iii. A UNIVERSITY TOWN

From the Iowa City Union Bus Depot, we took a cab and instructed the driver to take us to the Iowa House, a hotel in the student union building on the University of Iowa campus.  The three of us, newly arrived Filipino would be graduate students, shared a two-bed hotel room. An extra bed was brought in for me.  Each room at the Iowa House was equipped with a colored TV, a writing desk, a telephone, and a full bathroom.  Original works of Iowa artists are hung in the suite rooms, hospitality rooms, and regular guest rooms.  We stayed in the hotel for three nights and two and a half days.  We had difficulty in finding a place to stay since classes in the spring semester had already started.  On the third day, we finally found a rooming house on North Governor Street which was some six blocks away from campus.  That early morning, Lemuel Torrevillas, a Filipino graduate student in theater arts, came to meet us.  It felt so good getting to know a fellow Filipino showing his concern about our predicament.  He helped us move to our new residence in the afternoon.

My two women companions shared a spacious room on the first floor adjacent to the kitchen.  I had a small room of my own by the staircase on the second level.  Two American young ladies were on the bigger second-floor rooms, and two young male UI students lived in the attic. Another man occupied the front room on the first level.

John and Joan Liffring-Zug who owned the house on North Governor were into public relations, advertising, photography, and publications aside from renting apartments and rooming houses.  Most view postcards on bookstore racks carried the name of Joan Liffring-Zug as the photographer. She had been published in numerous books and booklets through their own Penfield Press.

Joan Liffring-Zug Bourret was a photographer for over thirty years before becoming a publisher. She founded Penfield Press in 1979, followed by Penfield Books in 2001, which includes all books published and distributed by Penfield Press. "Premiere Iowa woman photographer of this century" was the reference to Joan at a special ceremony held by the State Historical Society of Iowa acknowledging her gift of over 500,000 black and white negatives and color images now archived in the Society's collection.

Her photographs are in many collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art which holds two from her "Women 1957-1975" series. Exhibitions of her work have been held in many museums and galleries: the New York City Camera Club, Iowa Art museums and others. A retrospective of her work has been on tour in Iowa since 1996 and at a museum in Freeport, Illinois in the spring of 2000.

Joan's documentary photographs were instrumental in the 1960s civil rights movement, leading to open housing and employment in Cedar Rapids and Muscatine, Iowa. She was elected to the Iowa Women's Hall of Fame in 1996; she is also included in the Who's Who of Iowa Women, and in a thesis about women newspaper photographers in America by Margaret Thomas, University of Texas, Austin. Joan says, "I am an explorer trying to find aesthetic truths to share, whether the subject is a person, people, social situation, or nature. There is a visual unity possible and a visual spirit to discover."

Unlike Manila, or any of the other crowded cities in the Philippines, Iowa City was rather small, definitely not congested and was generally clean. There was not a pollution of any kind.  Trees lined the concrete sidewalks. At the time of our arrival, the trees were bare, except the evergreens. There was no sign of heavy traffic in the city. It was indeed an ideal quiet place to study.

During the first month of my stay in Iowa, there was less sunshine, and the ground was almost always covered with snow.  It was intensely cold as the temperatures would dip to 15 degrees Fahrenheit and would remain below zero for several consecutive days. It was terribly difficult to adjust to the wintry weather, to local food, to the place as a whole, and to local English used in daily conversation with Americans.  At times when I missed my family, I thought of going back to them. But I realized that I was an ocean away.

As expected of foreign students, we had to sign in at the Office of International Education and Services (OIES) before we could register for our classes. The spring semester had opened on January 20, 1986, but we were allowed to register until February 7th due to our late arrival.  I met with Bradley Loomer, a professor in the department of educational administration of the Graduate College. He was assigned to be my academic adviser. He worked on my initial schedule. I had four courses,  three of which were for three-hour credit each.  Dr. Larry Bartlett,  my professor in Legal Aspects of School Administration, advised me to take the course for a two-hour credit instead of three, since he believed that it would be tough and demanding for a beginner and foreign student like me to meet the demands of the study of American public school law. I had a total of eleven semester hours for the spring term of 1986.

Still haunted by the thoughts of the wife and son I left behind, I gathered myself together and, wearing an overcoat from the local Salvation Army thrift store, I braved the winter chill to attend my classes in the evenings of Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday.  I was free the rest of the week,  but I had to spend time in the library or do a lot of reading in my little room.#