Of Ballparks and Battlefields

MOE / OF BALLPARKS AND BATTLEFIELDS Of Ballparks and Battlefields Peter Wayne Moe When people visit me at the University of Pittsburgh, I take them on a walking tour through campus and its surrounding neighborhood, Oakland, on what I call the Tour of Oakland. The tour begins at the Cathedral of Learning, a 535-foot forty-two-story marvel of Gothic-revival architecture. Mouths agape, we stand in the cathedral’s Commons, a room easily likened to Hogwarts with arches, each shoring up five tons. (During construction, Chancellor Bowman insisted the arches be real, because, as he argued to architect Charles Klauder, “You cannot build a great university upon fraud.”) From the thirty-sixth floor we overlook the city before heading across the cathedral lawn to Heinz Chapel, its four stained glass windows the tallest in the world. Heavy soot—a reminder of Pittsburgh’s industrial past—cakes the Chapel’s spires. Crossing the street, the tour pauses underneath a life-size statue of Dippy the Dinosaur, cast from its eighty-eight-foot skeleton housed in the adjacent Carnegie Museum. When we pass Schenley Fountain, I provide pennies for tossing in and making wishes, for both the fountain and the Lincoln penny were sculpted by the same man, Victor Brenner. The final stop is Mazeroski Field, a little-league ballpark rest- ing where Forbes Field once stood, site of Bill Mazeroski’s 1960 game-seven walk-off homerun to win the World Series. This is my university, and in spring semester 2012, it faced a rash of bomb threats. The cathedral received a bomb threat once before—a WWII telephone call the evening of June 25, 1940—but this wave was different. The first bomb CCC 66:1 / SEPTEMBER 2014 37 m37-39-Sept14-CCC.indd 37 8/13/14 11:18 AM CCC 66:1 / SEPTEMBER 2014 threat appeared in February, scrawled in felt pen in a women’s restroom stall. In mid-March came another, now in the men’s room. Soon emails and text messages bore the threats, sent to local newspapers, the student newspaper, the Police Department, university administration and faculty and staff, and television and radio stations. In the coming months, the university would endure scores of bomb threats (145 by some counts), sometimes to individual buildings, often to multiple. Evacuation accompanies each threat. The first comes when ten minutes remain in my class; we simply call it quits for the day. With the second, we do the same. But with the third, we move class outside at the suggestion of one of my many visibly irritated students. Our outdoor classes initially meet on the steps of Heinz Chapel. The ruckus of other classes meeting there too, the maintenance crew’s leaf blowers, and tourists viewing the organ’s 4,272 pipes, however, render this space less than ideal. After a week of evacuations prompts a week of classes at the chapel, we relocate to the steps of Carnegie Library. With Dippy the Dinosaur in sight, shaded by sycamores, we discuss student papers and wade through assigned readings. But this location, with its steady flow of library patrons, also proves distracting. We eventually settle at Mazeroski Field, the students sitting in the bleachers along the third-base line. Our patience wearing thin, I attempt to lighten the mood by sharing some of the Tour of Oakland. I show students where Mazeroski’s homerun cleared left field. I tell them that, across the street in the lobby of Posvar Hall, home plate still sits in its original location. It’s where the Babe hit his last homerun. My students feign interest, as do I. We are beaten down. The bleachers aren’t comfortable, we still can’t sit in a circle, but the field is quiet, removed, peaceful. Class is calmer at the little-league diamond—maybe it is an association between baseball and lazy summer days, and the contrast of that with the chaos shrouding campus. As the semester wears on, students notify me via email that their parents, no longer believing campus is safe, have requested they come home. My class of nineteen shrinks to six. Students and teachers speak in hushed tones of the looming anniversaries of Columbine and Virginia Tech, fearful that our bomb threats are culminating toward something grim. Pleading that I hold class online, my father reasons, “If there’s a grizzly in the woods, don’t go into the woods.” At the time, I am reading C. S. Lewis’s The Last Battle, wherein King Tirian, knowing he has no hope of winning the battle awaiting him, charges ahead nonetheless. Lewis presents it as a moment of courage, of bravery. Riding the bus each morning while reading of King Tirian, I begin to see my classroom, 38 m37-39-Sept14-CCC.indd 38 8/13/14 11:18 AM MOE / OF BALLPARKS AND BATTLEFIELDS for better and for worse, as a battlefield. But this battlefield metaphor troubles me, and it prompts questions that linger today: might the act of going to a place be one of defiance, of triumph, of valor, knowing, like King Tirian, that I may face my own death in doing so? Is it mere foolishness? And what is my responsibility to my students—to my family—in continuing to hold class in a location of terror? Unable to answer these questions, yet compelled to continue teaching, I hesitantly finish out the semester at the ballpark. The university rescinds its $50,000 reward in April, and, disturbingly, the bomb threats stop immediately. A resolution, yes, but hardly resolved. The following fall, I gave the Tour of Oakland again to visiting friends. My patter, however, did not focus as heavily on the falcon nest atop the cathedral, on the eleven craftsmen who fashioned the chapel’s woodwork, or on the remnants of Forbes Field’s outfield wall, but rather on how the locations that define my campus became my classrooms for a semester. These places are where I con- struct my identity as scholar, teacher, husband, and human; they inscribe upon me the institutions I interact with daily, and I, in turn, inscribe upon them as well, writing myself into their institutional histories. And when these places of writing are assaulted, our narratives change, the locations and the self both bearing the marks of that violent act, the Tour of Oakland revised accordingly. Peter Wayne Moe Peter Wayne Moe is a doctoral candidate at the University of Pittsburgh, where he teaches first-year writing and introduction to literature courses. His work has appeared in Teaching English in the Two-Year College and Rhetoric Review, and he has pieces forthcoming in ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment; Reader: Essays in Reader-Oriented Theory, Criticism, and Pedagogy; and Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies. 39 m37-39-Sept14-CCC.indd 39 8/13/14 11:18 AM.

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