This week’s Project 100+ memory comes from Brad Trinkner.  He was born in Camden and raised mostly in Gloucester Township, NJ.  His father delivered packages for United Parcel Service (UPS), and his mother was a registered nurse who worked at Our Lady of Lourdes Medical Center in Camden.  He has a younger sister who attended Villanova. He attended public schools and graduated from Triton Regional High School in 2002.  He began at Rowan as an undeclared student that Fall but graduated four years later with degrees in secondary education and history and a minor in Political Science.  In the Spring of 2007, he taught as a substitute teacher, but he soon landed a full-time position teaching social studies at Eastern Regional High School in Voorhees, NJ.  He began teaching in the Fall of 2007 and continues at Eastern to this day.  In addition to teaching United States history, world history, AP world history, and humanities, he was the indoor drumline director for eight years.  He was the assistant director for outdoor marching band for many years.  On two different occasions, he was a class advisor.  He has advocated for charitable work by students through being the advisor for the Key Club and working with the local Kiwanis club of the Haddons.  In 2014, he completed his master’s degree at Rowan University.  He completed a thesis with Dr. James Heinzen on Soviet radio broadcasting.  He is married with two young children, and he lives seven houses down from where he grew up.

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Even though neither of my parents had a college degree, I always knew that I was going to college.  My father and, especially, my mother wanted me to do so.  I applied to, and was accepted at, Rutgers, the College of New Jersey, and Rowan.  At the time, I was unsure of what I might study.  I was interested in history, computer science, and graphic design.  My parents leaned toward my choosing a practical field like engineering (which was the profession of my uncle Bill).  They did not push me too hard on this, and they also never pushed the financial aspects of my college decision as well.  I ended up choosing Rowan for two main reasons.  First, it had good programs in all the fields that interested me and allowed me to enter as an undeclared major.  Second, I knew that it would be the easiest college for my parents to afford.  I could, and did, commute to college from my home for all four years.

Before I started college, Rowan sent me a letter announcing a new program, the Visions of the Future learning community.  My mother thought the program sounded like one that would be really good for me, and she was correct.  It was a cohort of undecided majors who took courses together and received special advising.  I can remember having two courses that first semester, College Composition I and World History since 1500 with Dr. Corinne Blake.  This was the first year of this program, run by Joanne Damminger, and we had many special benefits, such as priority registration.  The value of being in this program only became clear to those of us in it with the passage of time.  As I look back now, it was very important to my college career.  While taking Dr. Blake’s course, I decided that I would become a history major.  It was the one class that semester for which I really enjoyed doing the outside work. I can remember the exciting primary sources that Dr. Blake assigned and then loving the discussions about them in the classroom.  By contrast, the assignments I was doing for my other lower-level classes were just not that interesting.

In the Spring of my first year, I took Dr. Emily Blanck for United States History to 1865.  I loved her class, and she ended up being one of the two professors that I took the most at Rowan.  I can remember that she was very new because she still had us use her Emory University email.  Dr. Blanck had such genuine concern for her students that she made the classroom a great space for learning with her amiable style.  I later took her for the second half of the United States survey and then a Proseminar course on American Constitutional History. I liked the way that she organized small group discussions.  Sometimes, those experiences felt artificial, but she had a way of making them feel organically connected to what we were doing regularly in the course.

The other faculty member that I took multiple times was Dr. Scott Morschauser.  The first course that I took with him was Historical Methods.  His style of teaching was infectious, and I have modeled my own teaching on his style.  Dr. Morschauser was, to me, the epitome of a person whose talents were perfectly suited to his profession.  It is hard to put into words what he did in the classroom, but he deployed his great knowledge at just the right times, and he brought dynamic energy even to a discussion-based class like Methods.  He was doing what God had intended him to do.  I should say that I felt this way about the course despite the fact that he gave me my lowest grade at Rowan, a B+.  I remember coming into the course thinking that I was a good writer, but I was too slow to listen to his advice in that first course.  In the end, he forced me to self-reflect and to realize that I had much room to grow.  Later, I took him for Ancient Egypt, the Middle Ages, and Senior Seminar.  I can remember that my paper was on the religious dimensions of the Election of 1800.  I went to the Pennsylvania Historical Society to do archival research, and this work was so meaningful to me.  I can remember the excitement that I felt ordering and receiving documents published or created so long ago.  Those archival research trips remain some of my fondest memories of my time at Rowan.

After I began teaching at Eastern High School, I found myself teaching world history and wanting to gain more knowledge of parts of the world that I missed while an undergraduate.  At the time, Rowan did not yet have a master’s degree in history, but they had started a graduate certificate program.  So, I began taking courses that way. However, I intended later to switch over and complete a master’s in school administration.  One day, the graduate coordinator, Scott Morschauser, called me into his office and told me that Rowan would be offering a full master’s degree in history and that he thought I would be an excellent candidate.  I told him of my original plans at the time, but, later, I decided to switch and enroll in the master’s program.  I did love learning history, but I know that I did this in part because of my great respect for Dr. Morschauser and all that he had done for me.  I did not want to let him down.

I took Dr. Morschauser for a fifth time, taking his Readings and Research course where we focused on historiography.  I also finally got to take two courses with you, Dr. Carrigan, completing your course on United States historiography and another class on World History to 1500.  However, the most important instructor in the graduate program for me was surely Dr. James Heinzen.  I took two courses with him, one on Russia to 1917 and the other on Stalinism.  I had developed an interest in Russian history from my days as a student teacher.  I had to teach a Russian history unit in a world history class, and I had no real knowledge of the subject as I had missed Dr. Heinzen as an undergrad.  I enjoyed learning Russian history on my own, but I was very excited to be able to take courses on the subject in the graduate program.  Those classes only enhanced my fascination with the history of Russia, and I asked Dr. Heinzen if he would advise me on a master’s thesis. He agreed.  During the Stalinism course, Dr. Heinzen had introduced me to the Harvard University oral history project with Soviet immigrants.  I loved reading those interviews, and one of the things about them that I found particularly intriguing involved their comments on radio.  What was obvious to me was that this technology could be both a means of control and also a means of subversion.  These interviews were all digitized and translated, which made the research less exhilarating than what I had done for Seminar, but much easier for someone who was working full-time and not fluent in Russian.

Looking back now after two decades, I only have warm feelings for my time in the Department of History.  The faculty were outstanding because of their care and regard for the students, for their deep knowledge of their fields, and for their ability to convey their learning to us.  My regard for them made their decision to award me a merit scholarship while a graduate student very meaningful.  Not only was it the very first time Rowan had given me money of any type, but the award meant the world to me that it came as a result of the deliberations of individuals who I greatly respected.

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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 Link to all of the Project 100 and Project 100+ entries on the Web:  https://chss.rowan.edu/departments/history/alumni_highlights/project_100/