LehighWeek Volume 14, Issue 6

              Leaders in academia
Endowed     professors
to be honored at
Founder's    Day
See Page 3
LehiehWeek
Football moves to 5-0
Defense leads way to
big win over Towson
See Page 4
Volume 14, Issue 6
The campus digest for innovation, news and events
October 11,2000
Of architecture
and mental health
A $2.5 million study by Prof.
Arnold Spokane and a research
team in Florida will probe the
impact of architecture, street design, landscapes and other "built
environments" on the health of
elderly people.
The researchers hope their
findings will help planners, government officials and architects
modify existing residential
neighborhoods or build new ones
that better suit the needs of the
elderly.
The study, funded mainly by
the National Institute of Mental
Health, could help ease the need
to place aging baby-boomers in
costly nursing homes, Spokane
says.
"Do some types of neighborhoods contribute more significantly than others to the decline
of the elderly? That's what we'll
try to determine," says Spokane,
a counseling psychologist in the
College of Education.
The impact of built environments on human behavior has
been studied for some time. But
few studies have been done on
the impact of built environments
on the health of the elderly.
The researchers will interview 400 men and women, aged
70 and over, in Miami's East
-j- Little Havana section. They will
investigate the diversity of building uses; building types (walk-
ups, low-rises, high-rises, etc.);
street block dimensions and
landscape (including the space
between buildings and streets
that impacts on pedestrian convenience, comfort and traffic control) and the use of open space
(whether it provides opportunities for people to socialize).
The researchers want to determine whether the elderly of
East Little Havana feel connected to their community.
"When the elderly remain socially connected," says Spokane,
"they have less time to dwell on
their personal problems, thus reducing depression and anxiety."
Elderly individuals in low-income neighborhoods such as East
Little Havana often become isolated and house-bound because
they are afraid to leave the safety
of their homes, Spokane says.
"We will be looking at such factors as whether the buildings are
accessible and whether they are
near grocery stores, medical offices and other types of services
critical to the elderly."
For its study on the elderly,
the researchers will use a statistical method applicable to any
neighborhood, regardless of its
social, ethnic and economic characteristics, Spokane says. He
says the method can also be used
to help in the design of residential
areas for disabled people, college
students and other populations.
-Rich Harry
Saying no to Jim Crow,
these Exodusters went West
For most of her life, when
she thought about the
post-Civil War history ofblack
Americans, Kashi Johnson, assistant
professor of theatre, saw a line trav-
elingfrom Reconstruction through the
long dark night of Jim Crow, and finally, in the 1950s and 1960s, to the
modern civil-rights era.
Then, several years ago, Johnson
was introduced to Flyin'West, a work
by playwright Pearl Cleage that became the moststagedplayin America
in the first two years after its publication in 1992,
Although it is fictional, Flyin'West
is rooted in the history of the 1870s,
when thousands ofblack Americans,
eager to escape lynch mobs and test
the promise of freedom, left the South
to start towns in the West and Midwest. The pioneers were called
"Exodusters."
"This was a page out of American
history that I didn't know much
about," says Johnson, who earned a
B.A. from Lehigh in 1994 and an
M.F A. from the University of Pittsburgh
Last Christmas, after her mother
gave her an anthology of Cleage's work,
Johnson began aserious study ofFlyin'
West and oflatB-^-centuryAmerican
history.
Next week, at 8 p.m. on Thursday, Friday and Saturday, Oct. 19-21,
a student cast under Johnson's direction will stage Flyin'West in the Dia
mond Theatre of the Zoellner Arts
Center. Tickets, at $10, can be reserved by calling x82787.
Flyin' West is set in in 1898 in
Nicodemus, Kansas, one of several
dozen all-black towns founded in half
a dozen states in the late 1800s. Today, with a population of about 50, it
is the only one of those towns that
still survives.
In the play, four women and two
men form a loose family whose homestead is threatened by speculators
hoping to buy them out. Several of
the women have a single-minded determination to hold on to their home,
but one is just as concerned with her
courtship by a down-to-earth farmer.
The other male lead, a Hght-skinned
mulatto able to "pass" as white in society, is not as enamored of life on the
homestead.
Johnson describes Flyin'West as a
"your basic melodrama - a very
straight, clear story that is easy to
understand funnyandheariwarming."
The play attains a deeper meaning,
she says, by treating land as a symbol
of freedom and by dealing with the
issues of self-identity and domestic
violence.
The characters in Flyin' West are
played by Jasmine Broyles '02,
Yomaris Maldonado '03, Alyssa
Bryant '03, Savitri Vishnath '03,
Melvin Jones "02 and Robert Riley
Please See WEST Page 4
Photo by Rob Upton
RehearsmgascenefronLFfywi'WcsrfaiTe student actors (front,L-R) Yomaris
Maldonado '03, Savitri Vishnath '03 and Jasmine Broyles '02, and (rear,
L-R) Robert Riley f® and Melvin Jones'01.
Reform Partypresi-
denfial candidateRit
Buchanan speaks
with journalism ma-
jorKaraWetzel'02
(left),presidentofthe
Visiting Lecturers
Committee, and
Rebecca Kross *02,
an international careers and French
major. Buchanan
spoke to about 300
students and members of the community in the Zoellner
Arts Center on Oct
6. The event was
sponsored by the
Visiting Lecturers
Committee.
Photos by Pam Shealey
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