Today was Final Friday, the last day of finals week, and the day that I camp out in my Lincoln Hall office and collect final papers from all my students. The photo above is the lower right hand corner of my office door. Sometimes when unlocking the door I pretend I’m a private eye, looking both ways under my hat down the hall; the 1950s script and the clouded glass give it that aura, as does the massive wall-safe down the hall (!) and also most especially the giant piece of dark wood bolted to the other side of the window, possibly put there by my predecessor, the much beloved Dan O’Keefe, a highly decorated persuasion researcher who left the department this summer for Northwestern. If that board weren’t there, I feel sure I’d regularly see shadows of my colleagues pausing to knock and then remembering Dan is gone, lowering their heads and shuffling away. Other colleagues are jealous of the board because it doesn’t reduce me to cowering under my desk pretending not to be there when people knock. Even with the clouded glass the light can expose a person. Sometimes I wonder if Dan O’Keefe grew tired of cowering and brought in the drill.
I’m not sure how long O’Keefe was in 123 Lincoln Hall, but I have a hunch, judging from the number of people who have fessed up to pilfering things he left behind before I moved in, and also judging from the worn condition of the Persian rug that no one seemed to want to pilfer--I think John’s mom’s exact words were “you need to get that thing out of here”--that he was here for a number of years.
Before O’Keefe, the office, I’m told, belonged to Marie Nichols, a.k.a., Mrs. Nichols, who was on the Speech Communication faculty from 1939 until 1976. That’s thirty-seven years, two more than I’ve been alive. I wonder if Mrs. Nichols moved offices or if she was in this office for thirty. seven. years? I almost called it my office, but you see, despite the fact that English, my other department, has done so much hiring that they had no room for me and Speech Comm kindly took me in, and despite the carefully scraped off and replaced stenciling--I wonder if M. Nichols stood for Mrs. or Marie?--I don’t feel like I’ve earned the right to call it mine just yet. In fact, there’s an outside (out there?) chance that I may have a hallowed office mate.
To wit: historical information available on Mrs. Nichols suggests that she “introduced the field to Kenneth Burke.” Those of you who know the scholar side of D. Hawhee know that the rhetorical/bodily theories that form the core of the book I’m writing were developed (or in some cases not so developed) by Kenneth Burke. I’m starting to wonder if Mrs. Nichols didn’t arrange for the office vacancy so that the next woman Burke scholar in the department might inhabit it.
When I unlocked my door this morning, you can bet I looked quickly both ways.
