Joy of senior year of college -- and what followed

Fifty years ago I was approaching my senior year in college, my fourth year on campus, my first year in my Hughes single room in the basement, just a few steps out the back door to the iconic Lecture Hall Building. I was not keen on such a location; my room was accessible through the ground floor building, even if it was ground upon which very few would ever tread.

Let's start with the first residence hall I approached in late summer 1969, dropped off at a very early hour by Jim Messecar after a four-hour back roads drive from Eden, after a 3:00 a.m. departure. It looks almost exactly as it did 53 years ago. I spent much of the morning sitting on the low wall at the entrance, watching the new arrivals trundle in, usually with stores of goods that were significantly larger than my own modest possessions.

By 1972 the Hinman administration believed that I had outgrown Lehman 214, including a single for much of my third year, and placed me in a less attractive locale. Although it was a single from the start and Higher was close to Lehman, both the room and the building felt foreign to me. Hinman dorms has personalities and rivalries, and Hughes did not feel like home after three years in Lehman.

Below upper left shows the proximity of Hughes to the Classroom Wing and the Lecture Hall Building. In the upper right you can see -- just to the right of of the rd parking sign, the window to my room -- 22a -- in the corner, on the wall perpendicular to the parking lot and directly behind the blue parking sign. The two shots on the bottom row are shots of that backdoor Hughes entrance/exit, taken from two slightly different angles.

In my senior year I was feeling much like a BMOC or at least the Big Man in Hinman. I had a nice job working in the residence hall administrative director's (Ed O'Connor) office, primarily typing and doing menial tasks. The typing included writing, editing and typing the residential college weekly newsletter, the Hinman Halitosis. The job also put me in touch with a lot of Hinman residences, either checking out rooms, signing up people for new rooms, dealing with changes in room mates.

Checking rooms was the way I originally made close contact with Marcie Mard, near the end of the fall term. And a friend from the first three years, Lysa Palant, gave me access to her three first-year students, including the shy but charming Mona Margarita. By January (1973), that small dorm room also allowed me to host Nancy Galli for weeks at a time, from mid-January through early March.

Ms. Galli brought out the best and worst of my personality. In my three years at Hinman, much of them in the company of the very sexy Hinman heart throb Karen Madsen, I had developed a bit of an image as a very popular male, much of which was in my head more than in the Hinman public's picture of me. Along with the job, it made meeting attractive women very easy, especially younger women, the one's who were always more available to senior males than they were to their peers. On the bad side, this self-image clouded my judgment, made me more arrogant and callous, and a bit of a social climber, i.e., I acted as if there was always one more attractive conquest 'above' the one who currently charmed me. That explains much of my transition from Mona, to Marcie then to Nancy. Once past the excitement of the initial 'conquest,' as innocent as it was, my eye would wander to the next conquest.

Compounding this was the strong possibility that spring semester 1973 was going to be over very soon and all of this self-worth would disappear, all my social currency would go away, and I would be cast along with hundreds of thousands of other graduating seniors into the murky 'real world' we had found so easily to avoid -- and easy to mock -- for the pastor years. Binghamton was a traditional liberal arts school in every respect. No one ever spoke much of a life or a career post Binghamton, unless it was medical school, law school, or a return to whatever might come in "the city," New York. My March 1973, that transition was in my face on a daily basis. I had to make some sense of the "career center." I had awkward, almost embarrassingly poor interviews, perhaps three of them. I had no wardrobe for the real world. I had no sense of how to write or what (little) content (I had) to include in a resume. I had no money. I had no 'vision' of my future. All I was comfortable with was my recent adoption of business studies and my four comfortable years in the dorms.

A job prospect with Nalco was my safety line to the real world, but even after struggling through the Chicago interview in early March and receiving an offer -- $800 month -- I was terrified of the real world. So falling into a teaching assistantship with Jack Duffy and the MBA program became my fallback, last resort, an easy way out of a tough situation.

Reflecting back on that spring, I was a modestly successful student, an aspiring business major (having escaped a dismal record in chemistry), and certainly not a very good boy friend, more selfish and self-centered than affectionate or considerate. I have my explanation, but I have no excuses.

Around February, I wrote a detailed but wholly speculative future for me as a Disney executive, married to Nancy, living in Chicago, father of two children, a world traveler and a rising corporate star. It was pure fantasy. There are days when I wish it would have been realized, at least in part. By mid-April, with graduation a few weeks away, it was over for Nancy and me.

In fifty-year hindsight and with some reflection, it is probably safe to conclude that about the time I decided that Nalco was not for me and that staying on at Harpur and Hinman as a graduate teaching assistant and director of the Hinman night guard program, I realized that whatever status, power or ego my fourth year had offered could be extended and even increased with a fifth year, a fifth year of hundreds of newly arriving female students, a fifth year of paid room and board, free tuition, and some lucrative side gigs, meant that I'd probably be better off financially as well as long-term career-wise by staying at SUNY Binghamton another two years.

So, yes, I think that I was happy and optimistic as to my continuing happiness, creating a sense of joy in staying in college. On the other hand, that fifth year also became more of a comeuppance, almost anti-climactic, in terms of my 'career' in Hinman. Very few -- if any other than me -- Hinman students spent five years in Hinman. This probably can be best described as having overstayed my welcome; I should have left when my sense of self-worth was still rising, rather than taking on a fifth year to exploit that sense.

Once I hit that fifth year, it meant I'd have to stay a sixth year, just not necessarily on campus. And my success with M*A*S*H football disappeared almost overnight, as the very best of my team mates had moved on, while I dawdled at Harper. I recall a miserable final exit from the intramural fields, probably in September 1973, following a football loss and the realization that my M*A*S*H memories were now just that, just memories. I think I even abandoned the team in mid-season, showing just how disappointed this turn of events were for me.