This week’s Project 100+ memory comes from Ed Purcell.  He was born and raised in Hunterdon County, New Jersey.  His father was a practicing lawyer, and his mother was an office manager.  While Ed started his education at public school, he transferred to parochial school in 5^th grade and graduated from Immaculata High School in 2003.  Thereafter, he enrolled at Rowan in the Fall of 2003 and graduated in the Winter of 2007. During his time at Rowan, Ed’s studies were focused on history, the Russian language, and political science. Ed also served as an officer of Rowan EMS.

After graduation, Ed received a Fulbright scholarship to travel and study in Russia. The program, sponsored by the American Council of Teachers of Russian (ACTR), focused on Russian language learning. Ed lived in a city named Vladimir, which is located about two hours east of Moscow.  He succeeded in improving his Russian. One of his most memorable experiences was talking to a group of Chinese students where the only shared language was Russian.  He also remembers seeing a statue of Glassboro visitor Alexei Kosygin at the New Tretyakov Museum in Moscow. It was a great experience.

Ed returned to the United States in the midst of the Great Recession. He had a very hard time getting a job, but he eventually found work as an emergency room technician. He did this for one year. During this time, he applied to Rutgers-Camden Law School and the graduate program in Russian at Middlebury College. Accepted at both, he decided to go to law school. He graduated three years later in 2012.   

Ed worked in Trenton during law school, which inspired him to take his first “legal” job after graduating with the New Jersey State League of Municipalities. Over a hundred years old, the League represents all 563 municipalities in New Jersey. Ed thought it was a great place to work and to learn about how government (state and local) works in New Jersey. While there, he argued before the New Jersey Supreme Court multiple times, and he was able to deploy historical research in these appearances.  He worked for the League for almost four years.  When he left, he went into private practice at the DiFrancesco Bateman law firm. There, he often represented towns, especially in their interactions with the telecommunications industry.  He left this firm after three years as he wanted to do more private development work and specialize even more in telecommunications law.  He took a job with Price Meese, P.C. and works for this firm today. One of his niche areas of expertise is small wireless facilities. He finds it fascinating that the laws that regulate these types of technologies were drafted over a hundred years ago when communication technology was primarily telegraph and, later, telephone lines.  A big part of Ed’s practice is taking these old laws and applying them to modern, high-speed communication technology. Beyond the wireless industry, Ed also represents private developers with respect to obtaining land use approvals for various residential and commercial activities.

Ed is also very active in the legal community. He is a past director of the New Jersey State Bar Association land use section and is the co-author of a yearly compilation of important land use decisions.  Ed is also the Treasurer for the Somerset County Bar Association and organizes the Somerset County Bar’s annual land use symposium. Ed lives in Somerville with his wife Jenn and three daughters, Anne, Hazel, and Edith.

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I’m pretty sure I always knew that I was going to go to college. Having said that, for various family reasons, I wasn’t really that focused at the end of high school. In the end, I believe I only applied to Rowan University. I had no idea if I would get in or not. I was pretty clueless at the time. I applied as a history major because I had always loved the subject. My father loved history, and he often took me to museums and to historic sites in New Jersey and to Civil War battlefields like Gettysburg. I remember watching the History Channel with him in the morning while getting ready to go to school, and I remember discussing history on our drives to school.

I was accepted and started my time at Rowan. My first ever history class was with Lee Kress, and I thought it was great. It was at a higher level than my high school classes, and I just found it so enjoyable. He didn’t just lecture at us but involved us in discussions. Moreover, he spoke to us like we were adults, and he expected us to have high level conversations with him. It was great.

Another important thing about my first year was that I began taking Russian. History majors were required to take a language, and I chose Russian because of my fascination with the Cold War. Kipp Matalucci was my professor. Kipp was just an absolutely wonderful professor. Because of him, I ended up taking as much Russian as the University offered. When I exhausted all these courses, I wanted to keep improving my Russian, and Kipp worked with me independently. I got no class credit, and he got no money. We just met in the library and worked on different grammatical skills. Kipp suggested that I apply to ACTR to go abroad and study in Russia. I did and was able to study there.   

I also took several courses on Russian history with Jim Heinzen, and these made a major impression on me. I remember him requiring us to memorize all these cities and other geographic locations that we were supposed to write onto a blank map of Russia. Since I was taking the Russian language at the time, I was able to complete his map quiz with actual Russian names instead of the Anglicized versions. I remember him editing these answers and adding the accent marks in the right places. He and I became close, and he asked me to be his research assistant. To assist Dr. Heinzen’s research on corruption in the Soviet Union, I remember reading through transcripts of Soviet prisoners of wars from World War II on microfilm.  I enjoyed this deep dive into Russian history, studying actual interviews with people who lived through this important time.  Later when I was studying in Russia, I remember how close World War II still was for so many people there. The war had taken the lives of so many Russians. I remember one woman crying about her mother’s experiences in St. Petersburg during the war. 

During my senior year, I remember taking a political science class with Professor Bragg as well as Senior Seminar with Lee Kress. I decided to take the theoretical ideas I was learning in the political science class and apply them to the paper I was doing for Dr. Kress. The paper was on the American Expeditionary Force in Russia during and after World War I.  While I am sure the paper would be better written today, given all the writing I have done since, it was well-received at the time and won the Department’s Best Paper Prize. One of the lessons I drew from this experience was that there was real value in taking what you learned in one field and finding a way to apply it in another. 

I think about my time at Rowan a lot. I think about my history degree often. History is not just a subject that I studied in college, it is an important part of who I am. My time at Rowan taught me how to learn, how to do research, and how to apply that learning. That skill set is valuable for a practicing lawyer because I have to be able to understand various types of information (planning, engineering or environmental information) and use it to argue on behalf of a client. Another lasting impact of my study of history is my love of reading. I can’t imagine who I would be today without all the time I spent studying the past. 

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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/