Chalkdust Memories

A Local History Project Sponsored by the NMC Archives

In connection with the 50th anniversary celebrations of Northwestern Michigan College, we are planning a series of interviews with people who were at the college during its first years. The object is to recover, if possible, and preserve some impression of what the experience of NMC was like then. Records and documents from that time exist, but they do little to convey the feeling of daily life at an infant college. Photos and artifacts are more helpful, and Doug Campbell has already assembled displays of them for the library and the museum. He further hopes to re-create a 1950's classroom, with slate blackboards, real chalk and dusty erasers, wooden table armchairs, and perhaps a balky movie projector whose bulb is always burning out.

But the actual experiences of those days now exist only in the memories of those who were here then, and our project hopes to capture some of them while there are still some of the original college members available to us.

A lead article in the June 13, 1999, Community College Week pointed out that only now are some two-year colleges beginning to "understand the need to preserve for posterity," and that, unless these schools take steps to preserve their past, "important chapters in the history of two-year institutions could go unwritten and unrecoverable." Since NMC was one of the pioneers in the development of community colleges, and was in many ways not a typical one, it is doubly important to preserve as complete a picture of our beginnings as we can manage.

We hope that this project, in conjunction with other 50th anniversary celebrations, will result not just in historical preservation but in a renewed appreciation of the pioneering efforts that created NMC.

There would even, we hope, be opportunities for specific learning experiences for some students. Mark Howell of the English Department will be offering a section of English 266 that will deal with the social and cultural impact of the 1950's, and this oral history project could provide honors projects for students not only in that class, but also in journalism, history, or photography classes.

We are fortunate that there are still in this area quite a few surviving members-students, faculty, and staff-of early NMC, a resource that we should tap while we can.

Chalkdust Memories is being funded
as part of the 50th Anniversary Celebration