This week’s Project 100+ memory comes from Mark Speeney.  He was born and grew up in a mostly Polish neighborhood of Camden, New Jersey.  His parents were, however, both Italian-Americans.  In their early days, they both worked in the truck farming industry in southern New Jersey.  His father’s name was Spina, but it became Americanized to Speeney.  He served in World War II, and his parents got married when he returned and moved to Camden.  He got a job at the Curtis Publishing Company, which ended poorly when the company failed after raiding the pension fund for employees.  His mother took care of their five children early on, but she later began cleaning offices at night for RCA.  Mark is the second youngest of five children.  As a child, he had a hard time, in part because he developed epilepsy.  He attended St. Joseph’s Elementary School in Camden.  Mark’s father died when he was 11 years old.  It made a hard childhood even more challenging, as his older siblings had all left the house.  He attended Bishop Eustace Prep for high school.  There, things began to turn around.  He did well, participating in the drama program and the student-faculty committee.  He won multiple awards, including one for public speaking.  He graduated from high school in 1981.  He graduated from Glassboro State College in 1985 having won the Marius Livingston Medallion for Excellence in History.  For three years, he did a variety of jobs, including substitute teaching.  Influenced by GSC professor David Kasserman, he decided to go to graduate school for anthropology.  In 1988, he began in the Master’s program at Rutgers University in New Brunswick.   The experience was a challenging one, but he improved his writing and got his Master’s in 1991.  He began pursuing a doctorate, but he left the program and moved to New York to work in the publishing world, which he did for the next two decades.  In 2007, he returned to southern New Jersey, where began working for his sister’s retirement planning company.  He continued to return to New York frequently during this time.  After his sister passed in 2017, he moved to Philadelphia where he resides today.

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Neither of my parents attended college, but my eldest sister graduated from Glassboro State College in 1966 or so.  She was a theater major, and she loved Glassboro State.  That made an impression on me.  However, I didn’t really have any other great options.  My mother could not afford college, so I had to borrow money to attend college.  Obviously, I wanted to minimize the amount I borrowed.  Fortunately, the cost of attending Glassboro State was not too high at this time.  Tuition was actually lower than what my mother paid for me to attend Bishop Eustace Prep!  

College was such a different experience for me, even though I wasn’t quite as free as I wanted to be because I was still living at home.  At that time, Glassboro State would not allow students to live on campus if their residence was too close to campus. Of course, it would have been challenging for me to afford living on campus even if they would have allowed me to do so. 

I began at Glassboro State as an undeclared major.  It was a great place for me to grow and mature.  I took advantage of being able to attend plays on campus.  I remember meeting male cheerleaders for the first time, one small example of how it helped broaden my perspective.

I thought I would be a political science major.  My mother wanted me to go to law school.  I was very interested in ornithology, but my mother did not think that was a good path for me.  I declared political science in my sophomore year.  I began taking history classes from the beginning, and I ended up declaring a second major in my junior year.  I ended up gravitating more to the History Department, as I found the faculty more engaging and interesting.  The emphasis of political science classes on statistics was not as interesting to me. 

I took classes with almost all of the history faculty by the time that I graduated.  I think that one of my early history classes was Mary Taney’s Western Civilization class.  Later I took a class with her on the history of the Ancient Mediterranean World.  I took an African history class with Gary Hunter. He was a great guy, and his class was one of my first “Oh, my God” moments.  I knew nothing about that history.  I was really into world history back then.  Now, I am more interested in United States history, but I was not that excited about it at the time.  I did take two classes with Lee Kress, the first half of US History and his World War II class.  I also took two classes with Robert Hewsen, one of which was a Western Civilization class and the second was a history of the Byzantine Empire.  I took Seminar with David Applebaum, and I got so much out of the class.  He helped me see the world in a new way.  He was part of my political transformation during the 1980s. Marie Wanek was a wonder.  I took her for the second half of US history and also a marvelous class on the history of India.  She became probably my favorite professor in the end.  She was the advisor for Phi Alpha Theta, and she was my academic advisor in my senior year.

I was exposed to so much during my college years.  I remember doing a Model United Nations, where we represented Yemen.  I also remember that I helped bring to campus a very controversial speaker, an active supporter of a communist insurgency in Latin America.  I was very involved with Phi Alpha Theta and was proud of my membership.  I became a representative to the Bureau of Honorary Organizations for the Student Government Association.  I remember getting into a tussle with SGA over funding.  I did attend the Phi Alpha Theta regional conference at Trenton State College.  I didn’t present myself, but I was there to support the other students.  I was surprised when I won the Marius Livingston Excellence in History Medallion. My grades were good, but I don’t think they were better than all of my fellow majors.  I think it was due to a combination of my academic performance and my involvement with Phi Alpha Theta.  I remember that Marie Wanek gave a speech remembering Marius Livingston at the end of the year banquet. 

College helped me see things from different perspectives.  I began to be interested in peoples and histories outside of Europe and the United States, whether that was India or the Byzantine Empire or Africa.  I also learned to find the history of the working classes and the poor fascinating.  I can’t stress enough how important it was for me to go to college.  While I had started coming out of my shell in high school, I continued that at Glassboro State.  It was such an important time to me.  I spent so much time on the campus outside of class, even though I was a commuter.  I remember going to campus even during the summer though I was not taking summer classes.  At one point, I regretted that I had not been able to afford to go to a different school.  Later, I came to realize that Glassboro State had been great for me. In part, this was due to the fact that I had met students from other colleges such as one from Harvard during the Model United Nations.  It was also due to my realization that the faculty at GSC were remarkable. I learned so much more than I anticipated when I began.  Although almost all of the students were from New Jersey, it was a nice cross-section of students.  They came from a wide variety of backgrounds, and they possessed a wide array of political perspectives.  The entire experience helped me become more engaged with the world.

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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/