The winds of Autumn have been especially strong these last few weeks, with leaves falling rapidly after their brilliant show of colors in late October, and with continuing reports of the tragic devastation, death, and displacement of our Central American neighbors, victims of the ravaging gales and widespread after-effects of Hurricane Mitch's six-day presence.
The Cosmopolitan House on John Street, the University, and Champaign-Urbana are responding: an email message today tells of campus-wide food collection to fill a trailer for Honduran relief; the proceeds from our annual Cosmopolitan Club Thanksgiving benefit dinner, usually between $300 and $400, will be directed to alleviate the suffering of the victims of Mitch. We are humbled and saddened by the magnitude and force of the destruction, and of actual and threatened disruption of peaceful daily living in so many parts of Cosmo's world.
On a more cheerful note, East Central Illinois maples played a spectacular role in welcoming back to campus, more than a half-century later, Professor Emeritus Carl Wagner of the History Department at the College of San Mateo, California, and his wife, Margaret. In 1942 the Cosmopolitan House at 605 East Daniel Street was home to approximately forty young men, including Carl Wagner and Raymond Hamburg from Chicago, Cesar Baptista and Hector Manjarrex from Mexico, Mustafa Kazdal from Turkey, Gerald Schuck-Kolben from Prague, Beto Albeda from Bulgaria, Robert Gibson from Hays, Kansas, Richard Handrich from John City, New York, William Eng (now UIUC engineering professor emeritus), Hugo Terrazes from La Paz, Abdul Sattar Shalizi from Afghanistan, and Clement Ching from Hawaii. The December 7, 1941, bombing of Pearl Harbor catapulted the United States into World War II, and the mix of nationalities at the Cosmopolitan House provided a ready-made environment for the airing of widely varying viewpoints during daily discussion of world events. That turbulent year provided the backdrop for Carl Wagner's UIUC Master's in history and for his Cosmo diploma in international living.
Today the lives of our Cosmopolitan Club members are still being shaped by the lives of one another. Our Sunday Dinners, attended by campus and community members and often photographed by resident Pratik Singh from India, started off this fall with three constituents of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire: Hungary, Serbia, and Turkey. Our Thursday evening coffee hours featuring various countries started with France, Fiji, Thailand, India, the Czech Republic, Brazil, Britain, Germany, and Uzbekistan. Each Thursday evening at 9:30, to return Cosmo House to residential equilibrium, house manager Julio Urbina (Peru) flicks the lights and it is back to the books for the other dozen residents: Xiaohan Tang (China), Akisa Nakamura (Japan), Kelli Harsh and Becky Mladic (USA), Esther Schreijen (The Netherlands), Manjula Samarasinghe (Sri Lanka), Liana Rojas (Costa Rica), Ai Watanabe (Japan), Thomas Schreiner (Germany), Jhonny Sim (Korea), and Maryline Langier (France).
Nestled between Sutton House, Cosmo's architectural twin to the east, and the newly converted-to-apartments fraternity house to the west, the Cosmopolitan House continues to welcome new friends and old, from season to season, from year to year, and on into the new millennium.
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