A chilly wind whips the windows of the small metal booth. The two chairs inside do not leave much elbow room, and the constant stream of buses rattle the entire structure.
Despite the chill, the tiny space grows comfortable. The woman inside is average height with long, gray hair that falls down her back and blows in the wind when cars pass.
Even with unpleasant drivers, she is warm and cheerful, and her infectious smile expels the sharp, cold air. Drivers tap on the glass and excuse after excuse is tossed in through the fast-food style sliding door.
Marcy Vaughn has heard it all. For 16 years, Marcy has been the traffic controller in the small metal booth directly across from the School of Public Health and the Indiana Memorial Union. The service access roads that the booth blocks are some of the quickest shortcuts through campus. However, during the day, vehicles without permission cannot take it.
Ballantine Hall, Woodburn Hall, the Fine Arts building, and the IU Auditorium are all on these streets, but IU students and faculty are unable to drive past to drop off or pick people up.
Marcy’s job is to monitor the incoming vehicles and make sure no one without the right permit enters the service roads that pass through the pedestrian-prone area of campus.
Simply put, her position doesn’t please everyone. During the day, vehicles come to Marcy’s window and she turns the majority of them around.
“It’s like I threw this booth up five minutes before they pulled up to it,” says Marcy. “‘I’ve always been able to go up through here’ they say. Really? I’ve been here 16 years.”
Brent Dukes, a recent graduate of IU who crossed the street by Marcy’s booth nearly every day had no idea that her job even existed.
“I didn’t even know there was a person in there,” he says.
Workers with jobs like Marcy’s are often forgotten or underappreciated. However, they do much more than meets the eye.
Jodie Figg, the reservations manager at the IMU, works with Marcy regularly and appreciates her thorough knowledge of parking rules that impact visitors at the hotel.
“If there’s a development with parking, she is usually my go-to person. She knows the rules and regulations of parking and I always check with her,” says Jodie.
There are additional hazards to Marcy’s job apart from being overlooked. Besides being threatened by people whose vehicle are not allowed through the entrance, Marcy has been approached several times by angry recipients of parking tickets, an aspect of IU Parking Services that she has no control over.
“I’ve had a couple of guys, they get mad, and you get cussed at and they throw them at you, and different things, or they’ll say, ‘I want to pay this here’ and I just say ‘Uh, you can’t,’ I can’t even accept money here,” she says.
Marcy’s official job description is to deal with the traffic flow on campus, but over the years she has assumed a second clandestine role as observer. She is originally from Bloomington and grew up on the IU campus. Now that she has worked there so long, Marcy is one of the most astute observers of the evolution of the cultures of both the campus and Bloomington in general.
“The people have changed,” she says, as the third X Route bus of the hour rumbles past. “You see the way people dress over the years has changed.”
From the buildings to the students, IU is never static, although Marcy has noticed that things tend to come back, especially fashion.
“You start to see some of it repeat itself. The miniskirts, and the ones that wear the dreadlocks and the tie-dye; you know that was in style in the ’60s. The ’60s and the ’70s and some of the ’80s are coming back. The bell bottoms and the straight legs are from the ’50s. Guys used to wear the straight legs and now the girls are doing it, too. The poodle skirt hasn’t come back quite yet. But they’ll all be here.”
The cycle makes sense to Marcy, but she does not welcome all the trends back.
“I haven’t seen MC Hammer pants again yet, but when I do I know it’s time to tell my boss, it’s time for me to retire,” she says, laughing, this time as a black limousine slid along.
Aside from students’ fashion, the geography of campus and the town has been drastically altered in Marcy’s lifetime.
Looking out of her window she glances toward the IMU parking lot and her face goes soft.
“That used to be the [baseball] field,” she said as she points to rows of filled spaces. The lawn of the School of Public Health sparks the same type of musing. “And then this lot over here was grass,” she says. “They actually had bunkers on it during World War II.”
Change seems to define Marcy at her job, but its true impact is within her family.
Once divorced and now remarried, she has seven children.
“It’s kind of large.” Marcy described. “I have step-children, but they’re not step-children. So I actually have four boys and two girls.”
After she became friends with Marcy during a chance meeting, Media School career services director Marcia Debnam witnessed an addition to Vaughn’s family.
“I knew that she was pregnant,” Marcia said. “We started chatting, ‘how you feeling and all,’ and then she shared with me that this baby was going to be significantly younger than her older children.”
Marcy’s youngest daughter, who is now 13, was a surprise to Marcy and her husband. Marcia remembers Marcy’s daughter playing outside her booth on warm afternoons as a child.
“I literally watched her go from expecting her, to seeing her little girl playing and frolicking around on what we used to call the HPER bank,” Marcia says. “Now she’s 13, and the last time that I saw her she was about the same height as her mom.”
Marcy’s IU beginning was a surprise to her and her family. She was looking for any job, and never thought she would get so lucky.
“A friend of mine was a bus driver at that time and he got hold me and said, ‘go into parking, they have an opening,’” she says. “I said I don’t know if I can walk and write tickets. He said, ‘Nuh-uh. This is your kind of job, honey.’”
Her friend proved right.
Marcy, as a traffic controller at IU for 16 years, is one of the few people that inhabit the margin between fixedness and fluctuation. Surrounded by all the buildings that have gone up and come down and the thousands of students that have passed through, she remains a point of strange stability in the middle of a busy road. As a mother and wife, she is anything but confined by her small metal booth. But she still commits herself to her job every day.
“There are days that I don’t want to get out of bed and I sure don’t feel like driving to Bloomington,” she says. “But I’m going.”
