FIFTY YEARS OF REFLECTION ON FOUR YEARS AT WILLIAMS COLLEGE

By Jeffrey Bowen’67

My wife Hillary and I are nearing our fiftieth wedding anniversary.  Our son Seth (40), and daughter Carrie (42), are both happily married and we have two sweet adolescent grandchildren, Sam and Willow.   I owe Williams a good deal of credit because all this started when I met and fell in love with Hillary Warner in my junior year. 

 She became a wonderful feature of my college life, really at times a relief from its academic stress. We married in 1967 after her many visits to the campus from miles away.  In fact, on a snowbound weekend in December 1967, we spent our honeymoon (between term papers at John Hopkins) at the Williams Inn.  I can still see us skating around the Williams hockey rink amid the flakes.  Just the two of us.  It was magic.

At Williams I learned how to research, write, and think across a broad liberal arts spectrum of coursework in American Civilization.  I enjoyed writing about unusual topics.  Most provocative and fun was my culminating senior honors seminar paper (encouraged by Professor Fred Rudolph) titled, “Party Women, Party Weekends at Williams College.”  To complete this paper, I sifted through reams of Williamsiana stored in a little room behind the main desk at the Stetson library, interviewed a houseparty queen from the 1920s who lived nearby, and corresponded with alums who had seen the first cars to arrive on campus.   This was more than an academic paper.  It was an adventure.  I called myself a social historian and declared at the outset, “I have treated extensively a confounding, nebulous subject – women and man’s thoughts about women – as a means of showing how houseparties and their implicit moral tones have evolved.  Nearly every word I utter about women is biased.”  So true.  

Other courses still live in my present.  Thanks to American Art and Architecture professor Whitney Stoddard, whenever we arrive in a community, I put labels on the architecture.  Also, by assigning us the task of building plans for a summer vacation house on an actual plot, he inspired the handicraft triumph of my life.    

War and American Society with Professor Zilversmit highlighted the history of America’s conceptions of collective security.  The course occurred simultaneously with our developing entanglement in Vietnam.   After four years in the USAF, with a tour in Vietnam, I have come to realize that we baby boomers live chronically in the presence of war and the absence of peace.  We constantly retrofit national security to justify our needs.

Music offered a buffering, fun-filled experience at Williams, partly because my trombone always led the marching band down Spring Street.  To this day I marvel at the precision of large university marching bands.  Too bad they never have learned the superior famous scatter formation of the Williams marching band, directed by our forgiving conductors Irwin Shainman and Fran Cardillo.  

My years at Williams were a powerful launching pad.  They propelled me toward married life eventually in a healthy rural environment in rural western New York.  They led me to a professional career in public education.  Thus I spent 20 years as director of research for the New York State School Boards Association. They encouraged me to embrace the dynamics of American politics embodied locally in school boards.  Thus I served as a school district executive for many years.  The gorgeous setting of the college enabled me to appreciate beauty in writing, photos, and music.  I still pursue all three.

My time at Williams nurtured an understanding of the word community.  American history and democracy are anchored on the bedrock of small-town community life.  Hillary and I, both retired superintendents of schools in adjoining rural districts, have realized that community is self-renewing.  Now we have the space, time, and choices to create new and different variations around it.  Never do I forget how much of my destiny was shaped by sitting across from Mark Hopkins on the end of a log.       

  JMB1016