Nineteen months...but who's counting?

November 21, 2020. It's been nineteen months since I taught my last class, an undergraduate management class at Loyola. For reference, the first class I taught -- my own class, not as an assistant -- was in September 1974, when my faculty mentor, the late Mickey Kavanagh, surprised me at registration with the news that demand for the introductory organizational behavior course (a course not unlike the ultimate Loyola course in 2019) was so strong that the SUNY Binghamton School of Management had to add a rare, one-night-a-week section of the course, and I was going to be assigned to teach it.

The previous fall (September 1973) I had led three discussions of the same course for Jack Duffy's large lecture class, back when lectures of over 120 students usually included a Friday, fifty-minute 'discussion' section. There was never much of a discussion. Students had few questions from the lectures. Jack was a funny and engaging instructor and I was a sorry second fiddle each week for students, many of whom lived in the same Hinman College residential complex where I had spent the last four years, and where I had accepted a job in Hinman for this fifth year -- my first year in the MBA program -- as director of the student night security guards, the ones who manned the desk at the entrance to each of the five Hinman dorms (not residential halls back then), every night that school was in session, from 11:30 p.m. to 7:00 a.m.

The night security job brought me free room and board in a single room in the dorms, Smith Hall (1973-74), after three years in Lehman (1969-1972) and senior year (1972-73) in Hughes Hall. Add in a week end job at the campus pub, a few shifts as the 'salad and milk' man in the Hinman Dining Hall (I quit that job after perhaps two weeks), and twenty graduate credits a semester, and it was a busy, almost overwhelming life.

So when I moved off campus in fall 1974, after an eight-week internship with Foseco in England, teaching my own class while also on a lighter course load of my own, and no dining hall or night guard work, that final, sixth year at Binghamton was one of the most memorable years of my life in many respects, of which one memory was teaching that first class.

Gary Levine and I lived at 32 Schiller Street. I had a car much of the time but usually relied on the Off Campus bus to get me to and from school. I had an office of my own in the new School of Management building, zero supervision from Kavanagh, Duffy or Vince Pasquale (the assistant dean), and a lot of freedom, including many four-day weekends, a television in the apartment, enough cash to live well enough. [NOTE: Tuition was free and the assistantship included a $2400 stipend for the academic year, or $200 a month. My share of the rent was $60 a month. Dad paid the car insurance. Food and utilities were dirt cheap. Gary cooked and I cleaned dishes. Eating out was uncommon, almost as uncommon as 'dating.' No one dated. Some students paired up and spent a lot of time together, like Gary and Maxine Mintzer, while I quite casually moved among a variety of social groups, including fellow graduate students, fellow bartenders at the pub, old friends still living in Hinman, casual, serial monogamy with a variety of women, including Marnie Fisher, Louise Carter, Nancy Galli, and brief flings with the occasional bar flies from the pub or the nearby Turf Exchange, a five-minute walk from our Schiller Street apartment and a favorite late night haunt for those working evenings and then congregating at the Turf around 1:00 a.m. for an hour or two of very late night relaxation.

That sixth year also produced my momentous decision to do on for my doctorate at Penn State. I think that after six years I had become so enchanted with the life of higher education, so interested in following the footsteps of Jack Duffy and Gary Levine, and so willing to forego life in fifty-hour a week corporate America, that three or more years of free graduate education, employed as an assistant, was an almost too easy, default decision. If I could do it over, would I do the same? Looking back and looking at today, I think I would have chosen to pursue the doctorate at UCLA -- if I knew then what I knew now and had a smaller sentimental attachment to mom and dad's alma mater -- yet I think that the overwhelming feeling at that point was that Penn State was a convenient, less risky, romantic notion of college, one that I had not fully experienced in six years at Binghamton. I think I wanted to have the life my dad had instilled in me about his adventures at and fondness for Penn State.

So it has been a joyful life, before I turned 65, and after. The pandemic has heightened my awareness of the fragility of life, of the inevitability of death, and of the anxiety of a life mismanaged by woefully misguided tyrants on the left. I have Dena, Jane and Gaby, Jane and Abe, my brothers and sisters, adequate resources for retirement, and a comfortable if confining home in northeast Wisconsin. No real nearby friends, but a good relationship with Fr Carl at Holy Spirit, Jane and Abe, and more casual yet friendly relationships with a few helpful neighbors.

Is this what I though retirement would be? Not really but, then again, not completely unlike what I expected. Better in some ways, worse in others. This year has been a particular challenge, but also a chance to reset and to re-align our interests and our priorities. If we can get through this politically charged pandemic without lasting damage to our social and economic fabric, we will be just fine.