SAAH 004 Tom McGowan 6-17-2016ufdc

I designed and received funding for what was called the Rhodes College Life history project in which we, over the course of seven or eight years, I taught a seminar for undergraduate stu

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1 hour, 15 minutes | 35 pages

Samuel Proctor Oral History Program

College of Liberal Arts and Sciences

Program Director: Dr Paul Ortiz

241 Pugh Hall

PO Box 115215 Gainesville, FL 32611 (352) 392-7168 https://oral.history.ufl.edu

Interviewer: Annemarie Nichols

Date: June 17, 2016

N: Good afternoon, its Annemarie Nichols at the Lincolnville Museum and Cultural

Center, interviewing Mr Tom McGowan It is June 17 [2016], and let’s get

started Can you state your name?

M: My name is Thomas McGowan

N: Okay Can you tell us when you were born?

M: I was born June 11, 1959

N: Okay Can you tell us a little bit about your growing up years?

M: Yeah I actually grew up in New York City Staten Island, New York I went to a

Catholic Grammar School which left me with considerable contempt for

hierarchical organizations and the church [Laughter] I went to a public high school I attended Hunter College That’s part of City College of New York My undergraduate degree was in communications I then entered a master’s

program at CUNY I earned a master’s of science in social research, and MSSR, but during that time I really fell in love with social theory and sociology So I attended the University of New Hampshire and worked with Walter Buckley He wrote a really interesting book in the 1960s entitled Sociology and Modern

Systems Theory He’s a brilliant man, and I had the honor of working with him And he sponsored my dissertation My dissertation was on the work of Hans-Georg Gadamer, who was a German philosopher And my thesis was, I was very interested in the sociological significance of his work He does work in

hermeneutics, or interpretive theory, and what I believe is, there is an aspect of interpretation in everyday life that sociologists don’t really study, so I was trying

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to open up some theoretical ground there So I earned my PhD in sociology It was conferred on me in 1988 That same year, I took a tenure track position in Rhodes College, in Memphis, Tennessee I really wanted to be a college

professor, and I was able to realize that dream And I’ve been there ever since

My research interests have kind of gravitated from or meandered from initially, I was really kind of a generalist looking at social theory and its implications in practice And then I kind of stumbled into the area of social gerontology I

designed and received funding for what was called the Rhodes College Life history project in which we, over the course of seven or eight years, I taught a seminar for undergraduate students, and the purpose of the seminar was to combat ageism by locating individual students as companions with homebound elders in the Memphis community And I had the students journal, and I

published a series of articles around that research project, and that was a great project I had hoped to do a book around the project, but honestly, I kind of lost interest in the gerontological side of it, and more—my interests kind of shifted toward interaction across difference in general, not just ageism ‘cause I

published on ageism, discrimination against elderly people And then I got into looking at medical sociology with a focus on community health and just social discrepancies in epidemiological patterns Kind of the demographics of health and access to care I did a lot of consulting work for the Tennessee Health

Department and the Shelby County Health Department Throughout that period

of time, over an eight year period, and then I had another sabbatical, and really meandered into the topic of integrative learning and professor-student interaction

M: It’s a really interesting story I’ve told this story to some students over time I was

going to be a sportscaster That’s why I was studying communications I worked

at a radio station in New York as an undergrad WINS, all news, all the time It was a twenty four hour news station And I was also working part-time at a place called sports phone, which, before the internet was this telephone service people could call and get live updates or almost live updates on different scores like the basketball and football, depending on the season And believe it or not, the

night—the office was on third avenue and fifty third street in Manhattan ‘cause Hunter College is on the Upper East Side, so it was close to the college And the night John Lennon was killed, I was working And I was on the New York sports phone, and we had—back in the day we had these wire services Associated Press and what was the other one? Was it UPI? It might have been UPI But when there was a bulletin, bells would go off, and there were three bells, which I believe I remember three bells, meaning there was a big bulletin Fourth was the highest And I went over and read the copy and said, oh my goodness John

walked I would usually take a taxi or the bus home, and I walked down second avenue in the rain the two miles or so to the dorms And when I got back to my dorm room, I just knew that I wanted to change direction Actually, in the spring I left that job I was able to get unemployment insurance, which was wonderful I spent the summer at the beach writing music ‘cause I was an amateur guitar player and song writer In the fall, I started my senior year, but my heart wasn’t in

it And so, I withdrew toward the end of the semester and went out to California

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and just lived in Berkeley, California for a while But while I was at Berkeley—

‘cause its kind of like a hippie kind of area, you know I was playing music on the streets, and I got a job at a pizzeria beer joint on the campus of Cal Berkeley My friends increasingly were students at Berkeley And Berkeley is a tremendous university The students were really smart, and really interesting, and I started spending a lot of time with them And I started spending more time on campus, and then, I started crashing lectures I heard some amazing people speak Like

IF Stone who was a long-standing Liberal and person who advocated for human rights And during that time I realized that what I was trying to do with my music, which I really didn’t have the talent to do—I’m a very average guitar player and a very average, well, less than average singer But I wrote some really good,

insightful songs like social commentary I realized that my passion was to be a constructive critic of society To try to make a difference in the world And that’s when it dawned on me that I should go back to the academy and finish my

degree and pursue graduate school because I probably, that’s probably where I needed to be so I could think freely and be creative and kind of pursue my

passion So I did I went back to Hunter They readmitted me I finished my

undergraduate degree I stayed at Hunter for my master’s and then went to New Hampshire for my doctorate

N: That’s great Let’s see So you’ve had a lot of different experiences Can we back

track a little bit too and talk about your family maybe and growing up on Staten Island?

M: Sure Sure Staten Island used to be a beautiful place It’s an island, and for

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many years, it wasn’t even connected by bridge to New York City, but in 1964, when I was five years old, they opened a bridge, the Verrazano Narrow Bridge, which connected the north shore of this area known as Rose Bank, to Bay Ridge And when that happened, Staten Island started to get very developed And it’s known as the forgotten borough There are five boroughs A borough is a county, but it’s also part of a city, so Staten Island is Richmond county, and it’s part of New York City But it’s called the forgotten borough because it—traditionally it has had dramatically smaller population relative to Brooklyn or Queens or the Bronx, and of course, Manhattan And for so many years, it was on the margin, literally, geographically The only way to get there was through ferry boat by a ferry boat, which takes about twenty-five minutes, so it was always a world away But I think because it was the forgotten borough, it developed after 1964 in a very haphazard, irrational way Developers tore down a lot of woods In fact, I lived on the south shore, not far from a harbor called Great Kills Harbor You know, the Dutch settled New York in Staten Island, so a Kill is kind of like a marshland So Great Kills was a great marshland There was a little barrier island that they filled

in forming a really nice harbor, so I’ve always had a connection to the water and the sea and all that But Staten Island changed dramatically So growing up there very young, like six, seven, eight, nine years old, I remember playing in the

woods a lot, riding bikes with my friends There’s a historic place not far, maybe two miles from my house called Richmond Town It’s kind of a very, very small noncommercialized version of lets say, Williamsburg Its very small though Like five, ten percent of that that is But there were historic homes, and there was an

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old lighthouse up on a hill, and a very, the hill and the woods around it were really kind of fun to play in but then that changed So my teenage years, I

witnessed a lot of ugly new houses going up, and I just didn’t understand

capitalism, you know, why everything was profit driven There was still, and there are still, little slices of what’s called the old Staten Island I mean, David Thoreau used to go to Staten Island, and he wrote a little bit about how beautiful it was back in the day So but by the time I went to high school, I found it to be a very depressing place You know, overrun When I was in grad school my first year, I drove a taxi cab in New York, which was a real experience in and of itself

N: Definitely

D: Yeah And I remember I had a fare A woman came out of a convention, and you

know, some fares were wonderful We had great conversations And we were making small talk, and she said Staten Island And she had just heard a paper given It was kind of like a planning conference or maybe, I don’t know if it was urban studies or what, but she said Staten Island was referred to as the most over-developed, under-planned area in the entire country, so that kind of

summarizes what I just described So I had a love-hate feeling for the city I really wanted to be some place—I’m not a nature buff per-se, but I just love the

aesthetics of oak trees and marshlands and the water I think I was eight or nine years old when one of my aunts—I know you probably say aunt—but we say aunts—took me and a couple of my cousins to the Jersey Shore, and that was the first time I ever swam in the waves And once I went in the ocean, it was like I just, I just love swimming in the ocean, even to this day So that, in a roundabout

N: That’s great Do you have any siblings?

M: I have two brothers and two sisters, so there’s five all together Ironically, the

three boys, myself included, are men, all ended up moving to the South I have a brother in Onancock, which is a sleepy little town on an inlet to a creek to the Chesapeake Bay on the eastern shore of Virginia Very pretty And he actually works for—he worked for the state of Virginia, and now he works for the nature conservancy as a planner And he’s a very boat-oriented person, has a sailboat I have a sailboat And he’s always oriented toward the water My other brother lives near Asheville, North Carolina, and he’s an accountant And he works for Habitat for Humanity now He worked in bigger firms for a while, but I think he was always kind of disappointed with some of the ethical things that happened or didn’t happen And I think he’s happy there I have two sisters One is a stay-at-

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home mom, although she recently took a part time job because her husband lost his job on Wall Street, which is a big thing now up east in New York Wall Street has changed dramatically in the last five years, really since 2008 My other sister was a stay-at-home mom, but she does kind of nannying a little bit, but the older sister of the two lives on Staten Island In fact, she lives in the house I grew up in she took care of my parents when they aged, and now they’re both deceased, and so, in kind of the Irish-Catholic culture, the child who takes care of the

parents assumes most of the property out of kind of a thank you gift from the other siblings The other sister lives in New Jersey She’s very close to the

beach, so We like visiting her, so [Laughter]

N: I bet So it seems like your siblings in general and you all have this kind of tie to

like this moral sense of like social justice and like doing justice to other people, but also like you have this connection to nature How did your parents kind of like foster that and like kind of teach you that?

M: I don’t think I want to do justice to my parents in this interview because it’s funny

My father was a steam fitter, and that’s a person who works on big buildings as kind of almost like an industrial plumber, and he was a member of a union But I would characterize him as kind of a working class union man But he worked physically very hard, but when he would come home, I received very little

mentoring from him ‘cause he was always tired So I was the fourth born of five,

so the joke was by the time my parents had me and my youngest sister, they were kind of done And so, I don’t know how I was—of course, he always said to

me, get your sheep skin, get your sheep skin I didn’t know hwat he was talking

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about, and then, one day one of my brothers said its your college degree, you idiot [Laughter] I don’t think, he died just last year almost to the day, July 1, last year at age 85, and he was, I don’t think he ever understood what I did like as—

‘cause I had a very flexible schedule and travel a lot, so he thinks—he thought I didn’t work as hard as he did necessarily, you know But he was happy I didn’t have to work with my hands, necessarily So I think, but they—and my mom was

a stay-at-home mom, and she was a little neurotic She worried about a lot of things seems to me that I almost—my siblings said I almost drove her to the grave because I did all of these things like travel Like even going out to

California—I dropped out of college to go to California, and they were like, oh my god, what’s happened to Tommy? But my parents had a very intense love for each other And I think the emotional care that they showed for each other was very impressionable I think the Catholic Church, even though I left Catholicism

‘cause I think its very violent in so many ways One of the good things about Catholicism, though, is a value system around charity and social justice, which I’ve learned more about, ironically, in recent years So but I almost think, I don’t know, I almost think my sense of social justice came from witnessing what I call violence around me I remember very young, when I was a first grader, the first day of school, I couldn’t believe how strict all the rules were and how you had to discipline yourself and sit still and march in a line [Phone rings] it just seemed unnecessary, so I had a lot of contempt for institutions It was like really? This is the best we can do? So I think I was a sociologist at age five I just, I really

thought that there were these patterns or social structures or forces Especially

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tied to institutions, but ultimately a function of groups that could be very

problematic, like very violent toward individuals Like very oppressive And that’s

a theme that I’m actually thinking about still to these days I’m writing about this notion of interpretive violence Some people call it stereotyping There’s this misnomer that stereotyping is a conscious choice or prejudice is a decision, so it’s kind of in that modernist, epistemological framework of thinking and just kind

of deciding to judge people But what I learned from Gadamer and others is the way human interpretation works is through a projection of assumptions, so

everybody stereotypes Everybody’s prejudicial in the sense that we project assumptions onto people And it doesn’t have to be race It can be class, it can

be gender identity or gender preference It could be age We have this need to categorize people and box people, in part because of just the was consciousness works So you know, interpretive violence is when we live unaware of our

condition of projection and assumption making And so, rather than just look through psychology, things like microagression or stereotyping in gerontology around ageism or racism, I’m trying to raise awareness about the need to

educate people about how interpretation as a function of everyday life But I think that comes from a desire of just wanting ot ameliorate suffering, you know You know, I just, I don’t know if I got that from my parents or not Maybe through osmosis, but I think it had more to do with just being in an environment where my parents allowed me to do—not do whatever I wanted—but to pursue my passion and try to find a profession or career that I found meaningful, so

N: Yeah That’s great That is wonderful So I kind of wanna think about maybe

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comparing—you left New York City and Staten Island for Memphis, Tennessee What was that transition like after spending a lot of time there, it’s like a large place, its heavily, densely populated And it’s a place you can do a lot of good and also a lot of research, especially with like what you did and what you were studying So what was that like?

M: Well, you know, if you think about your own development now, you know, when

opportunities present themselves and whatnot Actually, when I left New York, I went to New Hampshire first to study at the University of New Hampshire to study with Walter Buckley And that was just like liberation because the

University of New Hampshire is in Durham, and its only about ten miles from the ocean Course, the water is ridiculously cold, and I rarely swam there Maybe one day a year, but it’s spectacularly beautiful I mean, New England is just flat out beautiful I mean, the South has its beauty, no doubt, but New England is beautiful And a lot of nature And so New Hampshire was almost like you know,

it was a beautiful time A short time I had already had my master’s degree, so I was only at New Hampshire for about four years, mostly doing my dissertation But at the time, I was married, and we had two little children, and my wife was a physical therapist, and I was teaching courses as a grad student And we

decided it was time for me to try to find a position You know, I hadn’t finished my dissertation yet, and I almost didn’t even apply to this job at Rhodes College I had no idea I had never been to the state of Tennesse, but I went down for the interview And it’s a beautiful, but more importantly, high quality liberal arts

college, and I realized it was a very small department, and they needed a

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generalist They needed a sociologist who could teach methods and theory, and

it didn’t matter what my specialty was My specialty really hadn’t emerged yet In fact, I’ve never really had a specialty I’ve kind of reinvented myself every six years So when I arrived in Memphis, it was like arriving in a foreign country It really was Like living in the South was like being in a different culture And even

to this day, I feel like an outsider, but in a good way I see, I just see so much I remember driving my children around, ‘cause the live histories project, we’d go into some very disadvantaged neighborhoods And I remember my oldest

daughter, who’s now thirty, Adelaide, Addy—she’s only Adelaide when she’s in trouble—Addy would say, Daddy, why are the houses spoiled? And I’d say, well, you need money to maintain your house and repair it constantly, and these

people don’t have money Why don’t they have money? And then, you know you get into the whole discussions of poverty and structural violence and

stratification But I felt New York was so big I didn’t really look for work in New York I assumed New York, I didn’t want to be in New York And I assumed, had I worked in New York, I would have been operating in a context where it would have been really hard to impact anything Like it’s so overwhelming Its so big and overwhelming In Memphis, especially at Rhodes College, Rhodes College is one of the leading institutions in the city Now there’s St Jude Children’s

Research Hospital, which is amazing, it’s amazing And there are a couple of other good institutions, but Rhodes is one of the most prestigious and influential institutions, and so, I really wanted to live the life of the professor So it worked really well It worked really well for me So you know, we would go to New York

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at least once a year to visit family, and for many years when I would return, I would be like, aw, it’s so—the skyline is so spectacular, and you know blah blah blah But like all the cultural amenities, I have been to the museums, and I’ve been here and there, but it’s really, I think a young person’s city It’s very

expensive My daughter, my youngest daughter is in grad school right now at Hunter, and she lives in Brooklyn with her boyfriend, and their rent is eighteen hundred dollars a month Well, for eighteen hundred dollars, I can pay both my mortgages, ‘cause I have a house in Memphis, like a little bungalow, and I have the house on Cerro I could pay both mortgages on what they pay in rent, so its almost obscenely expensive And I can’t wait for her to move out of New York, yeah I think she’s going to go to Seattle when she finishes ‘cause her boyfriend’s from there, and he has a really lovely family and good quality of life there, so, anyway

N: Well, that’s great So kind of continuing on Memphis and thinking about that,

thinking about you coming there and your studies, and how you’ve studied a lot

of different things, how has that place kind of affected your decisions to study, you know, start the life history project or do this integrative disposition study M: Well, I was very fortunate because again, I think being at Rhodes, and at the time

I was assistant professor, I had access to different organizations like Senior, it was called Senior Citizens, Inc and now its Seniors, Inc and I remember a

woman, Deborah Cotney who ran it When I approached her, the foundation approached Rhodes about doing something with elderly people, and I didn’t have experience in that topic, but I had experience studying prejudice And I

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discovered the topic of ageism, so I read in that area, and then I was able to conceptualize a really, in fact a project, which was pretty cool But then, I think the project allowed me to go into the homes of, I’m looking at these photographs Almost all African Americans, initially, because that was the population most in need The idea was provide companionship to homebound elders, and they responded so favorably But I also deconstructed the fact that they would look at

me and clearly saw a White middle class professional, and tended to be very deferential A few of them were, would kind of contest and scrutinize and

interrogate me, which was great I recall very early that it was my responsibility to understand what this was really about, and what it was about was we needed the elders more than they needed us I mean, I would work with people in their

eighties routinely They’re survivors They live alone They probably have

someone bring them meals on wheels and do things, but they’re survivors They don’t need us I mean, the literature said they needed companionship They did and they didn’t We needed them We needed them to help teach students that when people get old, that they’re people who became old, they’re not old people

So instead of leading with the category or the stereotype first, you lead with the person, and then you fill in the blanks It’s the same with anything, you know a rich person or a person who’s rich Or a poor person or a person who’s poor Or

a gay person or a person who happens to be gay So you like wanna privilege the humanness of a person first and then look at the categories later So again, that project taught me that, and I’ve been really, a musician would say, riffing on the same theme ever since But I think that’s what, you know, like even what

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happened in Orlando recently or any of these even terrorism, it has to do with this interpretive disability about respecting other people, and confusing ideology

or hatred for what’s really important, which is sustaining and supporting people

So I see this notion of not being able to understand another person as the core of all kinds of problems So Memphis taught me, and you know, Memphis allowed

me to find friends in the Black community, and that is like, I feel more comfortable

in a lot of cases in the Black community than I do in the White community And those are generalizations, but what I mean by that is the people I’ve met anyway, the African Americans in Memphis, who are my friends, tend to be real They tend to be very down to earth about what’s important Now, again, I think when you bring class into it, there’s probably just as many materialistic African

Americans who might be blocked from ethical interaction as there are White people, but generally speaking, I found a lot of realness in that community And I think that allowed me to come to St Augustine and just rub elbows with anybody

if they’re willing to talk to me And so I think I’m unfettered with the weight of kind

of racial segregation around normative boundaries or just kind of etiquette So anyway, I don’t know

N: That’s great So I have a question about your project centering first around

ageism and that interaction that students had and kind of like this almost like a fieldwork experience that really taught them about a lot of different things How did that translate and help you start the project, and like how did the project with Rhodes College come to St Augustine? Can you tell me a little bit about that? M: Well, you know, it’s not the same project, but it’s the same lineage of my interest

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and work So for example, like you’re interviewing me right now It’s in some ways no different than what my students were doing with homebound elders The difference was, they would visit on a weekly basis for about, anywhere from eight

or nine weeks, depending, ‘cause they have to get in, introduce, establish

rapport, and then go for it So there was almost a kind of a friendship that

developed between the student and the elder And a lot of intimacy around life events You know, births, deaths, marriages, divorces, you know, all kinds of stuff like that So but the focus was, what happens when people interact through dialogue with an open heart and try to learn, try to understand another person? I think what happens is, you know, they grow So the students would grow and become, and not all of htem did of course, so that’s always been in the back of

my mind So when I was doing medical sociology, it was more applied work But then, during my last sabbatical, I thought, you know, my career is advancing, I want to hone in on what I really want to write about ‘cause I haven’t written that much I’ve only written maybe half a dozen articles and a couple of book

chapters And I haven’t really put my life’s work out there, you know? and I need

to do it in the next few years ‘cause you don’t live forever, but I thought the real link was this notion of integration and what is integration, so theoretically I’ve been studying integration I wanted students to integrate, I wanted to them to develop a way of being that allowed them to integrate another person’s story or perspective into their self understanding so they would grow beyond what I call tribal epistemology Beyond their narrow horizon So the notion of integration was, I didn’t use the language twenty-something years ago when I was writing