I lived off and on—mostly on—for six years in Anderson, Indiana, during the late 1970s and early 1980s. A good part of it was spent in the house shown here. I lived in all three apartments at one time or another. They were my college days. Anderson was an automobile factory town. General Motors parts plants spread across a large swath of the southeast side, employers of over 25,000 people in the late 60s, early 70s. My step-grandmother and step-grandfather worked at Guide Lamp and Delco-Remy, respectively, retiring years before I moved there.
Guide Lamp was gone by 1979. Delco-Remy was a sliver of what it had been and was gone by the time I left. The fall I arrived the city of sixty thousand was already cracking at its core. Its downtown was pockmarked by boarded up and vacant storefronts. The pedestrian walkway was a barren cement-scape, an urban planner’s ghost town.
Contrasting the decay and loss with the leafy, rolling hills of the Anderson College I found, it made sense to stay cloistered on campus, away from what lay a few blocks away. It made sense, that is, unless you were a runner, and your life consisted of twice daily runs beyond campus, past factory mausoleums, down debris-strewn commercial streets, and along the weed infested, garbage littered White River.
The College was a 163-acre green oasis a half mile from downtown. With its august red bricked dorms, library, and academic buildings, it was out of place in the urban scape. It’s students were academic migrants from places beyond Anderson, places most of them intended to return to diploma in hand. I suspect few experienced Anderson in any significant way beyond campus grounds.
Beyond its borders, the city gave way to manicured suburban lawns and cornfields. The White River went from a milky gray to bluish hues, dappled in sunlight, sycamores and elms lining its banks. The juxtaposition of city to campus to beyond was impossible to ignore.
As a runner, I felt at home in all three places. I looked forward to ventures into and beyond city proper. City life was new to me but had an appeal born of television shows and novels of my youth. I liked urban grit and the chaos emblematic of its hustle and bustle. I still do.
It didn’t take me long to recognize the differences between campus, city, and beyond as reflecting larger societal shifts honed by perceptions of otherness and difference. On the one side were Anderson and places like it and on the other, Anderson College and mostly suburban and rural enclaves, or those places from where most of the College’s students came, me of the rural bent.
As the city unraveled, the College’s sanguine evangelical foundation prospered, affirming the College’s core values. It responded with its brand of compassion to the economic and social stagnation of the city. However, in the realm of what was possible, it took a narrow view of what was equitable, just, and acceptable. It cared about what was happening but misidentified why it was happening and, thus, often misinterpreted what should be done.
Jesse Jackson’s presidential candidacy in 1984 exemplified the chasm between the College’s interpretation of where the nation was heading and a more progressive understanding. Three years into Reagan’s first term and economic stagnation, the City of Anderson was worse off than ever but Anderson College was all-in with the conservative turn of the nation. Jackson’s “peace abroad and justice at home” campaign was ridiculed by my college peers even as it was a direct response to what was happening to the auto industry and the city, even as it was pulled from the gospels by a reverend leader.
I left Anderson before the transformation of the city from a working class auto town to a rust belt poster child of urban blight was complete. I’d been gone forty years when I returned a few weeks ago. I knew, however, that even as the economic transformation so many on all sides hoped for in the 1980s never materialized the political and social transformation had. Anderson is MAGA. It is majority White (nearly 80%) but socially and educationally segregated. Although there is a still strong and politically powerful White middle class, Anderson has a higher-than-national-average poverty rate that doesn’t distinguish between Black and White. It adheres closely to generational wealth, the Matthew effect on full display.
I’m not privy to all that has happened in Anderson the last forty years. I do know Anderson College, now University, is vested in the city economically and socially more than ever. It’s a point of pride. Even as the University has shrunk in enrollment, its presence in city life is felt strongly.
My return had nothing to do with present-day life; it was a celebration of past accomplishments. In this, I was appreciative of everything the College had meant to me and given me. Anderson College was a good place for me those six years.
On campus again, I felt the same pull of community and sense of place I felt the years I lived there. Driving beyond the campus, I felt, too, the differences I recognized as a young, impressionable man, only more pronounced. Maybe it was because it had been forty years, or maybe because I was more attuned to economic disparity, or maybe because things were worse. Anderson looked more decrepit than I had remembered it.
The houses around campus were more worn for wear, the commercial stretches along the east side of the city more depressed. The city itself eerily quiet, with few people out on a Saturday afternoon.
One day, however, is not enough evidence to support any claim beyond the anecdotal. Six years there, however, does give me some authority to say what I think about a place, then and now. The College, now University is as beautiful and welcoming as ever. The people are the same: friendly, open, and proud of who they are and what they are a part of.
The city, though, has only continued along the path it began before I arrived in 1979. While the auto plants have been torn down or converted to one thing or another and downtown urban blight has given way to the urban renewal familiar to many midwestern mid-sized cities, the neighborhoods are as, if not more, blighted than ever before.
As I drove north from Anderson to meet up with friends and ultimately continue home to Chicago, I ruminated on my one day in Anderson and on that which has been most on my mind lately: the war the MAGA government has declared on Chicago. Chicago has for forty-plus years served a similar purpose for me as Anderson had for six years. Anderson and Anderson College prepared me for life in Chicago and, without understatement, made me who I am. Yet, they stand ideologically, politically, economically, and socially at opposite ends of a continuum, representing different vision of America, even as they share similar challenges.
Although it didn’t make me a Chicagoan, Anderson—both city and College—did awaken me to differences of perspective, privilege, and possibility when confronting these challenges. It immersed me in ways of moving comfortably among difference. The awakening that began in Anderson made it necessary I leave Anderson, but it also made imperative I hold close and nurture what it gave me.