Jack R. Westbrook

Gone ten years now, my mom continues to bestow gifts on me. Yesterday I went through several brown paper grocery bags filled with books that I found deep in a closet. In them I found a cache of her original textbooks, tattered and yellowing, mostly literature, many of them annotated in her handwriting, from the mid-1930s when she was a student at Central State Teachers College, now CMU. Among other favorite books, many of them decades old, I found this one, printed in 2007 by Arcadia Publishing, CENTRAL MICHIGAN UNIVERSITY: THE CAMPUS HISTORY SERIES, by Jack R. Westbrook. Like other Arcadia offerings, it is a "pictorial history," with many photos and maps and minimal accompanying text. I spent an entire afternoon and evening reading this fascinating little illustrated history CMU, where I was a student from 1967 to 1970. I married that first year, and our first son was born in 1969. And of course my mom was a student there, 1932-1936. (See her impressions of college life and falling in love during the Great Depression in her own book, DAISY: PIECES OF A LFE, by Daisy Whalen-Bazzett.)

Westbrook traces the school's history, from its humble beginnings in 1892 with only a few dozen students in some upstairs rooms over a drugstore in downtown Mount Pleasant, to its current-day size of over 25,000 students on a sprawling, modern campus. I was especially interested in the photos and thumbnail bio sketches of the early faculty and administrators at the college, as many of them were Mom's teachers and mentors, and she wrote about them in her letters to my dad. And she loved her life in the original Ronan Hall, and knew personally Bertha Ronan, who was the Dean of Women, as well as Anna Barnard, her Latin Teacher, and E.C. Beck ran the English Department. In fact, Mom knew many of the folks who have dorms and various other buildings bearing their names now at CMU. And Wariner Hall? Well, E.C. Wariner, who was President during Mom's years there, signed all four of her yearbooks, with his signature inscription, "Forward!"

And I scrutinized later aerial photos of the campus, looking for our first apartment at the corner of Fancher and Bellows (the street which forms the northern edge of campus), and Washington Courts married housing, where we lived our last two years (all of them now gone, demolished). There were, however, clear images of Northwest Apartments, another married housing complex brand new in 1967, where some of our closest friends resided. And those still remain as low cost student housing.

And pictures of William Boyd, the new, progressive CMU president in 1968, who weathered the Vietnam war protests, and even joined the candlelight march with students and townspeople, and dealt calmly with the takeover of the ROTC building. I only vaguely remember these events. I had already done my time with the Army, and was too busy dealing with a heavy class load, with a wife and new baby, working nights, loading and unloading trucks for UPS.

Anyway, you get the picture. Because of my mom's and my own experiences at Central, I loved this little book, was totally caught up in its photos and stories. Very, very highly recommended, especially for CMU alums. Oh, and P.S. Another very good book about CMU is Robert Knapp's COMMUNITY OF LEARNING, HISTORY AND MEMORIES: THE LABORATORY SCHOOL, CENTRAL MICHIGAN UNIVERSITY, 1895-1970. (And, just as a footnote, my mom witnessed the fire that destroyed the original Lab School in 1933, watching it out her dorm window with her friends.)

- Tim Bazzett, author of the memoir, BOOKLOVER… (más)