Wayne Danielson's Address
College of Communication Commencement
May 21, 1977
ROADS LESS TRAVELED BY
Last winter I went back to my home town in Iowa. And I was impressed, as I was when I was growing up, with how orderly and conventional life is there. Almost everyone in Iowa, I am sure, appreciates the verses from that gloomy preacher, Ecclesiastes:
To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose
under the heaven.
A time to be born, and a time to die;
A time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted.
A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to
break down, and a time to build up.
A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn and a
time to dance;
That is the way it is in Iowa all right. There's a time for everything. And that's not all. There's a right way and a wrong way to do everything. There's a right way and a wrong way to be born, to grow up, to get married, to raise you children, to grow old and to die. There's even a right way and a wrong way to get buried. One day I drove to the supermarket and my brother-in-law said to me afterward, "You went the wrong way." "What do you mean?" I said. "We got to the supermarket didn't we?" "Yes," he said, "but you went two blocks out of your way!"
Everything in my home town is orderly and regular and according to custom.
Even the streets are laid out in an orderly fashion. In the small prairie towns of the Midwest, the streets run either north or south -- exactly north and exactly south -- or east or west -- exactly east or west. On a cold night in Iowa you can look up and see the north star shining at the end of every north-south street in the whole state. I'm sure of it.
In the exact center of nearly every small Iowa town there is a square. If it's a county seat town, it will have the court house right in the middle of the square. If it's not a county seat it will have a bandstand in the mathematical center of the town. And on summer Sundays at 2 p.m. and on Wednesday evenings at 7:30, exactly on time, the conductor will lift his baton and the band will play a march by John Philip Sousa. (As small boys we used to swipe slices of lemon, from the iced tea at the family picnic and when the band started to play we'd suck lemons in front of the trombone section. It made the players salivate like crazy and get furious with us as we innocently chomped on our lemons.)
The sense of order and neatness was so strong in my home that compass points were often used to give directions. "Mom," I would ask, "where is my scout knife?" "It's in the east bedroom," she would reply, "on the table on the north wall. Or maybe on the chest in the northeast corner of the south bedroom."
Directions like that made sense because everyone's house was exactly lined up on the lot. No one ever put his house diagonally on the lot -- or catawampus we called it. It just wasn't done.
I don't know how old I was -- I think it was in the fourth grade or maybe the fifth that I gradually found out that the whole world was not like my home town. There were places where roads followed the natural contours of the land, where streams were not channeled into straight lines, where people ate strange foods -- like frog legs and snails and crawdads--and didn't swell up and die on the spot. I started packing right away.
For somehow the orderly and safe and conventional and predictable patterns of life were not interesting to me then. I loved to see the high school band mess up and everybody go every which way. I liked it in Handel's Messiah when everybody stopped dramatically before the final hallelujah or the Hallelujah chorus and some dumb person started his hallelujah ahead of time. I hated living in a house in which there was only one road to take to school or work. (Even today the notion of driving to work on the same road every day fills me with a certain dread.) For me the pleasure of life, the richness of life, was not in the samenesses but in the differences, not in the usual, but the unusual, not in the ordinary, but in the extraordinary.
I think that may be why I chose communication as the center of my life. For the job of the professional communicator is to keep us aware of the differences in life, the changes that are taking place or need to take place. The journalist calls our attention to the things in our society that are extraordinary, so that we can do something about them. The advertising professional calls our attention to products and services we can use to add new dimensions to our lives. The professional in radio-tv-film, through moving images, music and words, engages our minds with the distant, the strange and the remarkable. The professional in speech communication helps individuals and families learn to accept differences in communicative abilities, to bridge gaps of understanding, to resolve conflicts, to appreciate innovations in literature. In all these professional areas, we see people at work with the unconventional, the new, the different, the unusual. They deal with change on a daily basis. And they lead interesting, challenging lives.
Now, as I've grown older, I find that I've become more conventional. I think teaching may have had something to do with it. But on drowsy afternoon in class, when I'm really into my subject, telling students exactly how something should be done, I look around and see eyes glazing over with boredom, or eyes fiery with resentment at what I'm saying, or eyes thoughtfully contemplating the crossword puzzle in The Daily Texan. And I think -- it's happened. I, the rebel, the unconventional one, the trouble-maker, I -- have become the stable, regular, dependable, organized defender of the status quo. Suddenly I fell like a court house in the center of an Iowa town. I fell a grid of north-south, east-west streets pressing down on me. And I hear, distantly, the sound of a band playing The Stars and Stripes Forever.
The point of this recollection is simply to observe that in spite of our deepest inclinations some change in the direction of safety and conventional thinking and conformity probably is inevitable in all our lives. But at the heart of the craft or art of communication is an appreciation of the unknown, the untried, the unconventional. If, as Ecclesiastes says, there is a "time to every purpose under the sun," now is your time to be different. Now is your time to innovate. Now is your time to try those new ideas your teachers hated. In our conventional way we have taught you what is good practice; now you have the opportunity to show us what will be good practice in the future. There's not just one road to the supermarket. There's not just one road to your career -- to your work in life. I urge you to follow your own best instincts and not be held back or pinned down too much by the conventional wisdom we have offered you. Use this wisdom in your won way.
Robert Frost, that ornery New England poet, put it this way in his poem, The Road Not Taken:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I --
I took the one less traveled by.
And that has made all the difference.
a the status quo. Suddenly I feel the center of an Iowa town.
