Binghamton, Fall 1973: The Frampton-look years

February 14, 2023. In the spring of 1973, I graduated from SUNY Binghamton. I had interviewed in Chicago for a job with Nalco, where brother Al worked. They offered me a base salary of $800 a month. Having secured a $2400 stipend with free tuition and free room and board to be a teaching assistant and MBA student, it was the proverbial no-brainer to stay a fifth year. It helped that I had made a late decision to change my major from chemistry to business -- administrative science -- in my junior year, which left me with a pretty diluted major. So improving my credentials at no cost (and actually a modest income) won the day.

I spent eight weeks that summer in England, working for Foseco in Tamworth, Staffordshire and in their Birmingham test lab. That was both an exciting prospect and a relatively boring and unfulfilling stint, but it was an alternative to kicking around Eden for the summer, where lucrative summer jobs at the steel mill no longer existed. In any case, I was ready to start school by late August and I had single room in Smith Hall for the fall, the same room I had 'tested' earlier that summer, after graduation, and had a few adventures with Jeff Cohen before heading home and then on to Birmingham, England via Dublin.

In some respects this was to be the most overwhelming semester of my fifty years of higher education. Let's start with the obligations I had contracted for the fall. First, the relatively new Binghamton MBA program -- we were the second class to enroll and the first class would graduate in the coming spring -- consisted of twenty credits a semester comprised of ten courses, each lasting eight weeks. All the classes were in the afternoon or evening. Second, I had taken on the job of student director of the Hinman night security guards, which primarily meant setting up the guards each night between 11:30 pm and 12:30 a.m. and writing up daily summary reports. This also meant that my ideal time to study was from 1:00 a.m. (when the Tonight Show ended and television went off the air) to 4:00 a.m., with 'breakfast' meaning lunch around 11:00 a.m.

Third, I was a teaching assistant for Jack Duffy's introductory organizational behavior class, which meant attending his large lecture twice a week and then facilitating three 'discussion' sections every Friday morning. Fourth, I had a primarily week end job as a bartender at the campus pub. Fifth, for about two weeks I also took on the job of the 'milk and salad' person in the Hinman dinning hall, but that did not last long. Sixth, I also tried to extend our M*A*S*H legacy in intramural football but a rough game early in the season led me to drop off the team. Seventh, I still edited the Hinman Halitosis, the weekly newsletter for the residential college. For an interesting tangent, see this link, from a Binghamton student's senior thesis on the history of Hinman.

I remember earning a 29 on a stats test and an A+ on a paper about IBM's domination of the computer industry in Europe from Professor Lorenz. At Thanksgiving, Bob Traub and I drove to East Lansing to visit Marty Pomerantz in graduate school at Michigan State. Just after Christmas I spent some time with my maternal grandmother, Vivian Heath, in Franklin (PA). I spent way too much time fascinated with Janine Snow, and allowed her to make me up like David Bowie and to pose for this photo.

My courses were exclusively business, and that was my first real immersion in what would become my career. It also led to my first teaching assignment, my own course in the following year. This time also furthered my sense of both deficiency in any substantial business expertise and my appreciation of the professorial lifestyle, personified by mentors Jack Duffy and Mickey Kavanagh.