the eighth question Awhile back, I posed some simple questions in a highly unscientific survey.  The questions related to issues of geographical mobility, a subject which has interested me for a very long time.  I asked quesions I've asked my freshmen students for many years:

1. How many houses have you lived in during your lifetime?
2. How many schools have you attended?
   
3. How many different cities have you lived in during your lifetime?
4. How many different states?
5. How many different countries?
6. How did your various moves effect your life?

Far more readers  shared their experiences with me than I had anticipated.  go back, if you will, to take quick look at the answers, I  Thiik you'll find them interesting too.  Save for the lenght of time during which TPM readers have accumulated experience upon which to base their responses, the responses aren't all that different from thos given by my students.  At the extremes, I've had one student who moved seventeen times in her eighteen years.  At the other, I had one student who had never moved--and not only had she not moved, she was of the fifth generation to live in that house.   But the median number was  somewhere around 8-10 houses in 2-3 cities.  My students are a quite mobile bunch.  The readers who responded were clever (as one might expect of TPM habitues) and broke their respnses down by categories--no two quite the same way, but generally they made a distinction between moves as children and moves as adults and/or types of property intop which they moved--houses, condos, apartments.

I didn't answer my own set of questions over there, and I owe it to everyone to do so now.  I will divide my life into three segments--that in which I lived "at home" (which was defined my my parents--and into her nineties my mom alwas asked when I was coming home), my years in higher education, (BA to Ph. D). and the years since.


My Geographic Footprint while growing up.


From age zero to age 14 most of my life was lived within the area represented on this map.  From the hospital in which I was born, I was taken to live in a small apartment on Cerntral Avenue between 24th and 25th.  It was above Al's Butcher Shop--Al was a member of our church, located on 181/2 and Central Avenue.  I don't remember anything of that apartment--except one "memory" which may have been implanted by mom and dad through stories told when I was older.  These were the days of rationing and conservation during World War II, and I remember being allowed to crush tin cans for recycling--or I think I remember that.  The first move was to 28th and Buchanan St.  Where we lived in an up and down duplex.  I don't know when we moved there, but we were there when Japan surrendered.  I remember being allowed into Mr. Anderson's (the landlord who lived downstairs) car by his teenage son so I could toot the horn.  I was much impressed with horn tooting...it may have begun my musical career.  I have a few memories of that address--Mr. Anderson smoking cigars in the basement and putting the butts in water to make insecticide for his rose bushes, knocking over a plant stand and cutting a little lizard in half on a broken fragement of plant pot (he was a souvenir from the circus)

Then my brother was born, and a noisy baby wasn't in the Anderson's plans.  We moved into my grandparent's house, just south of Lowry on Lincoln, where we stayed until our own house was built in 1948.  That Lincoln Street house was the center point of my world.  My grandparents raised my father and his two sisters in that house, and my great aunts lived in it for short periods of time when they came over from the Old Country.  When the sisters married and moved, they stayed northeast.  One lived on the west side of Benjamin St. just south of 27th Avenue, one just north of 27th St. on Benjamin St.'s east side--about half way down the block..  We Built at 27th and Brighton Street.  And this was my world.  My elementary school was at 23rd Avenue and Hayes st., my Jr. High School at Quincy and 19th.    I learned my President's forward (on the way home) and backward (on my way to) school--having to remember that Quincy was John Quincy Adams and  Ulysses was  Ulysses S Grant. 

When my maternal grandmother died, my aunt sold the family house in South East Minneapolis and built Northeast, between 26th Avenue and Lowry Avenue on Cleveland Street.  My Great Aunt lived just off the  north edge of this map--her son on Stinson Boulevard between 23rd and 24th.  And there was my world up until I was fourteen.  I made sorties into downtown on the number 4 streetcar and later on the number 4 bus.  At 14 I went to a private high school in south Minneapolis, built by the immigrant generation of our Swedish  tribe--and following in the footsteps of my aunt and my father. 

So, phase one, four houses, none of them more than a half dozen blocks from the others.  Two Schools--I migrated to the Jr. High with my  classmates.  In phase two, I added two more cities, Chicago (for college--and campus housing a dorm and a school apartment--do I could those as one or two?) and then Cleveland Ohio for the next 8 years, 1963-1972, where I lived in dormitory accommodations for two years, and then rented an apartment (3 years) and a house (3 years) with two of my grad school chums.  The apartment and the grad school accommodations were about six blocks apart, the house just beyond walking range. 

Phase three (1972-Now) I added yet another state (Rhode Island), and in it five residences within five miles of each other.  I was hired so late that my 30 days notice to my previous employer left me arriving on the same day as the freshmen did.  The college, having promised to find me accomdations, put me up in the dorms.  I stayed there for three years, then moved to double house across the bridge owned by the Dean of tthe College as an investment property, from there to the second floor of a house back on the right side of the bridge (for work)  and from there to a house six blocks closer to the school (I gave my apartment up when I took a year's sabbatical and spent it in Europe).  I wasn't allowed pets in that house, so I moved again to a place where cats were just fine with the landlady.  She grew to old to manage the property (a Mother-in-law house behind her house) sold the property, and tired of  landlords with different ideas of maintenance than mine, I bought my first and only house in 1991.  I'm stll there).
Soi in phase three I lived in one state, and five houses--the longest  residency the current one--not quite 20 years.  In this last phase four of my places to live were within four miles of each other, and none of them more than four miles from my place of work.

An eye-ball glance makes me think I have been less geographically mobile than the majority of TPM readers who took my little survey.   I would have to say that I was probably less mobile than I had intended to be when I popped out of graduate school in 1971.   I had the same kind of career-path dreams that a lot of my peers had--a couple of years at the first job to build up creds, then a second job at a more well-known school and securing of tenure..then a couple of years as  Department Chair, and as I out grew that, a move up to Dean, and who knew, President of a respected University--it it diidn't have ivy already, I could always plant some.  BUT--I discovered I  liked my first job.  I liked my students.  I liked my colleagues, I liked the town and the campus, and they seemed to like me, so I stayed and stayed and stayed.

Welcome to Reloville


"Haynes Park, located one and a half miles from GA 400 on Haynes Bridge Road and less than one mile from downtown Alpharetta.  Set behind a gated entrance, Haynes Park is a quiet enclave that will encompass just 58 luxury townhomes and a landscaped neighborhood park.  Introductory pricing is now available for a limited time. Home prices begin in the high $500s" 

Alpharetta is Kilburn's archetypal reloville.  I had my first student "from" Alpharetta two years ago.  I put the from in quotation marks because it was the most recent place he called home.  If his current history follows his most recent history, he's from someplace else now.

The link in the title above takes one to a video in which Peter T. Kilburn discusses a new kind of global mobility--not the once across the Atlantic jump my grandparents took or the within the tribal district jump my parents too with me in tow, but a more nomadic kind of existence which becomes the life's journey of many members of the managerial class.  Doron Tausig takes a  view of this phenomina which is similar to my own:  critical and cautionary: 

It may not be the best time to bring this up, just when we're all hoping no other sector of the economy proves to be a house of cards, but, well ... we may have another problem with American capitalism. It may be slowly eating away at the traditional concepts of community, place, and the extended family.


* * * *

But the fact that Relos know they'll be relocating also has ramifications for their community engagement: they don't really do it. At church, one pastor tells Kilborn, "nobody knows anybody." And it can be especially hard for a community to develop--by, say, taking on a big public works project--when no one is really committed to staying there.


The Eighth Question.

The issues Kilburn raises and which bother Taurig tend to look at the effect of the new nomadism on the new nomads..  A number of them sound remarkably like comments persons included in their answers to the seventh question in my little poll.  But I have never asked question eight.  I  haven't asked it of the students to date.  I may in the fall term, if I can find a way to bring it in naturally.  Here it is.  It has two parts.


8.  A. 
How big a hole did you leave in the community you left?
    B. 
Based on your response to  8.  A.  how significant are you as a member of a community?  How much difference do you make?



The questions need a little work, but the framework and underlying thesis is reasonably clear, I think.  For most of our history to be called footloose was no compliment.  The myths arising around Daniel Boone and Johnny Appleseed arose not because of the universality of their experiences but because of the uniqueness of them.  Do we have an inalienable moral right to leave friends and family and community behind as if we mattered not a whit?  Or maybe we do matter not a whit. 

My university, like many others, tries to teach students to be civically engaged.  The American Association of Colleges and Universities is deeply involved in the civic engagement movement. Interested readers can find many resources by clicking the above link.  Generally speaking we don't try to teach people what they already know, so it would be fair to argue that if they were civically engaged we'd not put the effort into it we do.  Are we successful?  Hard to tell.  Once they get on the Reloville trail will  they imbed themselves in commuinities they see as only temporary?  I confess to some doubt about this.  I think the kinds of cyber communities we erect instead are palliatives rather than substitutes for the real thing.



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