The Heart of Campus

The Heart of Campus

Beck Chapel, built by the Methodists in the 1800s, I presume it was; a small yet noble church among the trees left there by the custodians of this reverential space, at this close to two hundred year-old university. (Founded in 1820, as printed on shirts that my children wear.) The first state school was run by religious ministers of the wide-spread Protestant faith, founded by John Wesley.

It is not Oxford, nor Harvard, nor William and Mary, nor Al-Azhar, nor Salamanca. It is not ancient or among the firsts of the United States, but it is old for where I am from.

Beck Chapel is its heart, we give it tribute and note.

It is located in the central part of the main state school campus of Indiana. And Indiana is America at it's height and breadth.

A small church within a small mid-west state.

It is, as said, a small, mostly underused chapel, now probably non-affiliated or even a secular house of worship, where I consider it the heart of the Indiana University campus, in my home town of Bloomington.

Indiana. Our Indiana. Indiana, we're all for you!

Bigger venues and settings surround it for miles on this major campus.

On the campus of this flagship school within the state of Indiana, a state began in 1816, drawn up from the Midwest Compromise of the first forefathers of the land, like Jefferson and Madison. The heart of the nation? It is the heart of mine, at least, in many ways. The campus was started in 1820 by Methodist priests or ministers. Rectors? Over the decades the state school became less overtly religious, from what I have read. My parents moved there in 1967, and then my parents married into Hoosiers from southern Indiana.

I first remember Beck Chapel when being babysat by my adopted grandmother, when maybe age 4, in the summer time when little trickles of water flowed in the adjoining Jordan River, a very modest creek that flows through the august campus of IU. I liked looking at the flows of water and maybe I played with some rocks. Ruby was in her seventies by then; old to me, but very spry.

I am sure that she imparted some sage advice about nature, as she was wont to do. She always watched nature shows on PBS. That was around 1975.

Fast forward to 1988, when I was half way through junior year in high school. My dad was re-married there, in that humble yet central chapel, with a small group attending. Bishop Petersen, of my home Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saint Bloomington 1st Ward, located across the street from Binford Middle School, and his wife as a witness, conducted the ceremony. No children or grandchildren, just them as young 50 year-olds.

Life changes, but many of the places stay the same.

Fast forward to 2019, and a lifetime or so later, I find out that a former classmate, Paulo Fratianni, was also married there six years ago at age 43, presumably.

Unfortunately, prior to learning of that event in that chapel in 2013, I learned that Paul took his own life at the end of last month, October 28th. That was a normal day for us, most of the rest of the world... It was a Monday.

I don't know a lot of the details.

Another Bloomington South classmate Stacey, notified me. She had learned about him through our 30th class reunion last June when he seemed to be doing well, it seems. Her twin sister attended and they took pictures, of which she shared one with me of Paul, Linda, her sister Kelly, and Curt. All '89 grads from our old alma mater high school.

They looked pretty happy.

Paul is survived by his wife and two daughters. Stacey is sending me the program of the funeral.

Which was held at Beck Chapel.

The heart of the campus.

I imagine that Paul did most of his education at Indiana, in Bloomington. I am not sure.

I did some searches of his name in the local Hoosier Times. He had written to them, our main local paper, with letters and Op-Eds in the late 2000 teens; I saw him in Bloomington in 1998 when I was attending IU back then, too.

I am not sure how far he ever went from B-town, to live. I left multiple times, as I have left now. 1989, 1992, 1999. But my heart, in a sense, is still there. I have family there, still. I go there for holidays, still. I watch the sports teams from there, still. I probably always will. I go back to this heart of campus, go to the Memorial Student Union, at one time at least the largest student union building in the United States. I am not sure how it stacks up now. The east side is a multi-story hotel, that overlooks the chapel by the stream. There is a small graveyard by it, with old tombs, some of which it is hard to make out who was really attributed.

Go! IU! Fight! Fight! Fight!

My emotional heart belongs more with the family and spiritual roots of the Second Street chapel, the one with us Mormons, closer to the College Mall; certainly I have had my heart strings weaved through the buildings, streets, lawns, meadows, and creeks of the Indiana University campus.

I grew up playing in those streets and byways, in the shadows of the Schools of Math, Music, Law, and other university structures with classrooms ensconced therein.  Massive Ballantine Hall, the extensive physical activity HPER Building, the ubiquitous Auditorium and picturesqu Showalter Fountain, the IU Library and the track Stadium, before it was torn down in the 1980s and made into an outdoor arboretum. There are, of course, the dozens of student dormitories draped across the campus, where my high school friend Robert would take me to find music, rock tunes played live or boomed at parties from stereo systems. Eigemann,  the fourteen story international dorm near Crosstown, where I would find international talent to compete in table tennis. A talent that I happened to have developed, better than most Americans. My parents had a copy and typing business at Crosstown for 10 years.

This stately campus: the myriad pathways of worn asphalt trails winding through the west side of the of it, bordering Indiana Avenue along downtown...

The bronze statues of Adam and Eve among the trees, the stone gazeebo by the stately campus buildings east of there, immortalized in the 1979 Bloomington classic film, "Breaking Away". I think in this scene the main character gets slapped there under its roof, when the girl he has been pretending to be a Romantic Italian foreign connection to finds out that he is just a local townie from Bloomington, a "Cutter", as the movie creates. He was an imposter, and shammed her, a sorority girl beauty, into a fake love.

Local boy done wrong, not amounting to much academically, done good at bike racing. The story won an academy award, and brought a lot of attention to the Little 500 bike race every spring.

North of Beck Chapel is the Jordan River (creek), then the parking lot for the hotel of the Student Union, beyond that the old HPER (pronounced Hyper) building with its dozens of basketball courts and other sports rooms, passed that the soccer fields connected to the Library Aboretum and gardens, then 10th Street and the Schools of Business, of Kelley School and other business fame. Then the sororities and fraternities, sprinkled among regular student apartments and houses, until you reach the fields and alumni buildings next to the football stadium and basketball arena, aligned with 17th street. Beyond that, churches and houses and country...

West of Beck Chapel is the aforementioned massive student union building. You can enter it from a few doors around the corner from the chapel, by the hotel entrance, or the other side by the Greek myth statue (Dedaelus?) and the movie theater. Walking through one of the two floors going west, one passes artwork and photographs, shops and stores, barbershops and restaurants, cafeterias, student lounges with couches and chairs (I took a few naps there in yesteryear, especially while getting my education degree), administrative offices, and eventually technology rooms and computer lounges, a bowling alley, pool table lounge, and television lounges and study hall rooms or conference salons.

It is a very large, long building that is like many buildings mashed together. Longer east to west, but substantially wide as well. Going west of the the Student Union are a few more university buildings, some having math and other science classes, then the Indiana Avenue and downtown, separated by Kirkwood Avenue. Kirkwood leads to the main strip of the city (B-town a modest urban locale), the bars, restaurants, banks, churches, the library and a bookstore or two, to the courthouse paralleled by the main north and south junctures of Walnut and College, past them to the legal buildings and more bars and restaurants, the railroad tracks, and out past the large cemetery and more commercial and residential sites, leading to the eventual now-turned freeway 69, formerly the highway 37 leading up to Indianapolis. West of that major vehicle thoroughfare are the wiles of western Monroe County, towards the rural Green and Owen Counties...

South of Beck Chapel is the leviathan Ballantine Hall, once the largest classroom structure in the country, followed by other limestone (big product of southern Indiana) edifices that contain mathematics, music, and other higher learning places, bordered by Third Street, sororities, apartments, houses, and the neighborhood where I grew up with my elementary school-cum-alternative school (built 1926, a two story brick affair, with limestone trimming) and eventually Bryan Park, my dead end road of childhood surrounded by the parking lot and trees, the factory to the south alighted on a hill, and on and on into southern residential Bloomington. Go south from there and you will reach the largest reservoir in the state, named for the county and former Constitutional framer James Monroe, Lake Monroe...

East of Beck Chapel, the heart of this large campus (has some 40,000 students now? (2019)) the aforementioned Biblical stream traces east, which is straddles by stately edifices, one that seems newer, to the northeast across some small walking bridges, then the historic Dewey Library, the IU Auditorium, and across the creek to the south the massive Musical Arts Center. The amount of talent and art that has been displayed between those two venues to me is incredible: Broadway plays (I saw Annie, Evita, Cats, Les Miserables, among others there), musical artists, (I saw Ray Charles, but many others came and went), comedians (Bill Cosby is his hay day--he was big, before the ignominious fall), dance troupes and scholars and world leaders, (Mikhail Gorbachev, the Dalai Lama)...

While being small as a city, the town has attracted much of the country's and world's hoi polloi, if that definition in and of itself is not contradictory. The endless amounts of people populating our T.V.s and news: hoi polloi. They make it to Bloomington. But maybe not to Beck Chapel.

Past the Jordan Avenue going east of these places of entertainment and performance, neighbored by the Latin-American House or the Center for African-American Studies, not to mention the wooded and gardened house of the university president, are more school buildings, large student dormitories, the School of Education, more dorms, tall and medium sized, apartments and residences with the tennis courts and other fields leading to the Bypass. Cross the bypass and there is the Methodist Church of my step-mother, the one who married my father in 1988 (see connections to Beck Chapel), a restaurant or so aligning the shopping centers leading to the College Mall, more apartments and condominiums and shops and tennis courts, including the apartments where I happened upon my first girl friend way back in 1992...

Which leads to the expanses of more residential neighborhoods, roads leading to the country and Brown County, a bucolic respite of southern Indiana.

Southern Indiana, or Indiana in general, or the Greater Midwest, does have its farms, barns, cows and tractors. But we of the south enjoy a cornucopia of woods, trees upon trees, alighting the hills and dales, with the creeks and rivers that rush through them in all seasons.

And thus, we see that Beck Chapel is at the heart of this campus, this college, this university of splendorous schools of science, art, technology, sports, and research.

Beck Chapel, sits by itself largely unused, unnoticed. Surrounded by hubbub and peaceful nature, by much larger buildings more drawn to and frequented; at times lively and at other times melancholic in its solitude. Probably most times alone to itself and its empty airs of only breezes and shadows.

Like many of us, individually or collectively, there will be times where we sit together in groups, perhaps singing along at a concert, cheering along at a game, dancing around in circles or, observing a wedding or a funeral, worshiping along with the other church or synagogue or mosque dwellers.

At other times we walk alone, ambulatory across the foot bridges of leaf-strewn paths leading to other places, caught in the betwixt and between of duties, jobs, missions, thoughts, feelings, memories. Sports games. Student meets. Fun night outs. Classes. Pay checks. Grades.

I have had those moments walking through and past those stream beds of Beck Chapel. Most of those times, when walking by as a teenager on the way to a concert, or a student between classes or the job at the IU library, or going there with friends to play pool or bowl or other mischief, biking round the paths to reach downtown, the land did not belong to the solitary Beck Chapel. It was the campus of the Sample Gates, of the Law School, the Planetarium or the the other bulky buildings rising up three, four, five or more stories.

But at the heart of the campus, the lonely church sat, taking in the sun and rain, snow and wind, moon and icy hails, for going on 200 years (the church must be younger than the actual institutional founding). The creek may freeze over, or overflow with flood waters in heavy rains. Kids would laugh and play, students with their backpacks and totes traipse and strive on, from class to class and party to party, from book to book and the papers followed. Those with instruments plied their crafts, wielding their horns or the occasional Stradivarius across the meadows and lawns, past the abandoned tomb stones of the small chapel.

People would stop and sometimes meditate, others would smoke, thinking about their next chemical fix. Or the legendary Mad Max, the fiery crazed Evangelical preacher and his detractors yelling back at him, that were easy shouting distance away. Thousands would pass, at times in droves, other times only one in a very empty hour of the weekend, or during school breaks, when most students were traveling and reveling away from this scholastic domain.

A realm of college studies, sports, and activities. And later a place of respite and quiet.

You can go with me there now, you can picture this place, if you have been there or not.

Back in the 1970s, currently in the 2000s, all the way back to the humble beginnings of the 1800s.

Paul left the earth just two weeks ago; it was a Monday. Today is Monday, in November, a Veteran's Day when we celebrate them, the best of the military and their lives and deaths. Those that sacrificed for us in uniform.

I guess Paul was never an official military guy. But he was a soldier for a few things. Like Beck Chapel, I would argue. I do not want his presence or place to go unnoticed.

His heart has stopped for now, mine still beats some 670 some miles away, farther to the east.

By choice or by happenstance, all our hearts will stop beating.

Beck Chapel will be removed someday, I would predict. Unless fantastically reconverted to some greater iteration of itself. Like the Christian hope of our own souls and bodies.

Paul will resurrect someday, according to believers, like you and me. His body, all his organs, we presume, will be reunited with his soul.

We will reconvene somewhere, perhaps in a grandiose plain, in a vast expanse where the Lord reigns triumphantly with angels glorifying, trumpets blaring, drums pounding and the choirs raising sacred strains to the highest heavens. And harps, and French horns and all types of strings.

Or maybe this reconstitution might take place simply in a quiet, modest place like Beck Chapel, at the heart of campus.

This little abode of gathering, with one or two souls to witness the marvel of its beauty.