Sidebar (again)

Sunday included, in addition to color, some old memory-joggers for me. One was the "Wisconsin Concrete Park," in Phillips, WI. I used to travel past this weird collection of cement and glass statuary on my way to and from Northland College on Hwy. 13. Now it's a county park, commemorating the folk art of retired logger Fred Smith (www.phillipswisconsin.net/area.htm).

The real reason for going up 13, though, was to revisit Northland College (though I also took night classes from the University of Puget Sound while in the Army and finished my undergraduate degree from Pacific Lutheran University while auditing graduate courses at Southern Illinois University, I consider Northland College my alma mater) after close to 50 years. I attended three semesters there in 1958-59 and 1960 and have been back only twice since then. 

It's not the sleepy little school I attended! We had about 350 students in a 4-year college, more than half the students worked on campus (I learned to set type by hand in the college print shop) and the student center/gym/snack bar was  a converted chicken coop! But the dorm I lived in the first year is still there (Mead Hall), as are a couple of other buildings that were there 50 years ago (Wheeler Hall, shown, was built in 1892).

Now there are many new buildings and the Sigurd Olson Environmental Institute, which is a major force in Great Lakes studies. tv