Bud Spurgeon’s 50th Reunion Book Essay (May 2022)
Charles E. Spurgeon
(Bud)
Spouse/Partner: Joann Zimmerman
Going to Wesleyan in the fall of 1968 was an entry into a group of people who were intelligent, articulate and, most of all, intent on learning about themselves and their world. The late 1960s and early 1970s were a confusing, turbulent, optimistic, and exciting time to be a student, and Wesleyan was a remarkable place to be at that time. Wesleyan’s intensity as a place to learn and grow is my strongest memory of the place. The beauty of the campus, especially in the fall and winter, is my fondest memory.
The professors and administrators (sometimes the same people) at Wesleyan were generous with their time and knowledge for the most part. As the Argus photography editor for two semesters, I had the opportunity to wander the whole campus while visiting meetings, speeches, concerts, and other events before heading back to the Argus offices at Lawn Avenue to work on developing and printing photos for the next edition. As a student, I had a variety of classes large and small, some of which I found intensely interesting and others less so. Studying cultural anthropology with Zarko Levak, working on experimental music in class with Alvin Lucier, making ceramics in Mary K. Risley’s amazing studio, are all great memories and there are many others.
The student strike in May 1970, was another major event of the times. At Wesleyan, it became a remarkable outpouring of workshops, teach-ins, research meetings on the issues, outreach to the Middletown community, and more. It was hopeless as a strike since no one at high levels of the U.S. government cared whether we attended class or not (except for the purpose of sending male non-students to Vietnam). Instead, the strike was an expression of frustration and anger at the expansion of the war into Cambodia, the killing of four students at Kent State and two students at Jackson State, the trial of Black Panther Bobby Seale in New Haven, and all the rest of it. I think that it was a real reflection of the values of Wesleyan that the faculty joined in the strike and that the strike was expressed in so many constructive ways. Instead of setting aside the purpose and function of the university by canceling classes, Wesleyan became even more intensely a place of learning and engagement during the strike.
Over the last 50 years since leaving Wesleyan, I have been taking what I learned there and applying it to life. Continuing my education while attending to my duties in the “republic of daily life” (as an old friend called it). Through a series of unlikely events that occur in one’s life, I was working on computer technology at Stanford in the 1980s at the same time that several key Internet technologies were being developed there. An equally unlikely result was that I became an expert in those technologies, which led to a career in computer networking, first at Stanford and continuing at the University of Texas at Austin.
When I moved to Austin, Texas in the mid-1970s, I was fortunate to find a partner to share these experiences, and over the years my wife, Joann Zimmerman, has brought so much into my life. When she got a job in California, I ended up working at Stanford and starting a career in computer networking. When we came back to Austin in the late 1980s, she completed a doctorate in Art History, and as a result, both of us fell under the spell of Venice, Italy. We have been fortunate to have had 45 years together, and I would not be the person I am without her.
Today, I still believe that the world can improve and I try to take whatever opportunities I have to improve what I can. The remarkable optimism that we all enjoyed in the 1960s has not survived the intervening half-century of political, economic, and social events. In retrospect, that optimism was unusual and probably a result of a long period of economic growth and progress. However, I believe that the years since the 1960s have taught us all much more about the way things work and how change can be effected. That, in turn, gives me hope that what we have learned can help us to better understand what is going on and to be more effective in our attempts to make things better and in dealing with the major challenges that face us.
Wesleyan made a major difference in who I was and how I understood the world. It also gave me the tools and the confidence to go out and become who I am today. Being a member of that community and having access to that campus full of remarkable talents and capabilities was life changing. I count myself as being very fortunate to have been there at that time and with those people.