I had found New Orleans and Jackson surprisingly easy to drive in. Kansas City was quite the opposite. I never got anywhere close to downtown, and I don't think I ever want to. The song may say that "everything's up to date in Kansas City", but their roads are truly archaic. ...
I stayed at the Super 8 in Lexena, Kansas. Lexena is one of those places that basically didn't exist twenty years ago. Today its main purpose for existence is to be the main distribution center for the J.C. Penney catalog. ...
Lexena is adjacent to Overland Park, perhaps the most "typical" suburb in America. Years ago public TV did a documentary on shopping malls and chose as its model the Overland Park Mall. The mall was just three blocks (and an enormous parking lot) from the Super 8. I killed some time there. It could have been the clone of Burnsville Center in Minneapolis or The Empire in Sioux Fals. There was absolutely nothing to give it any kind of personality or interest. That's probably why the TV people chose it; it's about as generic of a mall as you can get.
* * * * *
I drove all around Overland Park looking for somewhere interesting to eat. Everywhere seemed either too upscale or too crowded or both. I ended up settling on a trendy Italian place with a cutesy name I don't remember now (and it's probably for the best). The homemade pasta was excellent, but their sauce tasted like Chef Boy-ar-dee. Any spice at all would have helped it.
* * * * *
Saturday, August 10, 1991
Lexena, Kansas -- Algona, Iowa
I left Lexena around 7:00am, drove around the beltway, ... and headed west on the Kansas Turnpike. I don't know how many times as a child we headed west across Kansas and my father took a miserable old highway (U.S. 24) to avoid paying the toll. The toll was steep, but I enjoyed driving on a pleasant highway.
I stopped briefly at a service center by Lawrence, where I had breakfast at a Hardees. Enormous signs here thanked Hardees for maintaining its restrooms at the service area. Because of budget cuts, Kansas has closed all of the rest areas on its non-toll interstates. These would probably be closed, too, if there weren't money to be made from burgers and biscuits.
* * * * *
I took U.S. 75 north from Topeka into Nebraska. (If you look at a map, you'll see that by following my whims, I ended up making the mark of Zorro across Kansas.) I then turned onto state highway 4 and headed westward to Beatrice (bee-AT-rus). I stopped at Homestead National Monument, west of Beatrice, where the first land field under the Homestead Act was claimed over a century ago. They have a very interesting museum on pioneer times, a very dull recreation of a log cabin, and a wonderful system of trails through the prairie grass. The trails are modern, but even so you get the feeling of what things must have been like when the early settlers crossed this sea of grass. I spent nearly two hours hiking through the park.
... I followed the west bank of the Missouri River north to Blair and crossed on a rickety old bridge ... into Iowa.
I stopped for about an hour at DeSoto National Wildlife Refuge. The claim to fame here is a sunken steamboat that didn't make the bend in the Missouri. They dug it up a few years back and have an excellent museum showing everything they found. More interesting to me, though, are their nature trails--which wind through forest, swamp, and prairie. The bugs were horrible, but I enjoyed the hike nonetheless.
* * * * *
I headed up highway 30 to Carroll and Jefferson and then took some sideroads to Fort Dodge. There I got on highway 169, which was much more familiar here than in Oklahoma, and headed back home.
There was major flooding in the farmland around Algona when I left, and down by St. Joe everything was still flooded now. A lot of crops had never been planted; I don't know when I've seen more grazing land in Iowa.
It was late afternoon when I got back into town. ... I drove around Algona a bit--out past St. Cecelia's, where mass was just getting out, and then out by Garrigan/ It seemed as if I had been gone an eternity, and it was reassuring to see that Algona was pretty much the same. As I went around I ran into Cory Buscher and Molly White, who were out riding bikes. Cory waved and shouted a friendly greeting--a bit different than the rude treatment I had while I was exploring Hattiesburg.
* * * * *
SUMMER, 1992 (The Sequel)
* * * * *
SATURDAY, MAY 30, 1992
Algona, Iowa -- Sikeston, Missouri
This was a weird winter in Iowa, and we missed a lot of days of school due to snow. To keep things so we would finish at a reasonable time, the faculty decided to make up the last of the snow days today--on a Saturday. Because I had to be in Mississippi tomorrow afternoon, I arranged ... to give my finals early, turn in my grades, and thus be excused from this Saturday make-up day. I felt both smug and guilty as I set off down the road around 6:00, knowing my co-workers would still be in school later in the day.
I drove down Highway 169 south of Algona. Around Humboldt I passed a car driven by Norm Kunkel. Norm is Garrigan's new librarian, and after hearing of my experiences in Mississippi, he decided to give the USM summer program a try himself. It was good to know that this summer there would be a face from home amid all the strangers in Hattiesburg.
* * * * *
I stopped for lunch in Mount Pleasant. They had just opened a new McDonalds (long overdue in a growing little city), and they hadn't even finished paving the parking lot yet. I was most unimpressed with the new McD's. Fast food places thed to be pretty generic, but this took things to the extreme. ... McDonald's passed on any kind of decor. ... All you see is blue and yellow plastic--everywhere. The place is huge, yet it came across as crowded, and the people who worked there seemed mechanical. I'm sure McD's will prosper, but the next time I'm down in Mt. Pleasant, I'll go elsewhere.
* * * * *
I headed east on Highway 34 from Mt. Pleasant, a route that took me back to high school, when I drove down to Burlington I don't know how many times. I paid my dime (that's still the toll), and crossed the Mississippi on the ancient Burlington bridge. They're building a new bridge, which will carry the new expressway across the river, but it wasn't due to open until 1993. (Since I'm writing this in '93, I can say that ... it didn't open on schedule. When all the flooding hit the Mississippi, ... it was the old Burlington bridge that ended up closing.)
Highway 34 decays to a well-worn cement track in Illinois, but I made my way across it to Galesburg. There I got on Interstate 74, which I followed eastward (or southward--the signs keep changing ...) ... to ... Champaign. There I picked up I-57 to head southward toward Memphis.
I-57 is one of the dullest roads in America, and I joined everybody else as I shot down it at breakneck speed. ... There was virtually no traffic, and absolutely no police--which surprised me on a weekend. It might be, though, that they all racked up overtime over Memorial Day and were thus off this weekend. ...
* * * * *
It was getting late when I reached Cairo (KAY-row), clear at the southern tip of Illinois, where the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers meet. Two years ago, on my first trip to Dixie, I had stopped at a Dairy Queen in Cairo, where I bought a pecan parline blizzard--a flavor that doesn't seem to be available anywhere else. It was suppertime (actually well past suppertime), so I pulled off at Exit 1 and stopped at Dairy Queen to eat. I had some discusting Mexican food and some cold coffee that was full of sediment. They still had those pecan praline blizzards, though, and that made for a teriffic meal.
I re-crossed the Mississippi into Missouri. ... Then I went onward a few more miles to Skieston, the chief business center of southern Missouri's boothill region. ... It was getting late (around nine) when I reached Sikeston, but my room was waiting for me. ... I found out later that Norm (who had taken a completely different route, crossing Missouri on two-lanes) had stayed in Cape Girardeau last night. Cape Girardeau is about 30 miles north of Sikeston, and he reached there about the same time I pulled in for the night.
SUNDAY, MAY 31, 1992
Sikeston, Missouri -- Hattiesburg, Mississippi
I got up early this morning and headed straight down I-55. ... There was construction in southern Missouri, but the traffic was light so it was no problem. ... I stopped for breakfast in Osceola, Arkansas. It was a lovely McDonalds full of pleasant people--with some of the slowest service I've seen anywhere. Nearly half an hour later I was again on the road.
It's much less than a hundred miles across this hunk of Arkansas, and before long I crossed the Mississippi one more time, entering Memphis Tennessee. I-55 had some serious construction in Memphis. Fortunately it was still early Sunday morning, and with light traffic I had no problems. I found out later that Norm (who was just a bit behind me) slowed to a crawl all through Memphis.
* * * * *
I said before that I-57 in Illinois was boring. So is absolutely every four-lane in Mississippi. (The only exception I can think of is the almost mountainous section of I-20 between Jackson and Vicksburg.) I was on auto-pilot driving this morning, which probably wasn't wise on a road I'd never driven before. Fortunately, traffic remained light, and I had no problems getting to Jackson.
It's always good to know your way around a city. Having been to Jackson several times last summer, I knew how to avoid a bunch of awkward intersections that traffic is supposed to take to get from I-55 to the Hattiesburg interchange. Instead of battling a mess of spaghetti, I took the Jackson beltway west of the city and came back east on I-20--which has an easy exit for Hattiesburg.
The final lef of the trip was to follow U.S. 49, an ancient four-lane tunnel through the forest between Jackson and Hattiesburg. I made it to USM around 1:00pm, but I still felt like I was driving for hours after that.
I walked into the lobby of Wilber Hall (the same high-rise dorm I was in the previous summer) and was delighted to see many of the same faces I remembered from before. I quickly found some old friends, and we chatted and got caught up as we checked in. Then I went to my room (#316, the same as last year), unpacked my stuff, and got moved in.
There was one big change at the dorm from last summer. They had installed a new security system, so now it was harder to get into the building. I used to frequently come and go via a fire escape, which was closer to the buildings where my classes were than either of the two main doors. With the new system the fire doors were always locked and alarmed. You had to enter at a main door, and then there were special precautions. They gave you a special card with a magnetic strip on it. You had to swipe the card through a reader and enter a four-digit code to gain admission. The system mostly worked, but it had its flaws--especially when you were trying to lug baskets back and forth from the laundromat. Whenever that was a problem, though, there was usually someone going out who was more than willing to hold the door for you. That may defeat the purpose of the system, but it worked. I wondered about the need for this extra security, and during the summer I found nothing that made me feel any less safe than I was before--if anything the area seemed safer. (Norm tells me, however, that that changed in 1993. Apparently they had a big wave of crime, and he really appreciated the security system in his second year down at USM.)
Norm showed up about the time I finished unpacking. He was upset at check-in to learn that, due to a mistake, he had been assigned to a double room. This was the first of many goof-ups that was to plague Norm. He decided he could live with a roommate (especially since it was cheaper that way, so he took what they gave him.
After Norm got settled, we went to register. This was all routine to me (having done all of it before), but the endless bureaucracy that USM does so well really floored Norm. I learned quickly that everyone in Hattiesburg is polite, but whatever you need done is never the job of the person you are asking. It's your job to learn whose job it is and make sure you do the right things in the right order to get everything done.
Everything seemed to go wrong for Norm. There was confusion as to exactly what program he was being enrolled in. Classes he had been told he could take were not being offerred that summer. They had his address incorrect. The financial people goofed up his money numerous times. Without his finances in order, they wouldn't let him register, and without a complete registration, the financial aid people wanted to ignore him. It was also clear that Norm didn't care much for Mississippi. The South certainly has its quirks (as you've no doubt read in these pages before), and virtually all of them seemed to rub Norm the wrong way.
In some ways it was fun to show Norm the ropes. I've never really been in that position before, and I enjoyed it. Eventually we got the confusion down to a tolerable level, and it was time for the year to begin.
SUMMER TERM (JUNE 1 -- AUGUST 2, 1992)
On the whole I liked this summer in Hattiesburg much better than the previous year--and I didn't dislike things then. First, I knew what was expected and what was going on now, which always helps. I also had lots of friends I had met last year, and I met a number of new friends this summer a swell. Finally, I enjoyed having Norm down in Hattiesburg. We often ate lunch and dinner together, and one of us could always call the other if we were looking for something to do. ...
Overall things were very similar to last year, so I'll avoid rambling on forever about all the details of daily life this time. I will highlight what was unique about this particular summer, however.
I will mention the classes I took. First there was "Topics in Algebra" with Dr. Gary Walls. This was basically a continuation of the "Number Theory" course I took the previous summer. In fact, we used the exact same book--which helped save a bit of money. The class met Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at 8:00am. ... Like "Number Theory", it was one of the hardest classes I've ever taken in my life. We had big assignments due every week, and I was always spending my spare time ... trying and trying to get everything to work out. The "Topics" tests were extremely difficult. In fact, I got the worst grade I've ever gotten in my life on one of the chapter tests (57%--which by his unique grading scale worked out to be in the C-/D+ range). I worked my behind off, however, and in the end I got the "A" I deserved.
My other major math class was "Graph Theory", taught by Dr. Porter Webster. It met Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at 10:00. When I started the first day of class, I thought I was in over my head. The terminology didn't make any sense, and the book might as well have been written in a foreign language. Before long, though, I realized that the book was basically irrelevant to the course, and if I just paid attention in class, I understood things perfectly. There were both graduates and undergrads in the class, with a wide variety of ability. I think that helped, because Dr. Webster made it appear as if he had to talk down to the undergrads. I definitely reaped the benefits of that. There were quizzes everyday in that class, and three major tests. When everything was said and done, I ended up with 100%.
There was also a "class" (quotation marks intentional) called "Math for Inservice Secondary Teachers II". This was just a continuation of a course I took in '91. You've already read about the dull ramblings of "Dr. Sominex"; nothing has changed. The course met at 10:00 on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and boy was it boring.
I had two education courses, both of which met at night. Monday nights I had "The Secondary School" (or something to that effect) with one of the profs. I had had in '91. This was basically a curriculum development course, and ... we had some interesting discussions contrasting the trends in different parts of the country.
It's interesting that we did curriculum development in "Secondary School", but the course called "Basic Course in Curriculum Development" included very little curriculum in it. It was pretty much the same as the "Schools in American Society" course I took as an undergrad at UNI. We traced the history of education and looked at a variety of current problems (especially legal issues--the class was designed mostly for administrators). Curriculum was mostly a side issue, although it was the subject of the main paper I had to complete for graduation. The class met Tuesday nights with Dr. Johnny Purvis, a man who spoke with that hesistant Southern accent that makes you think of Jimmy Carter (and kind of looked like him too). He had grown up as poor white trash in Baton Rouge, educated himself on a football scholarship, and raised himself to the point where today he is president of the school board in Oak Grove, a prestigious suburb of Hattiesburg. I think what I respected most about him is that when we wrote things for assignments, he actually read them--he read and remembered every word.
Entertainment was similar to last year. My two best friends from before were also back to finish up their master's degrees. ... We socialized with one another frequently. The first weekend at school a group of other friends joined us to see the movie "Patriot Games" (baout IRA terrorism). Like last summer, we attended two dinner theatre productions at a Bible college across town. This summer they presented "The Apple Tree", a spoof on the story of Adam and Eve that was perfectly tame but seemed a bit risque for the Baptists and "Encore", a musical journey across America. Various groups of us also attended three delightful shows as part of the USM Summer Theatre. We also visited New Orleans together, and one weekend Sandra and I made a trip up to Jackson, Vicksburg, and the Delta.
We also spent quite a bit of time at Cuco's, a Mexican restaurant and bar near the USM campus. ... You'll recall our favorite bartender, Scot Galante, a young married student from Florida. At the end of the summer in '91, we said a rousing good-bye to Scott, and he wrote out a coupon offerring us a free round of drinks when we returned to Hattiesburg, but only if we offerred to pay in nickels. I had been saving the coupon and a bunch of nickels ever since. When Sandra, Roy, and I walked into Cuco's, Scott recognized us immediately. When we actually presented the coupon and the nickels, not only did we get a free round of drinks, but a whole evening of food and drink on the house. Scott had been promoted to bar manager, and he was exercising his authority. We ended up leaving all those nickels as a tip--they added up to more than the appropriate amount.
CONTINUED IN PART EIGHT
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