Author: patcamerino

Our “first date” almost did not happen. I had returned to Kent early so I could celebrate New Year’s 1957 there with friends and be ready for the arrival of dormitory residents on January 2. The other dorm counselors and I had a great party on New Year’s Eve.

The following day I began to suffer, but not with the usual hangover one might expect. The joints of my fingers, wrists, elbows and feet began to itch like blazes. Welts developed and I even went to the infirmary for a diagnosis (unknown etiology) and Benadryl to help relieve the symptoms. The good thing was Karen had also returned to Kent and we were able to resume our communication in person.

On the second day of January, in addition to the itching, I had been awakened by maids and smoke. The former were noisy about the latter, which had filled up the hallway of Johnson Hall. During the vacation, the incinerator had not been turned on. Being overstaffed with the debris of returning residents, it billowed with pounds of smoke. It looked like a foggy night and portended the discouraging days which followed.

In order to attend the DU winter formal being held within 72 hours, I needed to find a means of transportation for Karen and me to get there. Apparently, every fraternity brother with a car had already arranged for others to double date with them. Finally, brother Marvin Katz offered a ride, but his problem immediately became worse than mine – his date canceled on the afternoon before the formal.

Confusion also reigned with the start of classes, discussion of grades for last quarter and assistantship funding sources for the remainder of my term at Kent. It was not a hopeful beginning for my final year as an undergraduate. The continued itching did not help my disposition.

The end of the week, fortunately, concluded much better. At noon of the day for the DU formal, one of the brothers, Bill Mottice, said we could double; suddenly, and at the last minute, I had a way to take Karen to the dance. She wore a red sheath dress with a tail – a stunning look. We enjoyed the pre-dance cocktail party held by one of the brothers and the dance, itself. Yes, the week for the start of the year had a magnificent finale.

The only remaining “problem” was that there were no additional journal entries for the rest of the quarter! My final months as an undergraduate were so filled by living them that I had limited opportunity to record what was happening.

The entry, dated January 5, 1957, was followed by a copy of a letter of March 22. Evidently, I had taken a train to Ithaca, New York in order to visit Cornell University for the first time. I applied for graduate school, but my choice had been based on information from a published catalog. I had never seen the campus in person and was impressed by the ivy-clad buildings located between the deep gorges high above the town. The line, “High above Cayuga’s waters” made magnificent sense!

On my return trip from Ithaca, I briefly wrote Karen about my meeting with the dean of the Graduate School and with those who might be able to provide me with a position as a dorm council for undergraduate Cornelians. The university had positions for married counselors and offered them small apartments in the dormitory complex – along with a very modest salary. Everything reminded me of those old-time movies and novels about university life in English schools. I looked forward to what might be next in my life as I passed through Batavia, New York, on my way back to Kent, Ohio. The next few years of my life had a great potential.

In March 1957, between winter and spring quarters of my Senior year and of Karen’s Junior year, we went on the KSU annual tour of New York City. Written details of this experience have never existed, but the memories have been indelibly preserved in the neural pathways of my mind. They have been inscribed upon the foundation stones of my heart.

On the way to the City, I presented her with my fraternity pin, an event called “pinning.” For many collegians, this action was equivalent to becoming engaged. And so, it was for the two of us.

The pinning was the conclusion of an earlier promise made on Valentine’s Day, a month before our trip. It was then, in the Robin Hood Restaurant in Kent, that I had offered Karen my mother’s ring: a green gemstone with a diamond chip that she had given me to be passed on to the woman I would choose to continue wearing her, and my, favorite piece of jewelry. Many years later, this ring was handed on to our granddaughter, Victoria, since this was also my mother’s name.

But now on March 16, someplace in the middle of the state of New York, Karen accepted my DU-pin and my pledge. The pin was stolen by a burglar thirty years ago; the pledge has been repeatedly renewed.

The places I had visited when I made my first tour of the City the preceding year, I saw once again, but in a different light, a brighter illumination. For Karen the sights were new. I enjoyed sharing them with her, even if the details were never included in a journal as had those of 1956.

There was Rockefeller Center, its coffee shop and its skaters’ pond where we watched the passing crowds. St Patrick’s Cathedral, where we went to Mass, continued to have a central place in my memories. I have forgotten the names of the plays we saw or slept through. However, I vividly remember a meal at Sardi’s Restaurant where we had a very thick, rare and over-crusted “hambourger.”

We also went with the college group for an evening at the Latin Quarter Nightclub. A traveling hostess took a photograph of the two of us and placed it in a folder with a very lively, but unclad, dancer on the cover. Later, when my Italian grandmother was handed the print, within its provocative folder, and told here was a picture of my girlfriend, she tossed it on the floor with great distain – until she was informed the photograph was inside, not outside.

The subway system was a revelation for both of us. It is there we encountered the shabby man who became, for us, the “prophet of the subway” – a homeless resident who shouted inanities at us as we awaited a train on the opposite platform.

Few of the other details of the tour have remained, but what we planted there was the seed for the later, formal engagement which occurred when I was a graduate student at Cornell. That New York event had its own story. It began once more, with Spring Break at Kent State.

I had invited Karen to spend this Break with me in Ithaca. I had planned on giving her a true engagement ring. I had carefully arranged for everything – except for one thing.

The day of the evening she was to leave Kent on the train for Ithaca, I had an attack of itching red spots. I thought I should probably go to the Cornell Infirmary just to be sure everything was fine, since the campus had been under a German measles alert for several weeks. Yes, the results were positive for me, too. I was allowed one phone-call before being confined overnight to an infirmary bed. I called Karen’s sorority house, but she was not there. I left a message; one I was not sure she would really believe. “Don’t come! I have German measles.”

Two weeks later, on April 1, I journeyed back to Kent when Cornell had its own Spring Break. There on a stone bench at the top of the hill on the front campus, near the bridge joining the Humanities and the Sciences buildings, I presented her with an engagement ring. We have visited this memorial site every time we’ve returned to the campus over the past six decades. There would, no doubt, have been a different result if she had not said “yes.”

My final quarter began at the end of March 1957. I was determined to study more than I had previously that academic year. My grade average for the last quarter had been only a 2.7, a far cry from the overall 3.5 I’d been carrying for the first three years. Dating time and studying time had conflicted since September of my Senior year. I had grown use to the dating and wanted the hours Karen and I shared at the Brady to continue. But perhaps we now needed to cross the street and spend a few more in Rockwell Library.

This was also the quarter I enrolled in a Linguistics course taught by Dr. Georgie Babb. It was my favorite non-chemistry/biology offering in college. I fell in love with language as a result of it. If I had found it earlier in my academic life, my professional life would probably have been extremely different.

There were, also, attempts to participate in cultural events. One evening Don Bushell, one of the dorm counselors and close friend, invited Karen and me to join him and his date for a drive to Oberlin College to hear the Weavers, a new folk group. When we arrived, we discovered the performance had been cancelled by the college on the grounds that the Weavers were believed to be Communists. We were greatly surprised, since Oberlin College had a reputation of being one of the nation’s more liberal schools. The cancellation did, however, provide Karen and me the chance to spend a very communal evening on the way back from Oberlin.

This quarter was also the time for us to begin our more serious discussions, like one on religion and the Catholic view of “Christ’s descent into Hell.” Karen’s Congregational background and limited appreciation of creedal statements led to a very involved conversation. Spending time watching television at the Alpha Chi Omega House was much more pleasant.

April 1 on the academic calendar was more than April Fools’ Day. That was the day when letters are received about scholastic awards. At first, I did not see the letter from Cornell University. It was stuck between several magazines in the mail. It took me the time to smoke a cigarette and to offer up a few prayers (even if I was a somewhat lapsed Catholic) before opening the envelope and learning I had received a Cornell fellowship worth $1,975 for the following year. There were no strings attached. I did not need to be a dorm counselor or a teaching assistant. The funds were not even taxable. When I told Karen, she floated as high as I had been since reading the award letter.

My high lasted until the next evening when I telephoned my parents in Niles. My mother’s response was to the effect: “Well, that’s nice. If you really want it, you should probably take it.” My father had no commentary whatsoever. His preference was for me to get a job after graduation. He always said I should get one making bricks at the Niles Brick Factory.

The months of April and May passed quickly. The usual social events came and went as they had in the preceding three years. My grades were better for the end of the year than they had been for this year’s earlier quarters. Graduation came. Karen and I parted for the summer, with a hope that we would somehow be able to see each other before she returned to Kent for her own Senior year.

Karen went off for a family vacation in Virginia. I went to Niles to deal with the stuff I brought home from living alone in Kent for four years. It would not be too long before I’d be off once more. A new life awaited me in Ithaca. In the meantime, there would be letters between us. Karen would be working as a camp counselor for the summer. I hoped I might see her there, somehow. In fact, it became much easier than I ever thought possible.

In some miraculous way my father agreed to buy me a car as a “graduation present.” The dream became the reality of a Ford Fairlane 500 Fordor sedan. It looked a lot like the classic Crown Victoria, but was less expensive, at a total of $2,600 with “white walls, radio, and heater.” It was destined for several trips to Camp Wingfoot in North Madison, Ohio. I had high hopes for the Summer.

For some strange reason this set of memories was not preserved when I recalled others from my Kent State period. In re-reading those entries almost three years later, I am surprised they were concealed from active recollection back then. The event involved a picnic, during the early spring of my Senior year at KSU. The gathering of a select group of DU brothers met on a small beach frontage on the eastern end of Lake Erie, near Ashtabula. The property was owned by the family of Paul Timms, a fraternity brother who liked to party. He invited us to spend the day on the beach, with a focus on a wiener roast, a feast of the highest magnitude for young adults, even back then.

Roasting hotdogs and burning marshmallows are among the highlights of my memory, some six decades later! Fortunately, there are also some old photos of many of us crowding around a bonfire, wondering if the results of the open flames were ready for consumption. After all, semi-cooked hotdogs are edible, especially for twenty-somethings.

The day went well, until the afternoon rains arrived. They provided our only opportunity to get wet, since Lake Erie is too chilly for swimming before late summer. Fortunately, the Timms family owned a small, nearby cottage, an excellent place to drink beer while attempting to stay dry, or dry-out for those of us who had been caught in the sudden rain. Karen was one of the latter. She had not brought a swimsuit, knowing, I suppose, the unlikelihood of taking a dip in the lake. Of course, most of the DU guys did have trunks, since jumping into cold water proved one’s masculinity in some mysterious way. For some reason, Karen’s blouse was completely soaked; she made do with a lightweight jacket she had brought along. This outfit was fine until a little bit later, on our drive back to Kent.

Our ride to the picnic and our way back to the campus involved Dan Patridge, a close fraternity brother, and his girlfriend, Lillian, who was the sorority sister who had introduced Karen and me at the beginning of that school year. For some reason, it was suggested we drive back from Ashtabula to Kent by way of Niles. My hometown was, geographically, on the way. It made some sense, since this would give Karen, as well as Dan and Lillian, a chance to meet my mother for the first time.

The interaction of Karen and my mother proceeded well, with one major exception. Karen’s blouse had not yet dried. She wore her tan jacket with only a dampish bra beneath it. My mother kept insisting Karen should remove her jacket in order to be more comfortable in our overly heated house. Karen kept refusing, much to my mother’s inability to comprehend why she wanted to remain with the jacket. We made an exit as soon as we could and had a laugh-filled drive back to Kent State. It was years later that Karen finally explained to my mother why she remained in a zipped jacket the first time they had met.

Love letters, even the most romantic ones, were no substitute for reality. Occasional long evenings on the beach, even the most romantic ones, were no substitute for reality. The summer between my senior year at Kent State and my first year at Cornell was no substitute for reality.

I wrote to Karen several times a week; she wrote more frequently and tried not to chide me too often about my own deficient schedule of responses. At least, they were very long letters when I did get to them. I found multiple pages written in the dark hours after midnight were very comforting to me. Somehow, during the daylight or the nightfall of early evening, I felt awkward about composing them. Or maybe it was because I slept a lot during the day. I did not have a summer job, since the Titanium Plant where I had once found statistical employment was in an economic slump. (During the one summer when I did not go back to Kent for classes, George Davies and I found employment for three months in the Niles Titanium Plant. We worked in their analytic office and did daily data entries of samples taken from the titanium sheets they produced. Certain, now unremembered, measurements were graphed to show that the product met specification. I spent that summer using an old-fashioned Monroe calculator to solve thousands of quadratic equations.)

During the summer of 1957, Karen did find a job as a counselor at Camp Wingfoot at North Madison, Ohio. It was on Lake Erie and only a two-hour drive from Niles. We tried to spend as many weekend evenings as we could on the nearby beach. It was a challenge driving back to Niles late at night when the wind coming through the open window was the only reason I could stay on the road. Driving with your eyes closed is not a good idea.

We did keep the letters and they have become part of our collections on paper, for her, and in electronic versions, retyped some ten years ago, for me. Comments on what we did, or in my case, failed to do, in our daily lives made up the content of many of them. This was also the time when I became enamored by sonnets created by both Wm. Shakespeare and E.B. Browning, many of which were copied into our letters. We also included items relating to potential wedding plans, especially those relevant to views held by a lapsed-Catholic-husband-to-be and Congregational-anti-Catholic-parents.

There were, in addition, four significant events I experienced during that Summer. I did get to meet Karen’s Mother and Father when I drove to Sandusky and spent a weekend with her family.

Secondly, we were, to some extent, affected by the June breakup between my fraternity brother, Dan, and Karen’s sorority sister, Lillian. They were the ones who had introduced the two of us a year ago. They had been “seriously” involved for several years previously and seemed to be destined for marriage. Karen and I vowed to be different.

The third event was a visit to Ithaca, New York with my dearest cousin, Rosemary, who had grown up with me and was virtually my own sister. She and I drove there in my new Ford so I could find a place to live the following September when I would begin my new life at Cornell.

There was also another pleasant trip for closing my life at Kent State. Bill and Frank, two of my DU brothers, drove with me to Middlebury, Vermont, for an international fraternity meeting at the College. It was my first trip to a New England campus and my introduction, albeit, in summer rather than in a magnificent fall, to the part of the country where I could live for the rest of my life. Fortunately, I did have the opportunity to experience New Hampshire, Vermont, and Massachusetts during the initial years of my academic life.

This New England trip was also the time I was first exposed to lobster. Frank, who became an outstanding chef and owner of a restaurant in Akron, Ohio, led us on a merry prank of our non-New England brothers. He assured every Midwesterner that lobster tails tasted terrible, but the three of us would take theirs and consume them so the brothers from Middlebury College would not be upset by all those visitors who would, otherwise, have left them, uneaten, on their plates. It was not an “easy living summer” but my addiction to red crustaceans did result from it.

This essay was written for inclusion in the “Oral History Project” of Kent State University, to be published in 2023.

During my sophomore year at Niles McKinley, several students went to KSU to take the regional, high school biology exams. On first sight, I fell in love with the ivy-covered halls crowning the hillside above the tree-covered campus. Since I wanted to be a high school science teacher, my enrollment, in September 1953, for Kent’s program leading to a B.S. in Ed. was inevitable. As a result of those high school science exams, the University offered me a scholarship which included four years of tuition and fees. In order to provide funds for housing, board, and books, I was offered work at the reception desk for Stopher Hall, the only men’s dormitory on campus. I managed the switchboard and transferred incoming calls to banks of telephones in each lounge. Passing residents answered the ringing phone and, shouting down the corridors, summoned those students being called. After living off-campus for the next two years, I returned as a resident-counselor for Johnson Hall, the second men’s dorm at Kent State.

Many of the hours between my classes were devoted to drinking coffee, smoking Kent microfilter cigarettes, and conversing in the Hub, where there was a daily contest to determine how many chairs could be crowded around each small table. The air in the Hub had more smoke from cigarettes than the amount produced by the Central Heating Plant across the street from the Student Union. Later, after joining Delta Upsilon fraternity, my coffee and cigarette consumption was transferred to the Capt. Brady Grill, opposite Prentice Gate, or the equally smoke-filled Rocky’s, a downtown bar frequented by the DUs.

It was at the Capt. Brady, during my senior year, that I met Karen Swank, a junior majoring in secondary education. We were introduced by her AXO sorority sister, who had been pinned to one of my fraternity brothers. Karen and I had a magnificent two-hour conversation in one of the grill’s garishly colored booths. However, I had forgotten her name when we met the following night in the Brady. Across a room crowded with fraternity and sorority members, I greeted her with: “Hi, Stupid.” Fortunately, she replied in a similar fashion. We have been married for over six decades and have lovingly continued to use this greeting with one another.

During my first year in Stopher Hall, I shared a triple room with two roommates, Al Kennedy, a chemistry major from Cleveland and Carl Oglesby, a polysci major from Akron. We had many long, evening-discussions about the world, in general, as only freshman can. My interactions with Carl were long ranging. In our junior year, he became the “Big Brother” who began the Macedonian Club, a men’s group formed as a protest against Greek-letter fraternities. At the time, I was Parliamentarian of the Student Government Council that had to approve acceptance of the club’s constitution, which included the goals: “…. To promote appreciation of the modern arts. … To criticize each other’s work, and … To improve the ‘humdrum existence’ on campus.” Carl finally agreed to exclude the purpose identified as “… bear baiting, boar hunting and falconry.” He did not graduate from KSU but, later, at the University of Michigan, became one of the founders of the Students for a Democratic Society. He also wrote a book about his visit to Castro’s Cuba and as well as another about the KSU tragedy of May 4, 1970.

My time at Kent holds many memories of non-classroom events. Stuffing colored crepe paper into chicken-coop wire at 3:00 am, is not easily forgotten. The results, for lawn constructions on Homecoming and for floats pulled by shining convertibles on Campus Day, were worth the all-night efforts. DU fraternity members were noted for their black-light productions for Pork Barrel and, on Campus Day, for painting the “K,” which dated back to its beginning as Kappa Mu Kappa. DU members were also known for their participation in basketball, swimming, diving, production of the Kent Stater and campus politics. One of them, Lou Holtz, also did well in football. Many of them participated in contests at Rowboat Regatta and other intramural events, including the local College-Bowl trivia-game broadcasts. I was on the DU winning team for three consecutive years. Karen was on the AXO team which placed first during the following year. She was also Parliamentarian of the Student Government Council, the year following my service in this role!

One of my favorite professors was Dr. Gerald Read, who taught a course in the philosophy of education. Beginning his series of lectures with a presentation on a major approach to education, he convinced me that this approach was, indeed, the way I wanted to teach. He then followed with lectures on how what he had presented made no sense and offered views on another educational approach, which was far superior, until he tore that one apart during his following lectures. After multiple build-ups and teardowns, I recognized a need to develop my own educational philosophy, incorporating parts of everything he had taught. This result is what education should be about!

Towards the end of my freshman year, I realized that, by taking at least twenty credit hours each quarter and a few summer classes, I could, during my four years at Kent, earn a B.S. degree, with a major in chemistry, along with the B.S. in Ed. In September 1957, I entered the Ph.D. program at Cornell University and, four years later, received a doctoral degree with a major in biochemistry.

Upon completion of my graduate degree, I held postdoctoral research fellowships at Dartmouth Medical School and Oregon State University. I then became a scientist-administrator with the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, MD. My shift to academic administration began with a position as Associate Graduate Dean for Research at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and ended with becoming the Director for Faculty Research Resources at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. It was also during this period that I was ordained as a Permanent Deacon in the Archdiocese of Galveston-Houston. In 2014, I received the Centennial Alumni Award from the College of Education, Health, and Human Services, at Kent State.

The variety within my professional life began with the many opportunities KSU afforded me during those initial years of collegiate study and of the formation of lasting friendships. Several years ago, having moved to a retirement Community in Houston, Karen and I joined a group of residents devoted to writing down memories for transmittal to our children, grandchildren and future generations. My own efforts for this “legacy in words” can be found in a blog I initiated: “CameosAndCarousels.com.” An elaboration of my years in Niles, Kent, Ithaca, Corvallis, Bethesda and Houston can be found there by anyone interested in my life as an “academic bum,” which began at Kent State University seventy years ago!