Where WTF? Meets A-Ha! Part 2 — Nowsliding the Rockbridge Open

Story #2: Old Man Jim, Age: 65 or so

Of late and motivated by my post-cancer “now or never” enthusiasm, I’ve been doing some DIY Personal Cultural Heritage Preservation. That’s an elaborate way of saying that I was doing a bit of creative writing that included scanning of forgotten personal photos and documents.

Of course, as Nowviskie, Drucker, and their Temporal Modelling Project collaborators remind us — see part 1 of these Nowsliding Tales for context — the simple act of remembering and thinking about these distant times, places, and events during this activity would subject me to the noncorporeal Time Travel experience of nowsliding.

As my “now” slid easily from fleeting memory to memory, I experienced how dormant personal memories have a way of moving to “long-term storage and retrieval” in “topical boxes” rather than their remaining at easy access by strict chronology. Through this experience-filtering process, our personal memories may become so compartmentalized that we need an embarrassing facepalm-worthy triggering event to reveal the critical connections between separately-siloed memories of key events in our lives.

The A-Ha! Moment that led to my realization of uncharted memory connections came during my recent work on two stories as part of the W&L Tall Tales publication. I had this insight-triggering moment while preserving and reflecting on my undergraduate experience at Washington & Lee University in the early 1970s — a time that was both post-Woodstock and post-Four-Dead-In-Ohio.

For context, let’s take a look at the scale of Old Man Jim’s lifetime compared to my 10-year-old Lil’ Jimmie:

The two stories I had worked on and that led to my nowslide-induced insights were as different as night and day. The first was a truly tall tale about the ill-fated and prankster-driven Rockbridge Open: “Fear, Loathing & Croquet in Post-Woodstock Lexington, Virginia”. The second was a W&L-focused trip back to the tumultuous days following our Four Dead In Ohio Moment after the Kent State Massacre at the start of the great Student Strike of 1970: “How Gentlemen Do Revolution.”

In my mind these Lived Experience Events were remembered as distinctly different as they could possibly be:

The intense and emotionally-charged terms associated with the “tragedy” box of my diagram above are the result of my having gone home to Baltimore after we shut down W&L. For roughly six weeks or so, I was what the Press of the day would call “an outside agitator” working with my fellow students to help close Baltimore and Washington area universities, colleges, and community colleges.

The easy-going, creative fun terms associated with the “comedy” box of my diagram are due to my having left Baltimore in mid-June to return to W&L campus. I was able to return to Lexington because I was awarded a Robert E. Lee Research Fellowship. This enabled me to work the Summer as a research assistant in the lab of a member of the Psychology department. That was my “day job.” At all other times, we met to play croquet and party, ergo the obligatory “sex, drugs, and rock’n’roll” encapsulation of the early ’70s experience under the comedy box.

Even though I’ve described the chronological relationship between these personal events that went into their respective boxes in the diagram above, once these memories were stowed topically, this chronology was forgotten.

Separate and distinct is how these events might have stayed. But I was creating a “Ground Truth” version of the Special Edition issue of the W&L student newspaper for the “How Gentlemen Do Revolution” story. I had to painstakingly inspect and correct all the text of this special issue of the Ring-tum Phi.

During what can often be the mind-numbing, detailed task of correcting OCR text, this sentence came up and I had to correct Fran Lawrence’s name:

“The purpose of this ad hoc committee,” said Fran Lawrence, president-elect of the student body, “is to have an open discussion about what we want the faculty to do about suspension of classes.”

For whatever serendipitous reason, seeing Fran’s name triggered a cascade of memories and their interconnections. These refreshed memories and their long-dormant interconnections brought the facepalming flush of insights that I can describe to you now.

The Things I Learned While Nowsliding the Summer of 1970

Seeing Fran’s name while doing the “Revolution” piece restored the chronological context of these two topically-distinct memories.

When I scanned the Rockbridge Open “memory book” and wrote the “Croquet” piece, the memories jogged and revisited were all in the context of the Ken Keyseyian “pranksterish” nature of the times. When having fun and poking fun by making folks’ nervous was a form of change-inducing social action.

If you skim the “Croquet” article you will see all kinds of ways we pushed the envelope of “Go Big or Go Home” bravado when it came to envisioning and promoting the Open. The “Fran Lawrence” I knew in this context was my new hippy-student buddy who was the Ringleader of the whole shenanigans that evolved into the ill-fated “socio-performance art” piece that was the Rockbridge Open.

When I text-corrected Fran’s name while doing the “Revolution” piece, the facepalming trigger that restored the chronological connections between these significant events was essentially this insight: Ringleader-Hippy Fran of the comedic Rockbridge Open had been Ringleader-Student-President-elect Fran Lawrence that emotion-charged day in May when he led the emergency All Students Assembly on the lawn of the historic W&L colonnade!?

That fateful day in May, I was a freshman and only knew Fran in passing and as the upperclassman running for student government. It was the summer research fellowship that gave me the unique opportunity to forge a number of upperclassmen friendships that summer which would dramatically impact the trajectory of my experience at Washington & Lee.

With the “two-Frans” puzzle pieces slipping into place, that warming facepalm insight led almost immediately to my revisiting the way I had read and interpreted the Rockbridge Open “memory book” materials. As I understand it, this context-shifting memory-moving “stuff” is all the grist of what Bethany Nowviskie and the Temporal Modelling Project folks explore through their nowsliding research.

I’ll show you a couple quick examples of my “nowslide-reinterpretation” of material from the Rockbridge Open “Croquet” story. I’ll start with the most obvious “zinger” which is found right in the Charter of the Transcontinental Croquet Association:

Obviously there was something less deadly than lead in the drinking water in Lexington during the Summer of 1970 as this Charter evokes. The optional dedication of the TCA to “Demagnetizing the Poles” takes on a much more meaningful interpretation in light of what had gone on both locally and nationally in response to the Kent State Massacre.

Lexington didn’t burn or have riots in the streets, but the emotions were high and nerves raw. There was a distinct generational “us vs. them” state of frustration and anger between young and old. And as folks who live in small towns know, folks have to get along or get going. So while we were Merry Pranksters for the large part, we were also aware of the need to heal the wounds of the Spring and to turn down the heat to get back the typical “town/gown” dynamic that was the usual state of affairs.

There was a “method in our madness” having set ourselves the bold task of demagnetizing the poles. What amounts to coalition-building is evident in this Richmond Times reporter’s description of the moment lost to the Rest of Us when the Lexington town supervisors forced cancellation of the Rockbridge Open:

The TCA went about eliciting local support for the Rockbridge Open, and Lexington, where Washington and Lee is located, “really got caught up in the thing,” Lawrence said.

A local sporting goods store donated some croquet sets, a department store provided prizes, an electrical supply company lent electronics equipment. A “couple hundred dollars” in contributions came in, he said.

“Late in the game we were working with the VFW (Veterans of Foreign Wars), which would have been terribly unique,” Lawrence said.
 — Larry Markley, Richmond Times-Dispatch, 31 July 1970

As Markley further noted:

…the idea of croquet as a vehicle to promote “dialogue” and “togetherness” evolved naturally… The format for the Rockbridge Open would be simple: a croquet tournament in the day, music at night, perhaps swimming and during it all, dialogue.
 — Larry Markley, Richmond Times-Dispatch, 31 July 1970

To top it off, we had focused the event as a fund-raising community venture to champion locally-supported environmental programs, in this case, the Save Marble Valley community action group.

And, funny thing is… even though the Rockbridge Open was cancelled — and we certainly felt crushed by the turn of the events at the time — in retrospect I can see where we… being basically everybody BUT the Lexington town supervisors… we were all winners.

The anger and suspicion that the Supervisors held onto in shutting down the Open turned out to be an unpopular sentiment with pretty much everybody else. So the Open actually started a LOT of dialog and togetherness in the days ahead. The Rockbridge Open had been our “ice-breaker” to help refocus relationships between young and old, students and townies, hippies and normal folk. The tumultuous days of May were fading in the rear-view mirror as students and faculty returned to campus that Fall following the aborted Open.

All these new and deeper insights about our croquet-playing daze in the Summer of 1970 were the result of this “second slide” through the “now” of memories revisited and reinterpreted.

Although it would be some weeks before being introduced to the concept of nowsliding by reading Bethany Nowviskie’s dissertation, there is no doubt in my mind that I had experienced many aspects of this cognitive phenomena that afternoon when I corrected the text for my “Revolution” article. Student President-elect Fran met mallet-wielding Hippy-Fran.

My DIY Personal Cultural Preservation activity had taken me on some eye-opening Time Travels without ever leaving my chair in our office.