I’ve mentioned aspects of the University and the Town where I spent four intensive years of academic study, three years of a wonderful beginning with Karen, and the first two years of Deb’s life with us. We have returned only once during the following six decades. The five of us, Ken and Chris were added in the meantime, spent an enjoyable two-week vacation on Lake Cayuga in the summer of 1976, the last one before we moved from Amherst to Houston.
Cornell, itself, is a picturesque, ivy-league university, although some wags refer to it as the “poison ivy” of the ivy-league. That put-down is undeserved. Cornell is a mixture of the many forms a university may take. The institution was founded, in 1865, as both a private university and the public Agriculture and Mechanical (A&M) school for the State of New York. The Biochemistry department was part of the College of Agriculture; its fees were in line with those of other state universities. However, most of the formal classes I took were in the private College of Arts and Sciences. So, I received the best of both worlds, financially and academically.
The architecture of the college was, also, an amalgamation of Gothic collegiate, Victorian, neoclassic and modern styles. The view from “Libe Slope,” between The Straight and the Library, overlooking the dormitories on the brow of the hill and Lake Cayuga at its foot, was magnificent in every season. In winter, it was the perfect site for undergraduate sledding on trays swiped from the on-campus dining halls. The surrounding quads were guarded by the usual ivy-covered buildings for the sciences, humanities and engineering. Much of my academic class-time was spent there. However, most of my daytime and nighttime hours were taken up by my research in Savage Hall, which housed both Biochemistry and Nutrition.
The graduate student office for budding biochemists was a large room lined with desks and bookshelves for each one of us. Given the communal nature of this office, I seldom remained there to study. As a graduate student, I was able to have a carrel assigned to me in the Mann Library which served the College of Agriculture. It’s there. I found the peace and quiet to study and to read the journals published in the field of biochemistry. Computer searches and the Internet were in the far distant future. Back in Savage Hall, the lab I shared with Howie had a workbench on each side of an aisle wide enough to accommodate one-and-one-half investigators. We usually worked there on different schedules. It was not the place to study, but only to inject and incubate eggs and dissolve products in ether or acetone.
Much of my leisure time, especially during my first year before Karen joined me, was filled by reading science fiction in a comfortable, wing-backed chair in the library of The Straight, which could have been used for an English collegiate setting.
During my first months at Cornell, I made a daily hike from my room in College Town and across Cascadilla Gorge to Savage. The bridge over the gorge afforded another panoramic view, straight down as well as across. Winter snows made the journey difficult but wonderful for sightseeing, if only I had the time to stop and look. After I had moved from an apartment in College Town to one in the Heights, I crossed the other gorge bordering the north edge of the campus. I often stopped at a small coffee shop there, with a view of Beebe Lake and its falls. The coffee shop’s free match books carried the motto: “best by a dam site.” This was a great place for a cup of coffee and a cigarette on my walk from the lab to my car, parked on one of the winding neighborhood streets.
I had the daily challenge of trying to remember exactly where I had parked, since I had to find a different location each day. I was tempted to put a pin in a campus map to remind me on which street I might find the snow drift under which my car would be hidden each evening. It would have been much easier, memory-wise, to use Kite Hill, the only on-campus parking lot for non-faculty cars. This location required a longer journey. It was not uncommon for me, in midwinter, to take a shortcut through one of the buildings on the way in order to thaw out a bit before getting into a car that never seemed to warm up.
Unfortunately, I seldom strolled the campus for leisure. The quads were worthy of such action, but time was not available for a scurrying grad student to slow down, unless there was an opportunity to eat ice cream, in the summertime. The Dairy department in the College of Agriculture constantly tried to formulate new mixtures and offered free cones to those willing to take part in a taste comparison. The investigators were especially interested in an apple-flavored variety, since this combination was extremely difficult to create as a unique flavor resembling what was consumed as classical apple-pie-alamode.
Another major contribution of the Dairy department was the development, in conjunction with a Swedish company, of the “tetra pac” for milk or cream poured into my cup of coffee. The trick was trying to open the appropriate corner of the tetrahedron without popping milk (or cream) all over your hands and everything within a three-foot radius.
The town of Ithaca was a typical upstate, small town, where Karen and I seldom shopped. Almost all of what we needed could be found in College Town, even groceries purchased on our trips between Floral Avenue on the Inlet and the campus on the top of the hill. The purchase of furniture waited until we had our first real apartment in Hanover, New Hampshire. Graduate students made do with what could be found in the usual furnished apartment. A crib, a playpen, a toddler’s eating table and a swivel, and a red-padded rocker were the only items of note we purchased. They lasted throughout several moves, even cross-country.
Although I enjoyed the ambience of the town and the university, along with the Finger Lakes we sometimes visited, I was anxious to graduate and continue my academic life elsewhere. I admit I did have a faint hope of returning someday as a member of the faculty. Later, when my interests became more in tune with academic administration, I did apply for a position as the Dean of Research there and visited the campus for interviews. They chose a woman administrator, instead.