A recent Ph.D. who has a ‘fascination with America’ is making his mark on the discipline
Maps, rivers, and the great diversity of human settlements rolled around in Blake Gumprecht’s mind for more than 30 years before he thought to make a career of them.
And he rolled around in them, too -- as an aspiring journalist, music producer, librarian, and mapmaker.
He shifted about the country from occupation to occupation, focus to focus, in the way that sometimes, somehow, ends up in one honed, scholarly pursuit.
Now, at 40 a freshly minted Ph.D. in geography, he is already making an impression on the broad-ranging discipline.
Last month, he won three awards at the Association of American Geographers’ annual meeting, including the prestigious J.B. Jackson Prize, honoring geographers who clearly communicate the nature and spirit of the discipline to the general public.
The Jackson award honored his book, The Los Angeles River: Its Life, Death, and Possible Rebirth (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), about that strangest of waterways. The book, which was Mr. Gumprecht’s dissertation at the University of Oklahoma, explores the life of a river that was the source of Los Angeles’s early prosperity. Once, Indian villages and Spanish missions dotted its fertile banks, amid lush orange groves and the country’s richest vineyards.
Today, the river -- 51 deforested, near-fishless miles of storm water hemmed by graffiti-marred walls and chain-link fences -- is “little more than a local joke,” Mr. Gumprecht writes. Nearly dry in some areas, the river has become best known for greasers’ drag races and Hollywood cop chases. Few Angelenos crossing its more than 100 bridges even notice that there is a river to cross.
Mr. Gumprecht’s achievement, enthusiastic reviewers have said, was to rediscover the river, at a time when city planners are under increasing pressure to find ways to revive its health rather than, say, convert its concrete bed into a sometime roadway for overflow traffic -- a classic L.A. approach.
Geography has a long tradition of the “latter-day explorer” who reconstructs and reveals the overlooked life of important places, and Mr. Gumprecht’s work should be seen in that context, says Peirce F. Lewis, a professor emeritus of geography at Pennsylvania State University and a judge for the Jackson prize. “Blake has done that with considerable elegance, converting a convoluted, conflicted, and fairly exotic story into terms that a nonprofessional can understand.”
Only academic insiders, however, will likely understand how Mr. Gumprecht also has come to exemplify that forlorn academic figure: the promising newcomer who cannot land a faculty job. On the day he won the important Jackson prize at the geographers’ annual meeting, he had not snagged a single job interview, at a time when doctoral graduates are, over all, having better luck finding jobs than in recent decades.
“I’m not the first academic to be frustrated by the hiring process,” Mr. Gumprecht acknowledges, gracious but clearly perplexed by his plight. “I thought my publication record would help me have more success this spring than it has.”
In addition to his book, he has several journal publications whose subjects reflect his “checkered past,” as Mr. Gumprecht quips. That has taken him from his hometown, Wilmington, Del., to his current position as a graduate assistant at the University of Oklahoma, with stops along the way in cities all around the country.
As an aspiring journalist, he attended the University of Kansas in the early 1980’s, and completed internships at the Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Tribune. Though his prospects in journalism were good, he was more interested in music -- post-punk, semipopular music, to be specific. He moved to Minneapolis, where at Twin/Tone Records he co-produced Soul Asylum’s first release, helped to bring the Replacements national exposure, and publicized the politically radical Mekons. Once, when he traveled to Chicago to hear the Mekons perform, he met his now-wife, Josephine Lenardi, who was also in the music industry.
After stints working in Nashville and Chicago, the couple moved to Los Angeles when Ms. Lenardi was promoted to a position there. Mr. Gumprecht worked briefly as a reporter before again concentrating full-time on marketing music, from his house.
Then he realized, “I’m not a salesman, and with most jobs in the music business, there’s an element of sales. So I started to think what I might do with my life, for career number three.”
Off he went to study for a master’s degree in library science at Louisiana State University, specializing in maps, a long-held fascination. The offer of a job as a map librarian from the Los Angeles Public Library lured him back to that city, where his interest in maps led him to take geography classes at California State University at Los Angeles, and to change his path again. “Once I’d made my first map, myself, the idea of making a living filing maps seemed utterly mundane,” he says.
He became seriously interested in studying geography, but ultimately decided against mapmaking, as that was becoming a computer-assisted endeavor.
Percolating in his mind were memories of childhood family vacations. “I always liked buying all the little town newspapers” wherever they visited, to see “how places were different,” he says.
As he drove back and forth to Cal State, he began to wonder about the “51 miles of concrete” he crossed day after day, and to ask: “Why is Los Angeles where it is?” Places like Pasadena, at the base of the mountains, and Santa Monica, on the ocean, made sense.
But Los Angeles is on the edge of a plain, about 10 miles from the mountains and 15 miles from the ocean. “You think, ‘Why here?’ Today, there’s no immediately apparent advantage of location,” he says.
The river, he learned, was the reason.
Something about that resonated. “Anyone who’s read Tom Sawyer has wondered about and romanticized rivers,” says Mr. Gumprecht. He had grown up on the Delaware River; he ended up doing a master’s thesis on “another pretty ugly one,” the Los Angeles.
Geography programs in the Los Angeles area, which were heavy on cultural theory or modeling assisted by computers, didn’t suit Mr. Gumprecht. He decided upon Oklahoma’s Ph.D. program because the department there is headed by MacArthur fellowship-winner Bret Wallach, whose humanistic approach seemed more akin to his own. When the Johns Hopkins press expressed interest in an expanded version of his work on the Los Angeles River, his advisers at Oklahoma agreed that the book could be his dissertation.
Meanwhile, he began turning out papers that won notice. One, on the role of grain elevators in the development of Enid, Okla., won an award for best student paper in 1998 from the Association of American Geographers’ historical-geography specialty group.
At the geographers’ convention last month, his paper on the way settlers transformed the prairie landscape through tree-planting programs won two such specialty-group awards. He has also published papers on whiskey towns in turn-of-the-century Oklahoma Territory, on the geography of marijuana cultivation in modern-day California, and on the evocation of place in the recordings of three modern-day West Texas songsters.
“I’m all over the place in my interests,” he says -- as a point of pride. The common thread is “just a fascination with America.”
The phenomenon he’ll describe in his next book is certainly an American one: the college town.
He has, by now, lived in or close to several. While he was growing up in a “boring suburb” of Wilmington, sanity dictated that he escape often to Newark, home of the partying Blue Hens of the University of Delaware.
Still, he says, “I used to dislike college towns because they weren’t ‘real’ places. But eventually, when I’d been to enough ‘real’ places, I discovered that that wasn’t such a bad thing.”
Now he admires many college towns: “They have the best of big-city life and the best of small-town life.”
When he began to look for the academic literature on them, “I discovered that, remarkably, next to nothing had been written,” he says. That struck him as odd, because “zillions of things have been written about mining towns, company towns, resort towns ...”
So, he has been surveying all manner of college towns -- the well-known (Amherst, Bloomington, Carbondale, Gainesville, Princeton), but also the less-familiar: Princess Anne, Md. (home of the University of Maryland-Eastern Shore); DeLand, Fla. (Stetson University); Decorah, Iowa (Luther College); Chadron, Neb. (Chadron State College); and Searcy, Ark. (Harding University). He’s investigating college towns with large research institutions; land-grant agricultural institutions; old normal schools; church colleges; and private, elite liberal-arts colleges, poring over archives and town histories, interviewing residents and business owners.
His research is far from complete, but he is confident that, as happened during his L.A. river research, inspecting the details will lead to significant overall conclusions. He is concentrating above all on what typifies college towns, considering phenomena that his academic colleagues will know well but that they might not, Mr. Gumprecht believes, have considered in relation to one another. Certainly, the general reader, whom he determinedly keeps in mind, will not have done so. What he will try to understand and express is the effect colleges have on the way their towns grow, both as physical structures and as social organisms.
He finds college towns strikingly comparable, nationwide, yet unusual locally. Lawrence, Kan., he says, is much more similar to Athens, Ga., Ithaca, N.Y., or Berkeley, Calif., than it is to Baldwin City, Kan., 10 miles down the road.
He will illustrate general points about college towns by looking closely at particular ones. Davis, Calif., will be the primary model for the liberal-inclined politics of college towns. As he says, “You could probably take a map of counties that voted in favor of McGovern, and it’d be a map of college-town counties.”
In Ithaca, N.Y., he will examine distinctive residential areas: fraternity rows, student ghettoes, and faculty neighborhoods.
Auburn, Ala., he believes, demonstrates the way college sports can shape a town.
He also plans to study university-related research parks and their landscapes; 19th-century lobbying by towns and religious communities eager for colleges to be located in their midst; commercial areas near campuses, such as Aggieville in Manhattan, Kan., that are driven by student fads; and the role many campuses play as town centers and parks.
As a frequent college-town dweller himself, he knows why many residents, sick of the incursion of students into their neighborhoods, utter the ironic complaint: “This would be a great town if it weren’t for the students.” Of course, as he notes, “if it weren’t for the students, it wouldn’t be the town it is.”
Research-wise, Mr. Gumprecht is set. Job-wise, all that is certain is that this year’s hiring cycle is ending, and he has no firm prospect for the fall. He has all but lost hope of finding a tenure-track position. His department at Oklahoma may keep him on, but it has only one-year appointments.
Mr. Gumprecht does, finally, have an interview lined up, at California State University at Fresno, but he probably wouldn’t take the job there unless it became a multiyear position. “At my age,” he can still joke, “I have too many books and records to move for a one-year job.”
His problem is, at least in part, that the kind of geography he practices is not in vogue. The Jackson prize often goes to a book that excels at historical, descriptive work not dependent on postmodern theoretical approaches. Nor is his research awash in the newfangled high-tech tools -- “global information systems” -- that are revolutionizing the field.
Karl B. Raitz, another Jackson-prize juror who is a professor of geography at the University of Kentucky, offers another explanation. “It could be the case that there just doesn’t happen to be a job this year that fits him.” He is confident that Mr. Gumprecht will eventually prevail.
Still, Mr. Gumprecht fears that the absence of postmodern and global-information-system approaches in his work is harming his employment prospects. “That’s frustrating,” he says. “One of the postmodern mantras is to try to incorporate different viewpoints in your research, but it seems to me that some of the people making that claim aren’t willing to do it within their own discipline.”
Mr. Lewis, of Penn State, says that the “descriptive, empirical geography that Gumprecht does so well” fell on hard times as long ago as the 1960’s, when many geographers discovered “quantitative methods” to reveal patterns in the surface of the earth.
In the 1980’s, postmodernism reached the discipline. Last year, many members of the geography association protested a perceived overemphasis on postmodern approaches in the group’s two journals. Now the leading journal, the Annals of the Association of American Geographers, has five sections emphasizing varied geographical approaches, and five editors.
Ironically, Mr. Lewis says, while the discipline’s “movers and shakers” may look askance at the “latter-day explorer” tradition, he has found while lecturing around the country that “there’s a tremendous hunger for this kind of geography -- accurate and vivid description of places.”
“It’s hard not to get resentful at times that the geography I like is getting swept under the carpet,” Mr. Gumprecht says. But he also remains the optimistic neophyte, convinced that geography is, almost, Everyman’s undertaking: “People experience geography every day. This is not some esoteric subject. Yet, geographers are not, to much of a degree, seeking to communicate what we know, as people who study this, to a larger audience. I consider that integral to what I want to do.”
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