Windows
I'm Rob Kaiser, and this website
is my home office online. In the
real world, my office is Room
318. That's in Lyons Hall, a state-
ly, red-brick building on the
campus of Canisius College. I'm
the director of the journalism
program at Canisius. I'm also a
journalism professor and the ad-
viser to the student newspaper,
The Griffin. Officially, I started
working at Canisius in late Aug-
ust 2010, when I walked into
Classroom 122 a few minutes be-
fore 10 on a Tuesday morning,
effecting a career switch from
doing journalism to teaching it.
Actually, however, my transfor-
mation from newspaperman to
professor began several months
prior, at 8:02 on a bright Mon-
day morning in April, when I
clicked "SEND"on an email noti-
fying Dr. Barb Irwin that I had decided to accept her offer of a tenure-track faculty position at Can-isius. By the time my wife and two sons and I zipped across the New York State line for keeps one late afternoon in mid-August 2010, eager to pick up the keys to our new house in suburban Amherst, my 25-year journalism career had disappeared from the rearview mirror. In front of me all I could see was Canisius. A small Jesuit college near downtown Buffalo, New York, Canisius is a fixture on U.S. News & World Report's annual ranking of America's "Best Colleges." Students consider themselves lucky to be here. So do I. My office, Room 318, has Rain Blue walls and a floor-to-ceiling window overlooking Forest Lawn Cemetery. Sometimes a four-point buck can be seen standing still as a statue in the snow among the gravestones. Sometimes wild turkeys amble through the cemetery, bald and picky as old men. In the after-noon, when the sun swings around in my window, lighting and warming my office at it sinks the West, I can see the top of the Buffalo skyline over the trees, silhouetted against the pale northern sky. I moved my office to Room 318 after only a year in Room 326 so I could have a window, and I love what I see. But it's the view from Room 59 that sustains me. Room 59 is where I go when I write. In those mo-ments it's a figurative place, an interior world with a window as big as my imag-ination. From my own personal Room 59 I can see the sun when it's cloudy. I can see my family when I'm away on business. I can see the Dodo Bird and Gettysburg run-ning red and Melville writing Moby Dick. I can even see Houdini, breathing again. This Room 59, my Room 59, can't be found on any map. But Room 59 exists in the real world, too, and it is that Room 59, the real McCoy, that inspir-ed my Room 59. The real-world Room 59 is a room at the Carousel Inn in Watseka, Illinois, an old motel that sur-vived being bypassed by the interstate highway system. Once, long ago, and briefly, I was inside that Room 59. While working on a story about old motels for the Chicago Tribune, I stopped at the Carousel one muggy summer night and knocked on the door of Room 59. It was 1:30 a.m. but that room remained lit -- the last light on at the Carousel. The door opened, I introduced myself to the stran-ger inside and stepped across the threshold, joining the long history of Room 59. Who and what did I find there? I'll let you discover that for yourself by reading the story, archived on Page 5. Why did I name this site for that room? Because the motel image seemed appro-priate. Every journey is a story, every story a journey. Writers step into the lives of strangers like I stepped into Room 59. We insinuate ourselves into the world of The Other and return transformed. During 25 years as a journalist, I've informed the lives of strangers and they have informed mine. As the Impression-ists knew, the key to art is self. So unlock Room 59, and step inside.
Room59
The story of a journeyThe journey of a story
"Late on a summer night, five minutes can pass between motorists on U.S. 24. It's quiet enough to hear the chirp of crickets, the belch of bullfrogs and the wail of trains. At the Carousel Inn, the last light on is in Room 59..."
--Rob Kaiser, Chicago Tribune, July 1997
