged by Indians. To get behind a heavy truck when climbing added much time to a trip. Today, wide interstates have made the trips faster. The drive from Baltimore is two to three hours shorter. Thankfully, the gorgeous vistas remain. I still marvel at the engineering feats required to build these roads.
As to being smug and invincible at 21, I guess that’s like the terrible two’s—inevitable. I wonder at what age most people realize they actually have become responsible, mature adults.
Hi Barbara, I remember Wilmer Hall very well. And the paper mill still smells awful, and the Cougars played horribly against Cal, and I drove down the old Grade just for fun
My most memorable college trip was a futile attempt to elope my second semester. We could find no one in Massachusetts who would marry 18 years olds so we took the Greyhound bus to Virginia (his hometown). His parents were out of town, the neighbors saw someone entering the house and called the cops who came in guns drawn. The only thing that saved us was the pictures on the mantel. Needless to say, I married someone else–the next year and never went back to that NE college or Virginia Beach again.