Hinman College, my college home, 1969-1974

I just watched a not-very-memorable movie about eight California high school 'besties' spending the last twenty-four hours together before they head off to eight separate colleges the next day. While there is little to recommend about the film, it did evoke memories of my own departure for college fifty-one years ago.

September, 1969. I worked at South Shore Country Club that summer, a job opening after the tragic death of Joe Batorksi in the late spring. Doung and I were part of the groundskeeping crew, basically a head greenskeeper, his senior assistant and three of us, primarily mowing lawns. The third of this trio was the younger brother of the greenskeeper, and the one who introduced me to the concept of 'banana greens' on a golf course. I'll save that story for another post or a conversation at a later date.

By the end of the summer, Woodstock had just completed what was otherwise wholly uneventful for me. I believe that I spent a lot of time with Jeff Striebich, including drive-ins with 'dates' and swimming in his backyard pool, where his dad invited us to drink and not drive.

What today's movie helped me to recall was the fact that I recall very little of that summer. I did not keep my journal until late 1971, and my memory is not that good. I am sure that I played a lot of golf for my dad at the Bethlehem Management Club and, having not yet reached the age of 18, trying to find as much of a night life as one legally could at seventeen.

The eight members' friendship of today''s movie also reminded me that I was not about to leave any special relationships behind me when I went off to college. Certainly no girl friend and beyond Jeff, no good buddies or peers from the Class of 1969. To limit this shift even more, only one other student from Eden -- Jim Messecar -- was going to Binghamton that year, and we were not friends by any definition of the word. Nonetheless, Jim provided me with transport to school for the first day of fall orientation, as I was able to include all of my meager possessions in the back of his 1964-ish Ford Mustang when he picked me up at home at 3:00 a.m to be among the first to arrive on campus four hours away, before 8:00 a.m.

I have no recollection as to why my parents did not take me to school. It was a work day for my dad. I was the third son to head off to college in three years, and there was certainly no enthusiasm -- from my parents or from me -- for them accompanying me for an emotional drop off and immediate return to Eden that same day. In an case, my non-friend and soon to be campus colleague was fully capable of taking me to campus. And probably because we weren't much in the way of friends, I saw Jim perhaps twice in the next four years we spent in Binghamton and back in Eden for the summers.

My best recollection wad that I was the first person to arrive on campus. In those days, the college drop off was a pretty simple affair -- kid, parent(s), car, and lots of stuff for the dorm -- with no campus schedule for the parents other than to get them heading home as soon as possible. Most Binghamton University (okay, known at that time as SUNY Binghamton or Harpur College) families were from downstate and they arrived after me. So after I moved in my few things, unpacked and changed, I remember going out to the front door of Lehman Hall (my home for my first three years at Binghamton) and sitting on the low wall, just waiting to see who would arrive.

I am quite certain that I had my hopes up for meeting a cute girl, perhaps as confused and bewildered as I was about this new stage of our lives. Little did I know how different the experience would be. To be candid and a bit superficial, the majority of the students coming from New York city, Long Island, Westchester and the lower Hudson Valley were not like me at all. They presented a demographic that was new to me. I pretty quickly felt like a clueless minority in a sea of sophisticates from "the city" (or nearby), leaving me flailing looking for my first friends.

My two room mates were not much help. One was -- I believe -- Larry Basso. The second, Perry Montalbano. Larry had been to Woodstock. In our tiny, tight triple he was as inscrutable as one could be to a Catholic kid from conservative, rural western New York. Perry was another story. From Long Island, Perry loved to smoke (cigarettes at first, later it was a lot of weed) and to drink beer and liquor. His dad owned a stereo/appliance store and Perry insisted on using his headphones to listen to music as he fell asleep each night, often smoking a cigarette as the muffled noise of Joe Walsh and the James Gang penetrated my sleeplessness.

Let's see. I took an entirely useless political science course, probably on the half-baked idea that I might consider law school and the assumption that poli sci was the place to start. Professor Eduard Ziegenhagen. The there was our required literature and composition course, with Phil Audino, in a small classroom filled with fellow Lehman Hall students. I had chemistry 101 with Thomas Dehner, recent Notre Dame grad. I believe that my fourth course was physics 101. My best estimate of a major in those naive years was chemistry, based exclusively on my admiration for my high school chem teacher, Ben Varco.

Studying was something new to me, at least at the level that college implied was necessary to survive and thrive. I had poor study habits and poor time management, especially with the four-course load of Binghamton, putting me in class twelve hours a week, the other 156 hours each week left to my discretion.

The dining hall became my refuge of sorts, with plenty of all-you-can-eat dining hall food, and the chance to joy hang out for an hour or two for each meal. Few ate breakfast but I tried to get my money's with by making it to breakfast. We were all on a rigid twenty-meal-a-week food plan.

Before and after dinner that first fall I spent a lot of time on the quad playing touch football. Compared to my Hinman peers, I was a much better football player and athlete than most of them. I would play for an hour, go back to my room and shower, eat in the dining hall and often finish the evening with another game on the quad. In a few years, Hinman's Bob Giomi came up with "co-rec" football played on the quad. Co-rec football is another story in itself. I did participate in a flailing floor football, team in intramural, a team assembled by our floor counselor, Randy Kramer. And I did spend one October week end in Syracuse in rickety Archibald Stadium for a Penn State game, a game I recall State won, 15-14.

It was an awkward fall at best. I made one trip how to see an end-of-the-season football game between Eden and Gowanda, under the lights in Gowanda. I made feeble stabs at befriending women but learned the harsh lesson that, socially, first-year women were the primary domain of upperclassmen.

I found the Newman Center, well across and just off campus to the west, a good twenty-minute walk to make Sunday Mass. The congregation was tiny and uninspiring but I kept attending regularly, out of habit, guilt, and the hope that I might be more likely to find a (female) friend with comparable values. Nothing social ever came of it, even after five years of faithful attendance.

This was not the first semester of college I had dreamed it would certainly be. There were no serious intercollegiate sports; fall soccer grew meager crowds on a campus bereft of 'school spirit.' Having read perhaps twenty enticing college catalogs as part of my college search, I had expected so very much more, in terms of fraternities, sports, campus clubs and activities, with romantic walks across a picturesque campus with smiling, sweet co-eds . Wrong on every count.

Today I wish that I had more and fond memories of 1969 but what little I do recall with any specificity was not that memorable and often not very positive. I know that within weeks I considered transferring, considered Alfred, where brother Al was enrolled, but nothing ever came of it. Yet, despite all of this grumbling, I have no reason to complain. Most of the awkwardness and loneliness was of my own doing. I was not an introvert as much as I was a small fish in a very big pond, having graduated third in a class of 164 Eden students, and soon realizing that not only were there ten times a many classmates in my first-year class at Binghamton, hundreds of them had done as well or even much better academically in high school. So Binghamton was also humbling and intimidating, socially and academically.

I left Binghamton in May 1975, with my B.S. and MBA, and immediate plans for doctoral study in business at Penn State. I had done reasonably well academically, had stayed those last two years for the MBA, and it was free and by then I had become quite comfortable at Binghamton. So comfortable and inexpensive, in fact, that I often think I took a very easy path to graduate school, staying in my comfort zone. And then I just as foolishly assumed that Penn State would provide that rah-rah school environment and experience that I had not seen in six years in Binghamton. Wrong again. But that's another story.