In the early spring of 1979, I was a graduate student in early American literature at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. I was working on my dissertation, teaching part-time at the Federal Correctional Institution in Oxford, Wisconsin, and bartending several nights a week. I was busy.
I said, “I have a job.” To which he replied, “Maybe not.”
In that academic year I had sent out more than one hundred letters of application for teaching jobs, and in March I was lucky enough to be hired by Dickinson College as a tenure-track assistant professor of English. Jobs in my field were scarce; indeed, they remain scarce.
With my appointment letter in hand, I plowed ahead with my dissertation. Dickinson’s English department expected me to have completed my degree before I arrived. On the morning of March 28, a good friend called and asked if I’d been watching television. I was a bit taken aback and replied, probably somewhat testily, that I was not watching television because I needed to finish writing my dissertation. After all, I said, “I have a job.” To which he replied, “Maybe not.” It was not a good morning.
I’ve never watched The China Syndrome again.
Things got worse. That evening my wife and I went with friends for dinner and a movie. We saw The China Syndrome which had been released only three weeks earlier. You may recall that in the course of that film a distraught Jack Lemmon announced that if the nuclear reactor at which he worked melted down, it would “leave an area the size of the state of Pennsylvania permanently uninhabitable.” (Couldn’t they have said Montana?) To the best of my recollection, I’ve never watched The China Syndrome again.
I tried to concentrate on my research and writing, but TMI – and my job – loomed large. Finally I called the English department chair, Marcia Connor. I introduced myself and blurted out “Do I still have a job?” At virtually the same time, she said “Are you still coming?” Marcia said she thought central Pennsylvania – and my job – were safe. After all, she was confident enough to stay put. That was at least reassuring, but the news about TMI continued in the press and on television, and new questions about the plant’s safety seemed to crop up over and over again. In retrospect I’m pretty sure that I couldn’t talk about much else. I had a job, right? “Maybe not.”
“Better the devil you know than the devil you don’t”
The advice I received varied widely, from “don’t go anywhere near that place” to “Come on. It’ll be fine. Those guys must know what they’re doing.” The clincher for me came not from a nuclear engineer or safety expert but, interestingly, from the man selling me dog food at a local feed and grain store. (I mean, I was asking everybody what I should do!). He said, “Go. Those guys know they have a problem, and so they know they need to fix it. And they will. We’ve got a bunch of nuclear plants all around here, and we have no idea how they’re doing, if they’re actually safe. They could fail tomorrow for all we know.”
“Better the devil you know than the devil you don’t” is an oft-quoted cliché for a reason. My wife and I moved to Carlisle in August, 1979, and except for time spent directing Dickinson’s abroad program at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England, didn’t leave. I worked at Dickinson for 38 years. Though my wife and I are now both retired, we’re still in Carlisle. We’re sometimes asked if we’re planning to move away, and we hem and haw and bat the question away. Better the community you know that the one you don’t.
Bob