Posted on Sep 1, 1996

Beginning in this issue, we are happy to start a column calling special attention to alumni and
books they have written. If you're an author, we'd love to hear from you. The ideal information to send us would include a copy of your book (or the dustjacket) as well as the publisher's news release about your book. All material will be returned if you so indicate. Our address is Public Relations Office, Union College, Schenectady, N.Y. 12308-3169.

Andrea Barrett '74
Andrea Barrett's Ship Fever and Other Stories, a collection of eight short stories, joins four previous
novels-The Middle Kingdom (a Literary Guild alternate), Lucid Stars,
Secret Harmonies, and The Forms of Water.

One of the stories in her new collection, “The Behavior of the Hawkweeds,” is set at “the College” in Schenectady. It was included in the
Best American Short Stories of 1995; another story from the collection, “The Littoral Zone,” was a 1994 Distinguished Story.

Barrett interweaves historical figures, such as Gregor Mendel in “The Behavior of the Hawkweeds,” and fictional characters. A biology major at Union, Barrett says of her stories, “I wanted to write about the love of science and the science of love-and the struggle to reconcile the two.”

Ship Fever and Other Stories is
available from W.W. Norton and Company.

Robert Grant '72

The December Rose, the first novel by Robert Grant, combines two contemporary topics that seem to be heading in opposite directions as the twentieth century nears an end-modern science and major league baseball.

Luke Hanlon, a retired Cincinnati Reds Hall of Famer, finds himself-courtesy of a genetic drug
breakthrough playing ball after a twenty-five year hiatus. But he is faced with power- and money-hungry players who do not share his desire and obligation to protect and preserve the game.

Available in hard cover from Island's End Publishing, The December Rose is “a story about integrity, love, and fellowship, all tied up in the metaphor of baseball.”

David Markson '50
“A writer who kicks tradition out the window, then kicks the window out the window, letting a splendid new light into the room” is how fellow Albany native William Kennedy describes David Markson.

Markson's newest novel, Reader's Block, is to be released in October by Archive Dalkey Press.

Reader's Block is about an aging author-known only as Reader-contemplating the writing of a novel. During the process of attempting to write the novel, other matters crowd Reader's mind-literary and
cultural anecdotes, quotations, scholarly curiosities-the remains of a lifetime of reading and apparently all he has to show for his life.

Kurt Vonnegut offered the first pre-publication comment, describing Reader's Block as “hypnotic” and “profoundly rewarding.”

Markson is the author of four other novels, The Ballad of Dingus Magee, Going Down, Springer's
Progress, and the critically-acclaimed Wittgenstein's Mistress, now in its sixth printing.
Reader's Block will be available in November in paperback.

Michele A. Paludi '76 and James N. Tedisco '72
Michele Paludi and New York State Assemblyman James N. Tedisco collaborated on Missing
Children: A Psychological Approach to Understanding the Causes and Consequences of Stranger and Non-Stranger Abduction of
Children.

Missing Children focuses on variables that assist in confronting and preventing child abductions, including teacher training, public education and awareness,
and psychotherapeutic techniques for families and friends of abducted children as well as for the children themselves.

Published by the State University of New York Press, the book is part of a SUNY series,
The Psychology of Women, of which Paludi is editor.

Paludi, a developmental psychologist and consultant in sexual harassment, is also the editor of
Sexual Harassment on College Campuses: Abusing the Ivory Power, also published by SUNY press.

Tedisco is chair of the Assembly Republican Task Force on Child Abduction and Missing Children.

Daniel Schwarz '63
Daniel Schwarz, professor of English at Cornell University, is the editor of James Joyce's
The Dead: A Case Study of Contemporary Criticism (1994, St. Martin's Press, New York). He also contributed the introduction, the critical overview, and an essay, “Gabriel Conroy's Pysche: Characters as Concept in Joyce's The Dead.”

Schwarz also is the editor of Narrative and Culture (1994, University of Georgia Press, Athens); wrote
Narrative and Representation in the Poetry of Wallace Stevens (1993, St. Martin's Press, New York), and is working on Joseph Conrad's
“The Secret Sharer:” A Case Study in Contemporary Criticism, for which he will write three essays.

Richard Selzer '48
The most recent book from Richard Selzer, a renowned medical essayist and retired professor of surgery at Yale School of Medicine, is
Raising the Dead: A Doctor's Encounter With his Own Mortality (1993, Whittle Books in association with Viking).

In 1991, Selzer collapsed at his home in Connecticut. He was diagnosed with Legionaire's disease, and he lapsed into a coma, beginning a “painful journey to a place where there was `more than a hint of death.”'
Raising the Dead is his dramatic account of this journey and his struggle between life and death.

Selzer published his first book, Rituals of Surgery, in 1974. He has also written
Mortal Lessons: Notes on the Art of Surgery, Confessions of a Knife, Letters to a Young Doctor and
Down From Troy: A Doctor Comes of Age.

Neil S. Skolnik '80
Neil Skolnik's On the Ledge: A Doctor's Stories from the Inner City is a collection of twelve essays about his first job after graduating from a
three year residency in family medicine.

From July 1987 to July 1989, Skolnik was the attending physician at a small inner city clinic in Philadelphia. The stories give his account of the patients he treated, the sights he saw, and the feelings he experienced while working at the clinic, which was shut down in July of 1989 due to a lack of funding. He attempts to “create some shared understanding and feeling between myself and the reader of these stories.” Two essays from the book were published in the
Philadelphia Inquirer and Philadelphia magazine.

Skolnik is now the associate director of the family practice residency program at Abington Memorial Hospital in Philadelphia and clinical associate professor of family medicine at Temple University. He feels that his well-rounded Union education helped give him both the writing skills and the ability to express himself well enough to write this book.

On the Ledge is published by Faber and Faber, Inc., Publishers.

Peter Y. Sussman '63
“1 committed bank robbery and they put me in prison, and that was right. Then I committed journalism and they put me in the hole, and that was wrong.”

These are the first words of Committing Journalism: The Prison Writings of Red
Hog, written by Dannie M. Martin and Peter Y. Sussman '63.

In 1986, as editor of the San Francisco Chronicle's “Sunday Punch,” Sussman published an article on AIDS in the federal prison system written by Dannie Martin-known as Red Hog in the system. Martin continued to write and eventually was transferred to a federal prison in Arizona, beginning a legal battle over First Amendment rights for prisoners.

Committing Journalism interweaves nearly all of Martin's prison writings and Sussman's commentary about the life of Martin, their unique relationship as writer and editor, and their developing friendship.
Martin was paroled in 1992 and works in San Francisco as a freelance writer; Sussman continues to edit the “Sunday Punch.” They have won such awards as the Society of Professional journalists' Freedom of Information Award and the Scripps Howard First Amendment Award.

Committing Journalism was published by W.W. Norton and Company and is available in hardcover and paperback.

Richard J. Wagner '64
Richard Wagner, associate professor of management at the College of Business and Economics at the University of Wisconsin at Whitewater, is the co-author of
Do It … and Understand! The Bottom Line on Corporate Experiential Learning.

The book is a compilation of papers on experiential learning and its application in the workplace. Beginning with current trends in experiential theory
and methodology, the book discusses trends and issues in quality design, application, transfer and evaluation, and international and multicultural training strategies affecting corporate development.

The book is available through Kendall/Hunt Publishing Company.

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Posted on Sep 1, 1996

Mary Carroll Mahoney '86 has the distinction of working with colleagues who were once her teachers and teaching courses that she once took.

Carroll (she goes by this name professionally) is the first alumna to return as a tenure-track professor. A magna cum laude graduate who was elected to both Phi Beta Kappa and Sigma Xi, she returned to the College in the fall of
1992 as an assistant professor of chemistry.

Some who knew her as an undergraduate are surprised at her career choice.

“Weren't you pre-law?” she was asked recently by an alumnus.

“Yes, I was pre-law,” she answers, laughing.

A native of Spencerport, N.Y., Carroll came to Union thinking about a career in something like environmental law. But she also had strong interests in math and science, and by the end of her freshman year she declared a major in
chemistry. The summer after her sophomore year she stayed on campus to work as a research assistant with Leslie Hull, professor of chemistry.

Active in the performing arts, she sang in the Women's Glee Club, was a founding member of the Garnet Minstrelles, and was a member of the Court Gestures (an improvisational theater troupe), among other activities. ” I loved school,” she says. When the course listings came out for a term, she had a hard time choosing only three.

At the beginning of her senior year, she found herself in a dilemma. Before she had done research with Professors Hull and Tom Werner (her senior thesis advisor), she had never considered a career in chemistry or a career as a college professor. So she put off a decision a little longer by applying to five law schools and five graduate programs in chemistry. When it came down to the wire, she made her decision, and the rest, so to speak, is chemistry. She headed off to Indiana University to pursue graduate work.

At Indiana, she held a teaching and research assistantship and earned the Robert Chernin Memorial Award (for excellence in first-year graduate research), a National Science
Foundation Graduate Fellowship, and an American Chemical Society Division of Analytical Chemistry Full-Year Fellowship. She also learned a lot about what she wanted to do, and she began to identify and refine her career goals.

Completing her Ph.D. in analytical chemistry in 1991, she took a position at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst as a postdoctoral research associate and began applying for teaching positions. In that process, she realized that she did not want to work in a large Ph.D.-granting institution, such as Indiana, which has over 30,000 students.

“I knew I wanted to teach at a place like Union. I really liked the learning atmosphere, and I wanted to give students the same experiences I had,” she explains.

She admits that returning to Union was a little strange at first, but with a little time
she got very used to being on the other side of the desk. From 1992 to 1994, she held the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Assistant Professorship in Chemistry, and at Founders Day this year she was awarded the Stillman Prize for Excellence in Teaching.

She says that many of her students like the fact that she graduated from Union, although she often finds it difficult to answer questions about student life and changes at the College. “I think I have a unique perspective,” she says. “It's difficult to answer questions like that because now I see things from the perspective of an alumna and a faculty member, not a student.”

The professor in Mary Carroll enjoys working in the Chemistry Department with former teachers who have come to be mentors and friends. And the student in Carroll loves the advantages of being at a small liberal arts college-speakers, lectures, singing with the choir, and having the chance to “escape” from chemistry every once in a while. “I could easily have been a perpetual student … but I stopped at teaching,” Carroll says.

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Posted on Sep 1, 1996

Jim Marsters '47 learned early and well a lesson-a credo perhaps-that has become both definitive and descriptive of his entire life.

As a deaf student at Union, Marsters earned his degree in pre-med in the three-year accelerated wartime program, with no special help. “In those days, supportive classroom interpreters were not available,” he says. “You had to learn to persist and to cope.”

Persist and cope is just what he did, has done, and continues to do. This May, for example, the Rochester Institute of Technology awarded him an honorary degree for his roles in the development of a telephone system for the deaf and the establishment of the National Technical Institute for the Deaf.

In his student days at Union, Marsters coped by copying classmates' notes and what the professors wrote on the blackboards.

“The professors didn't know what to make of me, as they never had a deaf student before. Ditto for the staff and administration. I knew I had to persist or 'perish.' ”

A native of Norwich, N.Y., Marsters has been profoundly deaf all of his life-a result of maternal rubella and a bout with scarlet fever when he was only three months old. He received pre-school speech training at Syracuse University and attended elementary school in Norwich, with extra help coming from a tutor only during after school hours. His high school years were spent in New York City at the Wright Oral School for the Deaf.

At Union, Marsters was a staffer on the Concordiensis, coached the College's fencing team, and worked as a professional magician, performing occasionally on WRGB-TV in Schenectady.

He was also a member of Sigma Chi fraternity, and it was here-surrounded by engineering students, immersed in his own math and science education, and frustrated by his inability to make a telephone call-that an idea began to bubble. That idea would later become the TTY, a telephone system for the deaf.

First, there were other things to do.

After finishing his degree, Marsters had a hard time convincing others to give him a job in the New York City area, and he spent more than a year working in a Manhattan tie factory. In the evenings, he took graduate classes in philosophy at Columbia University to expand his education. Despite being turned down by five dental schools, he persisted. The New York University College of Dentistry admitted him,
on probation, in 1948, and he graduated with his D.D.S. in 1952.

After earning his master's degree from the University of Southern California, he opened a solo private practice in Pasadena in 1954. For over 20 years, Dr. Marsters also flew his plane back and forth to his second office in Lone Pine, California. He practiced orthodontics for
thirty-eight years, retiring in 1992.

In 1964, he returned to the idea of TTY (which stands for Teletype). Up to then, Marsters says that a hearing person would help him make phone calls. On his own, he worked on other devices, including one that converted sound into a light signal to indicate when there was a dial tone and when someone was on the other end of the line.

Marsters recruited Robert Weitbrect, a deaf physicist from Stanford, and Andrew Saks, a deaf businessman from the Bay Area, and the three invented and patented a signaling technique using telephone, cable, satellite, light beams, and radio signals. This TTY “dream” made the telephone accessible to the deaf.

Obtaining funds, gaining acceptance, and getting the system out to others proved to be much more difficult. But Marsters and his partners persisted, involving the deaf community in “developing a sense of pride, and educating and encouraging them in the face of resistance,” he says.

The federal government was not receptive to the project, since it was only interested in a voice-into-printout
device, so the three financed the project themselves. Eventually, they got the Telephone Pioneers and others involved in helping restore old Teletype machines along with training deaf people.

In 1966, he went to England and made a well-received TTY presentation at the University of London. Later, Robert Weitbrect, Andrew Saks and Andrea Saks (Andrew's daughter) were able to break through objections from the Post Office (which owned the British Telephone system), and the TTY System gained acceptance in England. Slowly but surely, TTY grew, and eventually the ability to make international telephone calls became a reality.

Today, TTY is available worldwide, and there are state and national 800 relays allowing the deaf to do things they were once unable to do-such as calling the ambulance or police in an emergency or discussing business, jobs or education with family and friends, and vice versa.

Marsters later was appointed to the U.S. National Committee on Education for the Deaf, which was responsible for establishing the National Technical Institute for the Deaf at RIT. The institute helps train deaf young people
for jobs in technology, provides internships and jobs, and assists them in moving off public assistance. He also served on the National Institute for the Deaf National Advisory Group for eight years.

Marsters is married and has three grown children-all hearing. Simply and modestly, Marsters sums up his many accomplishments, successes, and contributions in a very few words. “I am very pleased with the results of my life,” he says.

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Posted on Sep 1, 1996

Being a physicist, Allen Lee Sessoms '68 likes to use equations to explain what it takes to be a college president:

“Nowadays, being the president of anything is sixty-five percent politics and instinct, twenty percent common sense and street smarts … and the rest is all guts.”

For just over a year, Sessoms has been able to put his formula into practice. In August of 1995, he became the eighth president of Queens College, one of
eight senior colleges in the City University of New York (CUNY) system.

In a profile in The New York Times, Sessoms explained that he had three goals for Queens-to make a first-rate institution greater, to put Queens on the cutting edge, and to move the school into the twenty-first century. What he's done to meet these goals has gotten quite a reaction from some members of the Queens community.

One of his first orders of business was to require all faculty members to justify their research projects or face an increased teaching load. Professors had to submit a one-page description of their current work, including, for example, grants they had applied for and received, book contracts they were working under, and art shows they were preparing for or had completed.

Returning to his numbers, Sessoms explains how the exercise turned out: “Eighty-five percent of the faculty justified their work in the first shot, ten percent had to work on it, and five percent are teaching more.”

He continues, “Most members of the faculty thought it was a useful tool for themselves and to find out what others were doing. It's something that we will be doing every year. We have to know what we're doing. As administration and faculty, we have to be held accountable. If we can't convince ourselves that what we're doing isn't frivolous, then we're going to have a hard time convincing taxpayers to pay their bills or students to pay tuition and fees.”

Another of his initiatives-fundraising-could fall into the “gutsy” category. Before Sessoms arrived, the college had never had a capital campaign. “We've really got to hustle and do some fundraising,” he says.

The need to search for funds is linked to one of Sessom's external challenges
dealing with the New York State Legislature, which provides (or is supposed to provide) the budget for all CUNY schools.

“Dealing with the legislature is a huge challenge,” he says. “Members of the legislature sometimes
forget the importance of higher education. They can't lose sight of education. If they do, it could be catastrophic.”

Sessoms is a staunch defender of higher education, and education in general. He sees his students as the most important and enjoyable part of his job.

“Without higher education, society atrophies,” Sessoms says. “The U.S. education system is the best in the world. It's the cradle of invention. There is no other place where people can learn to be techno-literate, creative, critical. The basis of this nation is allowing all people to become educated. It's what has allowed us to become a super power and viable democracy. Without education, there is no democracy.”

The importance of education was instilled in him by his parents. His mother, a practical nurse at Lincoln Hospital in the Bronx, sparked his love of science by conducting at-home science experiments. His father owned a bodega where he and his brothers and sisters worked part-time and studied.

His parents' encouragement paid off. After graduating from Union with honors, he earned a master's degree at the University of Washington, than another master's and a Ph.D. at Yale. All of his degrees are in physics, and all were earned on scholarship.

Sessoms took a one-year postdoctoral position at Brookhaven National Laboratory and then worked for the European Organization for Nuclear
Research in Geneva, Switzerland. Returning to the States, Sessoms became assistant professor in the Department of Physics at Harvard University. After five years there, he served as director of the Department of State's Office of Nuclear Technology and Safeguards, where he led nuclear nonproliferation and arms control negotiations with, among others, the former Soviet Union and South Korea. Then it was off to Paris, where he was counselor for scientific and technological affairs at the United States Embassy.

From Paris, he moved to Mexico, and it was while serving as the deputy chief of mission at the United States Embassy that Sessoms fell back into education. On a trade mission to Mexico, the governor of Massachusetts was accompanied
by the new president of the University of Massachusetts, who invited Sessoms to join his administration.

“It sounded very interesting, so I just decided to do it,” he says. He became executive vice president of the University of Massachusetts in 1993 and was named vice president for academic affairs a year later.

The experience as vice president of the five-college University of Massachusetts system-a very different public university system from CUNY, according to Sessoms-and his positions during his years “off” from education have all prepared him to take the reigns at Queens College. Being a college president, he says, means using all of the skills from a lifetime-from growing up in the Bronx and learning to walk with his back against the wall to negotiating with the Russians.

“It's not rocket science,” he continues. “It's learning to deal with difficult issues. It's practicing a lot, maneuvering, and using a lot of energy.”

Energy is obviously something that this physicist knows a lot about.

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Posted on Sep 1, 1996

Walking by Old Chapel or going down into the Rathskeller, you have probably noticed – and perhaps, maybe once or twice even walked into – a tiny, walled-in garden identified only by a small sign outside the entrance as “Mrs. Perkins’ Garden – 1866-1920.”

The garden was not always this small, and there was a time when you didn’t have to ask, “Who is Mrs. Perkins?”

Mrs. Annie Perkins was the wife of Maurice Perkins, professor of chemistry at the College from 1865 to 1901.

Born in Natchez, Miss., in 1835, Annie Dunbar Potts was the daughter of the Reverend and Mrs. George Potts. Annie and Maurice were married in 1864 and came to Union a year later. They lived in Hale House, in what is now the Milano Lounge, until their deaths-his in 1901, hers in 1922. They had three children.

Both Professor and Mrs. Perkins were well-known on campus, he as a popular and respected professor and she as an active member of the campus community. In the September-October, 1922, issue of the Union Alumni Monthly, Mrs. Perkins was remembered as an important link to the past and present of the College. The article reported that she remembered President and Mrs. Eliphalet Nott and Isaac “Captain Jack” Jackson, connections that take us “almost to the very earliest days of the college,” as the magazine put it.

Mrs. Perkins was fluent in several languages and often volunteered as an interpreter for the non-English speaking employees of the General Electric Company. She held readings of the “classics” in her parlor, was a frequent contributor to the Atlantic Monthly, and was said to have written daily letters to her children when they were grown.

Her garden, which began in the courtyard directly behind Hale House, seems to be Mrs. Perkins’s defining characteristic. The Monthly says, “And many of those who came to Union… will remember her personality, her house and her garden.” She was a woman of “very striking character” who “loved to surround herself with beauty and her parlors and her flower garden were an index of her taste and will be remembered by all who knew them.”

What happened to the garden after Mrs. Perkins’s death is unclear. In the summer of 1941, it was destroyed by excavation and redesigned. Restoration work this summer expanded the garden and incorporated a new entrance to the Rathskeller.

Another landmark is found near Achilles Rink. The bridge that crosses Hans Groot’s Kill here is not just any bridge-it is a National Historic Civil Engineering Landmark.

The Squire Whipple Bridge is named for the father of scientific bridge building, who graduated from Union in 1830. The bridge was reassembled by Union students from parts of Whipple bridges found in disrepair in nearby areas.

There are a number of named places on campus where the wanderer can sit and relax.

Surrounded by the massiveness of the Science and Engineering Center is a quiet refuge named the Theodore R. McIlwaine Courtyard. Funds for the plantings here were provided by friends, colleagues, and business associates of McIlwaine, the business manager of the College, who died in 1970.

The reading court near the east entrance to Schaffer Library is a memorial to Herbert L. Willetts ’23. President of Mobil Oil Corporation, he served as a trustee of the College. Funds were provided by his family.

The courtyard between the Murray and Ruth Reamer Campus Center and the Arts Building is the Chester Arthur Courtyard, named, of course, for the 1848 graduate of Union who became the twenty-first president of the United States. The nine-foot bronze statue of Arthur came from the estate of John Starin. Commander Starin, who operated a large fleet of commercial and passenger boats in New York, greatly admired Arthur and erected the statue when he built his estate near Fultonville, N.Y., in the 1880s.

Two benches in the courtyard-gifts of the Class of 1996-face the Kappa Alpha Gate, which provides entry to Jackson’s Garden. The gate is adorned with the famous words “Climb High, Climb Far. Your Goal the Sky, Your Aim the Star.” Built to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the founding of the first social Greek letter college fraternity in the country, the gate also pays tribute to Dr. Daniel MacMartin Stimson, Class of 1854, a brother of Kappa Alpha. Dedicated in 1925, it was the last memorial gateway to be erected on the Union campus.

Behind the Murray and Ruth Reamer Campus Center and just inside Jackson’s Garden are three sitting areas. The first, by Kappa Alpha Gate, is named for John Storrs Cotton, an 1897 graduate of the College who became an economic botanist with the United States Department of Agriculture. Nearby is an open garden picnic area, made possible by a gift in 1989 from the H. Schaffer Foundation (the same Henry Schaffer for whom the library is named). And just a few steps away is a fountain and small sitting area given by Robert Avon Smith ’52 and Ruth Anna Smith in honor of the College’s Bicentennial. The welcoming inscription says, “When the world wearies, and society ceases to satisfy, there is always the garden.”

Four named gates serve as entrances for visitors to the College. Here’s how each came to be:

The Blue Gate, located on Union Street and erected in 1813, was so named because of the color of paint-blue, of course-put on its wooden pickets. The first evidence that it was referred to as Blue Gate dates to 1857.

In the late 1940s, the pillars of Blue Gate were battered by speeding motorists taking the turn off Nott Terrace a little too fast. The six original fraternities founded at Union-Kappa Alpha, Sigma Phi, Delta Phi, Psi Upsilon, Chi Psi, and Theta Delta Chi-were approached and agreed to donate money to restore the gate. Lawrence White, the College architect at the time, designed the pillars to take note of the role that Union played in the founding of college fraternities.

The Brownell Gate, located on Nott Street, was presented to the College around 1911 by the New York Alumni Association. It is named for Silas Brownell, Class of 1852, a member of Kappa Alpha, Phi Beta Kappa, and an alumni trustee of the College.

Perhaps the best-known gate, the John Howard Payne Gateway, is on Union Street and serves as the main gateway to the College. It was dedicated on June 13, 1911, a little more than 100 years after John Howard Payne had been a student at Union. Four verses of Payne’s famous song, “Home Sweet Home,” written in 1823 for the opera Clari, or the Maid of Milan, are inscribed on the pillars of the gateway.

As a young boy, Payne, of the Class of 1810, wanted to become an actor. His choice was not condoned by his father, a schoolmaster in Boston, and the elder Payne sent his thirteen year-old son to New York, where the boy worked with a merchant. In his spare time, however, John Payne began publishing a paper, The Thespian Mirror, which caught the eye of William Coleman, founder and editor of the New York Evening Post.

Impressed by young John’s accomplishments, Coleman made his paper public. A wealthy man, John Seamans, offered to pay for a college education for the young boy, hoping that Payne’s early talents as a writer could be improved and refined, and he would someday become an influential newspaper editor. That never happened, however; after his years at Union, Payne became the actor and writer he had always dreamed of being.

The Class of 1884 Gate was built from the donations of the Class of 1884. Dedicated in 1924, it is located off Union Avenue and serves as a gateway to South Lane.

The following poem about Union and the Blue Gate, written by Byron W. Reed ’06, appeared in the Alumni Review in June, 1946:

 

The Old Blue Gate

Dad was son of old Union. As a boy oft I heard him tell

Of eyes worn weak on “Whitey’s” Greek, how he tolled the Chapel bell,

Lost precious teeth catching baseball when catchers wore no mask,

Made a temperance speech by the college brook as a midnight hazing task.

Of a building called “Potter’s Folly” that stood uncompleted for years,

And a rather debatable tendency to welcome in engineers,

Of a lovely Jackson’s Garden with a graceful Nott Elm tree…

And that early and late, an Old Blue Gate would be waiting to welcome me.

And next to his Key, his pet treasure-he carried it all his life

Was an ever-useful and useable pearl-handled pocket-knife;

With a knowing smile, when questioned, he would readily admit

That not a single ‘farm-boy” blade remembered to bolster it.

All had been broken and all replaced, both handles also new,

But still, to Dad, ’twas the same old knife, a comrade tried and true.

The old Nott Elm has been born again in a sturdy seedling tree,

And dad’s delights in Union’s sights relived by you and me;

Now “Potter’s Folly” is our pride but the years have lent their weight

With the seasons’ change and the winters’ toll, to wear out the Old Blue Gate.

Would that we might rebuild each part and adapt to modern life,

Perpetuate the Old Blue Gate just like Dad’s old pocket-knife!

(The Nott elm mentioned was located in Jackson’s Garden; it died in 1937, at an age variously estimated from 350 to 600 years.)

Each of the fields that athletic teams play on bears the name of a prominent Union personality.

Frank Bailey Athletic Field and Track, commonly called Bailey Field, is named for Frank Bailey, Class of 1885, a loyal and respected alumnus who served as treasurer of the College from 1901 until his death in 1953. The Bailey name is also attached to one of the most prestigious student awards, the Bailey Cup, awarded annually to the senior who has rendered the most service to the College, and to three endowed professorships-the Frank Bailey Professor of Classics, the Frank and Marie Louise Bailey Professor of Physics, and the Marie Louise Bailey Professor of Mathematics.

Alexander Field, home to the softball team and a practice field for several other sports, was named in 1913 for Robert C. Alexander of the Class of 1880. Alexander practiced law in Elmira, N. Y., and later became a journalist. He organized the Union College Alumni Association of New York and was named a life trustee of the College in 1890.

Garis Field, home to soccer, is named for Charles F. Garis, dean of the College for forty four years until his retirement in 1947. Garis led the reorganization of the College’s Athletic Board, which established rules governing sports at Union in the 1930s and 1940s.

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