By TERESA FARRELL
Managing Editor
After more than 20 years at Saint Rose, Associate Communications professor Gary McLouth will be saying goodbye to the classroom at the end of this semester. McLouth, who currently teaches Magazine Practicum and TV Journalism during the fall semester, has written multiple books and has had his fiction, essays and poetry published in a variety of magazines and journals. Since his arrival at Saint Rose in August of 1988, he has made a career of inspiring students and faculty alike. Whether it was holding one of his first class meetings under the staircase in Albertus because of a scheduling problem; or using his experiences to help expand the horizons of not only the Sphere and earlier versions of the Chronicle, but also the young writers who worked on them; or guiding his students to the future as an internship coordinator and mentor, McLouth has always been known and loved for his unique approach to living, learning and knowing how to laugh. Here he shares some of his famous stories and life lessons with the Saint Rose community for the last time before he packs up and moves to Florida, where he’s ready to jump into the next adventure—retirement.
On Saint Rose:
There are a lot of stories that come out of Saint Rose. This has been the place where I’ve gotten a lot of things together, professionally and personally; sort of the “serious” part of my life, it’s been more consistent. I’ve been married, too; I started this job the same summer I got married. So it’s like, okay, now you’ve made these two big commitments. I’m good at floating around and doing really well at something until I get bored and quit. But this has been a good steady place for me to work. There could have been wilder things, but I’ve already looked at that world and been in it, and a lot of it is phony.
On Phonies:
I realize that more than anything I like being my own boss, and when you’re running a course, that’s who you are. You’ve got to figure this out. Your audience is a bunch of people who trust you—and if they don’t trust you, nothing happens. You gotta get them to trust you. Being a phony is the first thing that turns people off—any kid can spot a phony. The older people get, the less able they are to spot them, because they learn all these phony behaviors. We learn manners, protocols, PR strategies. Like when someone says to you, “Jeez, how are you, I’m really glad to see you.” Are you really? But you can’t really say, “Oh god, I’m not glad to see you.” I used to do political campaigns, and a lot of it is greasing up the right people and finding a phrase that people are gonna respond to, whether or not it’s true, or even possible. That’s what I loved about PR. When I started teaching I actually had to identify this stuff and it became really distasteful in a way because I realized how good you can be at it and how necessary it is.
On Staying Young:
The best part about being at a college is being around other people who want to learn. There’s an energy around students, and people talk about it so it’s no secret. A lot of us in the teaching business say it “Keeps us young”; I’ve never really sort of liked that, but actually it’s true. There’s an old Frank Sinatra song with the line in it: “Love, like youth, is wasted on the young.” And it’s really true. I never thought it was when I was young, but as you get older you realize that youth isn’t really how old you are, it’s actually something to do with your guts and your internal workings. Young, to me, means you keep your curiosity—you keep your belief in the future, and it gives you a different approach to people. You’re always looking for the next person you want to meet, rather than keeping an album of all the great people you have met and sort of shutting down. A lot of people do that. I don’t think it’s a bad thing, necessarily; we just make different choices.
On Retirement:
I remember when I first signed up for the retirement account. I had just started my so-called “career”; I was 25, and these guys were talking about retirement. I really didn’t know what that was, but I was also brought up by two parents who hated the term. In my family, saying “retirement” was like saying “dog s**t”. A lot of people retire from one thing and go on and do other things, and retirement is really about making plans and saving money and doing certain things. So what intelligent people do is they figure this out and do it and they go about their business. My parents did that too, the old fashioned way. They both went through the Depression and were poor as hell. They really appreciated work and money in a way that I never will because for me, it’s been easy—comparatively. I’m not broke, financially or spiritually, but I’m certainly not loaded, and that’s the thing—Saint Rose values spirituality and has financial value.
On Civil Disobedience:
In France, when they get pissed off, they go out in the street and start throwing stones. The streets are made out of cobblestones, so they dig them up and throw them. I don’t really like that. I’ve been there when they’ve done that—it’s not fun. I wasn’t there on purpose, I happened to be there as a tourist. It was Bastille Day, so they usually have some kind of celebration going on, but this was about work stoppage. There was this guy walking down the street with a huge knife—I don’t know where he got it, I’ve never seen a knife that big that wasn’t a machete. He was drunk and it was his time to raise hell. But I’ve been in demonstrations in this country, too, like anti-war, civil rights stuff, and I think people come out of those things with more purpose, rather than more violence. They understand what it’s about.
On Writing, Nature and Getting Along with People:
When I was a kid my parents took us to the Adirondacks. We used to stay at this place on Third Lake. It’s now been torn down, one of those old hotels with the big porches, boat liveries… that’s where I fell in love with boats. I’ve been going to the Adirondacks my whole life. Where I stay now is in Blue Mountain Lake, where my family has vacationed for 45 years. I lived and worked in Long Lake for a year. I’ve spent a lot of time there, especially in the fall. I have a friend who runs a boat livery on Blue Mountain Lake and he has a great cottage by the water. I used to go there and write. I must have written half my dissertation in the Adirondacks. It’s quintessential. I like the people who end up being there. I like the natives, what can I say? A lot of people don’t like them. Adirondackers are not particularly loquacious. They don’t trust most people, they don’t like most people, they don’t like each other. There’s all these weird little battles going on. But if you don’t take sides, you can be on all sides.
On Bold Moves:
Once, when I was teaching school, I was sitting in the cafeteria with this guy that I worked with, and we were talking. We started talking about the idea of doing something different for the summer—we wanted to run a motel. We didn’t really know how we were going to do that, but I went home and started making phone calls to people who had rented to my parents, and started saying I’d like to spend a summer in the Adirondacks doing… something, and at least break even financially. I wated to do something—I wanted a job! I had no idea where this was going, but it turned out someone knew a guy who had run a cabin colony, but it had closed down because the former manager had been stealing from him. We interviewed this guy, and then we had to interview his wife. And she told us, “If you guys are gonna do this you have to wash and iron all the sheets.” So we get up there and all the equipment is at least 20 – 30 years old, including the washers. It took all day to wash these sheets and towels. And the lawn was waist high on one hillside. The whole place needed to be worked on for a whole solid week before we could even open it. But we did it. It was hysterical—we were in our twenties, so everything was a joke. We made up all these cottages, cleaned them. They all had weird hot water tanks, gas stoves. You could blow yourself up. We had one cottage that threatened to blow up all the time. It was a hysterical summer. We didn’t make any money, but we had a great time and we met a lot of really neat people. This was a dump we were running, no doubt about it. There were a few good rooms and then these cottages. It was great and it really taught me a lot. The alternative was… I don’t know what it was. I’m not sure what I would have done. I would have done something. But the thing is, if you wanna do something you need to have an idea what it is, and then you gotta go look for it. And keep looking until you find it. If you’re not that curious, you’re not gonna get it.
On Hitchhiking:
People don’t hitchhike anymore because it’s dangerous. Well, it always was dangerous. There’s this romanticism that there was a time where you could hitchhike across the country and nothing would happen to you. It’s not true. Things were a little friendlier, but you’d still have to be resourceful yourself. It’s always been about how you present yourself and what you think about yourself. I hitchhiked and I picked up hitchhikers, because I understood what that was about, but there are certain people that you just don’t pick up. I came to understand that most people hitchhike because they have to. It’s not like they could take a bus or a car or a jet, but just choose to hitchhike instead. Those options are pretty much shot for you if you’re hitchhiking. Sometimes you only have to do it for 3 or 4 miles, but you’re still putting yourself out there, going “Hey pal, pick me up, I won’t kill you!” It’s interesting. Most of the people who pick you up are decent people. You don’t necessarily want to have dinner with them or take them home to your mother, but they’re probably not gonna stab you and take your wallet. It could happen though. You just never know.
On Hats:
I bought this top hat in a thrift shop in Glasgow, Scotland and it was in perfect shape. It was beautiful. I was traveling with one of my best friends at the time. I bought the hat and he bought this top coat, which you wouldn’t wear anywhere but Scotland or Ireland. It looked like a minister’s frock. It was a knee-length, black velvet kind of thing, with buttons. He walked around with that and I had this hat, and I had a backpack which became a huge joke because it was big and orange and we were in Northern Ireland, where orange is not the color to wear. Of course, you can’t wear this top hat all the time, so I ended up strapping it to this big orange backpack, and I had this pair of thick-soled boots, they were orange too. The first day I walk in these things I have a blister the size of a half dollar, so they were hanging off my backpack for the rest of the trip. And I would carry my coat on my backpack too. I looked like the kind of person I would run away from. So anyway, my friend had to go back to America, so I said, “Why don’t you take this hat with you?” At this point we’re in Switzerland so he takes the hat and he goes to put it in a box, but it wouldn’t fit. So he pounds the top down so it’ll fit, and wrecks the hat. And pretty soon this hat shows up at my parents’ house—no explanation—all squished, and I wasn’t home yet. All my dad said when he looked at it was, “Well, I don’t know what happened to Gary, but he was fine when he left.” Now I’ve been carrying it around for almost 40 years and it’s in here because I’ve moved—major moves—3 or 4 times, and I keep peeling down. That’s why all these boxes are in here. I have to look through them. I already got rid of boxes and boxes of letters. I corresponded with all kinds of people everywhere. I’ve read some great letters from people who I had met on the road someplace, and everybody trades addresses and stuff. But this hat comes out of an era of my life. It’s like a photograph, except it’s a hat.
On Advice to College Students:
If you’re in college, you’re there for a reason. It’s to learn about something, that’s why you’ve got all these courses, but it’s also the last time in your life where you’ve got a free shot at being kind of by yourself. There are all these rules and things you have to follow, but it’s a lot freer than you think. Even the freedom to make your own class schedule, if you think about it, is the freedom to structure your life in a way that fits you instead of a way that fits someone else. The trick now is economics, it’s always the trick—how are you gonna pay for this? But there’s still an opportunity to say, “I’m free to choose”. You make your own choices about what you’re going to be committed to. None of us are free-free; even flies aren’t free, they’re gonna be dead in 7 days. But there’s a lot of stuff you can do when you’re young that you can’t do when you’re older, and college is a great place to free range with that.
On Choosing a Career:
How do you choose to be something? You don’t really choose to be born and you don’t really choose to be where you are most of the time, and to be able to choose a career is sort of crazy when you think about it. Someone says, “What do you wanna do?” And you can say, “I’d like to do this.” And someone says, “I can help with you that.” That’s pretty wild. And if you really look at it, it’s pretty frightening. It’s a lot of freedom but that’s a lot of responsibility, and we’re really good at blaming other people. We’ve all got reasons why we’re gonna fail. It really has to do with how you look at it. You assume you’re the dumbest person in the room, but you’re still in the room, and at some point you realize you’re not the dumbest; you’re not the smartest either, but you aren’t the dumbest. Some days I might be the smartest guy in the room and some days I’m not. And actually, it doesn’t matter. But I’m not sure that I thought that way when I was a student.
On Favorite Quotes:
I like this one: “Don’t believe everything you think”. Our egos run away with us; we think “Oh, I’m so smart, you know.” Don’t believe it. You meet people that really believe what they think, and you’re like really? Where’s your sense of proportion? There are people that go around laughing and they have no idea why they’re laughing or what’s so funny. The thing is, don’t be an idiot.
Then there’s a line from a Burt Reynolds movie where he comes in, he’s got these two big suitcases, the kind you have to carry by those loopy handles. They’re standing outside the train station, and the father character goes to pick up the guy’s luggage and he can’t lift it, and Burt Reynold’s line is, “I’ve always had my shit together, but I can’t pick it up.” And the father looks at him, like this guy’s just brought the Sermon on the Mount down and showed it to him, like, “Oh wow, I’ve never thought of it like that.” And in the theater, there was this intake of breath when he said it; it was a great moment in moviegoing. I’ll just never forget the line. So that’s me.
