Paradise for Misfits

6 paradise for misfits College towns, like the schools located in them, are tran- sient places. Young people come to them to pursue an education and leave once they earn their degrees. For most of the history of American higher education, this model held true for nearly all young people who attended college at residential universities. They went away to college naïve and irre- sponsible, and graduated four years later more mature and self-confident. They moved to cities and suburbs, began careers, got married, and started families. If they ever returned to the college town of their youth, it was to attend football games or alumni gatherings, and remember their college years. You were not supposed to stay in a college town after you graduated. The dynamics of college town life began to change in the 1960s. Col- lege enrollments grew rapidly as the children of the baby boom reached college age. Colleges and universities were forced to expand their faculties, and many of the new professors were more liberal than their predeces- sors, having earned their degrees in an era of war protests and civil rights marches. They influenced their students. College students, meanwhile, looked around them and saw a world in the throes of convulsive change. Heroes were gunned down. Politicians were proven corrupt. Large corpo- rations began to shape life in profound ways. To some young people, the American dream began to look like a nightmare. They started to question the conventional path of career, marriage, and family. Some quit school. Others saw in college towns an opportunity to create alternative ways of life outside the American mainstream. They opened coffee houses and formed rock ’n’ roll bands. They got low-pressure jobs in places like the university library, and worked only when necessary in order to survive. College towns came to offer a permanent escape for a wide variety of eccentrics—artists, musicians, writers, hippies, punks, slackers, tattooed Gen-Xers. Many went away to college with traditional aspirations of becom- ing teachers, lawyers, businessmen, and the like, but were changed in some fundamental way by what they encountered in a college town, abandoned 28081 text 02_rev.indd 189 8/28/08 1:27:48 PM those goals, and remained in the cities where they went to school, or later returned when they discovered they missed the college town life. The college years are widely acknowledged as a rite of passage and a time of indi- vidual awakening, but too often what happens in the classroom is given exclusive credit for this. Away from home for the first time, thrust into communities where young people are dominant, exposed to an eclectic mix of lifestyles and cultures at a time in their lives when they are impres- sionable, some students are changed forever. Often the experiences that trigger such life changes occur not on campus, but in the nightclubs, coffee houses, and roach-infested student apartments so characteristic of small cities with major universities. Life in college towns has the ability to transform young people in ways that have little to do with formal higher education. This is most common in college towns that are home to flagship state universities like Lawrence, Kansas, and Athens, Georgia. Such universities typically have strong programs in the arts and humanities that attract young people who see college as more than just a path to a nine-to-five job. They come into contact with like-minded individuals and, soon, something larger begins to coalesce. They form bands, organize poetry readings, spon- sor film series, hang out, discuss ideas. Eventually creative communities emerge. College towns provide conducive settings for people who wish to follow non-traditional life courses because they offer relatively cheap rents, lots of flexible, low-wage jobs, and a constant influx of new people with new ideas. Some also attract individuals with no formal connection to a university who are drawn to their unusual ways of life. Those who remain in college towns and live unconventional lifestyles are never numerically dominant, but, because many are creative, they shape life in college towns to a degree disproportionate to their numbers. I first recognized the ability of college towns to permanently capture young people who came to them to go to school as an undergraduate at the University of Kansas. There were the “old hippies” who hung out at the Crossing, sixties burnouts who, to our punk rock eyes, had changed little since the student union was torched in 1970. There was Bill Rich, who published a local music fanzine and started a record label. There was James Grauerholz, who moved to New York when he graduated but returned to manage the affairs of beat novelist William Burroughs (and persuaded Bur- roughs to relocate to Lawrence, which says much about the eccentric mag- netism of college towns). There was Steve Wilson, who grew up in town but remained after most of his classmates moved away, still manages a record store three decades later, and refers to Lawrence’s ability to swallow its 190 : paradise for misfits 28081 text 02_rev.indd 190 8/28/08 1:27:48 PM young as “the Wakarusa Triangle” (after a river south of town). There were also people of my generation who remained in town after they stopped going to school, such as Fred Fatzer, who grew up in Kinsley, Kansas, moved to Lawrence to attend KU, dropped out after one semester, but stayed in town for several years working in restaurants and playing in bands. Eventually, he moved to New York, got a record contract, adopted the stage name of Freedy Johnston, and developed a successful music career. Athens (fig. 6.1) is similar to Lawrence in many ways. Both are cultural islands in comparatively conservative states, though the Athens music scene is better known and, in fact, world famous. The people who helped create that scene were originally students in the University of Georgia’s Lamar Dodd School of Art. Music was something they did for kicks when they put down their paintbrushes. Eventually, others became involved. Today, Athens is a bohemian pocket in the South (fig. 6.2). Many of those who have advanced the city’s reputation as a cultural mecca came there to attend college but never left. Members of now famous rock ’n’ roll bands like the B-52’s and R.E.M. did not set out to become pop stars. Such bands were a natural outgrowth of the nurturing environment for experimenta- tion that exists in many college towns. As R.E.M. drummer Bill Berry once remarked, “It’s funny; I came to school to grow up and do something right, but I just said ‘fuck’ it and I threw myself into the band.” 1 Many others fol- lowed similar paths. Over time, Athens became, in the words of one writer, “a paradise for misfits.” 2 College towns all over are home to creative individuals who found their place in a college town. Like Athens, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, became nationally known for its music scene, thanks to the success of bands like Su- perchunk and the presence of independent labels such as Merge Records. Iowa City and Missoula, Montana, have acquired reputations as literary en- claves, developments stimulated initially by the presence of creative writing programs on campus, but over time both cities have developed writing scenes that have a life beyond the university. College towns such as Char- lottesville, Virginia, and Boulder, Colorado, have developed vibrant visual arts scenes. Several of the activists who helped transform Davis, Califor- nia, into a liberal college town came to the city to go to college and stayed. Many other college towns are home to loose collections of eccentric and free-thinking individuals who may be unknown outside the area or region, but nonetheless inject vitality into a community.3 To examine why some young people who go away to college never leave or return to the towns where they went to school, and to consider how it is that certain college towns develop into bohemian islands, this chapter paradise for misfits : 191 28081 text 02_rev.indd 191 8/28/08 1:27:48 PM figure 6.1. Central Athens. Map by the author. 28081 text 02_rev.indd 192 8/28/08 1:27:49 PM figure 6.2. will profile six individuals who came to Athens to attend the University of Sidewalk scene on College Avenue Georgia but now call the city home, plus one who was drawn by the city’s in downtown music scene. These individuals were chosen from a longer list of nineteen Athens, epicenter people I interviewed in depth who came to Athens to attend college but of the college stayed—captivated by its verve, openness, and free-spirited lifestyle—or town’s alternative community. moved there for similar reasons. There are many more people in Athens 4 Photograph by the who fit that description. author, 1999. changeful times Athens was a very different place when Pete McCommons, editor and pub- lisher of the alternative weekly Flagpole, enrolled at the University of Georgia in 1958. McCommons (fig. 6.3) grew up in the small town of Greensboro, Georgia, a cotton mill town thirty-four miles south of Athens. He had been coming to Athens since he was four years old, when his parents drove him up Highway 15 to have his tonsils removed. His family occasionally went to Athens for Georgia football games. During his four years in college, how- ever, McCommons seldom ventured into the town. “Athens hardly existed for me a student,” he later recalled.

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