This week’s Project 100+ memory comes from Jim Scythes.  He was born and raised in Bridgeton, New Jersey.  He attended public schools and graduated from Bridgeton High School in 1989.  His parents were working class.  His father owned a printing company in Vineland, New Jersey.  His mother worked at different places.  In high school, she worked at a business that made Christmas stockings and related holiday items.  Jim has an older brother and an older sister.  None of his immediate family attended college.  When Jim graduated high school, he worked for his father with the intention of taking over the family business.  After two years, however, Jim concluded that he did not want to do this.  While continuing to work part-time for his father, he began taking classes at Cumberland County College, completing his Associate of Arts degree in 1993.  Jim believes that community college was important to him.  After high school, he was not as academically prepared as he needed to be for a four-year college.  Cumberland County’s small classes and other supports for students such as him were important.  He transferred to what was still called Glassboro State College in the summer of 1993, and he was there during the name change.  By the time that he earned his degree in 1995, his degree was from Rowan College of New Jersey.  After graduating in the Spring of 1995, he began the Master of Arts program in History at Villanova University.  During graduate school, he began working as a home instructor for Millville High School and Cumberland Regional High School.  This meant that he was working one-on-one with students who could not attend regular classes for one reason or the other.  In December of 1997, he completed his MA.  He continued working as a home instructor, and in the Fall of 1998, thanks to the support of Dr. Gary Hunter, he began teaching at Rowan University as an adjunct faculty member.  At the time, the adjunct rate was $1700.  He eventually stopped working as a home instructor and took more adjunct teaching positions, specifically at Cumberland County College and Neumann College.  In the summer of 1999, he called West Chester University of Pennsylvania to inquire about adjunct faculty positions.  Fortunately, the same day that he called, an adjunct professor resigned.  After an interview, they offered him three classes for the Fall of 1999 at a rate of $5,000 per class.  This was much better pay, but he continued to teach at all the other places initially.  He can’t remember exactly, but he thinks he taught nine classes that first semester.  After a successful semester at West Chester, they offered Jim a contract for a full-time position teaching four courses for the Spring of 2000.  Still, he didn’t want to completely abandon his positions at the other institutions, so he continued to teach nine classes, dropping only one of the Neumann courses.  Later, he became the head of the union’s Adjunct Faculty Committee at West Chester because he had so much sympathy for the plight of adjunct faculty members.  He can still remember the exhaustion of teaching during this time.  Briefly, starting in the summer of 2000, he entered the doctoral program in education at Rowan University.  In the Fall of 2000, he dropped out of that program, however, as it was beyond his ability to balance with all the teaching.  He worked at West Chester full-time almost continuously from that point forward.  “Almost” because there was a union rule at West Chester that forbade non-tenure track full-time faculty from teaching for more than four semesters in a row.  Thus, he ended up taking one-semester breaks because of this rule until the Fall of 2006.   A major tragedy changed Jim’s life in the Spring of 2007.  His wife died during childbirth.  When a second mother died in childbirth at the same hospital 15 days later, the story became international news.  He ended up testifying about maternal mortality before Congress and on major media outlets, including the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC).  He remembers the great support that he got from his colleagues at West Chester University during this very difficult time as he now had to raise his daughter as single father.  Around this time, the faculty contract at WCU changed.  It now allowed for folks in his position to be converted to tenure-track after five years of full-time service.  In 2013, after much negotiation, he joined the tenure track at West Chester as an Instructor.  His contract required that he either complete a doctorate or publish a book to earn tenure.  2017 was an important year for Jim.  In that year, he got remarried, earned tenure, and became Assistant Professor after publishing This Will Make a Man of Me:  The Life and Letters of a Teenage Officer in the Civil War with Rowman and Littlefield through Lehigh University Press in 2016.  In 2022, he published his second book, Letters to Lizzie:  The Story of Sixteen Men in the Civil War and the One Woman Who Connected Them All with Kent University Press.  Beginning in 1994, he began volunteering at the Gloucester County Historical Society.  In 2002, he joined the Board, and he became the President of the Board in 2021.

***** 

I only applied to Glassboro State College.  I didn’t even know that one could apply to more than one college.  At Cumberland County College, almost all students went to Glassboro State or Richard Stockton.  My girlfriend (and later first wife) at the time went to Stockton, but I wanted to go to GSC.  I went to GSC with my good friend Kris Miller.  Kris is a year younger than me, but we had gone to high school together.  When I started attending at CCC, Kris was also attending, and we became close.  We hung out at each other’s houses, played games, and studied together.  During our time attending GSC/Rowan, we commuted together, studied together, and had numerous conversations.

Two faculty members from Cumberland County College were very important to me.  One was Dr. John Reinard.  He taught history and was a freeholder for Cumberland County.  As a politician, he knew how to talk to people.  It was fun just to speak to him. He made you feel special.  His wife was an even better teacher and a fantastic economics professor.  In the end, I became friendly with both, and they served as mentors during all my subsequent academic journeys.  Dr. Reinard encouraged me to go to Villanova and wrote a letter of recommendation for me.

When I applied to Glassboro State, I thought that I would be a high school history teacher.  During the orientation day for transfer students, I met with a faculty member from Education.  He questioned whether I would be accepted into the secondary education program.  While I disagreed, having done well academically at CCC, this frustrated me, and I decided to not even apply as a result.  Thus, I was simply a history major at Glassboro State.

At Rowan, I took Dick Porterfield for Historical Methods.  I enjoyed his class, and he served as my academic advisor. Dr. Porterfield was fun.  We could always get him sidetracked by bringing up boating. 

I remember even better my Civil War class with Steve Gimber.  My friend Kris and I weren’t able to get into the class at first, but we were both able to switch into the course with special permission. Since we were past the late registration period, Steve made us take a special quiz to make sure we would succeed.  We passed, and it proved an important moment for me.  Steve and I became close.  He was also from Bridgeton, and it was his first semester of teaching.  I remember helping him carry things to and from the classroom.  He was a reenactor and did all kinds of special things for the class, including making hardtack for us to sample.  Steve became a mentor and then a very good friend.  We later became colleagues, first as fellow adjuncts at Rowan University and then at West Chester University.  Today, he is an Associate Professor of History at West Chester.  I text or talk to him just about every day.  We are currently working on research project together, a study of obituaries of soldiers who died during the Civil War.

I had one class with Cory Blake on World History, and it was great course.  I liked the way that she taught the course.  She had us keep weekly journals, in which we had to take one the documents assigned for the week and explain how it was relevant to the subject of the course that week.  I have tried to implement something similar in my own classes.

I had a class with Joy Wiltenburg. I believe it was on Medieval Europe.  I had to miss about ten days of class as I had planned to go to Normandy for the 50^th anniversary of D-Day.  I remember that she told me that I could make up the missed time by going to where Joan of Arc had been killed, taking some photographs, and giving a presentation on the topic when I returned.  I remember that all these years later as I very grateful for her understanding. 

I took three classes with Edward Wang -- Modern China, Chinese Cultural History, and Modern Japan.  He was a wonderful person to talk with outside of the classroom. He and the other faculty members made me feel that I was special and not just another student.  We have maintained our relationship all these years later.  I remember a very generous email that he wrote to me after I had sent him a query related to a university matter at West Chester.  I also had a lunch with him and Dr. Blake not too long ago.  It made me so happy that he was proud of me for publishing my first book.  

Dr. Hunter is the most important person in my professional career.  I tell my students all the time that there are people you will encounter who will make a difference in your life.  Dr. Hunter was that person for me.  I remember so many conversations in his office.  My friend Kris smoked, and he and Dr. Hunter would puff away in his office.  I loved those moments, even if I was not a smoker.  He was just so cool, and I always enjoyed talking to him.  I took him for African American History and Seminar in History.  My senior seminar paper for him eventually became my second book.  He was a great mentor to me, and I would often stop by after graduating to speak to him.  His taking a chance on me by hiring me as adjunct was a great turning point.  I know for certain that I would not have gotten the position at West Chester without that experience. I think about him all the time. I was devastated when he passed away.

There was no one like Chet Zimolzak, a true character and a very memorable professor in the geography department.  I ended up taking five classes with him while an undergraduate.  I even came back after I graduated to sit in on a sixth class, “The Geography of the United States and Canada” because he had not taught it when I was at Rowan.  I paid for this class even though I didn’t need it at all, which tells you something about how much I enjoyed Chet’s teaching. His lectures were dense and filled with much information, but he had this wonderful way of noticing when the students needed a break.  He would then launch into these hilarious personal stories of his travels around the world.  Sometimes, these comedic breaks would be straight rants about some topic that had recently exercised him.  Almost always filled with profanity, these rants invariably made us all laugh and gave us that needed break from the lecture material.  All these years later, I remember one expletive-laced tirade about deer on the Atlantic City Expressway. I always found him funny, and I loved his teaching.  He made me want to pay attention and learn.  I had no intention of minoring in geography until I had class with Chet. I also remember many, many conversations with Chet in his office after or before class.  I should also say that he gave very challenging exams that were like unlike any that I have seen. He had multiple choice answers that went from “a” to “k.”  I found it surprising how much of the material I remembered on these exams, and I always thought it was from the way that he carefully interspersed humor into his lectures. I have tried to do the same in my teaching.

I didn’t quite realize how special were my relationships with faculty like Gary Hunter, Edward Wang, and Chet Zimolzak until I went to Villanova. There, sadly, I struggled to form such relationships with faculty.  I wouldn’t be where I am today without the relationships I forged with the Rowan faculty.  They went above and beyond.  They made it clear that that cared about us outside of the classroom and all year long and not just during the 15 weeks of a given semester.  All my teaching tricks and methods are borrowed from what I observed of Rowan faculty. 

Many don’t think of Rowan as a top University, but I would rank it as among the very best places I could possibly have gone.  The connection between the faculty and the students was just special.  I have often thought that this may have been somehow connected to the fact that so many of the students came from working class backgrounds and were first generation college students like myself.  The faculty who enjoyed teaching at Rowan enjoyed teaching us, either because they came from similar backgrounds or because they liked working with us.  This made all the difference.

*****

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_all/