Graduation Day 1973
Forty years ago I complete my studies in college. For reasons that elude me now, I didn’t attend the graduation ceremony. It was not a protest against the school; I loved my four years at The Cooper Union, and I did well too. But graduation came at an odd time for me. My father had died the summer before my senior year, and I was working weekends just to stay afloat. My mother was working too and still had two younger kids to manage. So there was no graduation party and no celebrations. Oh well! As I said, I didn’t attend. Ours was a commuter college with no real campus, just three building at the meeting of 8th St and Third and Fourth Avenues. With no dormitories or campus quadrangle, the experience felt was more like being at work than like attending the typical college, which are places which replicate the town square but for students and their friends only. Most of us arrived at school between 9 and 10 each morning, and left school sometime between 5