Taking a Moment to Bask in Our Past: Six Decades of APCG and AAG Presidential Addresses

Taking a Moment to Bask in Our Past: Six Decades of APCG and AAG Presidential Addresses1 R obin E lisabeth D atel Independent Scholar and Lecturer, Department of Geography California State University-Sacramento, Sacramento, CA 95819 Presidential Address delivered to the Association ofPacific Coast Geographers, 62nd Annual Meeting, Reno, Nevada, October 2,1999 Introduction W h en I w as fifteen years old, my mother introduced me to Van Loon's Lives, and today I continue to enjoy its clever presentation of history and biography. In this 1942 book, the author, Hendrick Willem Van Loon, and his friend Frits give a series of dinner parties. Several famous guests from different times, places, and walks of life are in­ vited to each party; for example, Plato and Confucius come to one, Emily Dickinson and Frédéric Chopin to another. We learn about the guests through essays Van Loon writes for the less-cosmopolitan Frits so that he knows what to talk about and—equally important—what not to talk about at the party. The hosts plan suit­ able food, drink, and music for each evening, taking into account the guests' backgrounds and tastes. The guests arrive via histori­ cally appropriate means of transport, have dinner and talk, and then disappear at midnight. The setting for the dinner parties is Van Loon's house in the little Dutch town of Veere. A subtext of the book is the threat to such free association and free discussion by the grow­ ing power of the Nazis. What I want to borrow tonight from Van Loon's imaginative work is the idea of the ongoing conversation that we can have, and should have, with people who are not our contemporaries. The idea of this conversation-through-the-ages was reinforced for me by two years of undergraduate study at St. John's College in Santa Fe, New Mexico. The college's curriculum is built upon reading and discuss­ ing the "Great Books," selected classic works of mostly Western 9 10 APCG YEARBOOK •Volume 62 •2000 Civilization. The aim of the St. John's program is to give students a chance to converse with a set of people whose ideas were important shapers and reflectors of the world. Tonight we will converse with some of the people whose ideas shaped and reflected Pacific Coast and American geography, the past presidents of the Association of Pacific Coast Geographers (APCG) and the Association of American Geographers (AAG) from 1939-40 through 1998-99. Our conversations with the 56 APCG presi­ dents and the 59 AAG presidents or honorary presidents will be through the medium of their 115 presidential addresses (Appen­ dixes 1 and 2). Now it may be a source of some amusement to you that I seem to be comparing the past presidential addresses of our regional and national professional organizations to The Odyssey, The Divine Comedy, or The Origin of Species. Actually, maybe the com­ parison to The Divine Comedy is not too far off: Melvin Marcus in his 1979 AAG Presidential Address said that reading "every single [presidential] speech...must be the closest approximation we find to purgatory on this earth" (1979, p. 526). Certainly, many APCG and AAG presidential addresses are not classics within the geo­ graphical canon, let alone in any larger annals of scholarship. Or, again quoting from Marcus, "some Presidents have been more equal than others in the preparation of annual addresses" (1979, p. 526). By paying attention to this entire body of work, we practice the virtue of inclusivity and avoid prejudging which addresses might have meaning for us today. As part of this exercise, we will look for differences and similarities among the two sets of voices, the re­ gional and the national. We follow in the footsteps ofJohn K. Wright, who in 1966 asked, "What's 'American' about American Geogra­ phy?" (Wright 1966, pp. 124-139). We ask, "What's Pacific Coastal about Pacific Coast geography?" Why did I choose to have this particular conversation? I was led to it by a convergence of my teaching and research paths and by the calendar. We are nearing the end of the decade, the century, and the millennium (if...