Spring 2012 - Clarion University

Running
the
VictoRyLap
Deborah Burghardt, Ph.D.
Director, women and gender studies
We would have taken any space, just to have a room of our own. However, thanks to
Provost John Kuhn, we didn’t have to settle for less. “Women need windows,” he told me, “I have
the perfect place for you.” When he opened the doors to Harvey Hall’s west wing five years
before its slated renovation, we understood. There in the midst of the radio station ruins, a
magnificent window welcomed us. Through the panes we gazed at two pear tree crones, soonto-be
witnesses to women’s studies life. Their brilliant red, autumn leaves, stark limbs of winter,
bevvies of white spring flowers and lush green of summer would observe the passage of our
seasons.
There was a homecoming element to my being assigned to Harvey Hall. I came to Clarion
in 1967 and donned the blue and gold beanie that distinguished me as a first year student. My
ZETA blazer came later. James Gemmell was president. I borrow words from his son, James
Christopher Gemmell, who described my Student Union at the dedication of Gemmell Student
Center.
I listened as he recalled his boyhood discovery of a “small rectangular Indian Clay colored
building [on his] new academic outpost.” There, “thatched in the limbs of an overgrown forsythia
lay a faded sign: Harvey Hall.” He perceived “the subterranean haunt,” what passed for my
Student Union, as a landscape of “fluorescent lighting, Formica topped tables…molded plastic chairs…
and… aging Wurlitzer jukebox set against Commonwealth green walls.” He sized up the place as a
“mecca of social opportunity.”
All I would add to Gemmell’s remarks is the woman
working at the snack bar. She stood small in stature, a walking
apology with thin, dull, red hair pulled up in a net. Her eyes mere
slits, her expression, the frozen kind, communicated no joy or
hardship either. I’d watch her as she prepared my usual:
grilled cheese and a chocolate milkshake. I wondered what
her life off-duty might be like, but I never inquired. I was
oblivious then to how significantly one woman’s story can
shape another woman’s life.
Gemmell continued to wax poetically about “the
transformation of that tiny rathskellar beneath Harvey” into
the new Student Complex. My mind wandered to another
transformation, the one now thrust into my hands by an act of
serendipity.
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