My
Adventures as a College Boy
By the roaring roaring banks
Of the old Kanakadea
They were a strange lot, those Victorians who went to
university in the late nineteenth century in upstate New York, or as the anthem
went “’neath the watchcare of sentinel pines.”
In another little ditty, whose key lines are cited above, they sang the
praises of the tiny stream—you could stand with one foot on either bank with no
trouble stretching—as though it were a mighty mountain torrent. Somehow in Alfred, in the southern tier of
the Niagra Frontier, not too far from Corning and a bit further from Rochester,
out in the New York side of the Pennsylvania oil fields they imagined
themselves to be like the Ivy League schools nearer to the Atlantic.
Of the Kanakadea I recall one little incident. Coming down from a big wooden structure that
served as the main lecture theatre, after our eight am lecture on Western Civ
(as it was known), we all jumped across the stream and then hurdled a small wooden
fence in order to arrive at our next destination, the small red brick building
in the valley below. One of the young
women in our group did not quite negotiate the trip over the fence and flopped
down in a most awkward posture. She then
stood up and nervously declared to all of us staring in wonder: “Thank goodness
for pantyhose.” As this was in the early
1960s and we were all still somewhat lagging in whatever advanced morals and
technology enjoyed by our counterparts in larger universities and in bigger
population centers, we were startled, or at least I was. First, because for a member of the female sex
to speak out with gusto about an embarrassing situation was rather unique.
Second, because it was the first time I
had ever heard anyone of any sex say the word “pantyhose” in public and, though
it had appeared in newspaper advertisements, this gave me the first
glimpse—excuse the wordplay—of what they actually were. Third, because though everyone laughed
raucously with and at her after she made her declaration, it was only later,
speaking in confidence with a classmate, that I understood what she had been
saved from. It was good that this
discovery was made somewhat later in the relative privacy of the men’s toilet
because as the implications of what she had said sunk in I turned a rather
bright red. Such was our, or my,
affinity with the weird Victorian era which had confused the thin little
trickle of the stream running through the valley with some song-worthy river,
and our old-fashioned university with those which were the subject of many
early films about college life.
Now you may well wonder how a naïve Jewish boy from
Boro Park in Brooklyn became a student in this “pioneer college of western New
York” fame, if for anything, in the nineteenth and early twentieth century,
for almost nothing, except that, as having been founded (with a land-grant) as
a Seventh Day Baptist (not Adventist) theological seminary it had the privilege
of a post office that was closed on Saturday but open on Sunday, the only one,
so we were told, in the United States.
It also had a small nursing school somehow affiliated with some teaching
hospitals in Corning and Rochester, and thus was properly a university rather
than a college, despite the fact that it had no graduate program to give
Masters of Doctoral degrees. In
addition, thanks to the proximity of Corning and its properly world-famous
pottery works, the New York State University system located its School of
Ceramics on the campus as part of Alfred.
This was quite unlike the School of Agriculture located on the other
side of the village named Alfred; it was a separate institution
altogether. Yet the School of Ceramics
was the making of the university in the sense that with the Soviet launching of
Sputnik and the inauguration of the space race, the United States government
poured a lot of money into Alfred in order to promote ceramics engineers needed
because the nose-cones of rockets were made of ceramics. To train such engineers, the money also went
into the development of the departments of mathematics and physics, and into
the other departments there to fill out those bachelor and master degrees.
In brief, as though anything I set out to say can be
brief, by the time I was finishing high school and my father was to choose
which university I would go to, since Alfred had had a meteoric rise in
standing to one of the top ten small colleges (read: universities) in the
north-eastern United States, excluding the Ivy League in New England. It had two other advantages appealing to my
father, and perhaps also my
mother—though she probably would have preferred me to go to Brooklyn
College so I could stay home: it was a rural institution and my father thought
that I should have the advantage he never had of experiencing life in a small
town among mountains and forests. It
also had dropped its formal exclusion of Jewish students and staff, something
typical of rural colleges. In fact, this
part of New York State, swinging out over the long flat Pennsylvania border
towards the Great Lakes—a permanent disaster area in terms of poverty and
virtual ghost-towns once the oil wells proved unprofitable in the early
twentieth century—this was a hotbed of the Klu Klux Klan. As in some mid-western states, this part of New
York had been where the Klan most flourished, rather than in the border states
of the south, as is usually supposed.
One of the fraternities on the campus kept a remnant of that fact in its
title as Klan Alpine.
After my father told me that that was where I wanted
to go and I duly sent in my application, along with a very few others,
including Brooklyn College, I was accepted, and I then discovered that a few of
my friends from Stuyvesant were also going there, probably because their
parents had told them that that was what they wanted to do. So in the autumn my parents drove me in a
packed car up to the “valley so fair/ Where the forest trees share/ Dominion
o’er hillside and glen.” I was to be a
freshman amongst a small contingent of other “Jew Yorkers” in this nice WASPish
school of higher education. There were
actually so few of us that young men from local communities attending the
university came running to see if I or my fellows had horns, goat’s feet and
other marks of our Jewish heritage. We
probably disappointed them greatly because they mostly avoided us for the next
four years, with a few exceptions.
The main exception for avoiding us came when we were
confronted. It happened two years later,
during our attempt—that is, the small group of Jewish students who decided to
support NAACP in the Civil Rights movement by carrying signs in front of local
fast-food chains in nearby Wellsville and Hornell—to demonstrate in
public. As this group of about twenty of
us walked back and forth, holding up signs saying things such as “Integration”
and “No More Jim Crow,” a bus carrying football players from Alfred
University’s team drove up and disgorged a crowd of two dozen or so rather
drunken young men. They streamed across
the street and started pushing us around, throwing some punches, and saying
rather rude things about our protest march.
As this went on, I noticed that the President of the University and the
local Police Chief were standing together down the road, smiling and whispering
to one another. All this went on for
some fifteen minutes or so. Then someone
somewhere blew a whistle, the brave athletes desisted from their violence, and
returned to their bus. We looked about,
somewhat stunned, but could no longer see the officials from Alfred. It was then decided that we had made our
protest and, as no one was seriously injured, aside from a few blackened eyes, some
bruised arms, and a little torn clothing, we would return to the
university.
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