This week’s Project 100+ memory comes from Leslie Livingston.  This is the first of two interviews.  In this interview, she discusses her childhood in New Jersey and her parents, Ina and Marius Livingston.  Marius was a longtime faculty member in the Department of Social Studies and one the founding members of the Department of History.  In the second interview, she remembers her time as an undergraduate at Glassboro State College where she graduated in 1970 with the first ever cohort of geography majors. 

Leslie was born in 1951 just outside of New York City in Port Chester County.  The family soon moved to the Princeton area, eventually settling in Levittown, Pennsylvania.  They had a new house that her father had acquired as a result of the GI Bill, and they were one of the first families to move into this new town.  On the one hand, she remembers this time as idyllic, with all the families moving into all the new houses and her having many friends with whom she played in the street.  On the other hand, she remembers the terrible strife that accompanied the attempt by African Americans to move into Levittown.  Her parents had become Quakers, joining New York Yearly Meeting six months after Leslie was born.  They supported integration and were working on behalf of civil rights.  But most of those living in Levittown did not share these ideals.  Leslie can remember a cross being burned on the lawn of at least one African American family.  Her father was Marius Livingston who was at the time a social studies teacher at Pennsbury High School in Pennsylvania.  Marius had been born in Germany in 1921, into a Jewish family, but he fled with his stepfather, who later adopted him, his mother, his brother, one stepbrother, and one stepsister five months after Adolph Hitler came to power in 1933.  After living in France for two years, they immigrated to the United States and lived in New York City.  Leslie’s mother was Ina Peck Livingston.  She came from a rural background, having grown up in western Maryland near West Virginia.  She was not only the first person to get a college degree in her family, but the first person on both sides of her extended family to finish high school.  Marius and Ina married in 1949 and eventually had three children, Leslie, Emily, born in 1953, and Pamela, born in 1956.

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My grandparents were an important influence on me.  In the summer, I loved going to the farm owned by my mother’s parents in Pennsylvania.  I loved the outdoors.  During the rest of the year, I frequently travelled with my father and the rest of my family to New York City to visit his parents.  They lived in Washington Heights, which at the time was a German-Jewish neighborhood where memories of the Holocaust seemed to be omnipresent.  I can remember that one of the very typical questions that adults exchanged with each other was “when did you get out?”  Sometimes, they would ask, “what happened to this person?”  The reply was often, “they didn’t get out.”  I can remember there being a period of awkward silence after this reply.  They never asked further questions but moved on to the next topic.  During this time, I became very close to my grandfather, who was one of the most important people in my life. He was a neurologist and psychiatrist.  Whenever I went to his office, I noticed that most of his patients had tattoos on their arms, and I eventually came to understand that this indicated that they had survived a concentration camp in Europe.

My father’s passions radiated throughout my childhood.  As the eldest, he often included me in his various projects.  I was his academic heir, and he put a lot of pressure on me to excel in school.  He was passionate about world affairs.  He cared deeply about what was happening all over the world.  He was a huge supporter of the United Nations, and we visited the UN as a family on multiple occasions.  He was also particularly supportive of Israel, which he saw as a shining star and haven for Jewish refugees and Holocaust survivors.  His brother felt similarly and travelled to Israel to support the development of the new country.  My father lost track of him and eventually had to travel to Israel himself to discover David’s fate, which was that he had been killed in the fighting in 1948. 

As a high school social studies teacher, my father always developed special projects involving world affairs.  He took his high school students to the United Nations regularly.  I can remember him telling me at this very young age about colonialism and about the importance of these new African countries becoming independent.  My father loved maps, and he would always use them to teach us about the world.  In 1956, despite the fact that I was only five years old, I remember his Operation Ghana project very well.  The independence movement in the British colonies on the Gold Coast had gained momentum, and the new nation of Ghana was set to become independent in 1957.  Marius and his students decided to help with this transition by providing books and other resources.  He and his students not only collected books, but he raised funds so that he and two or so of his students could actually travel to Ghana to be present for their independence celebration in March of 1957. 

We moved to Glassboro in September 1959.  I can remember having to help my mother with the directions in the driving back and forth from Levittown.  I can also remember my father’s excitement about being able to become a college professor again.  He had done such teaching in the late 1940s at Princeton and for one year in Maryland, where he had met my mother.  His contract, however, was not renewed, and the family story was that this was because he took students at Towson to the United Nations and had them meet the representatives of various countries, including those under communist rule.  After this, he was only able to work in high schools until he was offered the job at Glassboro State.  I think that Harold Wilson, the chair of the Department of Social Studies at GSC, had read about some of his various projects.  He was very eager for him to join the faculty and travelled to our house in Levittown to recruit him.

We moved into the Ridge neighborhood of Glassboro, and we lived on Cornell Road.  I attended the Campus School, starting in fourth grade.  Most of the children at the Campus School were the sons and daughters of faculty at Glassboro State.  I have great memories of that time.

All the social studies faculty used to have offices on the second floor of Bunce Hall.  After I got out of the Campus School around 2:30pm, I would go to the Bunce Green and call up to my father who was able to hear me through his open window.  He would come down and bring me up to his office.  At the time, the entire department was in one huge room in the middle of the floor.  Each person had a desk.  I can remember so many of these faculty, including Harold Wilson, Bob Edwards, Sid Kessler, Anne Edwards, Dick Porterfield, Eva Aronfreed, and Marv Creamer.  Later, probably after Bosshart Hall was built around 1964, I can remember other faculty members joining the department, including Aaron Bender, Edward Miszcyak, Wade Currier, Herbert Richardson, Mary C. Taney, and many more. 

At the Campus School, there were only six girls in my class, but we all had much in common given the academic backgrounds of our parents.  I can remember well also the student teachers because we were a demonstration school.  It was like we had three or four teachers in every class.  We got great attention, and it was an outstanding academic experience.

It was while we were living at Cornell Road that Operation Uganda took over our lives.  To me, it was a bigger version of Operation Ghana.  It was my father doing his thing, spreading education around the world and spreading awareness of world affairs to others.  He had the ability to get others excited about things.  He could share and infect others with his enthusiasm.  It was during this time that I finally began to understand that my father was special, that he had some qualities that drew others to him, that he was not an ordinary father.  I can remember students always coming over to our house, like Betty Bowe, the student leader of Operation Uganda. 

I can remember going with him to the Uganda House where they collected all the books and other materials.  One of my jobs was to stamp the books with this special stamp that said as I remember, “From the people of the United States, To the people of Uganda, Glassboro State College, October 7, 1962.”  It seemed to me that as fast as you could stamp the books, more books were arriving.  Some of the books were brand new, some were used, and they just kept arriving and arriving.  I think there were 100,000 in the end.  Sometimes, I would take a break and read one of the books I found interesting.  After a while, my father would remind me to “get stamping again.”  It was the only time in my life he told me to stop reading.

One of the community members who was really helpful with Operation Uganda was Clayton Platt.  He owned the Glassboro movie theater, and he allowed my father and the team to store books in the basement until my father secured the use of the “Uganda House.”  Later, Platt bought and renovated Pitman’s Broadway theater.  In addition to storing the books, Platt agreed to show a movie and for all the proceeds to go to Operation Uganda.  I can remember the movie well, it was called Carry On Nurses, a British farce that was the third or so in the series of Carry On movies.  One of my tasks was to go door-to-door to sell tickets to this movie.  At the time, most people had never heard of the Carry On series, and I had to explain the film to them, which was challenging since British humor was not quite the same as American humor.  However, most of my pitch was about the cause, the worthiness of Operation Uganda and what we were doing.  Glassboro State students also sold tickets this way.  Together, we filled the theater.  I can’t remember if I was allowed to go to the actual movie.  I know that my parents looked up films in Parents Magazine, which noted whether or not films were suitable for children.  The only films they would allow me to see without looking it up first were the Disney films.

He used to write letters to famous people all over the world.  He got his students to write all these letters as well.  I think these letters were critical to me realizing that he was different.  Other fathers did not receive letters from John F. Kennedy, Bertrand Russell, and so many others.  He wrote these letters all his life, not just for Operation Uganda.  Later, we realized that this went back all the way to when he was a teenager.  After he volunteered to serve in the United States Army in 1941, he was sent to the Philippines.  We later found that he wrote a whole series of letters to Franklin Roosevelt explaining that he had been sent to the wrong theater of war.  I am not sure if these letters had any impact, but he was transferred late in the war to the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), which was the forerunner of the Central Intelligence Agency.  Right before the war ended, he was dropped off in Japan, behind enemy lines, and given the job of pretending to be a German businessman so that he could find the Nazis who had been advising the Japanese, allowing their quick capture after the surrender of the Japanese.  He was good at this work, of course, because he was fluent in German.

I can remember the preparations for Uganda Day very well.  There was a circus with an elephant.  The actual celebration was massive with many politicians and speakers.  For me, what makes October special every year, is Operation Uganda.  I never cease to think that project and my father during that month.

In the middle of the orchards on the other side of 322 from Bunce Hall was an old farm house, which I think was built in the 19^th century.  Somehow, my father secured use of this house for storing the books and the other things that we collected.  The house wasn’t in terrible shape, as it had electricity.  However, I don’t think it lasted long after Operation Uganda.  Most of the books were stored in the basement, while the scientific equipment and other items went upstairs.  There were so many books I can remember crawling over the books to get from one area to the other.  Not all of the books that were collected were in good enough shape to go to Uganda.  They were all sorted into different categories.  I can’t remember being involved with the loading up of all the books and sending them away.  I think that college students and others did this work.

Of course, my father was frustrated by what happened in Uganda in the late 1960s with the rise of Idi Amin and the violence in the country.  I can remember him saying, “Why is it that every country where I send books turns to dictatorship?”  He was trying to use humor, as he often did, as a way to respond to the situation, but it was easy to tell that he was greatly saddened by the turn of events.  While my father was generally seen, and was, a very positive and optimistic person, he had bouts of depression.  When one of these spells hit, he would often withdraw to his study and spend time reading.  One of his friends that would help him out of these spells was Aaron Bender, one of his closest friends. They would often play chess when they got together.  Chess was one of the things that always brought him back to himself, centering down as the Quakers say.  His most important chess partner was his father, with whom he played regularly until his father’s death a few years before his own.  There is a famous story about chess in our family.  According to my father, when he and Ina were living in the Princeton area, he used to set up his chess board in a park and waited for someone to sit down to play.  One day Albert Einstein sat down and played with him.  My father didn’t say that he won, so we always assumed he lost.  My mother said that they would see Einstein from time to time in the supermarket, and my family still has a photograph of my father, Einstein, and another Princeton physicist.

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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/