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Early in my academic career, I taught at Bowling Green State University in Bowling Green, Ohio, from 1997 to 2002. Bowling Green, with a population of about 30,000 and located twenty-five miles south of Toledo in Northwest Ohio, was the smallest town I had ever lived in (other than the village where I was born and lived until age 15). Bowling Green was a nice college town, with BGSU having some 20,000 students (in addition to faculty and staff).
During my first year at BGSU, I rented a four-bedroom house in town. I was the only one living in the house; Kamal decided to stay back in California for another year and joined Golden Gate University in San Francisco as an Associate Professor. Our younger daughter, Anu, was still at UC Berkeley, completing her Molecular & Cell Biology and Economics undergraduate degrees. It was good that she stayed back and could help Anu when she got hurt on the campus.
However, this story is not about BG (or San Francisco); it’s about an even smaller town, Fostoria, Ohio, where we lived for one academic year, 1998-99. I will write more about BG in a future blog post.
After a year at BGSU, the owner of the house I had rented decided to sell the house, and I needed to find other accommodation. Coincidentally, at the same time, Kamal accepted an Associate Professorship at Tiffin University in Tiffin, Ohio, and moved back from California to Ohio. Tiffin University is a small private university with about 3,000 students. Tiffin is about 40 miles from BG and we decided to look for a house to rent somewhere between the two cities. Luckily, we found and rented a house in Fostoria, somewhere between BGSU and Tiffin University. I used to think that BG was the smallest town we had ever lived in; Fostoria, with a population of about 13,000, was even smaller.
The house we rented was an old house, with a basement that was not quite livable, but the rest of the house was reasonably good and had large front and backyards. The basement was so bad that even the mice from it sometimes came upstairs to the main level. I used to do our laundry in a laundromat in town, not in the basement, even though it had a washer and dryer.
The owners were teachers who had accepted teaching positions in a nearby town. They were a nice couple and the owner even did lawnmowing for us a couple of times; we were not yet set up to do our lawnmowing. They were nice, except they never paid back the rent advance I had given them.
Tiffin, Ohio, is a small town with a population of only about 17,000, but it has two universities—Tiffin University and Heidelberg University. Having taught at several universities in the U.S., I have found that even small, less prestigious universities in America have good facilities and offer local people opportunities to study.
Kamal used to drive to Tiffin
University, about 14 miles, and I to BGSU, about 24 miles. We would both be back home by late afternoon or evening. Life was relatively easy and event-free, except for a couple of notable events.
We invited the owners of our house to lunch one day. Both husband and wife came along with their two school-age sons. The husband and wife ate the vegetarian meal we had prepared, but the sons refused to eat anything vegetarian.
We often call India on our home phone. Outgoing calls from the U.S. to another country must use an exit code, 011. The country code for India is 91, followed by the city code and the phone number of the party being called. Whenever I call my sister in Dehradun (city code 135), I would dial 011-91-135… On the day I called my sister, I probably overlooked dialing the exit code, 011. I dialed 91-135… Soon, a police cruiser stopped by our house, and a police officer rang the doorbell. The police officer said someone called 911 from the house and wanted to know if there was a problem. We told him everything was OK and tried to explain that I probably dialed 911 by mistake. He wasn’t convinced and wanted to check inside the house, even the basement, to make sure that no one in the house was hurt or needed help. We were, in a way, quite pleased that the police department sent someone to our home even though we had never registered our phone numbers with them.
In the end, living in Fostoria was a unique experience. I had never lived in such a small town. It had many of the things we needed for our daily lives, but not megastores like Walmart and Target. It provided a convenient midpoint between our two academic lives and offered us a glimpse into small-town living in Ohio.
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