Graduation Day 1973

May 25, 2013

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 and 9 each evening. We didn’t hang out together, especially those with long commutes like mine.

The actual ceremony was to be held at Town Hall... not at the Great Hall. Town Hall is a performance venue on 43rd street, so what was the point anyway!

Nonetheless, each time you graduate you move forward - and time moves only one way. When I left St. Phillips’s at the end of eighth grade, I left behind all of my classmates but the few who went on to Pope Pius XII HS. Unlike with public school where you attend school with neighbors, Catholic school is different. Few of my neighbors attended St. Phillips (certainly none of the Jewish or Protestant kids). My high school I was in a completely different town, so the nearest classmate lived over a mile away and was separated from me by two highways.

When I left college I was still living at home (painting landscapes by day, waiting tables at night) and waiting for something to happen. It did. I went to graduate school the next year (this time I lived at school). Three and a half years after my college graduation, I was married, in two more years we would have a our son. From 1973 - 1983, I held a succession of lousy jobs (like being a waiter, delivering copiers, and managing a Kentucky Fried Chicken). I also had interesting jobs which did not pan out - I taught briefly at Wright State University and failed in a picture frame business. By the 10th year after college, I finally got a real job with benefits (at the Prudential).

We moved often and a few times we split up while I looked for work. My wife (and our son Nick) would stay in Ohio with her mother, I would stay in Clifton with mine, while l tried to find a better job. We lived in Jersey City NJ, Medway Ohio, Dayton Ohio, Totowa NJ, Orange NJ and finally Whippany NJ - all from 1976 to 1983. We moved to Whippany when Nick was five (so in the 10th year from my college graduation). We remained in Whippany through Nick’s public school career - but lived at three addresses - all rentals. The year after high school, we finally bought a house and so moved to Dover NJ where we remain.

It has been said that you can’t go home again. Of course it is true, but you don’t know just how true when you leave home for the first time. For me, home became more and more remote until my mother died in 2003. She had lived in Clifton for almost 50 years. By the time she died, none of the old neighbors were still there (or maybe the Gawleys were?). Since then our old house has been completely remodeled, and a neighborhood that once was full of college teachers (we lived near Montclair State College) has morphed into another neighborhood for folks who work in Manhattan. The houses mostly look the same but the occupants now have smart phones and buy lattes.

As noted above, time goes only one way. Of my college teachers, Nick Marsicano has been dead for a while. Ruben Kadish (pal of Jackson Pollock) is dead too. Paul Resika and Wolf Kahn are in their 80s. Some of the rest, I’ve forgotten.

I started out imagining that I would be an illustrator. By the time I left graduate school, I hoped to be an art professor in a college somewhere. After bumping into reality, I just wanted steady work and benefits. Eventually, I got the steady work, so there you go. As has been observed by others, life is what happens while you are... well you know the rest.

The Cooper Union