Lincoln Hall Project
Clare Gaynor Willis (AB ’04, history; AM, ’10, library and information science; reference librarian at the U of I Law Library) and her husband Christopher Willis (BS ’03, psychology) discuss the divisions between students from downstate and the Chicago area.
Clare: So I have something that I wanted to ask you about, because one of my first memories of you was that you had a little bit of a—what I considered at the time to be a southern accent. And, well, okay, so I thought that, what is it, I thought that you were from Georgia.
Christopher: Correct.
Clare: Because your license plate said “Peanut,” which is a childhood nickname.
Christopher: Correct.
Clare: And you had the accent. So in my mind—
Christopher: Allegedly.
Clare: (Laughs)—you’d become the next Jimmy Carter.
Christopher: I was a peanut farmer from Georgia.
Clare: Exactly, exactly. But anyway, so I do remember that it was part of your identity that you were from downstate.
Christopher: Correct.
Clare: So what did it mean to you to be a downstate kid at the University of Illinois, which is kind of dominated by kids that are from the Chicago area.
Christopher: I guess I kind of felt like I was the home team and the underdog. Because the University of Illinois is in downstate Illinois, or what people would consider to be downstate if they’re from—
Clare: Well it is.
Christopher: —the northern parts of the state (laughs). It’s the center of the state. Carbondale, that’s downstate. So—
Clare: Alright.
Christopher: —So I felt like so many people, because the way the population of Illinois is dispersed, are from the Chicago area, or Chicago suburbs, or Chicago, and despite it being a downstate university, there, population-wise, weren’t a lot of people who were from the downstate areas. Which is not all that surprising just because by the population distribution there’s not a lot of people who live in the downstate areas as compared to the other areas of Illinois. So that to me was, I think, something that set me apart. For the first time I was a little bit of an outsider, as opposed to living my whole life in central Illinois, east central Illinois, west central Illinois, where I was born. I was always just kind of an Illinois person in the part of Illinois where they were generally from.
Clare: I would almost say that you had a little bit of a chip on your shoulder—
Christopher: Perceived.
Clare: —about it though.
Christopher: Perceived.
Clare: Yeah? Okay. I don’t know. It just always kind of seemed that you wanted everybody to remember that there was more to the state.
Christopher: Well I do! I still want everybody to remember that there’s more to the state than the fine Chicago suburbs. And don’t get me wrong. I love Aurora. And Schaumburg.
Clare: (Laughs)
Christopher: I think they’re wonderful places too. And I want to hear about them 24 hours a day just like everyone else.
Clare: Well, I don’t know, that stuff did kind of bug me a little bit, I guess being from the outer reaches, we’ll say, of the Chicago area. Well you know, it always seemed to me that maybe when everybody got to college things like that wouldn’t matter, that we would all have kind of a group identity, but there was sort of, um, where you were from was important. But more so when you were a freshman.
Christopher: Yeah.
Clare: It seemed like people really had gotten over that to a large extent by the time they were seniors.
Christopher: Yeah that fell away pretty quickly. Pretty soon everybody figured out that nobody gave a damn.
Clare: Right. Well I remember, someone else on the mock trial team went to kind of a supposed rival high school, and at first it was sort of a, “well, I’m not sure about that,” but then I think we both realized that it was very silly to worry about high school things once we got into college.
(Length: 3:31)