Meadville Lombard Theological School has created this blog as a means of remembering and honoring our time here at the corner of 57th and Woodlawn Avenues. We welcome current and former students, trustees, faculty and staff to join us in memorializing our time in this place. Leave comments, post links to your own blogs, or, if you have photos or longer remembrances to share, email them to us and we will post them.
Meadville Lombard
Theological School
5701 S. Woodlawn Avenue
Chicago, IL 60637
A six-week, late-summer job in 1971 barely qualifies me as “former staff,” but I’ll take it. (Duties: helping proofread the course catalog but mainly mimeographing, collating, address-labeling, packing, and mailing copies of the 125th (?) anniversary lectures that went to board members and other donors.) Those of you who made it to First Unitarian on Sunday mornings are the ones I’m likeliest to know. Things to remember: (1) My amazed first impression of Wiggins Library and learning which floors in the library corresponded with which floors in the rest of the building. (2) Jeffery Tidwell, who crammed a lot of ministry into his student years, and whose too-brief life is memorialized by the tree in front of 5711, right next to the landing of the front-door ramp. (3) The means of memory: that tree, the plaque in the stairwell, revisited rooms, and more. I wonder: What will happen to that tree, crowding against the younger ramp? What will the Chicago contingent of the new theological university use as replacements for the tangible reminders of those previous members of its community whose lives are so worthy of reflection and emulation that their peers planted trees, dedicated plaques, and otherwise made likely the question, “Who was this, and why did this community think we should know this name and this life?”