Last week a driving trip to visit an alumnus in Nashville, Tennessee afforded me the opportunity to make a side trip to one of my favorite places in the world — the bustling hamlet of Princeton, Kentucky, population 6,500 or so. Princeton sits just a few miles off Interstate 24, about 50 miles east of Paducah, and it was home to my mother’s mom and dad for as long
as I can remember until their deaths in 1997. It had been years since I was last in Princeton, and I decided to take an hour or two to visit my grandparents’ grave site, drive by their old house, and treat myself to some country ham at Newsom’s Old Mill Store on Main Street.
Ninety per cent of my Princeton memories are set in my grandparents’ house, and the other ten per cent are bounded by the four-block walk “uptown” and Main Street. For as small a town as it is and as fond as my memories of it are, I realize that I really know very little about it. I had to ask directions to the city cemetery, which is all of six blocks from the town square; I even used Mapquest to remind myself of the highways to take in and out of town. I don’t know anyone there to speak to, though I’m sure there are people who still remember my grandparents. Yet I continue to have a strong sense of attachment to this place. I never lived there, yet it is part of where I am from.
Driving past my grandparents’ old house I noticed it was for sale, and peeking in the windows I saw the current owners were making some major renovations. I took pictures with my camera phone and the next day posted them to the web for my mom, siblings, and cousins to see, and we have had a great time reminiscing via email. So much of our common histories are tied to this small town and the house on Jefferson Street.
Much of the heritage on both my parents’ sides of the family is Scots-Irish, and as it happens this summer I’ve been reading Virginia Senator Jim Webb’s book, Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America. This history, like a walk down Princeton’s Main Street, gives me a sense of being “from” places that I don’t really know but would like to claim, particularly since in making the Ozarks my home I have continued to shadow the continued Scots-Irish migration beyond my parents’ roots in Western Kentucky.
I have similar feelings toward Missouri State University. I feel like I am “from” here, yet sometimes I also feel like someone’s middle-aged grandson walking around a town that I remember but do not really know, a place that I claim but where no one on the street would know who I am.
My mother’s memories of Princeton are much more numerous and intimate than mine; in fact, I imagine the Princeton I conjure in my mind is quite different than what she would describe. But she has told me more than once this past week how much it meant to her that I took the time to go back there and reconnect with places that still touch her deeply. It is as if the desire to share the same history serves us as much if not more than any actual sharing.
Perhaps that also describes my feelings toward Missouri State University. My ancestors did not settle Springfield; my parents did not attend college here; and it can be difficult to connect the dots joining a small normal school and an ambitious comprehensive university. Nevertheless, this is my place, and the desire to feel a part of it tugs at me continuously.
I marvel at the number of colleagues who have been here 25, 30 years and longer. I imagine they marvel at the magnitude of change and growth that has occurred in that time, and I would not blame them for occasionally becoming irritated with the impatience and ignorance of many of us newcomers. (And although I have been here since 1991, I still feel like a newcomer in many ways.)
In a few short weeks our campus sidewalks — not to mention the parking lots — will be full again, and among the crowds will be around 4,000 new students and several dozen new faculty and staff. How many of them will come to feel not just “at home” here, but that they are “from here”? How will you and I help cultivate that sense of belonging? And what if we’re not quite sure we have experienced it ourselves?
We can’t go back to times and places where we have never been, but we can appreciate that we have stepped into a flow of history where we have much to share with those who came before us and those who will succeed us. Here are a few modest suggestions for connecting the present with our past.
- If you are a relative newcomer to campus, buy a senior colleague a cup of coffee in exchange for a few stories about what the place was like when he/she first came here. If you’ve been around a while, offer to buy a rookie lunch if he/she will let you go on for a while about the history of the institution.
- Sift through the “Of Local Interest” sections of your favorite Springfield bookstores.
- Browse through Don Landon’s book, Daring to Excel: The First 100 Years of Southwest Missouri State University or Roy Ellis’ Shrine of the Ozarks: A History of Southwest Missouri State College 1905-1965, both available in Meyer Library.
- Visit the Wall of Fame on the third floor of Plaster Student Union.
- Check out the several digitized special collections focusing on historical aspects of the university and the region.
- Attend the annual Ozarks Celebration Festival, September 5-11, featuring traditional Ozarks music and other arts as well as presentations by authors and scholars about the region.
- Check out the Springfield-Greene County Library’s online exhibit of historical postcards of Springfield.
- Pay a visit to the History Museum for Springfield-Greene County.
- Catch an episode (or two!) of Ozarks Watch Video Magazine on Ozarks Public Television.
We do not all share the same experiences of Missouri State University, but we can share the same desire to connect with the institution and with one another. We may not have “grown up” here, but we can lay claim to being “from here.” We may have limited understanding of the entire university or its history, but we can be powerfully affected by those areas that we have touched. Most of all, we can become part of a place to which people return to appreciate the formative experiences they had here.
