This week’s Project 100+ memory comes from Andi James.  She was born in Philadelphia and raised in Glassboro, New Jersey.  Her father was Marvin Creamer who was a professor of geography at Glassboro State College.  He had been born on a small farm in Pittsgrove Township near Parvin State Park.  Marvin’s father was a machinist who worked in a Vineland manufacturing establishment until the Great Depression.  He then worked for the Civilian Conservation Corps and helped create the infrastructure for Parvin State Park.  Marvin’s grandparents were farmers, and the land they farmed is still worked today by family descendants.  Her mother was Blanche Layton Creamer, and she grew up on a chicken farm on the border between Vineland and Millville.  Both of Andi’s parents graduated from Vineland High School.  They both attended Glassboro State College with Blanche graduating in 1942 and Marvin graduating in 1943.  Her mother got a job as an elementary school teacher.  Her father worked as a principal at Alloway Township School, until he was drafted in 1945, serving in the Army Air Force as a payroll clerk at Mitchell Air Base.  Although Blanche and Marvin had met many times before, they did not date during college.  They got married in 1946 in Millville.  As a result of the GI Bill, Marvin entered the master’s degree in education program at the University of Pennsylvania.  In 1948, Harold Wilson offered him a position at Glassboro State College while he was completing his education degree, which he finished in 1949.  The position was for the teaching of geography, and he subsequently earned a master’s degree in geography at the University of Wisconsin in 1953.  During the 1957-58 academic year, the family moved to Madison, Wisconsin.  In that year, Marvin completed his doctoral course work, but he never finished his dissertation.  Andra (Andi) was born in 1952.  Her parents had two other children, a sister named Lynn born in 1958 and a brother, Kurt, was born in 1959.

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 From kindergarten through eighth grade, except for one year when the family lived in Wisconsin, I attended school at the Campus School all the way.  This school was a neighborhood school for families who lived in the Ridge neighborhood, but the children of faculty had priority.  The Campus School had an amazing playground, and we had trees that we could climb!  We had not only our own teachers, but also student teachers, so I think that we had more instruction than other schools.  We often had other college students observing us, which ended up just fading into the background.  Our classes were small, and it was a bit of a cocoon.  I still remember all my 8^th grade classmates, all 27 of them.  I remember that I took the bus to the Campus School, and the busses were all driven by off-duty policemen, which meant that there were never any discipline problems on the bus. Most of our parents were faculty, and so we almost all came from families that cared about education.  When I went to Glassboro High School, my class had over 200 students, and it was a very different experience.

My father had been a student of Harold Wilson when he was an undergraduate. Dr. Wilson kept up with my father after his graduation and then recruited him to teach at the college.  The Wilsons sometimes hosted us at their house, and we sometimes hosted them.  Personally, I liked Harold and Bea Wilson.  I knew that my father respected Dr. Wilson and thought of him as a man of integrity.  This was in part because my father freely talked about all his colleagues that frustrated him.  He never said anything negative about Dr. Wilson, other than that he was more traditional in his demeanor than my father.

In 1962, when I was ten, I remember thinking that the entire country was celebrating Uganda’s independence.  Of course, I learned later that Glassboro State College was the national location for this celebration.  It was memorable to me because we almost never had visitors who stayed overnight with us.  For this celebration, our family hosted an official from Uganda.  He wore African dress, and I thought at the time that he was the prime minister, but I later learned this was wrong.  At school, I remember that we participated in the celebration by drawing maps of Uganda.  I remember that there was a big celebration on campus and that the weather for this event was terrible.  The sky was black in the morning, and it rained very hard for most of the day.

I remember something related taking place a few years later.  In the mid-1960s, grant money became available to improve African studies. This program was especially for teacher’s colleges and for the improvement of the training of social studies teachers who would later go to the public schools.  My father, along with his colleague Bob Edwards, eagerly applied for this funding.  I think that he would have been interested in this opportunity regardless, given his love for new horizons, but Operation Uganda probably played some indirect role in his desire to learn more about African geography and culture.  In any event, they succeeded in their application, which provided monies for them to do several things.  First, in the summer of 1968, they both received support to travel to California to study at the University of California at Los Angeles.  Our whole family moved with him, travelling across country in a trailer and staying in Westwood.  Bob and my father studied intensively that whole summer.  I remember that there were many other faculty members from different colleges in the United States that were also participating in the program. I became friends with the daughter of a faculty member from Nebraska.  Second, the following summer, the program sent my father to Nairobi, Kenya.  He had been studying Swahili since the previous summer.  He was based at the University of Nairobi, but he travelled all over Africa that summer, including, I remember, Senegal, mastering African geography.  After he returned, he began teaching African geography at Glassboro State College. 

I loved growing up in Glassboro. It was a small town.  It felt like you knew everybody or that at least everyone in town was connected to a person that you did know.  We frequented many local businesses in downtown Glassboro.  One that I remember well was “Joe’s Sub Shop.”  The owner’s daughter, Joanne, was in my class at the Campus School.  I remember that the Sub Shop delivered sandwiches to students attending the Campus School.  However, it was only for those lucky students whose parents were willing to pay.  This group did not include the children of the frugal Creamers.  One of the most important businesses in downtown was the Bowe News Agency, run by Joe and Tom Bowe.  Joe was the mayor.  Tom’s daughter, Mary, was in my class.  I also remember Angelo’s Diner, which was in downtown, and PB Diner, which was out on Main Street and Delsea.  Adults and working-class folks frequented Angelo’s, which was fairly small.  PB’s attracted a wide audience, but it was a big hangout place for teenagers, especially after school and in the evenings.  Gino’s was another place that I remember well.  It served fast food, hamburgers, and fried chicken.  It was another hangout place for teenagers.  Likewise, the bowling alley, which was near the PB Diner, was another popular spot for teenagers.  There were three grocery stores, namely an Acme in the downtown area (where the library is located now), a Shoprite, and a Food Fair.  Another important location when I was young was a Silco’s, a five and dime store that was similar to Woolworth’s.  It had a variety of interesting things. There were an actual Woolworth’s in downtown Pitman (as well as several other nice stores).  As my father was always building something, my family visited Abbott’s Hardware just about every Saturday. I can still remember how it smells.  That place was an institution for years, and I remember that it had a gumball machine.  I also remember a cleaner’s and a deli.  There were two swimming pools that I remember.  One was Lakeside, which my parents believed was not worth the money since we visited the Jersey shore so often on weekends.  Instead, we swam at the cheaper option, Rough Acres.

In the summer of 1967, my father was at the University of Minnesota.  I am not sure why he was there, but it meant that we were not in Glassboro when Lyndon Johnson and Alexei Kosygin met in our hometown.  As news of the summit broke, we began camping out in front of the televisions at the local Sears in St. Paul.  Eventually, my father convinced the Sears manager to let us borrow a television set so we could watch coverage in our trailer at the campsite where we were staying for the summer.  I remember my father pointing out on television all the things from Glassboro that were now on the national news.  It was mind blowing.  I remember being stunned by seeing how they had transformed the college gymnasium into a gathering place for reporters.  We had always been forced to take our shoes off when we ever had reason to visit the gym so as protect the floor.  Now there were reporters tramping all over it, even grinding cigarettes out on the gym floor. That has stuck with my all these years later.  Another memorable story I learned after the summit from my friend, Shelly Glazer, whose parents owned a drapery shop in Glassboro.  They got a call late at night to furnish new draperies for Hollybush.  I am not sure why these were needed, perhaps they wanted them for increased privacy and security, but they were required immediately.  They had to make them overnight.  This is just one example of all the many things that had to be done so quickly to get ready for the summit.

The following year my father told me that Lyndon Johnson was going to attend Commencement at Glassboro State College.  This was not advertised ahead of time.  My father took my boyfriend, Jack, who was one year ahead of me in school, with him to see President Johnson.  Jack’s parents thought it was worth missing a day of school to see the President. That same sentiment was not shared by my parents who would not allow me to skip school to attend. However, on the day of the address, Glassboro High School announced that Johnson was speaking and allowed us to leave school.  A friend and I immediately headed over to my favorite tree, so that I could climb up and get a good look.  Much to my surprise, we found a secret service agent in the tree. I can remember that he was dressed in a suit and had shiny shoes.  He allowed us to share the tree with him, and I can remember seeing the President and spotting my father and my boyfriend in the faculty section.

My father was very supportive of the College expanding its mission and offering liberal arts degrees in addition to teaching certification.  He had been a supporter of this for many years before the official change was made.  He joined the faculty in 1948 not long after the College had a Junior College program specifically for World War II veterans.  As far as I know, he was always an advocate for pushing the College to adapt and change and meet the needs of the present and the future.  I don’t think the Social Studies Department had broken up by the time that I left for college in the Fall of 1970.

Only 10% of my high school graduating class went to college out of Gloucester County.  Most of those who went on to college, including my high school boyfriend, went on to either Gloucester County Community College or Glassboro State.  However, I never considered attending Glassboro State College because I wanted to leave home.  I remember that I wanted to go to a college that was at least 500 miles away.  However, I did apply to Princeton, even knowing that they did not accept women.  They did indeed send me a letter declining my application on the account of my sex.  In any event, I ended up attending the University of Rochester even though my college tour was cut short by my father’s desire to get back to Glassboro to see my brother pitch in Little League.

My father liked teaching at Glassboro State College and how rooted it was in the region.  He was from southern New Jersey, and he was proud of GSC.  He had attended as a student, and he was delighted to be on the faculty.  As a progressive, he liked the fact that it was not a snobbish institution.  He liked the fact that it was a place that welcomed students from the working class and the rural communities and helped them advance in their lives.  He liked the fact that Glassboro State was growing and evolving over time as well.  The only thing that he didn’t like was the bureaucratic aspects of working for a state college.  He didn’t like following rules that existed for the simple reason that the rule existed.  I remember him coming home from faculty meetings frustrated with colleagues whose hyper attention to rules threatened to delay needed changes. He was a creative problem solver and thought everyone should be the same way.  And, if they could not join him in solving problems, they should at least get out of the way.

I was 25 years old when my father retired and set off on his great sailing adventure.  My father had always been interested in boating.  We always had a boat.  I remember that he built himself a small sailboat and sailed it on Parvin Lake.  I remember that he long had an outboard motorboat, which he took everywhere with the family.  He eventually took it some 75 miles out into the ocean.  He purchased his first large sailboat in the early 1970s.  I think that he liked the way that sailing required the use of so much of his knowledge and so many of his skills.  He liked to problem solve, and the problems of sailing touched on so many different areas.  In the social studies department, he surely discussed sailing with fellow enthusiast Richard Porterfield, but they never sailed together.  The one colleague that he did sail with was Ivar Jensen, who I believe was in the Education Department.  Ivar sailed with him across the Atlantic one time. 

In the 1960s, he became totally focused on sailing around the world without modern technology.  He spent so much time thinking about it that he eventually concluded that he had to go on the trip to justify how much thought and time that he had put into his plan for how one could do this journey.  My father admired Robin Knox-Johnston who had completed a solo journey around the world.  Like my father, Knox-Johnston had great mechanical skills, which proved so important in what turned out to be his successful trip.

I sailed with my father on multiple occasions, including two trips to Bermuda.  My brother Kurt had sailed with him even more, including on the first no-instruments trip across the Atlantic.  Both of us thought he had a 50/50 chance of returning alive from his trip around the world. I knew that I could not talk him out of it, but I was upset at the time.  My mother was incredibly worried about my father during the trip.  However, she had always given him unqualified support in his adventures. It was at the core of their marriage and partnership.

My father had a deep, deep affection with Glassboro State.  He was loyal and devoted to the College.   He loved his former students. One of them, Ed Budelmann, asked my father to be the best man at his wedding.  He always wanted to return for reunions, and I remember arguing with him about his desire to go a reunion when he was over 100.  I remember that he was so excited about the gift from Henry Rowan.  He had admiration for Rowan’s accomplishments as an engineer and applauded the way that he had chosen to use his wealth.  He was very happy with how the College honored him after he retired, especially with the construction of the tribute monument on campus.  He was very happy to have been asked to give his thoughts during construction, and he was very pleased that the final version, shaped like The Globe Star, included the cardinal points.

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This is part of the Department of History’s “Project 100+,” an ongoing collection of memories by Glassboro State College and Rowan University alumni and staff that began as part of the celebration of the 100^th anniversary of the founding of Glassboro Normal School, later Glassboro State College, and now Rowan University.  Due to interest in the project, the number of interviewees continues to grow.  Thanks to Laurie Lahey for helping proofread and edit the final versions.  Email carrigan@rowan.edu with questions or corrections. 

You can find the Project 100 and Project 100+ entries on the Web at:  https://chss.rowan.edu/departments/history/alumni_all/

For interviews related to former faculty members, see:  https://chss.rowan.edu/departments/history/alumni_all/former_faculty.html