Junior business faculty office, University of Kansas 1980

Rotary phone, clock radio, Rolodex, leather day planner, chalkboard -- antiques!

Summerfield Hall, University of Kansas, Lawrence, Kansas USA

I commenced my full-time, professional, professorial life in August 1978, in Lawrence, Kansas. The University of Kansas (but abbreviated as KU, not UK) was not really on my radar when I was finishing at Penn State. I had on-campus interviews at Indiana, Cincinnati, and Auburn, maybe one or two others. With an offer from Auburn and a later interview at Kansas -- after a Minnesota candidate declined KU's offer -- I took the Kansas job with literally no reasonable sense of the American midwest.

Kansas was a new if not unique experience for me. Despite KU being called "the hill," die to its positioning on Mount Oread in Lawrence, eastern Kansas was pretty flat and generally sparsely treed, with some rolling hills. Kansas City -- as I think I knew but never really thought much about -- was primarily in Missouri, even thought there was a much more industrial, run down, poor and not-so-attractive Kansas City, Kansas, and the Kansas City airport (MCI) had moved, not that long ago, from right along the Missouri River in Kansas City that divided the states, to an empty space about fifteen miles north of the city, in Missouri. When I had interviewed, there was a four-seater plane service from MCI to the very small Lawrence airport, not any larger than the then-used Penn State airport, high on a mountaintop, named Phillipsburg, but primarily serving State College.

I recall that I characterized Kansas women as "lacking ethnic characteristics," with their more blondish, farmer's daughter appearance, quite unlike the Italian and Jewish features that I had experienced at Penn State. More important, I was not much older than my undergraduate students and often younger than my MBA students and any of the doctoral students in Summerfield Hall. I recall trying a silly trick on my first day of class, entering early, sitting among the students, and only a few minutes after the star of class did I leave my seat and walk to the front of the room. In retrospect, this was probably a bad move, emphasizing my youth and trying to be funny on my first day; at my age, commanding respect from any college student was hard to come by, as I had learned as a teaching assistant at Binghamton in fall 1973, when I faced three discussion sections, all of them laced with students I had known in my undergraduate years in Hinman -- and I was still living in Hinman, working for room and board as director of the student night security team.

My home was 2500 Montana, I had purchased in late spring, for $36,500, with ten percent down from mom and dad and a thirty-year, fixed mortgage of $336 at 10 7/8ths percent.