Rob Hunter:
CLASS OF 1974
Madison-Grant High SchoolClass of 1974
Fairmount, IN
Indiana UniversityClass of 9999
Bloomington, IN
Purdue University - Liberal ArtsClass of 1978
West lafayette, IN
Summitville High SchoolClass of 1970
Summitville, IN
Duckcreek-Boone Elementary SchoolClass of 1968
Elwood, IN
Rob's Story
Life
After graduating from M-G I attended Purdue University, earning a bachelor's degree in political science in 1978. Unable to get into law school, I decided to move to Bloomington and see what I could accomplish there. In December of '78 I hired on with the IU Campus Bus Service and have been one of their drivers for twenty-nine years. Melanie Kearns and her two little boys began riding my bus in 1982, and nine years later they became Mrs. Hunter and my two stepsons, Josh and Ethan. Melanie is the Marketing/Public Relations coordinator for the Adult Education division of the Monroe County schools. She is also a freelance editor who works with IU professors and other authors on their manuscripts. I'm currently driving the morning E Route, servicing the married student housing units and three eastside dorms. Bus driving isn't what I imagined I'd be doing at fifty-one, but I have to admit that I like it. Many of my passengers are impressive young people, and the IU campus is a beautiful - though sometimes crowded - place to work.
When not behind the wheel, I'm playing with my Lionel trains, or trying to roll a good hook ball. Friends who knew me at Duck Creek-Boone won't be surprised to learn that I attend the Indy 500, and I'm also a big fan of the USAC Silver Crown series. High school basketball is still my favorite kind of hoops, and Melanie and I are great movie watchers and sometime theatre goers. (We saw "The Producers" when it opened at Cadillac Palace and laughed 'til our faces hurt!) I try my hand, occasionally, at composing poetry and short fiction. The economy of words is challenging, as is the attempt to surprise without lying. There has been no success getting published, though a short story of mine took honorable mention at the 1990 IU Writer's Conference. I just give Melanie my first drafts and say, "Here. Make this better." She does.
Favorite book: WEST WITH THE NIGHT, by Beryl Markham. I read it once a year, with pleasure.
Favorite movie: "A Month in the Country," (1987) with Kenneth Branagh, Colin Firth, and Natasha Richardson. Directed by Pat O'Connor.
Help yourself to my Photo Album.
School
I liked my school and felt lucky to attend. We didn't have the kind of problems that occasionally closed the bigger high schools in the area, which is to say that the people at M-G were basically decent to one another most of the time. Jack Heavilon and I would roam the upper and lower halls prior to first period, telling each other that we were "doing inspection." One girl in our class we privately called "the bee's knees." Whenever we passed her going in the opposite direction we glanced at each other and said, "Buzzzzz!" My four years included a little bit of sports, a little bit of music, and a little theatre. There were things I wanted to achieve in sports and academics - even my social life- that never came to pass, and I sometimes forget to be lighthearted. I grieve for the me I never was.
Many memories compete for the title of favorite, but the first to mind is the freshmen boys' basketball team of 70-71. The A team won fifteen games in a row and finished with only one loss. (The combined freshmen record yielded twenty-six wins out of thirty games played.) Their play was smart and unselfish, and the memory of it makes me wish that I had a video tape of one of those games.* My freshman year also featured a field trip to Chicago sponsored by the Science Department. I've loved going up there ever since.
Two words describe Madison-Grant in those days: young and new. The teachers included a former Purdue basketball player, James Dean's drama coach, an Ivy League alumna, and at least three valedictorians. Nearly all of them had an affiliation with Ball S...Expand for more
tate. Favorite teacher? Impossible to say. The faculty was an energetic, enthusiastic bunch; they were also a very young bunch on balance. I would imagine that the median age of the M-G faculty in the early 1970's was about thirty-two. Half of them had been teaching less than ten years, married less than ten years, and either had small children or no children. Several were working on master's degrees while teaching five sections of thirty students or more. But class with most of them was very satisfying because they were professionals who gave of themselves while maintaining proper boundaries. I liked many of them well enough professionally to wish that I also knew them socially, and I find that when I'm speculating about an M-G person it's usually a faculty member.
I was very good in some subjects, but very poor in others. I studied hard but not always effectively, and I was loathe to admit when I was having problems. These are issues that I would address if I were attending high school again.
(*Among those fifteen wins was one over Winchester in the championship game of the Eastbrook Tourney. The Golden Falcons freshmen were coached by the same Tom McKinney who, twenty-six years later, coached Indiana's last single-class state champions at Bloomington North. McKinney was inducted into the Indiana Basketball Hall of Fame in March of 2006.)
College
Purdue was a good fit for me at the time. My sister was finishing there and I was already acquainted with campus from visiting her now and then. As with any land-grant college, it's easy to feel out of place there if you're a liberal arts student; even today these students account for about twenty percent of the student body. This is not to say that the liberal arts departments left something to be desired. They didn't.
I think of the professors first. Stephen Robb of the Department of Communications was a native of Brooklyn and spoke in a way that flattened his lower case r's. My last name coming out of Dr. Robb's mouth sounded like "Hun-tuh." On our first day of debate class he assigned us to go to the library and gather as much evidence as we could to support the position that man had landed on the moon. We were incredulous; it seemed like a self-evident truth. "Don't you believe it?" I asked. He studied his hands for a second and replied, "Mis-tuh Hun-tuh, what I think doesn't mat-tuh. But since you ask, . . . no."
Kenneth Kofmehl was one of the nation's foremost authorities on the professional staffs of Congress. He also taught a class on political parties. The lecture notes from which he spoke were on pages smaller than the ones I was recording them on. He stood behind a table at the front of the classroom with hands palms down on the table top and the sole of one foot poised on the wall behind him. When he wasn't assuming this posture, he was pacing before us and breaking pieces of chalk in his hands. (Other profs who used that University Hall classroom must've wondered why the chalk pieces were so small!) He was a slender man with glasses and white hair, a bachelor and a full professor who saw after the care of his elderly mother and met with us individually, if we desired, to discuss our performance on tests in his class.
My professors guarded their class time jealously and would have seemed insensitive to today's college students. "Hey! You up there with the hair," my biology prof thundered in a Life Sciences lecture hall. "Cut it! Not your hair. Your mouth." The material was paramount and they weren't interested in our feelings or opinions. Sometimes it felt like intellectual boot camp, but the atmosphere was superior to what I'm perceiving of college today. When sensitive means soft, something important is lost.
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