James Spellerberg – 50th Reunion Essay

James Spellerberg

123 Lansdale Ave.

Fairfax, CA 94930

jimspellerberg@aya.yale.edu

415 459-6260

Spouse(s): Susan Lundy

Child(ren): Gregory

Education: UNC-Chapel Hill, U of Iowa (PhD)

Career: Asst Prof Ohio State U; motion picture advertising; software development and design

College: Berkeley

After 50 years, a deadline looming, another Yale paper due!

Yale was not a formative experience for me. I was 16 when I first visited campus, the guest of the brother of a fellow senior at my high school. We drank a little at his fraternity, then wandered around the campus on a cool, drizzly fall night. The lights, haloed by my mild inebriation and mild myopia, glowed off the wet stones like Paris in a movie, and I decided then that I wanted to go to Yale.

I think now that I was too young to form an attachment to Yale. When I matriculated, my reading and writing skills were already formed, thanks to two extraordinary high school teachers. As it was, Yale gave me the time and opportunity to read more widely and sample different disciplines. I lost my interest in chemistry when it became quantum mechanics, and lost my way in calculus when the instructor lacked English. But there were anthropology, philosophy, religion, architecture, and other subjects I explored. Outside the curriculum, my brilliant peers gave me the opportunity to learn about film, especially American film.

In the absence of an emotional attachment to the university, I have only fragmentary memories: The excellent food in the dining hall. The freezing trudge up the hill to German class on dark February mornings. Late-night conversations in the suites. Falling asleep mid-sentence while handwriting a paper, waking to a mental blank on where the sentence was going, and heading off in a different direction to complete the assignment—a pinch of automatic writing to spice up academic rigor. Road trips. Yale Film Society (and the scorned Law School Film Society). The mostly unlocked campus with friendly campus cops. The stacks. Yale warning the freshmen about Gundelfinger’s strange ideas in his mailings, yet taking eugenics-inspired posture photos of us. A hatchet mark in the paneling in our living room. The Hallelujah Chorus blaring from a window when Johnson announced he wouldn’t pursue re-election. Janis Joplin at Woolsey Hall. Going from shirt and tie at meals as a freshman to co-ed classes as a senior.

Several years later, on another campus in another part of the country, I did have the epiphany that I missed at Yale. On a clear, warm midnight in February, standing on a flagstone path lit by lamps (like Yale’s) and a bright moon, surrounded by trees filled with fragrant white flowers, I realized how much more world there was beyond the one I grew up in. I knew I would never return to live in the northeast. I went on to meet my wife, get a doctorate and teach at yet another university. We moved again and we had our son. My wife founded her own business and I had several careers.

But Yale is a fine place to visit with old friends.