There’s a 200-pound dinosaur in my house. It is 4 feet long and 2½ feet high. It’s made out of metal pieces welded together by a student of mine in shop class about 15 years ago.
When he put it up for sale, I paid $75 for it. It took a truck and two people to move it to my house. Today it is in my guest room, which I call “The Dinosaur Room.” I don’t know what it was, but something about that dinosaur made me want to own it the moment I saw it.
A few years later (2012), I retired after 25 years of teaching high school English. I started writing opinion pieces for the Valley News, New Haven Register and The Cleveland Plain Dealer, perhaps 100 pieces over the last 10 years.
Gradually I have come to realize through that writing process that I not only have a Dinosaur Room, but I also have become a dinosaur myself.
What was commonplace to me in the 1960s and 1970s seems like ancient history, even a mystery, to others: “What ever are you talking about?” is a question I feel my younger readers silently asking me to explain.
One of those commonplaces to me but not to younger folk sits right at the end of my nose: the two-decade difficulty caused by my beard and mustache from 1964-1984.
It has literally been on my face since I was a freshman at Ithaca College in 1964. At that time, there were 1,200 students at Ithaca College and only two of them had a beard: Judd Shanker and me.
Judd was an anti-war activist, and his beard was a great bushy broom. I was in the debate club, and my beard was a Shakespearean affair that neatly framed my face with hair. It’s been that way ever since, 58 years now.
Two beards out of 1,200 Ithaca students was a tiny number. When the president of the college held a forum, I decided to put him on the spot, standing out as one of two beards myself on campus, by asking him in front of about 300 students, “Dr. Dillingham, what do you think of students who wear beards?”
He replied, “I like some beards. I like yours for instance.”
The idea that I, as a student, would feel the need to seek approval by a college president in 1964 for a personal decision like growing facial hair clearly makes me a dinosaur in 2022. I was a creature of the patriarchy.
No student today would think it necessary to ask the president of Dartmouth College at a public event, “President Hanlon, what do you think of male students coloring their hair pink and green?”
But my beard has been an issue more than just in the year 1964.
In 1973, I applied for a job in Auburn, N.Y., teaching middle school English. By that time, I had a freshly minted master’s degree from Kent State University. And beards and long hair were regularly ridiculed on TV by Archie Bunker as symbols of “pinko, commie, long-haired bearded protestors.”
The Auburn school interviewer asked me face to face, “If you are hired, would you consider shaving your beard?” My polite response that I liked my neat Shakespearean beard did not satisfy.
I received a rejection letter from Auburn stating, “We believe your beard would create a community problem.” This seemed ironic to me, since Auburn prided itself on being the home of William H. Seward, secretary of state to President Abraham Lincoln, who had perhaps the most famous beard in American history.
It is hard to explain to readers in 2022 exactly how my beard made me a target of suspicion and fear in the 1960s and ’70s, as if the mere fact of having hair on my face made me an anti-Vietnam War agitator.
Thirteen years after my 1973 beard rejection in Auburn, I found myself in Vermont still self-conscious about my facial hair. I had graduated from Yale Divinity School by then, and being a bearded student was nothing unusual at Yale.
The Vietnam War ended in 1975, so I was no longer feared as an anti-war protestor. Now suddenly I felt a freedom and comfort I had not felt as a bearded person for decades: Vermont hunters engaged in the annual ritual of growing beards for hunting season. My Shakespearean whiskers were not out of place in Vermont of 1986; they were nothing unusual at all.
Twenty-five years later, I was to retire as a Vermont high school English teacher with every hair of my Shakespearean beard in place, but now white.
Thus began my retired life in 2012 as a dinosaur, writing opinion pieces for journals, explaining the 1960s and 1970s to younger folk, hair by hair.