Teacher of legends Ridlen ends legendary career
May 25, 2007
KOKOMO, Ind.—With spring semester 2007, Lecturer in Folklore and American Studies Sue Ridlen, Ph.D., of Logansport wrapped up a teaching career at Indiana University Kokomo that started in 1969.
The year before, Ridlen became a student of folklore, enrolling in a class taught by Xenia Cord at IU Kokomo. Cord later urged Ridlen to take over teaching the course. Ridlen worked as an adjunct lecturer up to 1999, when she was named to the full-time faculty. While teaching, Ridlen completed her doctorate in folklore and American studies through IU Bloomington, and published her doctoral dissertation as a book, Tree-Stump Tombstones: A Field Guide to Rustic Funerary Art in Indiana.
“I can’t imagine my life without folklore,” she said. The topic has given “a whole new perspective,” she said, to the cemeteries, historic buildings, and folk museums that she and her husband, Judge Julian Ridlen, have visited throughout Europe and the United States.
“Students consider folklore as something that doesn’t affect them. I show them that folklore is family traditions, folk speech indigenous to Indiana. It’s modern legends, folk houses, barns, and gravestones. I try to raise students’ awareness of what’s around them, the relationships of those things to their history, and their importance to the people that made them.
“Students say, ‘We don’t have any traditions in our family.’ But, traditions don’t have to be extraordinary things. It can be food, recipes. I encourage them to record their family’s oral history . . . and [through stories] to ‘re-create’ the lives of family members who died before their birth. They learn about their grandparents and great-grandparents’ beliefs and values. They say, ‘Now, I understand why my parents acted the way they do.’ ”
Ridlen frequently taught a course called “Grave Affairs,” in which she would lead tours of cemeteries and a monument factory. “I tell students, ‘You’ll know you’re onto something when the gravestones start to talk to you.’ The patterns of death dates tell you about illnesses in the community. The size of monuments reflects social stratification. Where people are buried can tell you about relationships, especially of husbands and wives.”
Students in Ridlen’s folklore classes conducted all of the interviews for Coming of Age, a book of oral histories recorded for IU Kokomo’s 50th anniversary, and a subsequent DVD update for the 60th anniversary. “I’m proud of those products,” Ridlen said. “The DVD showed the campus’s shift to new technology. Transcripts and interview tapes are housed in IU Kokomo’s Library, so those interview subjects will live on.”
Ridlen served as assistant to the Dean of Arts and Sciences from 2004–2007.
She taught in several student retention programs for IU Kokomo and directed one of them, Project Success, from 1999–2004. “In the retention programs—Project Success, Summer Success, Lumina Program—we all did a great deal of mentoring of students who, for whatever reason, were underprepared for college,” she said. “I wanted those students to be successful. I didn’t give them the answers but charted the path for them.”
In retirement, Ridlen plans to organize a Logansport museum of political memorabilia collected by herself and Judge Ridlen.
