This week’s Project 100+ memory comes from Patricia A. Martinelli.  She was born and raised in Vineland, New Jersey.  Her father was born in Minotola, New Jersey, and was the son of immigrants from Italy.  He became a motor vehicle examiner for the State of New Jersey.  Her mother was also the child of Italian immigrants, and she was born in Buena Vista Township.  Before she married Patricia’s father, she worked in a clothing factory.  She became a homemaker after marrying. Patricia has one older brother, who attended Cumberland County College for two years before enlisting in the United States Air Force.  Patricia attended public elementary school, junior high school, and then Vineland High School.  She didn’t like high school, and she wanted to leave at 16 as she was ready, in her opinion, to start college early.  However, her parents disagreed and would not let her do so.  When Patricia turned 18, during her senior year, she was able to leave high school without her parent’s consent, which she did.  She then passed the General Education Degree (G.E.D.) examination in the Spring of 1971.  Instead of attending college, however, she applied for a civil service position at Stockton College working as a library assistant.  While working at Stockton, she met Dr. Demetrios Constantelos who taught history and specialized in the ancient world.  It was free to take courses while working at Stockton so she took his course on the Byzantine empire.  She became hooked and knew that she wanted to get a history degree.  However, this was not an easy thing to do because of finances.  Not only was college not part of her family’s experience, they did not earn enough money for her to become a full-time college student at the time.  To make matters more challenging, her father went on medical disability because his lungs had become infected with emphysema and other related complications.  This was no doubt due to the fact that the State made no attempt to eliminate the carbon monoxide at his workplace.  Every person that he worked with died of cancer eventually.  Later, he developed Alzheimer’s.  The money he received for his disability barely covered the minimum expenses needed by her mother and father.  There was no money remaining for Patricia to attend college.  At this time, she heard that Cumberland County College had recently expanded their financial aid program, establishing the Equal Opportunity Fund, which was open to students with severe economic need.  Guided by Joseph Hibbs, a financial aid counselor, Patricia applied and received not only tuition support but also a federal work-study position.  At 19, she left the library position at Stockton and enrolled full-time at CCC.  She immersed herself in college and loved her history classes.  She knew that she wanted to complete her degree and work in a related field someday.  She finished her associate’s degree in Liberal Arts in the Spring of 1976.  She entered Glassboro State College as a history major in the Fall of 1976, graduating two years later in the Spring of 1978.  After getting her degree, she started working as a freelance journalist and then became a full-time staff writer, first for the Bridgeton Evening News and later for the Vineland Times-Journal.  After a decade in journalism, she became tired of covering murders, suicides, and other similarly depressing topics.  At this time, she saw an advertisement for a curatorial assistant position at Wheaton Village in Millville, New Jersey.  She applied and received the position, working there for seven years.  During this time, she began working on her master’s degree in public history at Rutgers Camden.  Family concerns prevented her from completing the final elements of the degree.  Her next position was at Batsto Village at Wharton State Forest where she was historic preservation specialist.  She worked there for eight years.  While she was working at Batsto, around 2000, Thomas Edison began a master’s degree online.  She enrolled in this program, which was just as rigorous as the courses at Rutgers Camden.  She completed her MA degree in 2003.  Meanwhile, she grew tired of commuting to the job at Batsto, she applied for a new position in Cumberland County, working for the PARIS program, cataloguing local governmental records.  While working for this program, her mother began developing signs of Alzheimer’s disease.  By that time, her father had passed, and someone needed to take care of Patricia’s mother.  Her brother was unable to do this as he had his own family, so Patricia moved in with her mother and left the PARIS program position.  For the next six years, her primary role was taking care of her mother.  She did, however, continue to maintain an interest in history.  After giving a presentation to a local women’s club, she received an offer to work part-time at the Vineland Historical and Antiquarian Society.  With the help of one of her cousins, she was able to take this position and still take care of her mother.  Her mother passed away not long after she began this position.  For the next thirteen years, she worked at VHAS, during which time the position became full-time.  During these years at VHS, she discovered some of the truly amazing history of southern New Jersey.  She advocated on behalf of the VHS and local history whenever she could.  She retired in February of 2024.  Beginning in 2004, Patricia became a published author and has now written about a dozen history books.  Her most recent book appeared in 2018, titled We Believe: The Founding of the New Jersey State Society of Spiritualists and Friends of Progress.  She is currently working on launching, with Vineland native Monica Debbi, the Italian-American History Museum of South Jersey that is planned to be located in Hammonton, New Jersey.

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I only considered transferring to Glassboro State College.  I had no one in my family who could really guide me.  My decision was simply based on the fact that GSC was affordable and closer to my home than Stockton or other state colleges.  I also knew some acquaintances who had attended GSC, and they enjoyed their time.

I took a class in Russian history with Bob Hewsen.  He made the class so exciting through his lecturing style. I remember him bringing Peter the Great and Ivan the Terrible and all these other figures to life.  I wrote a paper on Peter the Great, and I remember being so happy that I received an A minus, as he was a very demanding and difficult grader. 

I took a class on Native American history and culture with Bob Harper.  This course was so enlightening to me and opened my mind to topics that I had known nothing about before.  I ended up taking more courses with him, including History of New Jersey, I believe.  He gave me a new appreciation of American history in general and New Jersey history in particular.  He was so encouraging of local history, and this made a profound influence on me, as I ended up doing so much professional work on the history of southern New Jersey.

I had one class with Dick Porterfield, British history, I think.  He was one of a small group who went on a number of road trips in the College station wagon.  There were three faculty, Porterfield, Chet Zimozlak, and Charles Stansfield, and two students.  I can’t remember the other student’s name now.   We visited both the Hagley Museum and the Winterthur Museum in Delaware and also the University of Pennsylvania Museum.

Edward Miszcyak was smart and funny and a good teacher.  Herbert Richardson was friends with Stansfield and Zimolzak, and I knew him that way.  The history faculty did such a great job helping me understand the past.  They showed how one had to understand the historical context and the times to grasp past events and the actions of individuals.

As important as the Department of History was to my time at GSC, the Geography and Anthropology Department was just as important.  I was a work-study student in that Department, and I remember typing up papers for faculty from some of the worst hand-writing I had ever seen.  I became especially close to Charles Stansfield, and we remained friends after I graduated.  In fact, he decided that he want to write books on the folklore and stories surrounding ghosts in New Jersey.  He asked me to be his co-author on these publications, and I agreed.  In 2004, we published Haunted New Jersey: Ghosts and Strange Phenomenon of the Garden State.  In 2013, they published the Big Book of New Jersey Ghost Stories, which received a second edition from Rowman and Littlefield in 2023.  The experience of these books led me to realize that I wanted to write books on my own.  I ended up writing a book on ghosts in Delaware and then a series of books in the true crime field, including Rain of Bullets:  The True Story of Ernest Ingenito’s Bloody Family Massacre (Stackpole, 2010).

Every professor that I came into contact with at Glassboro State made me comfortable and excited about my choice of major.  It was an amazing time of growth and development for me. I read everything I could get my hands on, no matter if it was French history, American history, or indigenous history.  Even though I didn’t have formal training in museum work at GSC, I give the College enormous credit for preparing for me my professional life in this field.  Not only did I learn how to write and how to do research, I visited so many archives, historic sites and museums that I became comfortable in that world, something that helped me so much later on.

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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/