GRADUATION ADDRESS BY JANE PIIRTO, Ph.D.
NORTHERN MICHIGAN UNIVERSITY
DECEMBER 18, 2004
SIX IMAGES: THE FOCUS OF YOUR LIFE
I would like to dedicate this speech to the memory of my father, George Piirto. Daddy, this is for you.
President Wong; Board of Trustees, especially Scott Holman, fellow member of the Ishpeming Hematite Class of ‘59; faculty, especially Dr. Kay Payant, who nominated me for this honor; staff; members of the class of 2004; and proud friends and family members, it is a distinct honor and pleasure to be standing here talking to you. The graduation ceremony is a ritual with ancient roots. We who are faculty wear these robes a few times a year to remind of this heritage, begun in the 13thcentury, and codified in the United States in the late 1800s.
Forty-one years ago, in June, 1963, I stood in line in the Hedgecock fieldhouse, waiting for my turn to walk across the stage and receive my bachelor’s degree. In front of me stood Susan Luoma, from Ishpeming, my friend since we were three years old, who was graduating Summa Cum Laude. She went on to become a professor here at Northern. Recently retired, she is sitting over there. I was graduating Magna Cum Laude. I had transferred back home after a year at the then-Suomi College and a semester at Augsburg College. We were Finnish American girls, and we were commuters. The local commuters were the kids I’d grown up with. I barely knew anyone who wasn’t a commuter. The dorm and social life at Northern Michigan University barely existed for us. The sophisticated sorority girls and fraternity boys lived lives far away, running for office, having parties, attending balls and sporting events. We slept in our high school beds, our mothers cooked our meals, we studied in our homes, and we went dancing at the Venice and Roosevelt bars in Ishpeming.
Early in the morning, at 7:12 a.m., a horn would toot once, outside, in the morning darkness. We were mostly children of workers for the Cleveland Cliffs Iron Company, and most of us were the first generation in our families to go to college. The car pool would be there. I would run out, the last bite of toast crunching in my mouth, and take my seat in the car. Each person would drive one day a week. Always there would be someone in the car who had an 8 o’clock class and someone who had a 4 o’clock class, and the driver had to stay and wait, while others would try to hitch a ride with an earlier group.
Forty-two years ago tomorrow, it was my 21st birthday, December 19, 1962. Because I was the driver, I had to wait for a fellow in my carpool, Kenny Luostari, who had a 4 o’clock class. It was the last day of college before Christmas break. He asked me whether he could buy me my first drink. He took me to what is now a steakhouse, but was then a notorious roadhouse, The Diamond Club, where hunting widows and wild divorcees hung out. It was 5:30 p.m., dark, as it is at this time of year. The place was empty. I had a Manhattan. Perhaps that was the first prediction that Manhattan would be my one of my destinations twenty years later, that my career would take me to the Upper East Side of New York City, to be the principal of The Hunter College Campus School, a venerated laboratory school, for five years.
After getting my master’s, in English, from Kent State in the mid 1960s, I and my family returned to NMU where I taught in the English Department as an instructor. We lived at Pine Acres Trailer Court in Harvey. My son Steven went to Cherry Creek Elementary School. My daughter Denise was born at Marquette General. After my husband graduated, we left for his job in South Dakota. This ended the 26 years of my life I lived in the Upper Peninsula. While in South Dakota I began to write poems, stories, and books, and to publish them. Having to leave home only crystallized my love for home. When I cross the Mackinac Bridge, and the sign says, “Welcome to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula,” my heart races. I am home.
I’m proud to be coming back to Northern, because Northern is, in many ways, our family college. My aunts Lynn, Siiri, Martha, and Dorothy, my uncles Bill and Art went here when it was a Normal School, back in the 1930s. My sister Ruth graduated from here. My sister Rebecca vowed she would break the tradition, and she went to Michigan State. My husband Paul took two degrees from here. My cousins Pat, Ernie, Dorne, George, Jack, Martin, Bob, Tom, and John, Tim, Carol, and Jim, and their spouses, Les, Bob, Suzette, attended here. My cousin Mary Jean was on staff. Their children, my first cousins once removed, attended Northern also. One of them, Paul Truckey, is a new prof here at NMU. My mother, Pearl, my Aunt Tyne, and Uncles George and Arvo lived a block from here, on Fitch Avenue, and attended the John D. Pierce Laboratory School in the old Kaye Hall. So this is sort of a homecoming for us, descendants of Finnish immigrants who valued higher education.
Now I should say what I have learned out there in the world, which is perhaps the reason you have awarded me this honor. I will do this by asking you to play a little game with me. As a teacher of teachers, I always want my classes –and audiences who whom I speak – to do some work, and not only to listen. My teaching motto is “what is the image”? I would like to ask you to go along with me – I am a crazy professor who teaches creativity classes. I am going to ask you to form several images that exemplify what I have learned.
The first is the image of the teacher. As a teacher, I have learned to push my students, to challenge them, and to raise their dreams. I attribute this practice to my professors at Northern, who inspired and frustrated us, who brought us from concrete thought to abstract thought, to relativistic thought. It was professors at Northern who took me aside in 1962, and invited me to be the editor of the Northern News. It was professors at Northern who told me I should try to get a Ph.D. and nominated me for a Woodrow Wilson graduate fellowship. I was shocked. I didn’t even know what you had to do to get a Ph.D. But I took their word and applied to graduate schools. They raised my aspirations with their confidence in a commuter from Ishpeming. My professors were mostly admirable and dedicated and expected serious work from us. Dr. Barnard, Miss Marriott, Madame Loubert, and Dr. Rapport stand out. Close your eyes and picture the most influential teacher in your life. PAUSE. I would like you graduates to stand up, and to applaud your professors, sitting here proudly, for what they have taught you.
The second image is the image of the land. What is your favorite Upper Peninsula scene? The Black Rocks at Presque Isle? The lake where you have your camp? A cross country ski run you frequent? The sandy beach next to U.S. 2 at the top of Lake Michigan after the Bridge? Mine is the view of Ishpeming from Jasper Knob, in Cleveland Location. It is the largest gem in the world. One thing I learned is that when you’re from the Upper Peninsula, you cannot always find a job that suits your educational background. You love this land and this land is of you and always with you, but you cannot stay and make a living. Many people who were raised here, who want to live here, cannot do so. We natives of the Upper Peninsula visit our families for vacations, but our money is made elsewhere. This makes us less insular than people who can stay near home. Some of the most parochial people I ever met were New Yorkers. When I give speeches, I always say I’m from the Upper Peninsula. Most people have no geographic picture –what is the image? –of the Upper Peninsula. “Is that near Lansing? Near Traverse City?”
Now I live in Ohio, and most of the students and friends I have were born in Ohio, went to school in Ohio, and stay in Ohio. Northern graduates, for the most part, must move away in order to make a living. If they want to stay or return, they often must take jobs for which they are overqualified. There is a brain drain from the Upper Peninsula. This is not as true for other areas in the country where I have lived. When I lived in New York, the students and faculties were born in New York, lived their all their lives, went to college there. We from the Upper Peninsula, in order to survive, have to move away, and we carry our love and longing with us. Close your eyes and picture your favorite Upper Peninsula scene. PAUSE.
The third image is the image of the family. Parents, close your eyes and picture your child graduating here, when he or she was little. I too have been a proud parent at the college graduations of my two children, Steven, and Denise, who are sitting over there. I have a college savings fund for my granddaughter Danielle, who is also here today. Graduates, today you are the successful child, completing a task that was difficult, that took a lot of time, that was hard. Many of you have taken more than four years. In fact, few people graduate from college in four years nowadays. Some of you are older and have returned after living adult lives. You are the ones who have worked two or three jobs, who have struggled with child care and money issues, but who have persevered. Students, picture yourselves triumphing in a difficult educational struggle. You, graduates, have done it. I would like your families and friends to stand up and applaud you for your achievements.
The fourth image is the image of friendship. Think of good times with friends you’ve made here at Northern. Think of how they’ve advised you, heard your complaints, gossiped with you about your love life, traveled with you, had adventures with you, and know about your foibles. Two of my best friends are here today, for me, all these years later; one, Susan, my oldest friend, and the other, Kay. Picture two pregnant professors in their mid-twenties, a redhead and a blonde, office mates in the old Kaye Hall, leaning over the 2nd balcony, gossiping . Close your eyes and picture a happy time with friends.
The fifth image is the image of the ancestors. We who graduated from Northern years ago were close to our ethnic heritage. All four of my grandparents emigrated from Finland about a hundred years ago. The image I am picturing is the 10 surviving aunts and uncles from the Piirto side of the family on sauna Saturday nights, at Grandma’s house in Ishpeming, Grandma rocking in her chair, telling us cousins to slow down as we ran past, rattling the china cabinet. We all took turns to take a sauna. See this: A group stands around the piano, harmonizing, while Aunt Siiri and Aunt Martha take turns playing. The men lean into each other as they harmonize. They bend down and peer at the small words in the Golden Book of Songs. A little kid is next to the aunt at the piano, watching her deft hands hit the chords. A loud group is sitting at the dining room table, gossiping about Lynn’s divorce. All except one are dead now, but they live on in images like this, and they are the family , who gave us the legacy of our love for this institution and for the Upper Peninsula. The mining towns of the Upper Peninsula were troves of diversity, as our grandparents and great grandparents came over from Italy and Cornwall, Ireland and Sweden, Poland and Norway, and many other lands, and went underground into the mines, above ground into the forests, or onto the lake to transport the riches or to fish. I would like you to close your eyes and picture a family gathering. Make an image in tribute to those immigrant ancestors who risked it all to come here. Graduates, would you please stand up and turn to your family members and give them a round of applause.
Our ancestors showed us this land. As a writer, I have celebrated their lives in many poems, stories and essays. This a poem I wrote about my Grandmother Ida Eskelinen who lived over there on Fitch Avenue.
GRANDMA YOU USED TO
keep a boarding house you fed pulp cutters
and ore dock men and railroaders up at 5
each morning packing lunch buckets
changed their beds fed them dinner too
for three bucks a week work work work
you yelled to my mother and aunt at dawn
sleeping behind the draped arch front room
(now my mother feeds you baby food)
Grandma you came over
on the boat to the promised land in ’07
from finland to be a maid in the U.P., Michigan
they beat you your cousin took you away
to the next town you were 19 you cleaned up
after rich people; work work work
you yelled at my grandfather a handsome lad
dark wavy hair who drank ’til you
divorced him when people didn’t get divorced
(now my mother changes you)
Grandma you scrubbed
floors at the hospital a scouring maid
finlander, knobby lady on your hands
and knees a cow a garden and four kids
can’t even talk english waiting on people
all your life; work work work
you yelled at your grandchildren whose mother
was having a baby on your hands
and knees scrubbing clean floors
(now my mother spongebathes you)
Grandma your mother
wouldn’t marry your father in Finland
she was a weaver travelled then town to town
with you the fatherless child the outcast
laughed at and scorned so when I came to you
pregnant with my new young husband you held
my hand on your knee and said love each other
in a language I never learned: rakastakaa
before you died you wanted to make for
my mother serve her just one cup of coffee
Finally, I would like you to form an image of responsibility. Now that is an abstract term, I know, and you may not be able to see something concrete. The image I am forming is of a sun. A sun that is shining in a blue, cloudless sky. A sun that is glowing behind clouds of fog. A sun that is rising in the dawn of the times of your lives you are beginning here. A sun that is setting on lives as old as mine. The sun of responsibility is one of duty, of commitment. Close your eyes and picture a sun. Let the sun’s warmth penetrate to your heart. Let your heart’s warmth go out and heat up the world.
Your education provides you not only with a great achievement, but with an imperative to serve, an obligation. The world has much evil and much good. I have traveled in 6 of the continents (all except Antarctica) and have seen much. I have seen abject poverty in India and beggars in Bangladesh thrusting their children into my face with their thin, clawlike, hands out. However, flies land on the faces of infants not only in the subcontinent, but here in our country, where we have more children in poverty than ever before. Here, now, in 2004, the best minds of our generation cannot find a way to peace. Ethnic wars rage on, and reignite. Mass graves still get filled. The misunderstandings and miscommunications continue. The last election indicated a great divide that must be smoothed by committed young people.
These six images are images of some of the things I have learned in my life. First, I wouldn’t be here without my teachers. Second, this land, the land of my birth, my beloved Upper Peninsula, has formed me. Third, as parents and grandparents, it is important to pass on the values for education to our children. Fourth, friendship nurtures. Fifth, we should honor our ancestors for their courage and legacy. And sixth, there is a lot of work to be done in this world.
Graduates, this is a cliché, but I am, yes, I am, asking you, to go out and save the world. I am, yes, I am, asking you to take what you have learned here in and out of your classes at this great university, in this great and beautiful north land, and to make a commitment to do what you can to be a sun of responsibility to others, as well as to your families and colleagues. Go forth, young graduates. Go forth and save the world. But first, walk across this stage and honor your struggle and your triumph. Merry Christmas. Happy New Year.