Conference High Fashion

They're not all alike, thank goodness. There are differences, trust me, but I've just spent an inordinate amount of time among old men in tennis shoes. They come in different colors--the old men and the shoes--but there's a vital consistency among them in the footwear. Call them what you like--keds, sneakers, gym shoes--they adorn the old crooked feet of old crooked men, one of whom I am, and I wear 'em too for obvious reasons--tennis shoes are comfortable, dang it. 

In history conferences 150 miles or so away from each other, in different states, on successive days, I sat (and sometimes spoke) in gatherings that were 90% elderly, men, often enough in sport coats and tennis shoes, and their female counterparts dressed, on the whole, less therapeutically, but some of them in gym shoes too. Do old women not have sore feet? Maybe so; for years, men--many of the xxls--hoisted more weight around town; they're the ones with museum feet.

My experience at two history conferences last weekend is that it's now clearly official--for old retired educators, wearing tennis shoes, even with a tie and sport coat, may not be high fashion, but is perfectly acceptable.

Last weekend I spent some wonderful time lumbering around with old folks at the Center for Western Studies in Sioux Falls and John Neihardt Center, in Bancroft, Nebraska. I may be the only attendee at both, but the crowds who gathered, like their shoes, looked remarkably similar. If the average age of conferees was four score years, then the handwriting is on the wall. The crowd was unmistakably elderly; we could have just as easily avoided the traffic and met at the Home.

It's sad, and it doesn't get said publicly. Neither conference hosted a speaker who outlined the problem, and no one wants to bring it up because simply talking about it is, well, embarrassing and, to be sure, smells like agism. But the truth is that an entire generation of amateur historians, people who love the stories that still rise from the region, people who have read and remembered the epic drama of homesteading, the epic desolation of the Dust Bowl, the epic confrontation of two cultures--one white, one red--with impossibly different definitions of home, those people are tottering. Won't be long and they'll be gone.

Edgar Allen Poe got a lot of mileage out of the concept of a premature burial, in part, because in the earlier years of the 19th century premature burial wasn't all that rare. Such things actually happened. 

But it's not a premature burial they fear. What chills them to the bone--and they'll talk about it over lunch maybe--is what seems the dearth of interest from younger folks and, even more, the sense that higher education has lost its moorings and become so impossibly expensive that it has to, it must, assure graduates of a profession. What scares them is that no one cares about American history or American literature, no one reads Willa Cather or Marie Sandoz, Frederick Manfred or Herbert Krause, Emily Dickinson, Ralph Waldo Emerson or Henry David Thoreau. There's just no time. What scares them is the sense, in other words, that no one cares about things they care greatly about.

Gym shoes don't do much to help that ache. "Used to be 150 people every Spring Conference," the emcee told me at the Neihardt Center. By the end of the afternoon, there were maybe thirty. "What do ya' do?" he said (we weren't up front). 

I told him I had no easy answers but to keep plugging, keep emceeing, keep up the steep admiration to know more about how in the world people lived in a place where, in twenty minutes, a prairie fire could lay waste to an entire county, where Winnebago warriors successfully held off the powerful Brule Sioux, where an old man in a white beard crawled 200 miles to get revenge on the kid who'd left him to die, only to forgive. 

I told him maybe the answer, if there was one, was there in the air at both delightful conferences: you keep telling stories and you keep having fun doing it. 

I could have said, "And you wear comfortable shoes."

I didn't have to. He had 'em on.