This week’s Project 100+ memory comes from Kathleen Woodruff Wickham.  She was born and raised in Phillipsburg, New Jersey.  She has ancestors from that area that go all the way back to the Revolutionary War.  Her mother was an elementary school teacher in Clinton.  Her father worked in the testing department of the Riegel Paper Company in Hunterdon County.  Her father was drafted in the Army at the very end of World War II and did not attend college as a result. Her mother did attend college, though she did not finish the degree until Kathleen’s senior year of high school.  She is one of their four children.  She has two surviving sisters as well as a brother who passed away in 2023.  Both of her sisters went to college, one becoming a lawyer and one becoming a certified public accountant (CPA).  Kathleen attended public schools, having many of the same teachers that her parents had when they were children.  In 1967, she graduated from Phillipsburg High School.  She graduated four years later with a degree in junior high education from Glassboro State College.  She chose the language arts/social studies track over the science track and then did enough additional courses in history and English that she was qualified to teach both subjects at the secondary level.  Her first job after graduating was as a reporter at the Daily Advance in Dover, New Jersey.  After four years, she took a position with The Press of Atlantic City, and then, two years later, another position with New Jersey’s most important and popular newspaper, The Newark Star-Ledger.  It had a daily circulation of 450,000 at the time she was hired, and it was the 14^th largest newspaper in the country.  She served as a reporter for the Star-Ledger for three years.  After she got married, she moved to Memphis and had two children.  While her children were still young, she accepted an offer to teach journalism at the University of Memphis.  At the same time as teaching there, she enrolled in their brand-new journalism graduate program and became the University’s very first recipient of a master’s degree in journalism.  When they expanded and offered a doctoral program in instructional technology that proved perfect for the coming revolutionary changes wrought by the internet.  The University of Memphis paid for her to enroll in that program, which she did, finishing her doctorate in 1999.  That same year, she took a position as an Assistant Professor of Journalism at the University of Mississippi.  After twenty-five years at Ole Miss, she retired as a professor of journalism emerita in May of 2024.  During her career, she published several books, including: Math Tools for Journalists, James Meredith:  Breaking the Barrier, and We Believed We Were Immortal:  Twelve Journalists Who Covered the 1962 Integration Crisis at Ole Miss.  In 2008, she won the David L. Eshelman National Outstanding Campus Adviser Award for her work with the campus chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists.  In 2010, she was instrumental in having The University of Mississippi named a national historic site in journalism in honor of the reporters who covered the 1962 integration crisis as well as the establishment of a memorial in honor of Paul Guihard the French reporter murdered on campus during the 1962 riots.  In 2019, she was named “Chair of the Americas” and became a visiting professor at the University of Rennes in Brittany, France.  In 2020, she won The Farrar Award in Media and Civil Rights History for an article on television news and civil rights.  In her retirement, she plans to pursue several more research projects related to the history of journalism.   

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College was always in my future.  Perhaps because he had not been able to go to college, my father was adamant that I was going to college.  Financial aid did not exist at this time, but my father would not have borrowed money even if that was an option.  He never possessed a credit card.  So, for financial reasons, we had to choose a state college to attend.  At the time I graduated high school, the only real professional options for girls were nursing and teaching.  I chose to go to Glassboro State College because it was the farthest from my home.  I wanted to go away for college and not to the same places that my friends were going, Trenton State College and Montclair State College.  I chose the junior high education major because it did not require a foreign language, and I discovered that I could still qualify for teaching high school by taking additional English and history classes. 

During the time that I attended GSC, the enrollment had exploded to the degree that only freshmen could live on campus.  During my first year, I was in the first class to live in Mimosa Hall.  I wish that I could have stayed on campus, but I did not win the lottery and had to live off campus in a rented room.  One interesting thing is that those of us living off campus still had a meal plan and ate on campus.  Not only did it take longer for those of us living off campus to get to the cafeteria, I remember that just getting to campus was very challenging in the winter when it snowed.

I had passed out of taking Composition I and Composition II .  They gave me three choices to replace the Composition course that would have been in my schedule:  Broadcast Journalism, Creative Writing, or Journalism.  I chose the Journalism class, and it was in that class that I fell in love with the field.  The journalism major did not exist at the time.  I think it was first offered in my senior year.  Ben Resnik was my professor in this course, and he was also the advisor for The Whit.  I soon joined The Whit and became a reporter and wrote many articles over my time there.  I liked the way that I could be part of the larger world through journalism.  It was an exciting time to be a reporter.  The Vietnam War was raging, and I saw journalists as having such an important role to find out the truth.  Later on, the great story that I covered was the decision by the faculty to strike in order to improve their pay and other aspects of their working lives.  My coverage of this story made me feel important, not only because of its direct impact on my life and that of my peers but also because of the way that the administration and the faculty both came to me to share their side of the story so they could get their perspective into print.

The social studies class that I remember the most was one on International Relations that I took with a new, young female faculty member.  [Editor’s note, possibly Mary C. Taney.]. This was the first course that required me to do research in primary sources.  I remembered that I travelled by bus to the Philadelphia Free Public Library and to the library at Lafayette College to collect documents for this course.  Later, when I began my graduate courses, I remembered this training as being very important.

I also remember taking Macroeconomic and Microeconomics.  I remember that the professor was visibly surprised to see me in the class.  [Editor’s note, probably Francis Peacock.]. I was one of the few female students taking economics, but I enjoyed these classes as they helped me understand the world better.  I liked explanations that helped me make sense of larger patterns.

I had Richard Mitchell for two classes.  He was a character.  In the Spring of my sophomore year, I had him for American Literature II, and I remember that at the end of the class, he gave us a list of books that we should read at some point in our lives.  That summer, I checked out all of them on this list that my local library possessed.  When I returned for my junior year, I had him for “The Short Story.”  In that class, he again mentioned a list of books that we should read.  Then, he added, “I don’t know why I bother, no one ever reads what I suggest.”  Without even really thinking, I said “I did.”  I then told him what books I had read that summer.  He tried to maintain his grumpy demeanor by admonishing me for not reading one of the books on his list. I countered that this was only because my library did not have it.  He did not say anything, but I could tell that I made his day.  Later on, he became famous for his grammar newsletter.

In addition to working for The Whit, which was unpaid, I worked to earn money as a switchboard operator on campus.  It was in the basement in one of the dorms.  I did a similar job during the summers when I worked for an independent telephone company in Belvidere, New Jersey.

Glassboro State College helped me in many ways.  Not only did I make wonderful friends, it helped me answer some of the big questions I had when I entered college, particularly ones about my future and about what was going on in the larger world.  GSC also gave me the reading, writing, and research skills necessary to succeed in journalism, both as a reporter and, later, a professor.  My time at GSC also filled me with a sense of pride in myself for having accomplished not only completing the degree but also the important work that I did outside of the classroom, especially for The Whit.

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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_all/project_100+.html