During the summer between my graduation from Kent State and my move to Cornell, my cousin Rosemary and I drove my new car there to find a place for me to live the following September. It was a vacation-adventure for the two of us – the only one we ever had.
I had lived in dorms and off-campus at Kent. After an earlier visit, before I was formally accepted into Cornell, I had not been impressed with the University’s housing for graduate students. The setting for the grad-student apartments near Cascadilla Gorge was extremely impressive, as were most sights around the campus, but rather old and run-down. I was not as interested in dormitory living as a graduate student as I had been as an undergraduate. So, Rosemary and I began our search.
The first off-campus apartment building had a dingy, red-tiled hall and eighteen residents. The landlady was a talkative one. In the single she showed me, was a rocker tied together with rope because, as she said, “Well, it was falling apart.” I declined her generous hospitality for next year on the grounds that it would be too noisy with eighteen residents, even though she protested that if anyone got noisy, she tossed them out.
The next places were much better. I finally settled on a boarding house at 107 Harvard Place. The owners were a young couple by the name of O’Mara. He was a law student. There were six men living in the house. I felt that six were not too many and gave me better odds to find a friend for next school year. Besides, the closet was large, and the bath had a shower. The rent was $7.00 per week, which was average for Ithaca. (Kent’s average had been $5.00 per week.) The house was located about two blocks from College Town, a commercial district about three blocks from campus. I would be living only five blocks from the campus.
At the time I really did not know just how large the campus, itself, was. Savage Hall, where the Department of Biochemistry was housed, was located in the center of the agricultural campus which was surrounded by the arts and sciences campus, the engineering campus and the veterinary medicine campus. I had classes on all of them. It was not uncommon for me to leave a class five minutes before it was to end and arrive at the next class five minutes after it had begun – even with a ten-minute break between classes. Lectures were constructed to accommodate both late arrivals and early exits.
College Town was the site for shopping and hanging out, other than on the campus itself. The Big Red, the main campus shop, was the place to buy everything needed for existence in the university. I learned to shop there and avoid the places located in downtown Ithaca, an area which was as “down” as anyone could want. Cornell was situated on top of the hill, and the town at its bottom. The roads, either straight or winding up its sides, were real challenges, whether on foot or in a car, during a frozen winter in the Finger Lakes region of upstate New York. Walking from Harvard Street to Savage Hall was not much different from a journey through the lowest circle of Dante’s Inferno – which, it should be recalled, had Satan sealed eternally in ice!
Two other events might be noted as part of my adventure. While on campus, I had checked on my German exam for next Fall. I purchased a copy of last year’s exam to study and a scientific German dictionary. The fellow at the information desk in the Union warned me the exam was rough, as did the Secretary in the Graduate Office. She said some German exchange students failed it. They knew what it said in German, but not in English!
The second event involved my new car. That model-year, Ford had changed out its electric system – but not completely. The first night, when Rosemary and I were driving back to the motel after a pleasant dinner, the entire electrical system burned out! We had to be towed to the motel. The car was in the local Ford repair shop for the next two days. However, Ithaca and Cornell were not bad places in which to be stranded. Walking up and down the hills, across the gorges, and over the campus did help strengthen our legs. This was an excellent introduction for the exercises I would endure for the next four years.