Mitch Hall and JoeKunkel were both accepted to Columbia College Class of 1964 and were excited they would be room mates in a great adventure leaving home.
Our first assignment during orientation week was reading C. P. Snow's "The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution." This brief book discussed the culture gap between the humanists and the scientists. All the freshmen met in small groups to discuss the implications of Snow's ideas. With all the required courses in the Columbia curriculum, perhaps we were supposed to realize that we would be among those well-educated few who could engage in the discourse of both "cultures."
One of the surprises at Columbia, which felt odd at first, was all-of-a-sudden to be addressed by professors as Mister Kunkel and Mister Hall, rather than as Joe and Mitch, to which we had been accustomed during our preceding years of growing up. Hearing ourselves addressed as mister felt a bit like trying on a new pair of shoes and not being sure how well they fit.
Another new experience at Columbia was having maids make the beds in the room every day and do the laundry for us weekly. Our tuition and fees, that totalled something like four thousand dollars a year, covered this service back then.
That first year on the 2nd floor of John Jay Hall was exciting. For one thing, we had a 1st floor roof landing outside our window, and every weekend the rest of the dorm seemed to think it was real neat to drop bottles or Molotov cocktails out their windows since they would only hit the landing and endanger no one. Who were we?
That first fall when it got cold, Joe used the ledge outside the dorm window to store snacks. He bought Kraft Neufchatel Cheese Spread from the Takome store across Broadway and spread it on cocktail rye bread and thought life away from home was cool. The swiss steak served for dinner many or most evenings in the downstairs dining room became old very quickly. Joe was also not happy with needing to suck up at home because he needed money for food. A job was found at the Columbia Men's Faculty Club and food became a pleasure again.
Mitch also had to work to earn spending money and to supplement his scholarships. He was given a job working at the information desk and sometimes in the game room of the student center. He was supposed to be able to do homework on these jobs, but sometimes he was too distracted by people asking questions and the sight of desirable girls walking by. Mitch also got to know some of the security guards. One of them had been a lawyer in Haiti, but in New York he worked as a night watchman. He seemed a sad, quiet man with an inner dignity. He had probably been a political refugee from the Duvalier dictatorship.
Some fellow freshmen of note who need to be introduced:
Larry Dickerson
Ned Maik
Bill Gross
David Leinsdorf
Steve Harris
Mark Covey
Bob Nash (the other Zoology Major)
Barnard girls of note:
Andrea _ who enchanted Maris.
Cynthia Ensolio, a geology major who was the main squeeze of Marty Hine for a while.
Biff Brownrigg who played with Joe's emotions. She was very certain that she was going to be a medical secretary. Joe could not believe she was going to Barnard to be a medical secretary.
Mitch met Anna Zagaloff as a "mixer" in the public area of the Barnard dormitory. He was very shy there and did not have the courage to say hello to any of the girls, so he walked around the area, nibble on some snacks, and just felt awkward. Wherever he went, he saw the pretty, smiling face of a girl. Finally, Mitch realized she was trying to get his attention, so he talked with her. They took a long walk down Broadway, all the way from 116th Street to Times Square at 42nd Stree and back. Anna and Mitch became girlfriend and boyfriend. In Mitch's first two letter back to his beloved high school Enlish teacher, Dorothy Sullivan, he expressed being unhappy. In his third letter, he said how happy he was, but he wrote nothing about Anna. Dorothy Sullivan, wise to the ways of the world, wrote back, "What's her name?" Anna was the daughter of emigré Russian psychiatrists who worked at a state psychiatric hospital in Poughkeepsie. She was a very sweet person who came from a family where she was well loved. She played piano excellently and passionately, especially works by Russian composers. She was already a sophomore and a pre-med major, who got admitted into a program at Johns Hopkins that would allow her to finish her undergraduate degree while she got started on medical school. That meant she was leaving Barnard at the end of this school year. Over the years, Mitch thought about Anna and wished he could send her a letter to acknowledge that she meant a lot to him and that he regretted any emotional hurt he had caused her at the time because of his own emotional immaturity.
General Studies friends:
Maris Chakers
Marty Hine
Mike Siegel
Events to develop:
We locked Bill Gross in his room for the entire weekend while his room mate Ned went home for the weekend. Bill stored up his urine in bottles over that time and poured it under our door the following Monday. It is hard to understand now the kind of hazing and games of dominance we played with Bill at that time.
Larry Dickerson amazed us all with his erudition. He read Sanskrit and was into Carl Jung's archetypal psychology and the poetry of Ezra Pound! Most of our classmates had really short hair, but Harry, who was tall, pale, and angular in features, wore his hair shoulder-length and walked as if gliding with a faraway look.
Larry and Ned got into drugs and scared the heck out of me by asking me to help them get rid of their illegal stash because the law was on their tails. Larry had a friend on the lower East side of Manhattan who as an ex-convict and was doing heavy drugs. This guy had an iguana that often rested on his shoulders. Ned's father was a medical doctor who worked for the Veterans' Administration in D.C. and who supposedly developed the tranquilizer, Valium. One night Mitch walked into Larry's room, where they were already smoking marijuana, along with Roger Lardé, the pretentious editor of the campus literary magazine, The Columbia Review. After Roger left, Larry and Ned laughed that maybe he'd be hit by a car. They had invited Mitch to take a few drags of the drug. It was Mitch's first experience. When Mitch heard them laughing about Lardé's getting hurt, Mitch got scared. Then he lost his orientation spatially and began to panic. An older student, Peter Winn, came into the room and took Mitch upstairs to his own room where he helped him get through the night. It was a very unsettling experience for Mitch that took him quite a while to get over. He never experimented with any drugs again. It was his one experience.
When Cornell came to play Columbia in Football, now Cornell Coach Joe Scanella, Joe's HS football coach would not talk to Joe, who had refused the Princeton 'football scholarship' Scanella had worked hard to set up. Joe was happy with his choice of trying fencing as a sport. Fencing was most of all an individual sport, which was a new experience for Joe. He had tried boxing in Junior High back in Oceanside and dropped it when he found out how profusely he bled from the nose after inevitable direct hits. In fencing you wore a mask!
Mitch once or a couple of times saw Joe in fencing matches and was very impressed. Joe's Freshman Fencing coach was a former Hungarian Military Epee Champion, Laslo Bankuti, and the sport seemed to Mitch to be very European and sophisticated. Mitch was on the freshman track team and went to practice at the outdoor track in Morningside Park, which was down the eastern slope from the campus and part of the way to Harlem. There was also a track up north that required Mitch to take a subway, and there was an indoor track. Mitch found some confusion resulted from being both an athlete and wanting to hang out with the literary crowd as represented by Larry and Ned. These were two cultures also, although not in the sense about which C. P. Snow had written. Mitch was the high point scorer on the freshman track team, where he did both the high jump and what was then called the broad jump (now the long jump)., but he dropped out of the team because of the identity issues and the conflicting peer groups.
Joe did not have a job starting that first college summer much to Gerda's disgust. He eventually found a job at a car wash on Sunrise Highway close to its intersection with Oceanside Road. Joe was one of about 6 workers on the cars, all the others were black. There was a white female cashier and the son of the owner was the manager. This manager was a law student at Columbia University Law School, it turned out. However, I (Joe) found myself in the position of lowest of the low manual laborers, wiping down the cars as they finished the run through the washer. I then became a washer in the innards of the washing machine, using a brush to ensure that the grime was removed from the lower edge of the side skirts and from the front bumper where the automatic brushes did not reach. One time while rapidly washing an older rattletrap I slashed my left ring finger open on a jagged, rusted through, side pannel. The manager sent me alone to go to a doctor at an Oceanside clinic driving his father's Cadillac. My blood dripped on his white leather seats. There Docter Smith, the same doc who sewed up my nose from sophomore HS football practice accident fixed me up and talked about my college work at Columbia. I know what finger it was because there is a faint scar there but more importantly some rust must have been left behind because I can still see a dark discolleration under the skin after 41 years! By the end of summer I finally graduated to being a driver who was responsible for cleaning out the dust from the dashboard and then driving the car out to the curb. Interestingly, I learned to start just about every make of car of recent vintage (1961) and earlier that were still on the road. The best were the Jaguars with their mohogany interiors and a beautiful old Bentley. The owner and manager were aggressive businessmen and tried to get us to work through our lunch times when the cars were lined up on weekends for their weekly washes. Somewhere around the third week on the job I combined with my coworkers in refusing to work until we were offered time-and-a-half for our lunchtime effort. The 'strike' was my idea and I became an accepted member of the 'crew' when we successfully negotiated our extra pay.
Joe and Mitch took a late sophomore summer bike trip from LI to Philadelphia via Princeton to Mitch's grandparents' house in Philadelphia. We had three-speed bicycles, which were called English racers back in those days. We made good time and had bright, clear summer skies. By the late afternoon of the first day, we had made it all the way to Princeton, New Jersey. We went onto the Princeton University campus to try to find a place to sleep for the night. Bob Morgan, one year behind at Oceanside, was undergoing Freshman orientation at Princeton and was involved in Freshman Football practice when we arrived. Some students were friendly and showed us the way up a staircase to a roof top where they assured us we could sleep in peace without being disturbed by security guards. We slept on the roof of the Princeton dorm. The next morning we saw Bob briefly before we were biking on Rt 1 in the countryside and Joe practiced calling cows from a roadside pasture "Cummm Baaaauuwssss". And they came running right up to the fence! We cruised on our bicycles into Philadelphia by afternoon.
Gerda quit college and went to Europe to study German at a Goethe Institute and then stayed on with her relatives to practice her German. She traveled around Europe with tours and saw the cathedrals that Joe was learning about in Art Appreciation in Sophomore year. Mitch and Joe were again room mates but this would be the last year of that. They drifted apart but enjoyed renewing acquaintance when they met.
Last edited on Thursday, November 19, 2009 7:06:17 pm.
  
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