Today’s Project 100 memory comes from Lee Bruce Kress.  He was born and raised in Baltimore, Maryland.  He attended public schools, graduating from a high school named Baltimore City College in 1958.  When he was in junior high, Lee’s parents had moved to Baltimore County.  This meant that to go to that high school, which was of high quality, his parents had to pay tuition, and Lee had to take two busses every day.  After high school, Lee enrolled at Johns Hopkins University, where he studied mostly science.  After John Hopkins, he began dentistry school at the University of Pennsylvania.  However, after a year, he left the program, in part because he didn’t like it very much, though he also had a bad wrist, which was an issue.  He explored several options after this decision, and he decided that he would go into history.  His friends were not surprised, as they said he was always talking about history.  He began by taking undergraduate classes at the University of Maryland because he had never had any history classes at John Hopkins.  He took a course on Latin American history with Don Giffen, who recommended that he apply to Columbia University to work with Lewis Hanke.  He enjoyed Columbia very much, but Hanke left in his second year.  Columbia then had several Latin Americanists over the coming years, never finding a permanent replacement.  This exposed Lee to many good faculty members. They eventually hired Herbert Klein on a long-term basis, and he became Lee’s final dissertation advisor. 

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I finished my degree at Columbia in the Fall of 1972, and I was looking around for a job in 1973.  I got an offer from the State University of New York at Potsdam to begin in the Fall of 1973.  My wife, Leslie, and I visited.  She was not impressed with the location, which was very remote and cold.  It was so cold there that you had to plug in your batteries at night or they would freeze.  Despite reservations, I accepted the position, and we planned to begin there in the Fall.  However, in the summer, a position suddenly opened up at Glassboro State.  I knew of the College because of the Summit in 1967. The location was also vastly preferable to Potsdam.  So, I applied and received an interview with Sidney Kessler and Dick Porterfield.  The interview went very well. They were desperate for someone as the position had become available due to a June resignation.  They took me to meet President Mark Chamberlain, and he offered me the job then and there.  I accepted on the spot. 

In my first year, I taught courses both in areas that I was comfortable, such as United States and Latin American history, and in areas such as Western Civilization, for which I little training.  I got along with the faculty very well.  They did wonder why I wanted to live so far away in Cherry Hill with such a long commute.  Most of the faculty lived in Glassboro or Pitman, something that had been encouraged by past and current Glassboro State College Presidents.  My wife, however, had gotten a job teaching in Cherry Hill, and that location worked best for our family. I did not mind the commute at all.

I didn’t realize at first that there was tension and in-fighting among the history faculty.  There was a coup at the end of my first year when they voted out the chairperson, Marie Wanek.  Some students and staff liked her very much, but others did not.  She was a single woman, and I wonder if sexism somehow played a role in her troubles. [Editors note:  There had not been a woman in the role of chairperson since Eda Willard in 1935.]. This was a sad moment.  She lived for the College and its students and commuted all the way from Washington, D.C. 

In any event, some of the old-time faculty members wanted her out.  One of the faculty members told me of their plan for the Department meeting, which was very organized.  It worked just as they told me it would.  They tried to make it easier on Marie by also voting to recommend her for full professor.  They then walked over both votes to President Chamberlain.  She was shocked at what happened.  She did, however, become full professor.

I was fired at the end of my first year.  The College was having financial problems, and Mark Chamberlain fired all new faculty members.  I was dismayed and did not know what I was going to do.  I believe that my wife was pregnant.  Later, I learned that my students had heard that I was being fired. They organized a petition and sent it to President Chamberlain.  He brought me in and said that the petition was so good that he was going to retain me alone.  Later on, however, the State’s position changed, and everyone was brought back.

The new chair was Marius Livingston.  His family was of Jewish and German descent.  He considered himself German.  He was very nice to me, and we got along very well.  I remember going into his office many times and just talking.  After my father died, he even became something of a father figure to me.  One thing about him was that he was virulently anti-communist, which perhaps played some role in his earlier work with Operation Uganda.  By the way, in those days, everyone who was hired had to sign a form declaring that they were not a communist or a supporter of communism. This was not Marius’s doing, as it was a state requirement I believe. 

Marius was a man of many ideas.  He was the sole person who initiated the 1975 International Symposium on Terrorism, a massive gathering of experts from all over the planet.  He had come up with this plan because of recent events in the early and mid-1970s, such as the rise of the Irish Republican Army and the hijacking of several airplanes.  Almost all of the faculty, and many students, ended up being very involved in the conference.  Sadly, he suddenly came down with cancer and died fairly quickly in late 1977. After his passing, I helped edit the papers delivered at the Symposium for publication.  Marie Wanek also helped, and our three names appear as editors of the volume. 

Mary Taney was a former nun. As expected, she was often very strict and somber. [Editor's note:  student memories suggest that she had a warm and helpful side as well.]. She was a specialist in Medieval history.  She retired in the early 1990s along with several others due to a very good State retirement package. 

Aaron Bender was the first chair of the Department when it split off from Social Studies in 1970.  He was fairly withdrawn.  I never got to know him very well.  He was a specialist in social psychology.  He was a bit all over the place in terms of teaching.  To me, he was always very nice.  I didn’t cause any problems, and he liked me.  I was actually very careful not to cause any trouble.  David, who was hired at the same time as me, pursued a different path.  Some senior faculty members tried to get rid of him.  I was called in by the President who asked me if I knew of any reason that he should not be retained.  I said that I knew of no such reason.  I am not sure if my comments made any difference.  David’s hiring of a lawyer was surely more important.

Sidney Kessler was one of the ones who interviewed me, and he became a very good friend of mine.  We got to know each other very well.  He was a specialist in United States history.  He had a wonderful memory, and he had served during World War II.  He had a lot of stories about the war, during which he worked in intelligence.  Most of those stories I can’t repeat. 

When I had been at Glassboro State for about four or five years, there was a major strike, mainly over salary.  It lasted a week.  No history faculty taught during this period.  The Union distributed many handouts during this time, and I collected them and deposited them in the Archives.  Sadly, I later learned that they threw them out, as they didn’t think they were valuable.  When it was settled, only the older faculty got any raise at all, while the junior faculty got nothing, to my great frustration.

Dick Porterfield was a character.  He specialized in British history, but he seemed to be most interested in sailing, as he went out on the Chesapeake Bay every weekend he could.  I think he liked me because we were both from Baltimore and had both gone to Johns Hopkins.  We had also both taught briefly at Baltimore College of Commerce.

Herb Richardson was a book buyer.  He would go out and buy books every summer to resell at this antique bookstore in Connecticut.  He had met a German woman during his time in the service.  She was very nice, but she sadly died fairly young, probably of cancer.  He later remarried.

Like many of the early faculty, Robert Harper was not particularly specialized at the beginning of his time at Glassboro State, but he became a specialist of New Jersey history, and he became a historian especially of Gloucester County and wrote many short articles for local publications.  At 70, the State forcefully retired him according to the law at the time, much to Harper’s great frustration.

Bob Hewsen was a specialist in Russian history and, especially Armenia and the Caucasus region.  He had gone into the service after World War II.  He earned a doctorate from the University of Maryland.  He was good at what he did, but I had a hard time getting to know him.  He stayed out of things in the Department.  He was a good friend to David Applebaum.  After he retired, he taught in California and other places.  I remember him returning to speak at a reunion event. I gave him an effusive introduction about his accomplishments.

By the time I arrived on campus, Lester Bunce was sadly not very good in the classroom.  He just taught the same survey course over and over and over.  He was very quiet.  Edward Miszczak was another generalist who eventually specialized in youth history.  Like Bunce, he was fairly quiet.  He collapsed and died while playing softball.  I believe he had a heart attack.

In the mid-1970s, I co-led a student trip to Mexico with Henrique and Josefina Pujols of the Foreign Language Department.  We had a bus and visited many places, included Mexico City, San Miguel Allende, Oaxaca, and Acapulco, among other places.  San Miguel Allende was terrible because they had booked us in a hotel right over a stable.  One of the students actually collapsed over the smell, and we arranged to leave.  I was going to lead another trip to Cuba, but the Cuban government changed our access and itinerary at the last minute. So, we cancelled that trip sadly. 

In the 1970s and the 1980s, I did research on 19th and early 20th century Argentina and wrote several articles in Spanish for the Museo Roca in Buenos Aires. In the 1990s I shifted to researching on World War II in New Jersey.  I visited the University Archives to study Glassboro State College during the war and later spoke on the subject before several groups. I also spent much time in the National Archives II in College Park seeking material on the Battleship New Jersey (BB-62).  I later published my findings in the Battleship newsletter.  In the early 2020s I studied the State of New Jersey during World War II.  I collected many materials from archives, libraries, diaries, and newspapers throughout the state and then donated these items to the Campbell Library. 

Over my time at the Department, my area of specialty, Latin American history, became less popular with students.  Latin America had been more in the news in the 1960s with Cuba and other events.  By the 1980s, there was less interest.  I still continued to teach those courses, but I could not teach them as often as I wanted.  In part due to this declining demand, in part due to Sid Kessler’s suggestion, and in part due to my own interest, I began to teach United States military history.  As part of my research and study for this topic, I visited many related historic sites in Europe.

The Department really began to change in the early 1990s.  Several older faculty took advantage of a great retirement package, including Sidney Kessler, Aaron Bender, Marie Wanek, and Mary Taney.  These folks were replaced by younger faculty whose commitment to research was profound, such as Joy Wiltenburg and Edward Wang.  They brought greater professionalism to the Department, and their publications made an impact in the wider scholarly world. 

Everybody liked Cory Blake, who took over for me as advisor of Phi Alpha Theta.  She did a tremendous amount of service and also did more to organize and support the social life of the Department than anyone else.

I remember President Donald Farish telling me that he had never been at a place that endeared as much loyalty as he saw at Glassboro State/Rowan University. He said that he saw this from alumni, current students, and from faculty and staff.  I was a part of that.  I felt closely connected to the place from fairly early in my career.  The students at Glassboro State College were much better than I had expected.  Many of them were very good, and their affinity for Glassboro State led me to soon join them in feeling strongly about the place.  Likewise, the faculty were a major reason that I so enjoyed my time.  Despite some moments of tension and conflict such as the ones mentioned above, there was a closeness among us that I don’t think is true at most universities, and this persisted even after the Department became more committed to research.  The University has changed so much since I began.  I believe that there were only 4,000 students at that time.  Yet, the Department of History remained collegial and close all the way to the time I retired.

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This is part of the Department of History’s “Project 100,” the collection and sharing of one hundred memories by Glassboro State College and Rowan University alumni and staff.  One memory will be released per day in the 100 days leading up to October 20, 2023, the date of a reunion celebrating the 100^th anniversary of the founding of Glassboro Normal School, later Glassboro State College, and now Rowan University.  The reunion will take place at 7pm at the Summit City Farm and Winery in Glassboro, New Jersey.  Registration for the reunion will be open from July 11^th and will remain open until the venue reaches its 100-person capacity (or October 13^th if capacity never reached).  We do anticipate that the reunion will sell out, so please register as soon as possible by visiting the Alumni Office’s registration page here:  alumni.rowan.edu/historyreunion2023.

You can also find the up-to-date set of Project 100 memories on the Department of History’s webpage.  William Carrigan arranged, interviewed, transcribed and/or edited these memories.  Laurie Lahey proofread and helped edit the final versions.  If you wish to share your own memories, please email Dr. Carrigan at carrigan@rowan.edu.  Alumni with Facebook accounts are encouraged to join the RU/GSC History Alumni group here:  https://www.facebook.com/groups/251485937221524.