Thoughts on Fall Semester, 2022

(Peter Reilly) Senior College has just completed one of the most significant semesters in its considerable lifetime. As you know, over the years the institution has become a cultural anchor for our community. Learning has thrived, fun has been had and friends have been made. When you sit next to someone through six classes, enjoy a cup of coffee together and exchange insights – it’s a giant formula for making new friends.

I call this semester significant because the reopening of the college marks a new chapter in its history. The reopening did not just happen by flicking a switch. With Covid and Zoom there are ongoing challenges for your Board of Directors. We may not agree with all the covid protocols, but for sure, it must be agreed they are in place to protect a very vulnerable population. Hopefully with time, the world will see less restrictions and return to normalcy.

All that said, I have to tell you as an instructor who did a hybrid class (in-person and zoom), I could not have been more pleased. While we still have work to do in order to bring in our Zoom participants and make the combination seamless, the fact is we started. And that’s a big deal. Zoom will reach people we never thought possible. In our Dylan class we had zoom people from as far away as Pennsylvania and Virginia. In class we had people attending from Freeport and Islesboro – and lots of surrounding towns. Our Board of Directors under the leadership of Nancy Perkins, has earned a huge Thank You for making this happen. Our Curriculum Committee, with Karen Gleason as Chair, must also be recognized. Recruiting instructors is always a challenge, but now it is even more complicated. Even so, this fall’s offerings were as strong as ever.

Finally, I have to say our Dylan course proved to be a fun topic and from my perspective very rewarding. Dylan seemed to bring out so many stories of those who saw him, listened to him or just knew of him. So much seemed so relevant for today. I received lots of emails about Dylan with lots of great stories. I wish we could print all the stories, but we can’t. However, I do want to share the following story from Pat Griffith. Pat is a former president of Senior College and before achieving that high honor was the chief White House Correspondent for a major news organization.

Pat Griffith – Sept. 15, 2022

Early on you mentioned Joan Baez a few times. Well, as a Californian and Stanford grad, I (and tens of thousands of others) “knew” her up front and semi-personally from her constant activity in the Bay Area and informal “appearances” at favorite hangouts in San Francisco. I was always fascinated and “drawn in” to what she was singing because her father had been a nuclear scientist at Los Alamos who then pulled out because of the emphasis on weaponry and settled in Los Altos, near Stanford, which was Joan’s home base for awhile. Anyhow, a magical, now almost unreal memory I have is from the summer of 1965, when my husband and I, then living in Carmel Valley on the Monterey Peninsula, took our 2 year-old son down to Esalen on the Big Sur coast for a Sunday afternoon concert on a grassy bluff overlooking the incredible ocean view. Oh, the performers. Joan Baez was the headliner, backed up by Judy Collins and Bob Dylan. Talk about classic! Sitting there in the sun, drinking wine with our picnic, listening to those three, who I think performed ALL their major songs. I didn’t have to breathe in the aroma from other picnickers (!) to be transported to a higher plain. I didn’t have to, I’m saying, but honestly … I do remember Joan Baez had sung several of the hits, including Blowin’ in the Wind, before Dylan appeared. There was no stage as such – just something like a sheet attached to poles that sort of screened off those behind scenes, and then they walked around the pole to stand in front of the crowd, which had to have been several hundred or maybe a thousand, sprawled across this vast field. I have a vague memory that Joan sort of promoted Dylan when she introduced him as coming from the East, which I now find interesting, thinking of how she had become such a monumental figure for protest and possibly more identified with the West, or the SF Bay Area? I also know this was the first time I heard Judy Collins sing “Both Sides Now.”

Good grief! You’ve got me lolling about in my ancient past. And yes, most all of what Dylan wrote withstands the test of time and is relevant today. True classics endure.