Moving to Chicago meant finding a place to live. Myers says the general rule of thumb as far as housing was concerned was to “make as clean a break from South Bend's monastic living arrangements as possible.” That said, because Myers lived near Chicago, he went apartment hunting the summer after graduation but came up empty handed, describing the campus as an “oasis” in a “slummy” and dangerous area of Chicago's south side.
“I did make a perfunctory effort but those I found were more appropriate to staging The Lower Depths or Porgy and Bess or some such similar classic rather than actually living in. I was accused of not looking very hard, and they were right - but we had the International House to fall back on."
The intent of the dormitory was spelled out in its name: to provide cross-cultural encounters between Americans and international students in a roughly 50-50 ratio. Dubbed “I-House” by the hip and “Int-House” by most everyone else, the looming structure was completed in 1932 with monetary contributions from the John D. Rockefeller Foundation. Notre Dame English Professor Joe Duffy had lived there in his student days and recommended it Bellairs and Myers, who does not recall any particular requirements or guidelines for living there. "It was a first-come, first-served basis, though I'm pretty sure it was reserved for graduate students, a safe assumption as the graduate student population greatly outnumbers the comparatively small undergraduate college."
Myers remembers living on the seventh floor ("more or less in the front and center of the building") but does not recall Bellairs's exact location. Rooms were single-occupancy and sparser than Notre Dame's, with communal toilets and showers. Also in those days there were separate wings for men and women students - "visitation, cohabitation, or whatever you want to call it was permitted on Sunday afternoons. This proved to be only a theoretical advantage to me (and I believe the rest of the group) because we didn't find anybody else there worth visiting or cohabiting with."
Elsewhere, the building had a large lobby downstairs with a lounge, a separate television room, a large function room, and a cafeteria serving mediocre food at cheap prices (“the cafeteria was home to our frequent bull sessions,” recalls Myers).
Bellairs and Myers took advantage (“to the extent our workloads allowed”) of some of the cultural offerings of living in International House, with movies being the biggest draw. Having frequented theaters in their undergraduate years, Myers says there was some differences from those offered at Notre Dame, such as a Darwin festival and a series of Russian film classics sponsored by the Young Socialist League. “I do believe that it was there that Bellairs and I saw Kurosawa's Rashomon and Seven Samurai, plus the first two films or Satyajit Ray's Apu trilogy, Pather Panchelli and Aparajito. We skipped the third, The World of Apu, because, frankly, we were both tired of Indians by that time.”
As far as other interaction with foreign students, Myers does recall participating in an informal chess tournament sponsored by one group. Also, upon receiving news of Patrice Lumumba's assassination in the Congo, a bunch of Americans were whooping it up, chanting 'Lumumba's dead! Lumumba's dead!' until an African women shouted at them, 'One day an American will die, and I will celebrate!'
“Chalk up another one to international brotherhood and understanding! Despite that, there was one Pakistani fellow in John’s group that we became quite friendly with; however, we made no lasting friendships with any foreigners. Anyway, I missed out on a lot of interaction because of my propensity to go home on weekends!”
One event of note that Myers recalls is the Academy Awards telecast in either 1960 or 1961. “A number of weeks prior to the program, a major police scandal had erupted in Chicago. It was later revealed that the cops were routinely casing various clothing, jewelry, or other stores to set them up for robbery by the local Mafia. Bob Hope, who was emceeing the Oscars that year, opened the show by gazing out at the auditorium, saying, 'I've never seen so many fabulous jewels, expensive gowns and furs in one place before. It looks like the basement of a Chicago police station!' That gag cracked our local audience up."
It is our assumption Bellairs lived at International House until the spring of 1961, packing up and moving into an apartment with new friend, Dale Fitschen. However, because of Bellairs’ many coming-and-goings during the 1960s, there is some speculation he returned to the I-House. In a 1966 edition of the Publication of the Modern Language Association (PMLA), John’s address is given at International House, room 667. It is unclear if this was a current address at that printing, or if this was his room when he moved there in 1959.
