From Rustic College to Urbane University — Elderhostel Welcomes the Senior Class

B Y J O S E P H S T O C K E R From Rustic College to Urbane UniversityElderhostel Welcomes the Senior Class

What do the following Arizona vignettes people is touring the few threadbare have in common? buildings. Their guide: Grace McCool, an 83-year-old who is herself an institution in Cochise County-ordained preacher, authority on ghost towns, author of books on the history of Cochise. A classroom at the University of Arizona in Tucson. Ann McClellan, a specialist in genealogy, is teaching a course in it. One of her students is Ellen Ericksen, a widow from Amarillo, Texas. She traveled expressly to take the course. She wants to write her family history. She explains simply: "My two girls, when I'm gone, won't know whom to ask about our family. Anything happens to me, they'll lose their roots.

Well, then, the answer finally to that question we asked above: what these happenings all have in common is Elderhostel. A very large happening in itself, it has swept into and through Arizona as it has every other one of the 50 states plus Canada and a goodly part of Europe. Elderhostel offers a study program for older adults (people 60 or over or couples of which one partner is at least 60). They don't have to be retirees but most are. A few face retirement and are testing the waters. They take specially-designed one-week courses at colleges and universities (currently there are more than 600 participating institutions). They live in dormitories,dine in campus cafeterias, attend classes taught by regular faculty members, take field trips, and generally have one hell of a good time.

"Where else can people go and learn so much and feel so safe?" says one woman Elderhosteler.

"You know," said another, "I didn't hear about arthritis once all week!" And this from an Albuquerque man at the Yavapai College Elderhostel: "Nobody's here to have to prove anything. At our age we can relax.

Last summer there were more than 55,000 participants in Elderhostels. Not a few systematically map out a whole season of them and travel from one campus to another. Sophia and Nick Kolen of Sun City (he a retired engineer, she a former singer with the Kansas City Lyric Opera) made 13 Elderhostels (including three in Hawaii) by the time I caught up with them at Yavapai College. Dr. John G. Westover, dean emeritus at Western Illinois University, now retired to Tucson, helps out with the UofA Elderhostel. He heard of a couple that attended 17 Elderhostels in one summer. At Elderhostel headquarters in Boston, Massachusetts, they speak of such peripatetic types-not derisively but, in fact, almost reverently-as "Elderhostel junkies."

"I say in my speeches that Elderhostel is a program in which people come on campus, live in dorms, take gang showers, eat cafeteria food, attend classes-and are willing to pay for it!" says Dr. Robert V. Conter of the UofA's division of continuing education. He's state Elderhostel director.

What do they pay? One hundred and eighty dollars per person per week most places (as of 1983)...a little higher at some Hawaiian and Alaskan Elderhostels.

Seven Arizona campuses are in the program-UofA, Arizona State University, Northern Arizona University, Cochise College, Yavapai College, The College of Ganado, and Eastern Arizona College at Thatcher. (Last summer Eastern Arizona's was underenrolled and had to be cancelled. It was the only one that didn't pan out.) This fall and winter there are Elderhostels at the UofA and Cochise, and then in the summer of 1984-if all enrollments fill-eight programs will be in the Arizona list: the seven enumerated above plus Sierra Vista-the latter jointly sponsored by Cochise College and the UofA and built largely around a study of Fort Huachuca and its history, back to frontier days. "My goal," says Conter, "is to have Elderhostels 50 weeks a year, excluding Christmas and New Year's-and my expeing to come Christmas and New Year's as well." (At Tucson this fall and winter the Elderhostelers are being housed in hotels

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rather than dorms. Not enough space in the latter because school is in session.) Who comes to Arizona's Elderhostels?

And why? The answer to the first question is: a little bit of everybody, from just about everywhere. Far more originate out-of-state than in-state, with California, Florida, and New York heavily represented. Answer to the second question: for certain courses. For Arizona scenery. For the weatherunderstandably, in summer, our highcountry schools get the heaviest Elderhostel traffic. To stop over and set, on the way to somewhere else during vacation season. To visit friends who've moved out here. (Retired Florida educator at an ASU Elderhostel: "We were going to see some friends at Sun City, and the only way to see them was here at ASU because this was where they would be.") And for reasons relating to none of the foregoing: a Colorado woman came to one of the UofA Elderhostels last summer because she had a piece of Arizona property she wanted to sell. A California couple, Wally and Dory Hicks, went to the Yavapai Elderhostel because they thought they just might want to retire to Prescott. "My wife's out talk-ing to real estate agents right now," says Hicks with a grin.

Most of the Elderhostelers come paired

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up, but there are numbers of widows and somewhat fewer widowers. "A single man who shows up becomes quite an attractive item," says Conter. "In the case of a really attractive man, women have been known to call Elderhostel headquarters in Boston to find out where John Doe is going this year." Conter says several latter-year marriages have resulted from Elderhostels. And to the inevitable question he answers with a twinkle: "What do we do when Mr. Jones and Mrs. Smith want to room together? We let 'em. One has to assume that if people are 60 or older, they are old enough to know what they want to do."

It was no longer ago than 1975 that the Elderhostel phenomenon sprang up. The place was New Hampshire. Marty Knowlton had the inspiration. He was with the division of continuing education of the University of New Hampshire. On Violent volcanic origins of San Francisco Peaks bequeath a legacy of cinders and buckwheat. David Muench photo An Elderhosteler in action. Since 1900, the population of the United States has tripled. Yet the number of Americans over age 65 has multiplied eight times during that period. Jeff Topping photo

A backpacking trip through Europe he became intrigued by the numerous youth hostels. He came home and to his colleagues popped an idea: match two problems together to solve both. Problem number one: growing old in a youthoriented society. Problem number. two: utilizing empty college and university classrooms and dormitories in the summer. Knowlton and Company based their idea on a philosophical underpinning: retirement doesn't have to mean checking out of the world. A person's later years can and should be an opportunity to enjoy new challenges and to keep growing. The patron saints of Elderhostel had some other firm notions about how the program should be run. Use regular professors and established authorities in their fields. No talking down to the Elderhostelers. No entrance requirements. No tests, no grades. (Or, as one Elderhosteler put it, "Not a hassle in the passel.") One taboo, and one only: nothing on the problems of aging! The Elderhostel idea took off like HulaHoops and pet rocks. There were 220 participants the first year. By 1981-six years later the enrollment was 37,000. Nineteen eighty-three's total for all seasons is estimated at 70,000, up 90 percent over 1981. The annual growth rate as of 1982 was 50 percent. Trying to manage that kind of expansion, says an Elderhostel official, is like "trying to shoe a horse on a dead run." The Elderhostel course offerings are about as eclectic as you can get. (You can obtain a catalog, incidentally, by writing Elderhostel, 100 Boylston Street, Boston,

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MA 02116.) There are, of course, the staples-literature, art, music, computers, creative writing, exploring the universe, the American presidency, developing your creative potential, and so on. But the real Elderhostel riches perhaps are the regional arcana: a course in Lincoln at a school in Illinois. "Overview of the Petroleum Industry" at Bartlesville (Oklahoma) Wesleyan College. "Who Are the Amish?" at Messiah College in Pennsylvania. "The World of John Steinbeck" at northern California's San Jose State University, located just north of Monterey and Carmel "Steinbeck Country." Bob Conter says that's the sort of thing the Arizona Elderhostels have been trying to do concentrate on Arizona and Southwestern culture, history, and climate, yet without neglecting the intellectual and esthetic. NAU, for instance, offers courses on Native American archeology, the Navajo, and the planet Pluto, with, naturally, a field trip to Lowell Observatory where it was discovered. And, of course, the geology of the Grand Canyon. Cochise College's course on ghost towns is taught by Grace McCool. The College of Ganado, on the Navajo reservation, lures sizable enrollments (despite what Bob Conter acknowledges are rather rustic accommodations) with courses in Southwestern archeology, Navajo history, and "Trees and Range Plants of the High Mesas." The UofA emphasizes astronomy (a strong subject there and at nearby Kitt Peak National Observatory), the flora and fauna of the Sonoran Desert (ergo, a field trip to the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum), and Arizona's natural resources -water, land, and air. One year the UofA took its Elderhostelers to Guaymas, Mexico, another time to the American Museum of Natural History's Research Station in the Chiricahua Mountains to study plants and animals. The folks slept in bunkhouses on a converted ranch west of Portal. Yavapai College offers, along with folk dancing, the history of the Pueblo Indians. It was taught last summer by a Hopi, Don Nelson, with a field trip to Wupatki and Sunset Crater national monuments. Wupatki, one of the great prehistoric Indian ruins of the West, shows how Pueblo Indians lived half a millennium ago. There was also a hands-on course in international cuisine ("our basic emphasis: less fat, less salt, less sugar"). Teaching this course was a woman goat farmer from Chino Valley, 14 miles north of Prescott. She demonstrated how to make cheese from raw goat's milk. Very healthful stuff. And for a week during Prescott's Frontier Days the Elderhostelers immersed themselves in Western Americana. That particular course was titled, aptly enough, "Frontier Days." ASU plays the Western theme, too. It enlists Marshall Trimble, for example, to handle the topic of "Cowboys and the Old West." Trimble, director of Southwest studies for the Maricopa County Community College District, writes history for Arizona Highways. He turns up in Western shirt, jeans, and a big flamboyant belt buckle; and he's frank about what he's doing. "You really ought to be skeptical about some of the tall tales told out here in the West," he tells his audience. But then he adds, "If people are telling folk history and they're not doing any harm, I say why not just let 'em do it?" Al Berkman, a retired U.S. Forest Service conservationist, came to the ASU Elderhostel all the way from his home in Wausau, Wisconsin, almost expressly for Trimble's slightly revisionist course about Western cowboys. Berkman is fascinated by the Southwest. He used to have a cowboy band in Wausau. When his son, Chip, who lives in Phoenix, wrote his dad, "If you want to study the Southwest, this is the place to do it," the 69-year-old Berkman took off for Tempe. "When I was a little boy, I loved the cowboys," he said. "Now, even though I know they weren't exactly the way I thought they were, I enjoy 'em even more!" Trimble and other faculty people presiding over Elderhostel classes find it a kind of professorial dream-come-true. Their students are eager...hungry for knowledge. They want to make every minute count, since they don't have as many

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minutes left to them as youngsters going to the same colleges. And they make up in life experience-which they're anxious to share-what they may lack in formal education (although in any typical group of Elderhostelers you'll find a respectable number of college degrees). Says one of last summer's Arizona Elderhostelers, a retired Los Angeles health-and-safety specialist named Harold Brown: "In our group of 40 here this week we have about 2000 years of experience."

William D. Berkeley, president of Elderhostel, talks of what he calls the "wonderfully simple Elderhostel notion." It's this: "If you take an alert, intellectually vigorous student group of older adults and confront them with a challenging and enthusiastic teacher, a wondrous thing takes place. It's called liberal education at its very best."

I saw precisely that mix at work in a Yavapai College Elderhostel class titled "Literary Hors d'oeuvres." The teacher was the bright, young, bearded chairman of the English department, Dr. James Pence. He had given his venerable students a provocative short story to read and discuss. The story was called "The Storm," by Kate Chopin. It was about a coupleeach person married to somebody elsewho met again accidentally in her cabin in the Cajun country of Louisiana during a storm and went to bed together.I arrived as the discussion was under way, and the room was in an uproar. Not an uproar of indignation over the adultery taking place. Rather an uproar of eagerness to talk about it. And Pence was a pastmaster at getting students involved.

There were the inevitable wisecracks. (Pence: "It seems to me that a dominating theme emerges...." Elderhosteler: "Don't leave your wife at home alone!") But mostly the discussion was serious. And it was thoughtful. One Elderhosteler remarked carefully: "I think that what the author was saying was that sin sometimes can have desirable consequences. If there had been no sin in the world-and I'm no Christian-God wouldn't have given us the Virgin Mary to transform the world."

Interestingly, nobody in the group condemned the bit of Cajun hanky-panky, leading one Elderhosteler to say to Pence: "May I ask you a question? Since we're all older, do our opinions shock you?"

Replied Pence: "No. What we had from you was an intelligent reaction. I teach 18year-olds, and their reaction is not nearly as sophisticated. They want to make moral judgments that are large and general. They don't want to discuss the story as you did but the morality of the acts. The idea that a brief encounter could improve the marriage of each party is very difficult for an 18-year-old to understand."Imagine that scene in Prescott duplicated a thousand times throughout the whole international network of Elderhostels and you can understand why professors love teaching the Elderhostelers. Marty Knowlton, the New Hampshire academic who had the idea to begin with, says it well: "the hostelers come with the mental energy and drive professors never see in their undergraduate classes.... They come for no other reason than the love of learning."

Look, then, for the good, gray Elderhostel movement to grow and keep on growing and then grow some more after that. One observer, after peering in on the program, allowed himself to be quoted on the cover of a recent Elderhostel annual report: "The momentum of Elderhostel... is irreversible. Its impact is ultimately immeasurable, as all humanistic advance is immeasurable. But it is real all the same, and a cause for celebration."

A contributor to Highways since the late 1940s, Joseph Stocker has been a reporter and public relations man. He continues free-lance writing full-time.