Reunion

(Left-to-right) Carol Weiss, Joy Slavin, and my wife — at the outdoor campus directory and map. (Photo by BobbaLew.)

For the past few days, two girls my wife shared a small dorm-house (Hazlett [“haze-LET”]) with during her earliest years in college visited us.
The girls are Carol Weiss (“wice”) and Joy Slavin (“slave-in”).
Neither are married.
Weiss lives by herself in her own house in Nyack, NY.
Slavin lives with her family in Manheim, PA. That includes her mother, who is 95, and most of her siblings.
Both were teachers, both retired.
This visit was prompted by my e-mail to them a few months ago, when my wife was at death’s door.
She no longer is; she’s fully recovered.
My wife has cancer, but supposedly it’s not fatal.
It’s treatable.
Actually, she has two cancers: -a) Non-Hodgkins Lymphoma, and -b) metastatic breast-cancer.
The Non-Hodgkins Lymphoma appeared about three years ago as a hard tumor in her abdomen.
That was poofed with chemotherapy.
The metastatic breast-cancer did not have a primary site; it never appeared in her breasts.
It was first noticed in her bones, where breast-cancer metastasizes.
We knocked that back with Femara®, the trade-name for Letrozole.
Femara is an estrogen inhibitor. Her breast-cancer was estrogen-positive.
Her breast-cancer just about disappeared.
My e-mail made things sound terrible; which they were at that time.
The cancer was growing in her abdomen, and restricting blood and urine flow.
Her legs swelled, she was in pain, and her kidneys began failing.
She also was getting very weak — anemia.
We visited a nearby hospital’s Emergency Room a few times, and she was blood-transfused many times. She was eventually admitted to that hospital.
Meanwhile our cancer-center, which is in another hospital in Rochester, was engaged in a turf-battle.
Since she has two cancers, her two treatment specialists were at each other’s throats — a Three Stooges movie.
“Not my cancer!” “Is too!” “Is not!”
The lymphoma specialist had also been appointed a head-honcho, so he was pulling rank.
They finally began to wake up when I called the breast-cancer doctor myself and said “I hope she lasts the night.”
“That bad, huh?”
“Well, I’m biased of course, but I think so.”
The breast-cancer doctor thereafter called my wife herself at the other hospital.
My wife had her cellphone.
With that call, our breast-cancer doctor could hear how bad my wife was.
Suddenly things began moving — the Stooges movie ended.
My wife would be transferred to the Rochester hospital for treatment.
She was admitted, was there almost two weeks, and is now home fully recovered.
She was also given chemotherapy that snuffed the fire in her abdomen.
Stents were also installed in her ureter-tubes (to flow urine through the blockage); and they have since been removed.
Our college, Houghton College (“HO-tin;” as in “oh,” not “how” or “who”) in Western NY, was very strict when we were there.
It still is, although not as strict as when we were there, when women couldn’t wear slacks or shorts, and sleeveless dresses weren’t allowed.
Television was also not allowed, so that when President Kennedy was assassinated, we had to hit the homes (and TVs) of professors.
Television was sinful and of-the-Devil.
Plus Kennedy had it coming (a Democrat — gasp!).
Those professors were of-the-Devil too.
The college was founded and run by religious fundamentalists, almost to the point of being ridiculous.
The village is along what once was the Genesee Valley Canal, and the broad fertile Genesee valley was the first breadbasket of the nation.
Wheat would be grown in the valley, shipped to Rochester via the Genesee Valley Canal, and then shipped east on the Erie Canal after milling in Rochester.
The village was a den of bawdy iniquity, brothels, drinking, gambling, and fighting.
The village was named “Jockey Street,” because people would race their horses up the long main drag.
A religious zealot named Willard Houghton arrived, and decided to clean up the town.
He was a Wesleyan Methodist, much stricter than the average Methodist.
A seminary was established in the village in 1883, and it eventually became Houghton College.
By the time I attended, Houghton was thought to be one of the two best religious colleges.
The other was Wheaton College (supposedly the best) outside Chicago, where I was refused admittance.
Houghton only accepted me after I proved I could do college-level work in their summer-school.
My attending Houghton was a compromise with my father. He wanted me to attend Moody Bible Institute in Chicago, where he attended.
Moody Bible Institute wasn’t a college at that time, but is now.
I wanted to do college, the first in my family to get a college degree. (My father could have done it, but never tried.)
Houghton is also a liberal arts college (dread!). “Liberal” is of-the-Devil, and liberal-arts isn’t studying for a specific career.
It’s too general (gasp!), and encourages consideration of the opposite side of an issue (greater gasp!), instead of noisily trumpeting only the side the tub-thumpers think correct.
And loudly browbeating with ad hominem put-downs and name-calling anyone that dares render an opposing argument.
I’ve never regretted attending Houghton, although I graduated somewhat a misfit. And not approved by the college, since I didn’t graduate a zealot.
What I like most about Houghton was that the professors weren’t elitists; and cared about we students.
It was the first time adults actually listened to me, and valued my opinions.
They even used to steal my ideas.
They encouraged questioning — which in my case made me not a zealot.
I went there with no idea what to major in, although I was gonna major in Physics. (The whole idea was to avoid ‘Nam.)
But I ended up majoring in History, because that’s where all the good professors were.
Other majors might have one good professor, but History had two.
Early during my time at Houghton I fell into trying to prove the Founding Fathers of this nation were inspired — that they had faith in the good of mankind, and our nation was a manifestation of this.
One of my two good History professors, who I really respected, and who inspired me to become a History-major, quickly put the kibosh on that, by trotting out the Beardian theory that the American Revolution was economically motivated, and all that high-sounding philosophizing about the good of mankind was pure bunk, mere justification for an economically motivated revolution.
He was just challenging me. The sort of intellectual challenge any scholar would have to endure.
After four years I’d had enough. There were no answers. Most scholarly pursuit seemed mere belly-button picking, and I had a life to live.
“So what brought you to Rochester?” Joy asked.
“Her,” I said, pointing to my wife, who was only my wife-to-be at that time.
My wife had enrolled in a Library Science Masters program at nearby Geneseo State college, but that failed too.
My wife tired of serious discussions about how librarians should dress.
So we both moved to Rochester, me first from home in October of 1966.
I also had been declared 4-F (not draft-able), so I wasn’t going to ‘Nam. —I had a duodenal ulcer.
My wife moved up later, after failing Library School.
I also didn’t wanna be at home with meddling parents, after four years of relative independence.
Our first stop was Letchworth State park, a really great park, perhaps 10-15 miles north of Houghton, where students hung out a lot.
The mighty Genesee (“jen-uh-SEE”) river, which traverses Western New York south to north, has to go from higher elevations in the southern part of the state, to lower in the north.
(The Genesee also passes Houghton.)
There are waterfalls, and a deep gorge carved out of rock, all in Letchworth Park, an area once owned by William Pryor Letchworth, later converted to a state park.
There was desire to harness the power in the waterfalls, but that never happened.
The gorge and waterfalls remained natural.
The only visible incursion of mankind is a huge railroad trestle above the Upper Falls.
At first the trestle was wood, but that burned down.
The current trestle is steel, but I think there was a wrought-iron trestle before that.
The trestle is Erie Railroad, their Buffalo Extension.
The line is now Norfolk Southern, and they will replace the trestle.
The trestle is down to 10 mph, and if a train locked its brakes (“emergency”) it might take down the trestle.
That trestle is part of Norfolk Southern’s railroad from Buffalo toward New York City, motivation to replace it.
We first looked at waterfalls, and then set up a picnic within view of the trestle and Letchworth’s mansion.
The park exists mainly because of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Civilian Conservation Corps, who built rock walls, overlooks, and carved paths.
They also built giant picnic-tables out of rock, and we set up on one.
The table was a giant slab of flat shale, about four inches thick, perhaps five feet by eight.
Those picnic-tables are forever. The only wood was the seat-benches, twin wooden 2x6 planks.
Our next stop was our college, our alma mater.
“This place lacks the charm it had when we were here,” Carol said.
A gigantic new Fine Arts building was built behind the Chapel-Auditorium, which was a class building.
The Fine Arts building overpowers the Chapel-Auditorium, and makes it look inferior.

Photo by BobbaLew.

John and Charles Wesley Memorial Chapel-Auditorium in 1965.

That Chapel was the classiest building on the campus. It’s a big box, but it still looks right. It was the portico that did it.
We went inside the lobby, and saw the infamous mural of the Biblical passing of time.
We gazed inside the auditorium. It looked great; just like it did when we left.
Although it has new seats, and temporary air-conditioning through removed window-panes from outdoors rental AC units.
The old radio-station control-room had been blanked off.
It looked nowhere near as bad as last time, when columns were on the stage.
An artist’s rendering of how it would look after renovation appeared in our alumni newsletter. It included the columns.
I wrote them a letter: if they included those columns in their renovation they weren’t getting another red cent.
So no columns this time. An empty expansive stage, except a small string orchestra was on it sawing away.
It sounded like Beethoven.
A youth music-camp was on campus, and the orchestra sounded pretty good.
A little murky, but nowhere near as bad as a high-school band, which can be annoying.
We also perused the new Fine Arts building, finding various empty galleries.
I went upstairs (via elevator, of all things.....), and found numerous tiny well-insulated practice rooms. They were inhabited by youngsters, a girl practicing scales on her flute, various pianists, and a soprano voicing scales with piano accompaniment.
It was barely audible.
Totally unlike the old Music Building, where it was so hot inside the students opened their windows, even in winter, and we were greeted with gorgeous cacophony when we exited the Chapel-building.
Trumpets and pianos and cellos, and yodeling sopranos and bellowing baritones — a torrential mishmash of convoluted clashing sound, cascading all over you.
The new Fine Arts building mutes that.
People used to call the old Music Building “Blare Hall.”
We then checked out the Campus Center, unheard of when we were students.
(Ours was nothing.)
Upstairs was the dining-room, and food was apparently served cafeteria-style.
When we were there it was by waiter; a job for students.
And Joy and my wife and Carol and myself all worked in the vaunted dishroom. Do students wash the dishes in this new arrangement?
I’m sorry, but I agree with my wife’s friends.
Houghton had character when we were there.
A character it now seems to lack.
And as we left we were passed by a skinny stick-human earnestly studying his iPhone.
He smiled as we passed, as did most everyone we met.
Do these people have any idea what the real world is like?
I drove city transit bus 16&1/2 years, and found that most strangers frown or snap at you.
Only people that know you smile.
The bell-tower rang three o’clock as we prepared to leave. Just like old times — probably the same recording (over speakers).
“Why was everyone so sincere?” I asked as we departed.
(My wife’s Hazlett dorm was gone, replaced by townhouses with the same name.)

• The upper wall of the Wesley Chapel lobby has a gigantic 150-foot mural titled “Redemption” painted by H. Willard Ortlip, a Houghton faculty member. It traces the entire passing of earthly history, from Biblical Creation to the end of time. (Ortlip took sick while painting the shackling of Satan. —Hmmmmmnnnnn.........)