Pago 8
Daily Nebraskan
Thursday, September 2, 1982
Arts & Eeteiiaimmeet
Eiseley's achievements noted
Loren Eiseley
Photo courtesy of Bartrand Schultz
By Jamie Bishop
"Even as late as 1947 they wouldn't
believe us.
That was C. Bertrand Schultz talking
about his long-time friend, Loren Eiseley.
Hie Lincoln-born anthropologist, poet,
author and philosopher died in 1977..
Eiseley is well-known for his first book
"The Immense Journey' which traces
human development through evolution.
Published in 1957, it caused a bit of a
stir, Schultz said.
But Schultz was talking about work
he and Eiseley did in 1931. They found
an arrow point in a trench by the base
of Signal Point near Scottsbluff. The find
placed humans on North America
thousands of years before originally
estimated.
Some told them "it was no use going
out there because The American Museum,
Amherst, Harvard, Princeton and The
Field Museum in Chicago; they'd all been
out there and they say there's no fossils
from the Miocene period," Schultz re
counts. That was in 1931. Today Eiseley is
being honored at "A Celebration of Loren
Eiseley," sponsored by the Lincoln City
Libraries and the Junior League of Lincoln.
Schultz, executive director of the Nebraska
Academy of Sciences and a UNL
paleontologist, will take part in the
ceremonies, providing his memories of
Eiseley and his life.
Would Eiseley think this event a big
deal?
"Oh, I don't know," Schultz said,
"he was such a modest man. Just think,
he had 36 doctoral degrees bestowed upon
him, and he had a whole bunch more
lined up for years in advance . . .'
Eiseley apparently thought a lot of
Schultz, too. He dedicated his second
book of poetry to "the bone hunters
of the old South Party, Morrill Expeditions
193102 and to C. Bertrand Schultz, my
comrade of those years, this book is in
memory of the unreturning days." The
book, published in 1973, is "The Innocent
Assassins."
"Many anthropologists didn't believe
Loren Eiseley when he was alive. He was
willing to stick his neck out. Everything
he did was oriented to finding out the
truth about how man fitted into his
environment, how he came about," Schultz
said.
Eiseley once wrote to Reader's Digest
in answer to an article critical of his
"The Immense Journey," Schultz said.
"They said 4Was you there Charlie?'
and he said 'Yes I was and so were you,'"
Schultz said.
Perhaps that critic objected to such
lines as these which appeared in "The
Slit," the first essay in "The Immense
Journey."
Continued on Page 9
Syllabuses hide Local drive-ins: The last of a dying breed
in bottom or oag B Jeff Goodwin
Another year begins. By now, every
body should know where their classes
are located and have a good enough idea
of what the professor looks like to be able
to pick himherit out of a lineup.
BilT
7 Rush
By now, you should be buried in a
pile of purple memeographed handouts
that detail your courses, right down to
the date of the final. Unfortunately,
those sheets so carefully put together
by the professor, tend to find their way
to the bottom of your bookbag, where
days after finals week you find them and
wonder why you flunked the course.
It must be frustrating to professors
to labor over a course guide day and night
for three weeks and then 20 minutes
before class, have the departmental
secretary hand himherit a stack of
blank papers and say:
"Our new electronic copier is on the
fritz, and the only person who can fix
it is on vacation and can't be reached."
I have a pet peeve about professors
and their handouts. Can anybody tell
me why the professors read the handouts
to us in class? It reminds me of when
I was in kindergarten and the class took
turns reading from books about Dick,
Jane, Sally, Puff and Spot.
Of course, the professors probably
know that if they don't read the course
outline to us, we never will know what
it says because we stick the syllabus
in the bottom of our book bags and
forget about it until the last day of finals.
I hate reading syllabuses because I
hate to have a piece of paper outlining
15 weeks of my life, day by day, week
by week and month by month.
Another thing about a syllabus is that
on the night before a big exam it reminds
me of all the chapters that I haven't
read. There is something about having
them in writing that makes the reading
assignments seem as if they came down
from the mountaintop and, if you ignore
the syllabus, you will be struck down
by lightning, or worse yet - be given a
F in the course.
I suppose syllabuses have their good
points. They make good paper airplanes,
good fuel for a December fire, good
dunce caps and even help you to study -if
somebody would read them.
Drive-ins. An American institution. It's
hard to imagine something like a drive-in
originating in Belgium, say, or Iceland. Of
course, when you think about it, it's only
natural that such a thing should originate
in America, combining as it does two
American inventions - automobiles and
movies.
Drive-ins have been almost a rite of pass
age in America, a sort of bar mitzvah for
the middle class, if you will.
Saturday night, and what do you do? If
you've got a date, you grab some beer and
go to the drive-in. If you don't have a date,
you get together with your pals, grab some
beer and go to the drive-in. When you
break it down to the basic elements, life
really can be quite simple.
However, all of that may be changing. It
seems that more families are going to drive
ins. "It seems like our average customer is a
member of the working class with a
family," said Dave Livingston, vice presi
dent of the Douglas Three, operator of the
84th and 0 Street Drive-In.
Livingston said the basic concept of the
drive-in has remained the same over the
years.
"It's still basically a hassle-free form of
entertainment where people can go with
out worrying about dressing up."
He said attendance at drive-ins is down.
"I would say business has dropped off
from 20 to 25 percent in the last 10
years," he said.
He ascribed this trend to the rise in
popularity of indoor theaters.
"I think people in general are more
comfort conscious now than they used to
be. They want the comfort that air-conditioning
offers," he said.
He also said expensive real estate prices
in urban areas have made drive-ins
financially unfeasible.
"In the last three or four years there
have been no new drive-ins opened in the
country," Livingston said.
A recent field trip to a local drive-in
would seem to confirm that drive-ins may
be headed the way of the dinosaur.
There seem to be no more than a dozen
cars there at any one time. It seems too
small of a turnout for the last weekend
before school started.
A few minutes into the first feature the
film breaks. It's several minutes before the
film is fixed and by then the crescendo
from the assmebled cars sounds like the
Dan Ryan Expressway at rush hour.
As usual, the action is at the snack bar
and its myraid offerings. (Where else but at
a drive-in can you get a corn dog? Where
else but at a drive-in would you eat one?)
By the end of the night only a few
hardy souls are left to watch the credit.
The lights dim. Soon the season will be
over. But there is always next summer.
And beer. And girls. And pals.
Third time a charm for degree obstacle?
It's finally happened. After 89 painful
credit hours stretched over some three
plus years, I've reached the pinnacle of
senior status. I'm sophisticated, wise, and
urbane, with a respectable entry-level job
awaiting me next May. I now can talk
intelligently about Third World politics
and have long since ceased to be scared of
any instructor in the School of Journalism.
I can speak Spanish flawlessly, without
Q? Mary Louise
j? Knapp
a trace of American accent, and am about
to be sent, free of charge, on a tour to
Europe.
That's the story I tell my relatives,
whose perennial question "And when are
you going to graduate" has been sounding
more and more unpleasant as time goes
by. The truth, alas, is somewhat different.
My graduation date, formerly listed
optimistically as "May, '83," is receding
further into the distance.
In fact, it's no longer visible even
with a microscope. I'm still finding myself,
mysteriously, in 200-level courses.
My records are spotted with incom
pletes, withdrawals, and to my eternal
shame, one glaring F, which has yet to be
removed.
It wasn't always this way. 1 didn't set
out to be a permanent fixture inside these
halls of ive, pleasant though they are. As a
freshman, I adopted a no-nonsense ap
proach to higher education. "Get it over
with and move on" was my motto.
I dutifully attacked the required courses
for the College of Arts and Sciences, passed
them (yea, even with some A's) and
advanced into journalism school.
I was even so zealous as to take a few
summer courses, hoping thereby to gain an
advantage over my classmates.
My sophomore year, at least the first
semester of it, went by without a hitch.
Credit hours piled up without end as did
many wonderful grades.
But, pride goeth before a fall, and so it
came to pass that during the next semester
1 fell victim to sloth and procrastination.
The due dates for my Economics 210
assignments came and went without my
making the least effort to do them. I still
came to class so as not to get talked
about by the more dedicated students,
but spent most of my time staring at the
guy sitting next to me.
My other classes suffered, too. I found
myself doing that which 1 had vowed
never to do - staying up until 2 a.m. to
finish a project due that day.
I still had self-respect enough to repent
of the dirty deeds, and vowed to make it
up in summer school. That was my first
encounter with the dread Photojournalism
284. After the first day, I decided that im
proving my command of the Spanish lan
guage was much more to my advantage
than taking pictures in the sweltering heat.
The next semester, I tried 284 again,
but the old devil laziness caught up with
me again and forced me to cash in my
chips.
To try it again in the spring proved a
task beyond what little courage I had left,
so I abandoned journalism for the murky
world of modern languages. By this time,
my career as a part-time student was well
advanced, my parents were rightfully up
set and my friends were becoming younger
and younger.
There was only one solution. I took to
the bottle - of cleaning compound, that is.
For three months, I cleaned America's halls
while trying to make firm future plans.
And now I'm in J 284 for the third
time. . .