Remembering the Sixties

The joke has long been that "if you can remember the Sixties you weren't really there." Well, maybe this will fill in some blanks for those who were there, don't remember, and just need a few prompts to refresh their memories. Let me take you on a short stroll down the end of that decade and the first year following that turbulent decade. And what better way than to show my college grades for my first three semesters.

I grow up in the Sixties, entering at the age of eight in 1960 and leaving when I was just eighteen on January 1, 1970, during my first year at Binghamton, before the first semester had even ended, and four months before the shootings at Kent State would close my college and rob an entire class year of a real finish to the critical first year of college. At best, I'd grade the college administration as "incomplete," while "incompetent" or "spineless" might be a fairer assessment.

The first semester was mostly a blur. I remember studying economics in the laundry room, terrified and lost in the subject, afraid of failure in my first semester. I can't recall anything about the teacher, the schedule or the mechanics of the course. Chemistry with Thomas Dehner, recently of Notre Dame, was no better. Phil Audino in Lit & Comp, was a cold, arrogant type, in a class of people from my dorm. So we could commiserate daily in the dining hall. Eduard Ziegenhagen ruined whatever respect I had for politics sci and prospect of going to law school. The course made no sense at all. These "general ed" distrubution requirement courses worked best at showing me how useless a liberal arts approach could be, and how just as pointless was this requirement. We had a week of classes after Christmas break, then a week off to "study,' Followed by a week of exams, our short winter break, and the resumption of classes and the second semester in February.

This second set of liberal arts courses were worse: Continuing the mess called lit & comp and chemistry, with the same teachers, and adding theater and Spanish literature courses, all basically imposed on me by the general education system in place. While I had an interest in chemistry, Dehner and that first year started me down my road to ruin; he declined to finish the course when the students went on strike. I took my second semester chem grade and took a crude final to attempt to earn a better grade in Spanish.

Enough said. That I became a university professor can be viewed as no small miracle in light of this first year of Binghamton. And, although a subject best left unsaid or at least to another time, my interpersonal skills with the opposite sex failed me almost completely, dealing with a primarily downstate, non-Catholic, wealthier group of peers, my best skill was probably demonstrated on the quad with touch football before and after dinner, against a generally unauthentic male peer group.