The Rock of the Marne monument, Billings Park, Syracuse, as designed by famed sculptor Roland Hinton Perry.

Bill Orzell understands the promise. It is reinforced for him by the sheer power of a statue in Billings Park in downtown Syracuse, across the street from the abandoned grandeur of the old Central High School. The statue portrays an American soldier in World War I, bayonet at the ready as he prepares for combat, a gas mask slung around his neck.

“What it really shows you,” says Orzell, who is studying geography at University College, “is just how awful the whole thing really was.”

The sculpture was unveiled nearly a century ago. Tens of thousands of people jammed the streets of downtown Syracuse for a parade before the dedication; at least 25,000 packed in around the park for the event itself. The Syracuse Post-Standard described it as one of the most unforgettable ceremonies in the city’s history.

Mayor Harry H. Farmer stood before the great crowd and made this promise:

“We of Syracuse accept this trust,” he said. “We shall never be forgetful of the honor it confers upon us. We will cherish it and guard it as we would the graves of the heroic men whose names make up a magnificent roll of surpassing honor.”

The hard truth is that Farmer’s vow disappeared into history. Few today recall the meaning of the statue. One massive bronze plate is missing from the monument. There is no evidence around it of any lingering sense of reverence. Rarely do you even see a flower at its base.

Yet, as Orzell appreciates, it is a direct statement on a pivotal moment that helped to win the war, erected by survivors of that battle. That legacy becomes especially powerful in these weeks before Memorial Day.

The statue was dedicated in memory of the dead from the 38^th��Infantry Regiment. The��sculptor, Roland Hinton Perry, had a national reputation: Before his death in 1941, his work included two memorable statues at Gettysburg and the elaborate Court of Neptune fountain at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.

The main plaque that describes the purpose of the monument, with a quote from Gen. John J. Pershing, the American commander.

In Syracuse, he carved his name into the base of the statue, directly beneath a sculpted stone on which the soldier firmly plants his foot. That instant is a symbol of purpose and courage that provides the sculpture with its name:

The Rock of the Marne.

A century ago, soldiers with the 38th organized at the State Fairgrounds near Syracuse. They trained there before they left for Europe, where they played a key role in the second Battle of the Marne. A quote on the statue, from Gen. John J. Pershing—commander of American forces during the war—describes the magnitude of their accomplishment: “A single regiment of the Third Division wrote one of the most brilliant pages in the annals of military history,” Pershing recalled, speaking of how the 38^th paid a steep price to prevent a German crossing at several key points along the Marne, a river in France.

By logic, history and emotion, it is one of the most significant World War I monuments in the nation. According to accounts of the time, the 38^th regiment began the battle with 3,600 men, and 1,142—almost one-third—were killed or wounded. Grieving afterward for all they lost, the surviving soldiers decided to raise the money for a monument.

They could have put the statue anywhere. They discussed such locations as Arlington National Cemetery, near Washington, D.C.

Instead, they decided on Syracuse, a place where they’d built powerful friendships, a place they remembered with devotion and affection. It was an unusually intimate and meaningful gesture of appreciation. On the monument itself, the soldiers offered thanks to “citizens of this city who graciously extended their hospitality.”

The community returned that trust with a huge turnout and a warm reception. Hundreds of veterans from the regiment showed up for the dedication on July 15, 1920, the second anniversary of the battle. The crowds were so thick it was difficult for those men to shoulder their way to Billings Park.

The space on the monument that held a missing panel, which included the names of many soldiers.

Over the years, that connection slowly faded. Almost a century later, the purpose of the statue is all but lost in Syracuse. Thousands of motorists drive past it each day without a second glance. The great bronze panel that honors the sacrifice of the 38^th Infantry Regiment has disappeared from the base.

Yet conversations are underway about bringing the monument the civic honor it deserves. The statue itself was restored and cleaned about 10 years ago by sculptor Sharon BuMann, under contract with the city. The nearby Marriott Syracuse Downtown, the old Hotel Syracuse, has also been newly restored at a cost of roughly $70 million, a powerful statement about rebirth in that district.

Merike Treier, executive director of the Downtown Committee in Syracuse, has started early discussions with city officials about ways to beautify the park and heighten civic appreciation—including the idea of holding a major ceremony of remembrance on July 15, 2018, the centennial of the Second Battle of the Marne.

“People are interested, and we’re talking about it,” Treier says. “Once we get a better sense of the cost, we can figure out what we want to do.”

While Syracuse Mayor Stephanie Miner will no longer be in office a year from now—she will leave City Hall in about seven months, due to terms limits—she says it is critically important to recall the meaning of the statue.

“World War I was the war to end all wars but, as we have learned, it tragically did not,” Miner says, in a statement released Tuesday. “This statue is a central reminder of the enormous sacrifice so many young men made, and the sacrifices of the communities they called home. Syracuse was no stranger to that war and—as a mayor years ago said—as long as we have a city, we must remember those who gave their lives for us.”

The monument has especially intense resonance. The Second Battle of the Marne has been called the “turning of the tide” in World War I. The battle was of such historical meaning that the army’s Third Infantry Division, stationed at Fort Stewart, Georgia, still calls itself “The Rock of the Marne.”

The Germans, aware that American involvement in the war would almost certainly end what had been a long and bloody stalemate, mounted one last desperate offensive. Only 50 miles separated the battle-hardened German troops from a full-blown assault on Paris, which might have forced an entirely different conclusion to the war. As The New York Times described it in 2014, in a reflection on the war: “In their way were divisions of exhausted but experienced French and British troops, along with their new, largely untested allies from the United States.”

The German offensive failed at the Marne. The allies held their position. At the center of that effort: The 38^th Infantry Regiment, credited with withstanding a withering attack from all sides and somehow taking hundreds of German prisoners.

As Michael S. Neiberg an authority on World War I, told The Times: “It is the turning point of the First World War.”

The monument as it appeared in the 1920s, when it was built. (image courtesy of Onondaga Historical Association)

Not everyone in Syracuse forgets that heritage. Orzell, the University College student, spent much of his career doing digital mapping. He is also a passionate student of Upstate history, a longtime member of the Canal Society of New York State, a guy who believes communities should understand the stories behind civic monuments.

Intrigued by the lonely power of the statue at Billings Park, Orzell researched the saga behind it. In a 2014 letter to The Post-Standard, he described how young men from throughout the nation trained in 1917 at the fairgrounds, briefly known as “Fort Syracuse.” He discovered that as a gentle form of humor, the soldiers adopted the nicknames of the farm animals that had occupied what became military barracks.

Those young men went to Europe, played a pivotal role in winning the war, then contemplated how to show their reverence for their lost friends. The statue, their highest form of tribute, was originally financed by donations from members of the regiment itself.

According to clippings at the Onondaga Historical Association—where the tale of the monument will be part of a new exhibit on World War I—the soldiers raised more than $24,000 to pay for the statue. But they lost thousands of dollars due to a harsh wartime exchange rate, leaving them far short of what they needed.

Capt. Hamilton Johnston, an assistant professor of military science and tactics with the Army ROTC at Syracuse University, served with the regiment at the Marne. Johnston went to the community for help. About 200 veterans of the battle had settled in Central New York, according to historical association documents.

They needed $8,000 to pay off the final costs of the monument. “The Syracuse Herald (a local newspaper) conducted a campaign which resulted in public-spirited citizens making up the remainder,” wrote David Wallace of the old Syracuse Herald-American, in 1946.

The sculpture was dedicated in July 1920, a monument to a courageous yet horrifying moment in time that helped shape events for the rest of the 20^th century. The crowds for the ceremony were so large that people watched from nearby rooftops.

The statue was the vision of hundreds of men who grew close as they trained at the State Fairgrounds, then saw their young friends killed amid the fierce, relentless stand at the Marne.

Their one dream was that this monument in Syracuse would always honor the memory of all they lost. Over the years, in a changing city, that hope—that sense of purpose—faded away.

If all goes well, far more than stone and metal soon will be restored.

The records at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library & Museum in Massachusetts don’t reveal the collaborative genesis of a that Kennedy offered at the 1957 Syracuse University Commencement, 60 years ago in June.

But they do include a that Kennedy went over and edited, writing many notes or additions between the lines and in the margins. At one point, for instance, the speech referred to the “University of Syracuse.”

The soon-to-be president corrected it:

Syracuse University.

These are fraught political times, filled with anger, recriminations and national division. The 100^th anniversary of Kennedy’s birth is on May 29, rekindling a national discussion of his career and his achievements.

Still, the beauty of Kennedy’s 1957 address is the power and impartiality of the message, a theme that resonates today as much—if not more—than it did 60 years ago.

According to several accounts by Dick Case of the old Syracuse Newspapers—Case would go on to a long career as a columnist with the Syracuse Herald-Journal and Post-Standard—Kennedy stayed at the time at the Hotel Syracuse, now restored and reopened as the Marriott Syracuse Downtown. He was interviewed there by local journalists, who were well aware that his name was already being mentioned as a 1960 presidential hopeful.

Kennedy dodged questions about those aspirations. He was only 40. He said he was focused on being reelected as senator from Massachusetts.

The next day, on what Case called “a sunny Monday morning,” Kennedy gave his Commencement address to a crowd of about 6,000 at Archbold Stadium. He also offered a stylistic precursor to a choice he made at his inauguration, three years later: Kennedy would become known as “the man who killed the hat” because he chose to appear bare-headed before the nation.

In Syracuse, he declined to wear a mortar board when he spoke. He did wear one, however, when he accepted an honorary doctor of laws degree from Chancellor William P. Tolley, who described Kennedy as a war hero “who has always had the urge to move fast, and take the risks that come with speed.”

Kennedy’s speech was a thing of quiet beauty. He was a Democrat. Beyond a couple of gentle pokes, he essentially stayed away from any sparring about party affiliations. Instead, he started off by bringing his talk close to home: He told a story of how Elihu Root, a Nobel Peace Prize recipient with deep Upstate roots, once handled hecklers in Utica.

Then Kennedy went after his point. He was on a mission to remind the graduates of the nobility of elected office—even if everything in the culture seemed to be pushing the other way.

He told his listeners to be prepared for the way “great newspaper advertisements offer inducements (to be) chemists, engineers and electronic specialists.” He spoke of how the University was often “visited by prospective employers ranging from corporation vice presidents to professional football coaches,” a thought especially appropriate to a class that included graduating football legend Jim Brown.

“But few if any,” Kennedy said, “will urge you to become politicians.”

He noted how a Gallup poll claimed few mothers wanted their children to go into politics. He spoke of the way selfless political service went to the heart of the American experiment, yet of how the idea was often scorned or insulted by celebrities, intellectuals and other famous people. He recalled the time of Jefferson, when the notion of being a thinker and an artist was not exclusive to a dream of running for elected office.

“Politics, in short, has become one of our most neglected, our most abused and our most ignored professions,” Kennedy said. Far too often, he said, thoughtful people shun that arena and “consider their chief function to be that of the critic.”

Yet how will anything ever change, Kennedy wondered, if young Americans with talent, integrity and passion “lend your talents to merely discussing the issues and deploring their solutions”? In a world threatened by the shadow of nuclear war, he offered a simple challenge to the graduates:

“I ask you to decide, as Goethe put it, whether you will be a hammer—or an anvil.”

To Kennedy, the comparison was simple. To be an anvil equated to civic dormancy, to receiving and enduring the blows of a quickly changing society. He saw the hammer as equivalent to a person of action, willing to offer assistance as a citizen while accepting the risk and conflict inherent in public service.

Kennedy offered a summary of domestic and international worries that have only intensified today. He spoke of “pockets of chronic unemployment and sweatshop wages amidst the wonders of automation—monopoly, mental illness, race relations, taxation, international trade and, above all, the knotty complex problems of war and peace, of untangling the strife-ridden, hate-ridden Middle East, of preventing man’s destruction of man by nuclear war or even more awful to contemplate, by disabling through mutations generations yet unborn.”

To Kennedy there was only one clear response for his young audience:

“I would urge therefore that each of you, regardless of your chosen occupation, consider entering the field of politics at some point in your career,” Kennedy said. “It is not necessary that you be famous, that you effect radical changes in the government or that you are acclaimed by the government for your efforts. It is not even necessary that you be successful.

“I ask only that you offer to the political arena, and to the critical problems of our society which are decided therein, the benefit of the talents which society has helped to develop in you.”

Archbold Stadium is long gone. The University has gone through great physical change and expansion since that time. As for Kennedy, he would and a passionate reception in 1960, during his successful campaign for president.

Three years later, in a moment that sent shock waves around the world, he was murdered by an assassin in Dallas. The are still matters of study and debate by scholars and historians.

One thing seems indisputable about the young senator’s speech in Syracuse, about his thoughts on youth, responsibility and public service:

Sixty years later, as both hope and challenge, they stay true.

John Lennon and Yoko Ono at the Everson Museum of Art, 1971. (Photo courtesy of Everson Museum of Art)

Even in a building with staggering history, suite 830 has particular meaning: It is the physical centerpiece of an extraordinary bond between Syracuse and The Beatles.

“Two of them stayed here, in the hotel,” says Riley ’78 of the legendary British rock band that dissolved in 1970. “A third might. And the fourth, we can’t do anything about.”

Paul McCartney is coming to Syracuse University. He will perform on Sept. 23 at the Carrier Dome, the first time one of the Beatles has performed on campus.

Still, based on at least one account, it is not the first time McCartney thought about bringing his music to Syracuse. In the early 1970s, May Pang was a romantic partner of John Lennon, the other half of the immortal Lennon-McCartney Beatles songwriting duo. In 2010, Pang told The Syracuse Post-Standard how McCartney paid a 1974 visit to Lennon, in California. They tried to heal a friendship that had been torn apart.

They also dreamed out loud about getting together to again write some songs, Pang recalled. The location they discussed?

“We wanted it to be close to New York City, but not in the heart of it, where it would be a bit too crazy,” Pang wrote. in 1971, so he just thought that if this were to happen, Syracuse might just be the spot.”

That reunion became impossible in 1980, when Lennon was shot to death in New York City.

It is far too early for Riley to predict if McCartney will stay at the hotel. If he does, Riley will put him in what is called “the presidential suite” on the 11th floor, a suite featuring a restored Steinway piano that Riley says may be original to the building.

Yet McCartney will certainly hear the tale of what happened in suite 830. It is where Lennon and his wife, Yoko Ono, stayed during the 1971 opening of Ono’s show, “This is not here,” at the nearby Everson Museum of Art. It is where Beatles historians say the couple wrote a song, “Attica State,” lamenting the bloodshed during an uprising that year at Attica State Prison.

John Lennon and Yoko Ono with children at the Everson Museum of Art, 1971. (Photo courtesy of Everson Museum of Art)

It is also where Lennon celebrated his 31^st birthday on Oct. 9, 1971, with a party that included Ono, Starr, legendary beat poet Allen Ginsberg, rock producer Phil Spector (now serving time for murder in California), such distinguished musicians as Nicky Hopkins and Jim Keltner, activist Abbie Hoffman and many others.

At the time, Lennon and Ono made their presence known throughout the community. One day—accompanied by longtime friend Klaus Voormann, an artist, musician and Beatles confidant—they went swimming at the quiet Syracuse home of Alex and Charlotte “Chuckie” Holstein. Alex was president of the Everson’s board of directors, while Chuckie is a longtime civic advocate in Syracuse.

She recalls how her father, Morris Garelick, a Russian immigrant well into his 80s, was also at their home. Ono, lacking a bathing suit, offered to swim in the nude. “I told her, ‘Not in front of my father,’” recalls Chuckie, who managed to come up with a swimsuit.

By the end of the day, Chuckie says, Ono and her father were deep in conversation, comparing their experiences as American immigrants. “After they left,” Chuckie says of Garelick, “he asked me: ‘Who was that nice lady and nice man?’”

Ono and Lennon also struck up a longtime friendship with Oren Lyons, a ’57 graduate and a faithkeeper at the Onondaga Nation. The couple met at Onondaga with Lyons and other native leaders, who were engaged in protests at the time against state plans to expand Interstate 81 on their territory.

John Lennon and Yoko Ono with Faithkeeper Oren Lyons and Chief Leon Shenandoah at the Onondaga Nation. (Photo courtesy of Rex Lyons)

There were even reports that executives with Apple Records dreamed of holding an impromptu reunion of The Beatles on Lennon’s birthday in Syracuse, a story confirmed by such authorities as Jim Harithas, who at the time was executive director of the Everson. It didn’t happen. Neither McCartney nor Harrison, the other member of the band, made it to Syracuse.

Even so, McCartney’s music got an airing at the time in suite 830. Lennon, Ono and their friends held an impromptu singalong during the birthday party, in which Starr used some overturned trash baskets for percussion. They sang many songs, including “Attica State” and the famous Lennon song that is officially credited as a collaboration with McCartney, “Don’t Let Me Down.”

They also made a haunting choice that shows just how much McCartney was on Lennon’s mind: In a slice of the party captured by filmmaker Jonas Mekas, Lennon and his friends begin singing “Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey,” a song McCartney and his wife Linda had turned into a hit.

The suite was the scene of a memorable exchange mentioned by famed rock critic Robert Christgau in his 1980 eulogy for Lennon, in The Village Voice. Christgau described visiting with Lennon and Starr at the Hotel Syracuse on the day of the party in 1971 and how Starr grew weary of waiting for room service. Lennon advised Starr to tell the hotel he was a Beatle and that he wanted his food in a hurry.

“You’ve got the fame,” Lennon said in a quote that included a profanity. “You might as well get something out of it.”

Riley, the businessman who became a hero in Syracuse by restoring the hotel, says it is hard to put the power of that Beatles history into words. The building has hosted presidents, famed entertainers, great athletes, fabled writers. But the presence of Lennon, Ono and Starr, Riley says, gave the place a spiritual resonance “that goes beyond musical culture.”

Starr has returned to Syracuse for other performances since that 1971 party. George Harrison died of cancer in 2001, at 58. As for Lennon, he had such fond memories of his stay in suite 830, May Pang told The Post-Standard, that he’d eventually suggest to McCartney that they someday meet in Syracuse to work as musical partners, once again.

Almost a half-century later, that reunion is an impossibility. It is what McCartney himself, once he arrives here, might describe as “one sweet dream.”

Charles V. Willie, at left, is awarded the Chancellor’s Citation Lifetime Achievement Award by Chancellor Kent Syverud during the One University Awards Ceremony Tuesday. Photo by Steve Sartori

Charles and Mary Sue Willie took a casual ride around Syracuse early this week with their daughter, Sarah Susannah Willie-LeBreton, chairwoman of sociology and anthropology at Swarthmore College.

Mary Sue and Chuck Willie, as everyone calls him, traveled here from Massachusetts. They drove past Grace Episcopal Church, where they met almost 60 years ago. They idled in front of a beautifully restored home on Allen Street once owned by Mary Sue’s parents. They talked about a long-gone billiards hall, near campus, where Willie and the late Bill Mangin, an anthropology professor, used to shoot pool during lunch.

Their drive brought them back to campus, and past Sims Hall. Willie was a groundbreaking sociologist, a champion of social justice whose areas of research included desegregation, urban struggles and family life. In 1965, Willie helped arrange for a visit from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., a close friend from their days together at Morehouse College. Willie gave the introduction before King spoke at the old Sims dining hall.

In those remarks, Willie described King as a “suffering servant” and—less than three years before King was assassinated—prophetically called him “a marked man,” his life at risk because of his work for racial equality.

Willie also made this promise: If he ever had a son, he’d name him Martin—both for King, who sought justice and peace between blacks and whites, and for Martin Buber, a philosopher who was an early advocate of a shared state for Israelis and Palestinians in the Middle East.

Chuck and Mary Sue Willie and their daughter, Sarah Susannah Willie-LeBreton

After that speech, Mary Sue recalled, the Willies escorted King back to Syracuse Hancock Airport. As he waited for his plane, King looked at Mary Sue and gently asked if she was pregnant, then leaned over and gave her a kiss. The Willies hadn’t realized it, but King was right.

Mary Sue would give birth to a son. His name is Martin.

The couple was in Syracuse for Tuesday’s “One University Awards” at Hendricks Chapel, an hourlong celebration of academic and civic accomplishments. There was a spontaneous and passionate response to Willie, 89, when he received the chancellor’s Lifetime Achievement Award.

During a quarter-century of study, teaching and administration at Syracuse, he served as chairman of sociology and a vice president for student affairs. He left for Harvard, continuing a career in which he wrote or edited more than 30 books and published more than 100 articles.

He also twice invited King, his old friend, to give speeches in Syracuse. King offered a resonant warning, another prophecy, about the generational damage that would be done if Northern cities failed to integrate their schools. When a tape of the 1965 speech was finally discovered two years ago—including Willie’s powerful introduction, and his vow to name a son after King—Mary Sue turned it into a CD, and sent it out with their Christmas cards.

Tuesday, when Willie walked to the front of Hendricks to be honored by Chancellor Kent Syverud, he offered a thought that brought reverent laughter from the crowd:

“You live long enough,” Willie said, “and something good’s going to happen.”

His presence was electric. The audience rose in long and sustained applause.

The reception left Willie recalling his career at the University. He brought up the moment in 1970 when he heard out the concerns of the “Syracuse Eight,” a group of African-American football players who refused to play until the team made changes to promote racial equality.

Willie-LeBreton said it was all part of her father’s quiet dedication as vice president of student affairs. She remembers his patient concern when the phone would ring, late at night, calls often informing him of students in crisis situations.

“My dad was here during some rocky times,” said Willie-LeBreton, a sociologist who said she was inspired by her father. Both Mary Sue Willie and her daughter remembered a campus protest in May 1970, when upset students took over the administration building.

They locked the door to prevent authorities from getting in, so Willie and Syracuse Police Chief Thomas Sardino entered through a window. They spent hours talking to the students, helping to defuse the situation without violence.

Mary Sue laughed. She said one student told her husband he’d never spent so much time with a professor in his life.

It all went back to a style Willie-LeBreton said her parents modeled at home: “They knew conflict didn’t have to be a stopping point,” she said. They were listeners who’d learned through their own experience how to deal with cruelty and thoughtlessness.

Chuck Willie is African-American. Mary Sue Willie is white. They met in the choir at Grace Episcopal, after Mary Sue showed up to sing as a favor for a friend, the director of the choir. Mary Sue said she was quickly drawn to Willie’s kindness and integrity. They were married in 1962, at Riverside Church in New York City.

Their love was an act of courage. At the time, interracial marriage was still outlawed in many states, Mary Sue said. What is commonplace today could be volatile then. There were still states in the South they could not venture into as a couple.

Mary Sue said her husband had a simple response: He believed in grace, in dignity, “that you don’t meet stares with an angry look.”

They persevered as the culture gradually caught up to them. They raised three children, Sarah, Martin and James, who did his graduate work at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs. Willie established himself as a skilled writer and a powerful speaker, a gift he shared with King: Mary Sue said they were both inspired by Benjamin Mays, a legendary minister and educator who was president of Morehouse during their college days.

It becomes impossible to forget, upon speaking with Willie, just how young King was when he was killed. Born in 1929, King was more than a year younger than Willie, his college friend.

As for Willie, he went on to a distinguished career in sociology at Harvard, where he maintains an office as a professor emeritus. Still, he clearly found deep meaning in his return to Syracuse. In a written message this week, he reflected on how the University is “where I made thousands of friends and learned hundreds of lessons about reform and rebellion, redemption and reconciliation.”

He was raised in Texas, during a time of harsh Jim Crow segregation. Education was his means of ascent, his best chance at equality. It would bring him to Syracuse University, where he spent 25 years. During a time of vast American change, he would meet his wife, start a family and launch an unforgettable career.

Syracuse, said Mary Sue, “is where he really feels that he grew up.”

After the awards, at a reception, the Willies settled in at a table to accept a stream of hugs and greetings. Cameron MacPherson, a senior football player whose academic achievements helped him earn a student-athlete award, was among those who made a point of shaking Willie’s hand.

MacPherson told Willie, “This is a better place because of you,” eight words that were another way of saying:

Welcome home.

Ericka Jones-Craven

Ericka Jones-Craven grew up with a deep presence in the church. Jones-Craven’s father was an Apostolic elder. Her mother served as a missionary. Attending worship services was a regular part of Jones-Craven’s Georgia childhood.

That ended, at least for a while, when Jones-Craven arrived at Syracuse University. For the first time, with full control of her own schedule, Jones-Craven drifted away from the routine of the church. That decision initially seemed to be a burst of freedom.

Yet she gradually realized it left a void in her college experience. Jones-Craven became involved with the Black Celestial Choral Ensemble, a student gospel choir at Syracuse University. The music—and the deep friendships—now play a major role in the joy she finds at Syracuse.

“The church had been such a huge part of my life,” Jones-Craven says, “and I definitely missed it.”

That sense of absence led to her presentation at last week’s 2017 McNair Research Symposium, where about 25 students gave summaries of their projects for the Ronald E. McNair Post-Baccalaureate Achievement Program. The effort is part of a federal TRIO program named for Ronald McNair, an American astronaut killed in the 1986 explosion of the space shuttle Challenger.

McNair was the second African-American astronaut to travel in space. He also earned a Ph.D., at 26, in laser physics. Lauren Malloy, McNair program coordinator at Syracuse, says the initiative is intended to support and instruct ambitious young women and men from struggling and marginalized communities, students with the vision and potential to go on to graduate studies.

In many instances, particularly for young people in the first generation to attend college, that kind of future might not seem to be a practical reality. The whole emphasis of the effort, inspired by McNair, is providing students with a greater chance of fully appreciating and pursuing scholarly opportunities.

“We want to help them achieve their goals, to go to a level they might not have believed they can reach,” Malloy says.

This year’s projects represent a wide expanse of academic curiosity. The summaries included such topics as the impact of preschool philosophies on the way children acquire language and literacy; whether sex education in high school affected the behavior of African-American students at Syracuse; and an exploration of identity among Dominican women who are choosing to embrace their natural hair.

Jones-Craven, 22, called her project “Let it be,” and described it as an examination of traditional gospel values. She set up four speakers in a gallery space at the Shaffer Art Building, and began playing “Total Praise,” a gospel recording made by the Black Celestial Choral Ensemble.

She watched the reactions of students who unexpectedly came upon her presentation, then asked them a series of questions regarding their response. Jones-Craven wanted to know if the music triggered a comforting feeling and made them feel welcome.

She asked whether they consider themselves spiritual, religious, neither ….

Or both.

The most common answer: About 36 percent of the students described themselves as “spiritual,” even if many no longer attend traditional services. That both matched Jones-Craven’s own experience and seemed to fit larger cultural trends. As one young man told her: “I don’t look outside of my mind to see spirituality. It’s within me.”

Jones-Craven, who has a double major in art photography and religion, describes the McNair program as life-changing. One of the goals for each student is seeking out a mentor. Marcia Robinson, a professor in the Department of Religion, has become such an important influence that Jones-Craven describes her as “a second mother. She’s always pushing me to do more.”

Her confidence during the presentation was another benefit. “I grew up as kind of a shy kid,” Jones-Craven says. “It was hard to break out of that shell, but this has really helped prepare me to be a professional, to be a scholar.”

Hatou Camara, 21, a senior majoring in anthropology and citizenship and civic engagement, went into city neighborhoods to frame the questions for her presentation. She calls the project “Where are you really from? Exploring modes of integration and negotiation of cultural identity among emerging adult refugees in Syracuse.”

Hatou Camara

Camara’s parents were born in The Gambia. Their children grew up in New York City, in a Bronx neighborhood that attracted many immigrants. Camara has witnessed the struggles faced by newcomers once they arrive, “all the people who make you feel as if you don’t belong.”

She says questions of cultural identity have only intensified during the Trump presidency. Camara decided to make those issues the focus of her work within McNair. Through her research, she learned that Syracuse, as of 2012, had a refugee community of 12,000 people.

It is important, she says, for students to understand neighborhoods beyond the campus. Camara traveled several times to the North Side Learning Center, which provides services in Syracuse for immigrants and refugees. Building on those connections, she found a group of young men and women willing to speak about the way they see themselves, about whether their goal is meshing with the larger culture, hanging onto their cultural identities …..

Or walking a tightrope, between the two.

One young man told Camara that he lost several relatives to violence in his homeland. To sacrifice his culture, he maintained, would represent turning his back on them. A young woman spoke of how being seen as an outsider often is not truly her choice: She recalled a potential employer who acted skeptical that she was an American citizen, and demanded proof.

The young woman went home and picked up the documentation—then told her interviewer she didn’t want the job.

Camara says her parents left a farming community in The Gambia to come to New York. They raised their children—including Camara’s older sister, Kujegi, a Princeton graduate—on the assumption and belief they could succeed in college.

Since early childhood, Camara has understood the tangled road and contradictions of assimilation. Her own history provided a bedrock for her research, and her point in the end is a fundamental one:

Many families arrive here “coming from a life of hardship in refugee camps,” Camara says. Almost immediately, they face the challenge of learning to live separate lives, in different worlds. The McNair initiative gives Camara a chance to test her gut beliefs and observations against her own research, and then to shape a larger scholarly response.

Jones-Craven, who expects to eventually attend graduate school, also sees the program as a revelation.

“I never really thought that I’d be doing this kind of research,” she says. “But I love learning, and McNair has helped me in a lot of creative endeavors. It really offers a platform if you want to learn.”

Kathrine Switzer running in the 1967 Boston Marathon, just after a race official tried to force her out of the race, which was not open to women. Photo credit: Brearley.com

For Kathrine Switzer, a pivotal moment in running history really began with a challenge in a snowstorm.

She was a student at Syracuse University in December 1966 when she went on a long run with Arnie Briggs, a Syracuse letter carrier who also served as her coach. As they often did, they spoke as they ran about the many times that Briggs had conquered the Boston Marathon.

As Kathrine recounts in her memoir, she said to him: “Oh, let’s quit talking about the Boston Marathon and run the damn thing!”

The problem: At that time, women were still barred from the race. Briggs replied that women were “too fragile” to complete a marathon. Switzer wasn’t buying it. When she fiercely responded that she was capable of running 26 miles, Briggs told her—once she proved it—he would take her to Boston.

Kathrine Switzer running with her coach Arnie Briggs, far right, in 1972. Photo provided by Switzer.

This week, a half-century later, officials in Boston announced they’ll retire Switzer’s bib number from the 1967 race, making her only the second person in the history of the event to earn that honor. The other number belonged to John Kelley, who ran Boston 61 times.

Switzer, now 70, became an elite marathon runner and an inductee into the National Women’s Hall of Fame in Seneca Falls. Monday, she will be among tens of thousands of runners who go to the starting line in Boston.

Fifty years after she shattered a ban on women runners by entering that famous marathon—and then finishing, even after race manager Jock Semple tried to drag her from the course—she will be a center of attention for world media, thanks to all she proved as a 20-year-old student at Syracuse.

“She has no idea how important she really was,” says Lennie Tucker, a friend of Switzer’s, a longtime runner and track official in Central New York—and a woman who recalls a time, not so long ago, when she rarely saw other female distance runners training on country roads.

“Kathrine had to invent the role she played,” Tucker says. “She had to become something many people couldn’t possibly see. She made people realize she had a mind, and she could run, and she could be free.”

Switzer made her epic run in the company of Briggs, a letter carrier and a World War II veteran who for years was a kind of running institution at the University.

This week, through publicist Laura Beachy, Switzer recalled how she’d “wanted to run Boston ever since I first heard of it.” Briggs, she says, embraced that potential. He provided the impetus with his challenge, then was at her side at the race.

He died in 2000, at 84, but Switzer says he’s “been on my mind every day for the last two years as I have been doing my training, and I’ve been talking to him a lot and asking him advice and asking him to help me in the race.”

Even before Briggs met Switzer, he was a pioneer in the Central New York running community. Bruce Laidlaw ’54 recalls going to the old Roosevelt Field in Syracuse for a workout in 1949, and meeting Briggs and the late Joe Ficcaro for the first time while they ran on a cinder track at that high school complex.

Kathrine Switzer finishes the Boston Marathon in 1975 doing her personal best: 2:51.37. Photo credit: Jeff Johnson

Laidlaw was impressed. They were running distance, he says, “at a time when people didn’t run. In those days, if you ran distance in shorts, dogs barked and people came out on their porches to look.” Briggs once told Laidlaw he made good use of running when he served as a paratrooper during the war, and had to survive on wits and stamina.

After Briggs came home to Syracuse, Laidlaw says, “He WAS the running community.”

He also became a regular presence, a guiding force and coach, around the track for decades at the University. He would quietly adopt and encourage younger runners—as he did years later, with Switzer.

“Everyone loved him,” says Tom Coulter, who ran on a national championship cross country team at Syracuse in 1951 and later became an Olympic boxing coach. Jerry Smith, another veteran runner in the region, describes Briggs as “a wonderful guy, the kind of runner who understood that if you have a chance to give back, it’s what you do.”

Tom Homeyer of Tully, a Central New York running legend who is preparing to tackle Boston for the 48th time, calls Briggs “a man well ahead of his time, an inspiration for all of us.” Briggs ran Boston 24 times, and in 1952 finished 10th in the race.

Homeyer, like so many others, recalls the power of the bond between Briggs and Switzer, the joy Briggs found in watching Switzer ascend and succeed. Homeyer remembers seeing them when they’d all cross paths during runs in the countryside. It was long before the time of sleek all-weather running clothes, and Briggs and Switzer would be wearing baggy gray Syracuse University sweat suits.

Bruce Laidlaw at Roosevelt field, where he met Arnie Briggs almost 70 years ago.

Briggs was evangelical about running, a quiet pioneer. Maybe he sensed—on some intuitive level—how Switzer would be at the forefront of an explosion of interest in women’s running.

“He was her mentor,” Coulter says. “She really helped him and he really helped her.”

By race day in 1967, Switzer had made her point with relentless training. Briggs was no longer skeptical. In Switzer’s memoir, she recounts how Briggs drove her to the marathon, accompanied by her boyfriend of the time, Tom Miller, who threw the hammer for the University track team, and John Leonard, who ran cross-country at Syracuse. Before the race, Briggs picked up the packet with her number and name, simply marked down as “K. Switzer.”

They were among 741 runners at the starting line. The first few miles went without incident. But at mile four, an angry Semple chased after Switzer, then tried to grab her number and drag her from the race. “Tiny, brave Arnie,” as Switzer described him in her memoir, did his best to intervene—until Miller knocked Semple out of the way with a full-blown block.

A race official is blocked by Thomas Miller as the official attempts to forcibly remove Kathrine Switzer from the Boston Marathon on April 19, 1967, in Hopkinton, Massachusetts. Photo credit: Boston Herald

Photos from that moment would make Switzer a legend. After that, it all came down to the purpose that brought Switzer to Boston:

She bore down and finished the race.

This week, she serves as a living international symbol of how women athletes have emerged in the last 50 years—and by running the marathon again, she offers a statement on how youth and fitness are not based on age, but on state of mind.

Yet she often thinks of the first and most important mind she changed, belonging to a letter carrier from Syracuse named Arnie Briggs.

“He was the most totally generous and giving person I have ever met, and it wasn’t just me he helped and encouraged,” Switzer says. “It was many, many people …. who really needed guidance, sheltering and encouragement.” This was the kind of human being, she says, who would go to a race and coach, work the gate and clean up litter afterward, which is why the Syracuse Chargers Track Club created an “Arnie Briggs Good Guy Award.”

Briggs, a working guy who loved running, made time to train alongside a young woman who’d help transform the running world. When you have a longtime running companion, Switzer explains, there is an almost spiritual communion to the miles of silence. Your friend becomes “an ongoing memory, sort of like a shadow when you run.”

In that sense, Briggs will again be at her side Monday, in Boston.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Kathrine Switzer will return to Syracuse on April 25 to serve as keynote speaker for the Women Igniting the Spirit of Entrepreneurship (WISE) symposium. Her talk, titled “Breaking Barriers,” will wrap in both her professional and personal triumphs—including the historic marathon.��

Hank Greenwald

Opening day has always mattered to Hank Greenwald ’57.

In his early childhood in Detroit, just after World War II, he felt the electricity when his hometown Tigers opened the baseball season at the legendary ballpark known then as Briggs Stadium.

Later, after his family moved to Rochester, New York, he’d sometimes ask permission to play hooky from school so he could show up as the Rochester Red Wings, a minor league club, began a new campaign.

He left Rochester to attend Syracuse University, where he studied to become a broadcaster. He remembers how he and a close friend, Jerry Hoffman, would do the play-by-play for WAER, the campus radio station, when the University still had a baseball team that played at the long-gone Lew Carr Field.

Greenwald went on to become a nationally renowned broadcaster with the San Francisco Giants, a guy whose first game with San Francisco in 1979 was on opening day for the entire Major Leagues, in Cincinnati.

Every sports journalist who’s experienced baseball in April knows exactly how he felt. Conditions were cold and raw, dropping to 38 degrees. The concrete floor beneath his feet felt like ice. The only extra heat available came from a small hair dryer. Greenwald couldn’t wait to warm up, after the game.

Still, it was opening day—not only to a season but to a legendary career.

At 81, he is retired, and he walks with a cane because his “legs are shot.” The Giants will open up Sunday against Arizona, on the road. Greenwald will watch that game with his wife, Carla, from their San Francisco living room. He said he still makes it to occasional games at AT&T Park, sitting with other retired writers and broadcasters in what he calls—in classic low-key humor—“the assisted living section” of the press box.

At home or at the ballpark, one thing hasn’t changed:

“Opening day,” he says, “is still a big day.”

Some of that was built during his years in Syracuse. “He might not say it, but he always thinks of Syracuse as his hometown,” says Hoffman, retired chief executive officer of the Onondaga County Medical Society. “Hank loves it here.”

Greenwald handled play-by-by for University baseball games and would later do some games with the Syracuse Chiefs, the city’s International League team. It was often gray and overcast for April baseball in Central New York, but the meaning of opening day—now and then—was not about the weather at the time:

What mattered was the promise.

In Syracuse, the snowiest big city in the nation, the return of baseball always signaled that warmer days were surely coming.

As for San Francisco? “I always explain the weather this way,” Greenwald says. “In the winter, the good news it’s always somewhere around 58 to 62 degrees, and the bad news is it’s exactly the same way in the summer.”

He graduated from Syracuse in 1957—football legend Jim Brown was a classmate—and he expects to be in town twice this year. This summer, he’ll travel to Cooperstown for the induction ceremonies for the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum. The late Bill King, a friend who partnered with Greenwald when they did play-by-play for Golden State Warriors basketball games, earned baseball’s Ford C. Frick Award for his work as the longtime voice of the Oakland Athletics.

On his way home, Greenwald will stop to see Hoffman, a ’57 classmate who still lives in greater Syracuse. They’ll talk about their plans for the coming autumn, when they’ll be together for their 60th class reunion. The Greenwalds have already booked a room in the Marriott Syracuse Downtown, the new name for the restored Hotel Syracuse.

“I was thrilled to hear it reopened,” Greenwald says. “Boy, if you were in college and you had a meeting at that hotel: That was the place.”

Hank Greenwald

Greenwald’s been around for a little of everything in his broadcasting career. Sixty years ago, he and Hoffman routinely broadcast Syracuse high school football games, from the old Roosevelt Field. But they also followed the Orange men’s basketball team that made a run deep into the NCAA playoffs, before that squad lost to North Carolina, the eventual national champions. After graduating, Greenwald ��returned to Syracuse in the early 1960s to work for WOLF radio.

He broadcast some games for the old Syracuse Nationals of the National Basketball Association, until the Nats left in 1963 to become the Philadelphia 76ers. In Syracuse, the Nats were the last of the NBA’s true small market teams, and it was clear to most observers that their days were numbered.

“It was like having a friend you know is dying,” Greenwald says, “but it’s still a shock when it happens.”

He also called five seasons of Syracuse University football games, including the 1961 Heisman Trophy season of Ernie Davis, lost as a young man to leukemia. Almost 60 years later, with full appreciation of Davis as both an athlete and a human being, Greenwald speaks of that ‘61 season with reverence:

“It was a privilege,” he says.

He developed his skills on campus at WAER, where he built friendships that have lasted for his entire life. His time as a broadcaster in Syracuse gave him a unique bond to both the campus and the city. He has heard, for instance, of all the impending changes surrounding Marshall Street, and he says he can accept them, depending on one thing:

“Just so long as The Varsity’s still there,” Greenwald says.

With baseball, the connection is especially intimate. Greenwald’s true first name is Howard, but he couldn’t stand being called “Howie.” He began going by “Hank” because he was a Jewish kid from Detroit when Hank Greenberg, one of the few Jewish players of the time, was an icon with the Tigers.

Greenwald went on to do baseball play-by-play while the game was still played at the University, baseball for the Chiefs from the old and rickety MacArthur Stadium in Syracuse, baseball for the old Hawaii Islanders of the Pacific Coast League, baseball for a couple of years with the Yankees ….

And he turned into part of the Bay Area fabric with the Giants, at Candlestick Park.

It was a miserable place for the game, Greenwald recalls, so windy that “you would see guys rubbing their eyes as they stood there in the batting box, and those kind of conditions, after a while, take a toll.” In that atmosphere, it was his job to be reflective and philosophical and simply very funny.

“Hank always, always had a great and original sense of humor,” Hoffman says.

He made the call when the Giants finally won the National League pennant in 1989, for the first time in 27 years. He remembers the earthquake that disrupted the Bay Area World Series, in which Oakland knocked off San Francisco.

“The fact that Candlestick survived,” Greenwald says, “was a bit of a disappointment.”

At 81, he has been around long enough to see all the great changes in baseball: He remembers the Dodgers and Giants going west, to California. When he was born, there were only 16 teams in the majors, a number that has almost doubled. He remains skeptical about such innovations as the designated hitter rule and the interleague play that Greenwald sees as pointless and often unfair.

And yet, above all else, baseball remains baseball. “It’s still only 90 feet between the bases,” he says. He insists any honest observer must admit that the abilities of today’s players are off the charts, that the greatest athletes to ever play the game now walk the field.

It was always his job to study them, to gently reflect on their idiosyncrasies, on their routines. Sometimes they could seem aloof, grown men doing their job, veterans who saw baseball primarily as a business. But in April, for one sweet game, all of that would change. Greenwald would see any pretense fall away as the players joyfully assembled in the dugout.

Even tough guys felt the magic, on opening day.

The Syracuse Chiefs, the longtime International League club that Greenwald remembers with great fondness, open their season Thursday, April 6, with a 2:05 p.m. game against the Rochester Red Wings at NBT Bank Stadium.

Roula Jneid, who escaped the conflict in Syria to study at the College of Law

Violette Khabbaz, silent, is listening to a conversation on a March afternoon. Sunlight pours through a window and illuminates her face as she leans across the counter of the Byblos Mediterranean Café, the restaurant she operates on North Clinton Street in downtown Syracuse.

One of her employees, Liqaa Al Dulaimi, is having coffee with a friend, Roula Jneid. It is a precious but routine moment in the restaurant business, a gentle lull between bursts of customers that brings an instant of warmth, of relaxed fraternity.

Yet there is nothing routine about the respite that Jneid and Khabbaz help provide for Al Dulaimi.

For Jneid, Syracuse is a place of safety, of asylum, from the violence and chaos in Syria. The 2015 graduate of the College of Law now works with Refugee Resettlement Services in Syracuse, an arm of Catholic Charities of Onondaga County.

Her official position is called an “employment specialist,” but her true role is more expansive. She met Al Dulaimi shortly after the 22-year-old arrived in Syracuse. Al Dulaimi is from Iraq. Her parents had both been killed during the war. As a refugee, Al Dulaimi found herself alone in an American city where few people spoke her language, a city whose wintry conditions were the opposite of the heat and sun she’d known while growing up.

Jneid speaks Arabic. At the Refugee Resettlement offices, her ease with the language gave her a bond with Al Dulaimi.

“She is tough,” Jneid says, “and I like tough.”

Al Dulaimi needed a job. Jneid had heard that Khabbaz, a native of Lebanon, has a big heart and is willing to give refugees a chance. Jneid called and asked Khabbaz if she might hire Al Dulaimi, at the restaurant.

Khabbaz agreed. Now, whenever Al Dulaimi begins a shift, Khabbaz quizzes her about her life in Syracuse. Al Dulaimi has earned her driver’s license. She dreams of becoming a nurse. Khabbaz wants to know all about it, about her schedule, about her plans to attend Onondaga Community College in the autumn.

“She is more like a mom to her,” Jneid says of Khabbaz.

To Jneid, building those connections goes to the core of her job:

She knows exactly how it feels to seek a new life, in a new world.

For many reasons, Jneid is careful about discussing the conditions she fled in Syria. Her parents are still there, and their safety is her primary concern. But Jneid also has relatives in Syracuse. When she was a child, her family often visited this city.

In the early days of the civil war, Jneid did not believe the violence would get close enough to be a threat. Like her father, she was a lawyer. Their life was routine, pleasant, without incident.

“Syria,” she says, “had always been very safe.”

That changed, in a fast and terrifying way. Families they knew began losing relatives in the bloodshed. In 2011, Jneid came to Syracuse to join her brother Fares, then a student at the University. She saw it as a reprieve. She believed the war would peak and recede, that she would soon be able to return.

Instead, her homeland turned into a global crucible of suffering.

Jneid’s training in the law meant nothing in her new home. In Syracuse, she had to start over. She took a job as a jewelry specialist at the J.C. Penney Co. As it became clear to her that she could not go back to Syria, she went through what she describes as an emotional struggle.

Everything turned around because of a spontaneous decision. One day, on the urging of her siblings, she decided to visit the College of Law. She did not call beforehand. She did not do any research to see if there might be opportunities. Joined by her sister Mira, Jneid simply walked in the front door and asked if any programs might be available for students from overseas.

Andrew Horsfall, executive director of international programs and initiatives at the College of Law, (left) and Roula Jneid, a Syrian who sought his help to earn a law degree, at Biscotti’s Cafe in Syracuse

By sheer luck, Andrew Horsfall happened to be at his desk.

“I’m the right guy,” he told her, after hearing her story.

Horsfall is executive director of international programs and initiatives at the College of Law. He recalls how he was stunned by Jneid’s “awful and powerful” account of going from “what seemed like a full and robust life in Syria to suddenly having it all turned upside down.”

Still, he was also “struck by Roula’s determination to take her experience as a lawyer and as a refugee to become a more productive member of her community here in Syracuse.” He told her about the Open Society Foundation’s Civil Society Leadership Award.

That scholarship program, Horsfall says, “promotes the Rule of Law, human rights and capacity-building programs in the U.S. and abroad through funded study opportunities.”

He saw Jneid as a perfect candidate. He guided her through the application process, which took almost a year. Despite Jneid’s background, there was no guarantee she’d be successful.

The moment when she learned that she’d been accepted, she says now, will always rank as one of the pivotal days in her life.

“From the beginning, she’s been a person who survived and prevailed,” says Arlene Kanter, founder and director of the College of Law’s Disability Law and Policy Program.

Kanter has worked with many international students. She says Jneid was historically important at Syracuse: She was the first survivor of the Syrian civil war to study in the College of Law, “and she opened an entire world for all of us about the inadequacy of the humanitarian response to international crises.”

From Jneid, Kanter says, “I learned so much more about the Syrian conflict than I ever knew.” Jneid’s accounts of the plight of women—as well as her descriptions of Syrians with disabilities, isolated by the conflict—were so raw that it “makes it hard to sleep at night,” Kanter says.

She reserves her greatest admiration for the way Jneid commits herself to helping refugees, not only from Syria but from other nations traumatized by war. Kanter remembers when Jneid would collect used clothing at the College of Law to distribute to newcomers in Syracuse. She admires her “sense of responsibility and obligation to serve her community.”

As for Jneid, she carefully avoids discussing politics. She acknowledges that she worries about attempts to impose a new American travel ban for citizens of six predominately Muslim nations, including Syria. She is afraid to leave this country to visit her family overseas, out of concern that she might not be able to return.

For now, she dedicates herself to helping refugees like Al Dulaimi. Her job with the Refugee Resettlement Program on the city’s North Side involves making it easier for newcomers—often men and women who had high-skill jobs in their homelands—to find productive work. She understands the frustration of going from a place where your profession is your identity, your means of self-esteem, into a culture where so many doors seem closed to you.

“Roula is very self-motivated and very positive,” says Felicia Castricone, program director at Refugee Resettlement. “Simply that she’s from Syria—that she understands the language, and the experience, and knows what Syrian refugees are going through—that’s very valuable to us. There’s a rapport there the rest of us just can’t achieve.”

Jneid says she has found her calling in the work. “When you help this population, when you meet them, their stories live with you,” she says. She is drawn to such refugees as Al Dulaimi, the young woman from Iraq whose innate resilience is a quality Jneid sees as an inspiration.

She intends to eventually take the American bar exam and return to practicing law. She expects she will specialize in helping refugees, an opportunity she sees as a gift.

“When you do good, you feel good,” Jneid says.

Kanter, her friend and professor, says Jneid has “amazing legal skills and is an amazing writer, researcher and thinker.” She looks forward to the day when Jneid brings the same insight and compassion to the courtroom that she now shares with refugees in Syracuse.

“Her clients will not only have the most talented legal help imaginable,” Kanter says. “They’ll be represented by an extraordinary human being.”

“Life-changing,” said Skaller, a Syracuse University senior majoring in music.

Skaller is a student peer educator. She works closely with Michelle Goode, a University specialist whose focus is preventing sexual and relationship violence. Katz’s appearance at Le Moyne was part of his two-day visit during the 23rd annual White Ribbon Campaign in Central New York.

Coordinated by Vera House—an agency that provides comprehensive services in response to sexual and domestic violence—the campaign is led by Central New York men. It involves what Vera House executive director Randi Bregman and men’s outreach coordinator George Kilpatrick both describe as a fundamental mission: Every participant takes a vow against committing, condoning or remaining silent about domestic abuse and violence.

In a sense, the entire Katz presentation was based on that fundamental premise. On the Syracuse campus, the peer educators spend hours trying to build on that awareness. It is why Goode brought a carload of students to hear Katz speak about an epidemic of heartbreak whose scar tissue, he emphasized, is not limited to women and children.

“I’m going to argue,” he told the audience, “that these are men’s issues.”

After Monday’s presentation on preventing gender violence, renowned author and educator Jackson Katz greets Rev. Tamara Jackson, pastor of the First Baptist Church of Syracuse in Jamesville.

Katz, raised in Massachusetts, has spent a career confronting the generational damage caused by violence and abuse. He has written books, played a central role in several films, and given a TEDx talk that has had close to 1.7 million views.

Katz was an early advocate of the approach known as “bystander intervention.” He argues there is a healthy, courageous way for men to step in and change perceptions when they witness actions or remarks, even in casual conversation, that reinforce damaging stereotypes and heighten the potential for violence.

The point he emphasized Monday—and the point that Skaller found especially compelling—was the idea that American men benefit from the ripples of that intervention as much as those they are called on to defend.

“Life is short, and if we want to make a difference, we’ve got to get moving,” Katz said. He said too many men are essentially frozen into the idea that if they don’t actively engage in domestic violence, it’s not their problem.

What that attitude guarantees is that nothing will really change.

Katz contends that millions of Americans remain in denial about the powerful grip of a cultural crisis with heartbreaking repercussions. He pointed out that in 57 percent of American mass shootings in recent history, the assailant was tied to “some component” of domestic violence.

Yet that deep link is swept aside, almost forgotten, in the media storm that follows all the bloodshed, Katz said.

He used images from popular films and video games to emphasize the growing deluge of graphic violence pouring down upon American boys and girls. He spoke of how children who see violence against others in their homes are often described as “witnesses.”

In truth, he said, that trauma makes them victims.

Katz also spoke of the harsh reality that millions of American boys will themselves become the targets of violence or sexual abuse—and how that abuse makes them 10 times more likely to inflict the same wounds upon someone else. Because young men are conditioned to bury those experiences, he said, that cycle of “interpersonal violence” is far more common than many people choose to believe.

The damage, culturally, extends across generations.

“There’s no peace on the streets,” Katz said, “if there’s no peace in the family.”

That led him toward the conclusion that made such an impact on Skaller. “We need to raise the bar a little higher for what it means to be a good guy in the United States in 2017,” Katz said. He said the whole notion of strength and masculinity has been turned on its head and that manhood is too often seen as some harsh construct involving power, intimidation and a kind of emotional solitude.

In reality, Katz said, masculinity involves reflection, humility, the courage to admit mistakes and to apologize ….

And the ability to embrace and empathize with others.

That resonates with Skaller. She is part of a student effort at Syracuse University, coordinated by Michelle Goode, to build “a community that doesn’t support harassment or violence” for anyone who might feel threatened or alone.

Skaller agrees that asking young men to embrace such a philosophy does not reject the notion that manhood demands courage. Instead, it is a call for a more honest and braver form of masculinity, a variety that could transform the culture.

Seth Quam, a senior from Lombard, Ill., also accompanied Goode to Katz’s talk. Quam, a volunteer in Goode’s office, shared Skaller’s impression of “how male-perpetrated, gender-based violence is deeply destructive to men, that it traumatizes children growing up in homes with domestic violence, that it affects men who are victims of violence at the hands of other men.”

He saw truth in Katz’s reflection that the feminist movement—by casting sunlight on young victims of domestic violence, by calling for new definitions of masculinity—is not threatening to men, but instead strengthens the fundamental notion of manhood.

“All of this provides me with tools to continue conversations and activism to work to end sexual and relationship violence,” Quam said.

It was a summary of the entire White Ribbon Campaign and a summary of the purpose that brought Jackson Katz here to speak.

“He calls us to commit ourselves to much more than responding to gender violence,” said Bregman, executive director of Vera House. “He challenges us to change the culture and to use our own power to lead change.”

Linda Dickerson Hartsock holds the framed postcard message from Quinton Fletchall who brought back the postcard to Syracuse from his new home in Chicago.

Linda Dickerson Hartsock had a simple question for Quinton Fletchall. Hartsock, now executive director of Blackstone LaunchPad at Syracuse University, worked with Fletchall for a long time during his undergraduate and graduate years in Syracuse.

As director of the Connective Corridor, she was his supervisor when he took over a University-sponsored project in the city: It was Fletchall’s job to sort through what he called the “Dear Syracuse, with love” initiative. He asked students, children and other city residents to write brief postcard messages, explaining why they loved the community. Fletchall chose what he saw as the most memorable ones. They were posted on a prominent downtown billboard along West Street, where thousands of travelers could see them every day.

The idea, Hartsock says, was taking on what her students believed was a civic tendency to minimize the quiet strengths of the city. Fletchall was in charge of the project for a year. Hartsock quietly watched and admired Fletchall’s transformation, how a young man from Iowa with no connection to Central New York gradually established a passion for being here.

Fletchall came to the University at 18, with no plans to stay a day past beyond graduation. He ended up remaining in Syracuse until he was 26. Maybe a year ago, as he worked on the billboard project, Hartsock asked when he’d write his own postcard message to Syracuse.

He told her: “When I say goodbye.”

A postcard from the “Dear Syracuse, with love” initiative

Last month, Fletchall kept that promise.

He is working now with a design firm in Chicago. He left for that position because it is closer to his childhood home, and because it offered the kind of work he loves to do, and because he is in his 20s and simply wants to explore the world.

“I thought it was just time for a change,” he says. Yet he climbed on a train last month and took the 13-hour ride for a quick weekend in Syracuse. He says he needed to do it for one main reason:

He had promised to say thanks.

“If you’d talked to the 18-year-old me, and told me I was going to spend so many years in Syracuse, I would have laughed at you,” Fletchall says. “As someone not from Syracuse, I had heard a lot of negative conversation about the city. But it’s a gorgeous region. I got to see the city in a new light. It has its own aesthetic and feel, and I really enjoyed the entire experience.”

After living in the dormitories or other student housing, Fletchall eventually moved to Armory Square, a downtown neighborhood. He began to understand the larger mesh of the campus and the community surrounding it, and he fell in love with the beauty of the Finger Lakes and the Onondaga Valley.

He stayed on after earning his undergraduate diploma to complete a master’s degree in communication and rhetorical studies. He worked on the Connective Corridor and spent a summer with the Near Westside Initiative, an effort to lift up a core neighborhood in Syracuse without displacing the people who live there.

After finishing his master’s work, he launched his own design company, called “Inquiry,” and became an adjunct faculty member with the School of Design in the College of Visual and Performing Arts.

One morning, he woke up and realized he’d spent more than a third of his life in Syracuse. When the opportunity arrived in Chicago, he embraced it. Still, Fletchall saw the University—and the city itself—as transformational.

In that experience, Hartsock says, he is hardly alone.

“I think he is emblematic of an entire cohort of students who come here with a set of fresh eyes,” she says. “They see this community for what it is—this nice, warm, friendly, walkable community—and they’re eager to connect.”

Fletchall says the “Dear Syracuse, with love” project was a chance to underline the point. The goal was�� reminding people of community strengths that are easy to overlook. Asked for a favorite, he hesitates. All the messages were sincere, and some came from children, and no single one seemed more important than any other.

But if he had to choose one message as symbolic, he says, it was from a young woman named Caitlin, a message he juxtaposed on the billboard with a beautiful winter image of Clinton Square:

“Dear Syracuse:

They told me the chill of your winters would make its way into my bones, but I discovered how much warmth you had, and it has made its way into my heart.”

One of Fletchall’s favorite postcards

Last autumn, Fletchall received the job offer in Chicago. He packed up and left in January, but that moment was not his true goodbye. He had some things he needed to prepare, and he brought them back on his train ride to Syracuse. They were gifts for the friends and educators who changed his life.

For Hartsock, he brought a framed postcard she plans to hang on her office wall. She is the caretaker, but the message is really for all of Syracuse, and it gives words to a feeling shared by generations of graduates.

Fletchall wrote:

“Dear Syracuse,

“Where to begin? You have given me so much the past eight years; lifelong friendships, a home of my own and perhaps, most important of all, an amazing amount of opportunity with the greatest mentors anyone could ask for. You also helped me discover who I am and what I want to do with my life. I am so thankful for every moment I spent here.

“Now, although our paths are diverging, I know my service to you is not finished. This faithful son will be ready to answer the call. I will never forget you, and wherever I go you will always be a home to me.”

It is a love letter to an education, and a community, and the two becoming one.

Fletchall’s postcard to Syracuse

Fletchall’s postcard, second half

Bernie Custis

It was just one game in a season few remember, a furious comeback that on paper came up a little short.

Still, if you want to fully consider what Bernie Custis meant to Syracuse University, you can find a vivid capsule in a 34-28 Orange loss to Columbia University at the end of the 1948 season.

Custis, whose death last week at 88 received national attention, was a sophomore on that team. The Columbia game was the finale to Coach Reeves “Ribs” Baysinger’s two-year coaching career at Syracuse. A new head coach, Floyd “Ben” Schwartzwalder, would take over in 1949. He would lead the program for more than 20 years, a period that would reach its crescendo with a national championship, in 1959.

Yet forget wins and losses. Set against the larger landscape, what Custis accomplished at Syracuse in 1948—and for the next two seasons—was staggering. He was an African American quarterback in a nation that had yet to recognize the equality of blacks, legally or otherwise. Within the city borders of Syracuse itself, there were no public schoolteachers or police officers of color in 1948; many businesses still refused to offer services to blacks.

That was only one year after Jackie Robinson became the target of racial venom for shattering baseball’s color line with the Brooklyn Dodgers. Despite that era, Custis began the 1948 season as the 19-year-old leader of a Syracuse team that included many players much older than he was, players who returned to college on the G.I. Bill after World War II.

“Oh, Bernie,” says Mary Schiffner, 92, now of New Jersey, who remembers him with deep affection. “He was a great guy, a good quarterback, and compared to a lot of the other guys, he was very young.”

Mary is the widow of Bob Schiffner, a receiver and a co-captain on that Syracuse team. Bob was a combat veteran who served as a paratrooper in the Pacific theater. The war, Mary Schiffner says, “took our youth away, but we still lived at a fine time.” The joys of college life carried full perspective, after the sorrow of the war.

She and Bob were already married during those postwar years; one of their sons was born in Syracuse. While Bob played football, the couple lived in a prefab trailer at Skytop, part of a sprawling community of student veterans. To help make ends meet, Mary worked as a nurse in the University infirmary, and she attended many of the football games.

Mary was there, in New York City, for Bob’s last game in the season finale against Columbia. She watched as Syracuse fell far behind, before Custis led a furious comeback that came up just short.

And she remembers why her husband was so upset, once the team returned to campus.

Bernie Custis

Custis was the second African-American to play quarterback for Syracuse. The first was Wilmeth Sidath-Singh, a standout in both football and basketball. During the war, he became a pilot with the all-black Tuskegee Airmen in the segregated military, where he lost his life in a training accident.

As a pioneer at Syracuse, Sidat-Singh shouldered many burdens. In his junior season, Maryland refused to play against the Orange unless Sidat-Singh was benched. His teammates remembered how he was sometimes barred from businesses, even in downtown Syracuse, where they could get a drink or a sandwich without problems.

Ray Adams, 87, played tackle on the 1948 team. He says Custis and Horace Morris—a senior lineman who in 1946 became the first African-American since Sidat-Singh on the Syracuse varsity—were embraced by the rest of the team. Adams remembers that Custis sometimes roomed with Leon Cohen, a Jewish teammate, which led Adams to joke with them that they maintained a “temperance room,” a symbol of tolerance.

“He was a nice guy, a gentleman, unassuming,” Adams says of Custis. “And he could throw the ball 65 yards.”

As that season began, Custis was in the spotlight. While local sportswriters would occasionally refer to Custis as “dusky,” or remind readers that he was “a Negro sophomore,” most of the attention was focused on his array of skills: Even as a teenager, he was a team leader who played offense and defense, a guy who could read the field, pass, run and tackle.

All of that went on prominent display in the second half against Columbia, in front of writers from some of the nation’s largest papers. Syracuse came into the game at 1-7, a heavy underdog even though Columbia was only 3-5. The full extent of the despair was summarized by this headline in The Post-Standard: “Orange Hopes Lie in Bad Weather.”

For much of the contest, that grim outlook seemed justified. With five minutes to go in the third quarter, another Columbia touchdown put Syracuse in a deep 27-14 hole. Custis responded with an electrifying performance that nearly pulled out a victory.

Few people beyond his teammates understood the depth of his motivation, how he and Morris had been confronted with an insulting rejection in New York, only a few nights earlier.

It is closing in on 70 years since that incident occurred. When Syracuse arrived in New York City, Ray Adams says, the players walked in the front door of a fine hotel on the Grand Concourse, in the Bronx, weary and prepared to settle in for the night.

The hotel managers were startled to see Custis and Morris. Adams recalls how they told Baysinger that the rest of the team was welcome, but the hotel would not accept African-American players. “They said the two black guys can’t stay here,” Adams says. “And Ribs Baysinger said to them: ‘If those two can’t stay here, none of us stay here.’ So the management changed its tune.”

Adams says he is sure of that memory, that he was nearby when the conversation happened and hotel managers gave in. As for Mary Schiffner, she says her husband was upset when he returned from the Columbia trip. He told her that Custis and Morris were barred from staying with the team at one point, and that the players didn’t learn about it until afterward.

He told Mary that as a co-captain he wouldn’t have tolerated it, and the other players would have supported their teammates, if they’d known.

Maybe there was more than one incident before that game; Larry Martin, a retired University associate vice president, recalls how Morris once told him about a road trip where he was initially barred from a team event at a country club near New York. In any case, both stories underline the regular struggles for players of color, in 1948.

What is clear is this: The one place where Custis could make a point about full equality was on the football field. The Onondagan, the school yearbook, noted how Custis started the Syracuse comeback against Columbia by returning a kickoff 25 yards, a duty unheard of for a quarterback today. Custis then completed five passes on a long drive that carried Syracuse to a fourth-and-seven on the Columbia 10-yard-line.

Facing do-or-die pressure, Custis promptly looked for running back George Davis, who seemed to be in the end zone when he caught the ball. Orange fans were aghast when no touchdown was called, and the ball was spotted instead at the half-yard line. But Davis—who went on to be a fine high school and college coach—quickly carried it in, pulling Syracuse within six points.

With 12 minutes to play, the Orange regained possession and Custis went back to work. Often turning to the “jump pass” for which he was renowned, he made connections with Schiffner, Ed Urban and Harry Nussbaum. The Orange rolled down the field. Finally, a Davis plunge over left guard gave Syracuse a stunning 28-27 lead and a shot at the upset.

If anyone wanted to dispute the merits of an African-American quarterback, Custis—a 20-year-old playing before national media—made the arguments look ridiculous. He turned in a sequence of beautiful plays, with no room for error. Even when Columbia rallied for one last touchdown to win the game, Custis put together another drive that fell short only in the waning moments.

As Bill Reddy, sports columnist at The Post-Standard, noted afterwards:

“Metropolitan sportswriters were lavish in their praise of Bernie Custis, sophomore pass master whose passing or running set up all four of the Syracuse touchdowns.”

Those accomplishments weren’t enough to overcome racial barriers. After college, Custis decided against playing for the Cleveland Browns when he realized he’d have no chance to be a quarterback in the National Football League. Instead, he joined the Hamilton Tiger Cats of the Canadian Football League, where—as noted in The New York Times—many historians believe he was the first black quarterback in professional football’s modern history.

After football, Custis would eventually serve as an elementary school principal. But today, with the passing of so many contemporaries, his achievements in Syracuse are fading in memory. John Brown, a retired banking executive and an African-American lineman on Schwartzwalder’s 1959 national championship team, said it is critically important to remember the kind of obstacles and humiliations that such groundbreakers as Custis routinely overcame.

Their courage, Brown says, created opportunities for ongoing generations of young African-Americans. The tale about the hotel is only an illustration of the hurts they endured. It is a point Brown makes as a tribute to Custis, with hope that his perseverance will still resonate for students of color.

“I was there years later, and we heard about what a great athlete (Custis) was,” Brown says. “You look back on it—a black quarterback in 1948?—and I’m surprised they even let him play. I’m not sure the young men at Syracuse today fully understand what a Bernie Custis or a Horace Morris or a Billy Haskins or an Avatus Stone endured on their behalf.

“You look at the team now, and I’ll say this: Those guys who came up before us, they had a building block effect that helped all of us. When I hear about what they went through, all I can say: Because of them, we were lucky. They helped to bring us here.”

Tani Huddleson

Tani Huddleson finds strength by remembering the hardest point. She was barely 16, a single mother with a newborn child in Mattydale, a gritty working community just north of Syracuse. She had dropped out of high school to care for her baby, and Huddleson needed a job.

At first, no one would hire her.

That was nine years ago. She recalls one night when the power was shut off because the bill hadn’t been paid, and she had to go to an aunt’s house to shower. Today, when friends endure similar trials, when she meets young mothers who believe all ways forward are closed off, Huddleson offers this advice:

“Don’t give up.”

Those three words are not simply encouragement. They are her story.

Huddleson, 25, is a graduate student at Syracuse University. She commutes each week to spend a few days in Virginia, where she is doing an internship for the Department of Justice. She is on track to earn her master’s degree this summer in forensic science, which represents a stunning, even historic, Syracuse trajectory:

In 2012, Huddleson enrolled at University College, which offers classes for part-time students who often have other obligations. She was already working at a Dunkin Donuts in North Syracuse while raising her son, John, who had yet to start kindergarten.

Huddleson walked the stage as an undergraduate last May, which leaves Rosemary Kelly, an assistant dean, and Marsha Senior, director of the Higher Education Opportunity Program at Syracuse, to emphasize this point:

“In my memory,” Kelly says of University College, “I don’t remember a student coming here needing four years (of credits) who finished in four years.”

In other words, Huddleson—a single mother with a full-time job—took advantage of every opportunity. She used summer sessions to add credits and graduated with a double major in forensic science and psychology. University administrators cannot recall anyone else in that situation doing it so quickly. It would have been historic under any conditions, but consider this:

Her GPA was 3.7.

“She is probably the hardest-working student I’ve ever encountered,” said Suzanne Spinola, who taught Huddleson in an undergraduate drugs and behavior class and later became her research mentor—and a friend. Spinola is now a doctoral candidate whose thesis has been accepted for publication. Huddleson’s role?

Spinola’s paper lists her as co-author.

“What struck me about her was that she was always so determined, and she always followed through,” says Joey Tse, now of SUNY Oswego, who worked closely with Huddleson as her advisor at University College.

A decade ago, Huddleson was a self-described “troubled youth.” Her parents had separated, and Huddleson and her sister Sasha were raised by their mother. Huddleson said she inherited her work ethic from Kimberly Huddleson, who had a full-time day job involving medical records at a hospital and then worked two other jobs, cleaning offices and helping at a gym, at nights and on weekends.

Today, to Huddleson, her mother’s diligence is sheer inspiration. In her teenage years in Mattydale, it meant opportunity. As a little girl, she’d always earned high grades. But in middle school, she began sneaking out at night to “party” with her friends. She became romantically involved with a boy.

For a while, Kimberly Huddleson says, her daughter could get away with it. “School came easy to her,” Kimberly Huddleson says, “and she’d skip a few days and then go back in, to catch up.”

Before long, that was no longer possible. At 15, while in the 10th grade, she learned she was pregnant. The relationship with the young man didn’t last.

As soon as she could do it, she quit school to care for her son.

Looking back on it, Huddleson says, the birth nine years ago of little John Wilkins was the greatest thing that could have happened. To her, he never symbolized struggle: He represented hope. She would hold him or read to him on the nights when they were broke, when the bills seemed impossible to pay, and she made a promise:

“You won’t go through a life like this. I’m going to make your life amazing.”

At a McDonalds restaurant one night, she saw a sign that said the place was looking for help. Huddleson applied and was hired. She worked at McDonalds for a year, then a took job caring for patients with dementia at a nursing home. From there, she moved on to Dunkin Donuts, where her diligence quickly lifted her into a job as an assistant manager, a position that gave her the flexibility to follow a dream:

She could return to school.

Huddleson was 16 when she took her GED exam through Onondaga-Cortland-Madison BOCES, and aced it. A teacher, Sam Reppi, was impressed enough to tell her to investigate HEOP, which provides collegiate assistance for non-traditional students.

Tani Huddleson and son John

“You see a lot of seedlings come through here, and you encourage them, and sometimes they catch,” Reppi says. He described Huddleson as “an extraordinarily bright kid,” an example of the “superstars” coping with hard times who often enroll in GED classes.

“Think of it,” he said. “Think of what that kid had to overcome.”

At 18, Huddleson met with Mary Pagan, then with the HEOP program at Syracuse. While Huddleson had not been in a traditional classroom since her sophomore year of high school, Pagan, too, saw only potential: With her help, Huddleson enrolled in 2012 at University College and began working toward an associate’s degree.

Five years later, she is on the brink of her master’s at Syracuse University.

“I always knew she was on her way to something good, someplace big,” her mother says.

Ask Huddleson how she did it, and she’ll tell you about her legion of supporters. “There were so many people who spontaneously helped at different points in life,” she says. There was her mother, working three jobs to provide her children with their security. There was her grandmother, Kathy Huddleson, who always read to Huddleson when she was little.

Most important of all, maybe, is her new boyfriend, Joel Large. “He’s just a really good guy,” she says. Large would care for Huddleson’s son when she had classes. At the time they met, he was serving in the Army. When her own car broke down—as it often did—he would make sure she found a way to get to school.

Tani Huddelson, right, with boyfriend Joel Large and son John

The people who love her say she gives them too much credit. They’ll tell you of the years when Huddleson would go to class, then hurry home to spend as much time as she could with her little boy until she put him to bed. She’d be up by 4 a.m. to do her homework, before punching in for her shift at Dunkin Donuts.

That was her routine for four years. Now she is expecting a child with Joel, a baby she will deliver shortly after she earns a master’s degree, a baby she anticipates will be born into this future:

The single mom who could barely pay her bills at 16 is hoping for a federal job involving forensic science, a job that would allow her to follow her passion while caring for her family. Now in the fourth grade, her son John is already embracing his schoolwork, especially science, and she quietly urges him to dream big dreams.

She intends to give both her children a warm and relaxed life where bill collectors never call on weekend mornings, a life where Huddleson can read to them at leisure before they fall asleep, a life she describes with one word:

Amazing.

The funny thing is, that’s the word the rest of us apply to her.

Frank Malfitano, founder of Syracuse Jazz Fest, speaks at Biscotti’s Cafe about the influence Syracuse University had on his life. Photo by Sean Kirst.

For more than three decades, Frank Malfitano ’72 has served as executive director and guiding force behind Jazz Fest, an event he founded in greater Syracuse. Admission is free for the annual festival, which has brought some of the greatest names in jazz, rhythm-and-blues and popular music to Central New York – including such legends as Dizzy Gillespie, Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin, Dave Brubeck and B.B. King – and put them on stage.

Wednesday, at 1 p.m. in the ornate lobby of the M & T Bank in downtown Syracuse, Malfitano will reveal the featured performers for the 35th Jazz Fest, to be held June 9-10 at Onondaga Community College. Malfitano, 71, said the announcement is always a jubilant moment: “To be in a position to present artists of that caliber? It’s dream-come-true stuff.”

Born in 1945, Malfitano was the only child of Frank and Mary Malfitano. His father was a machinist, while his mother worked as a clerk at several downtown department stores. As for Malfitano, he attended SUNY Fredonia and Onondaga Community College before enrolling in 1967 at Syracuse University.

He recently sat down at the Biscotti Café on North Salina Street to reflect on what the festival means to him–and to speak about the influence of his years at Syracuse, especially the performers he saw live at the legendary Jabberwocky nightclub.

The noticeable thing missing at Biscotti’s: an iPhone. Malfitano declines to use one. He said he finds something heartbreaking about going to a concert and seeing so many people staring at a device, rather than focusing on brilliant performers, up on stage. He fears a mobile device is often a barrier against experiencing the world, as it is.

The conversation, edited for space:

Looking back on it, how important was the University in your life?

If I look at what I’m doing now …. it gave me a world-class education in regards to the greatest blues, jazz and folk artists in the history of American culture. At Jabberwocky, those were the halcyon days, man …. Big-time. I saw everybody from Mississippi Fred McDowell and Buddy Guy and Junior Wells to Taj Mahal.

The place (Jabberwocky) was small, a low ceiling, dimly lit; it really wasn’t fancy but it had its own kind of ambience. I saw Weather Report there. I saw Chick Correa there. There were so many things that left an indelible impression on me. Gil Scott-Heron …. I went on to have a lifelong relationship with Gil. At Syracuse, we saw so many illustrious people. We saw the best films, the best lectures: Timothy Leary! I met Timothy Leary.

What I remember of my days at Syracuse was mostly on the cultural side. And certainly on the athletic side. I was a big sports fan. I was part of the Manley Zoo (the raucous basketball crowd at Manley Field House) around ’72,�� but you’ve got to remember, I started in ’67. So I was at Syracuse for five years. I was hanging around Syracuse (in the mid-1960s) when Saul Alinsky was in town, because that’s where the action was …. ��I had read “Rules for Radicals,” and he was very dynamic, very smart, and he was the textbook for community organizers, and certainly that had a tremendous impact on me.

You came in with the Baby Boom.

I did. Nov. 22, 1945. Music has had a profound influence on my whole life, but Syracuse University really opened up my world to the world of music and to the world of community organizing.

The interesting thing is, I worked with Ray Charles so many times, and I worked with B.B. King on multiple occasions, and I worked with Aretha. The first time I presented Ms. Franklin, I was artistic director for the Music Hall Center for Performing Arts in Detroit. She said that when her father used to preach, when his church was being renovated, he used to preach at Music Hall. We forged a bond, and we’ve worked together 16 times since then.

Being able to work with the “Queen of Soul,” who’s generally regarded as the greatest vocalist of all time? And to be able to work with a Ray Charles, and to get to know Ray and talk music with Ray, and to be able to hang out with B.B. King? These are bonuses in life. Just to be able to present them is an honor, a privilege and a blessing, just to be able to put their artistry on stage in Syracuse.

Those are amazing moments at Jazz Fest, and it’s why I encourage people to attend every year. People might say: “Oh, I go every year, I won’t go this year.” But you’ve got to go. The reality of what’s happening is that an entire generation of ’60s giants and pioneers is leaving us, and the thing that always gets to me is when I look up at our stage on a summer’s night, and I realize: Nowhere else on planet Earth is this happening on this night except in Syracuse, N.Y., my hometown.

Do you have a favorite Jazz Fest moment?

Falling in love with my wife (Kathy Rowe) at Jazz Fest. It was 1998, our first kiss. And there were transcendent moments spiritually, musically, culturally, but I think if I had to really pinpoint one, probably the 1989 festival at Long Branch (Park), because Dizzy Gillespie came. You get to work with Dizzy, and all of a sudden you’re in the jazz stratosphere.

Is there one compelling purpose, one theme, that you see as central to�� Jazz Fest?

Look, the way we work, this is a free admission festival. And I’m more committed to it now than I’ve ever been, and I’ll tell you why: We’re rapidly morphing, transforming into a society that’s all about the haves and the have-nots, the super-rich and the very poor. The middle class is going, disappearing. But people still deserve a night out, they still deserve quality entertainment. Not everyone can pay for some enormous ticket. It’s absolute insanity, really insane, the way the cost of entertainment has skyrocketed to the point where it’s out of reach.

That’s tragic, because, basically, what are you saying? You’re saying based on economics, there’s a caste system, and you can’t see these artists. And in many cases, this art has come from the very community that can’t afford to see it. In that way, I’m a throwback, an anachronism, no doubt about it.

Regardless of comings or goings or other things I’ve been involved with, I’ve been doing Jazz Fest (in Syracuse) pretty much continually. We’re inextricably bound up with one another, synonymous with one another. If you ask me if I want it to continue, then you’re asking me if I want to continue. Of course! My spirit hasn’t waned.

But the future of the festival isn’t certain. It’s not predictable. It’s only predictable if people continue to support it on an unconditional basis, and that gets harder and harder to do.

If the support is there? I’d stay there until I die.

How about the lasting impact? The way your time at the University played out in the way you see the world?

Think about it. I’m in the music business, and I’m a community organizer who’s using music to organize the community. All of that came from my time at Syracuse University. I mean, it’s who I am today. The seeds that were sown …. I’m not just a child of the ’60s. I’m still fulfilling the mission of the ’60s.

You know, it’s funny: I spent seven years in Detroit, which is the most segregated large city in the country. Knowing that, when I took over leadership of the Detroit International Jazz Festival, I wanted to create a festival that was inclusive and inviting. Every year, festival attendance was 50/50, racially 50/50.

And look, I don’t want to have a Meryl Streep moment here, but I think it’s important for everybody in the community to get to know their neighbors – black, white, Hispanic, gay, straight, old, young – it doesn’t matter. That’s the fabric of community. That’s who we are.

But too often, I think, we’re segregated. We’re segregated by race or by gender or by age or by this or by that. The great thing about JazzFest: You’re going to see everyone in the community, and now I’m seeing people, as adults, whose parents brought them when they were little kids.

The community comes out, in a huge way. You’re likely to run into anybody at Jazz Fest and I think that’s good, and I think the music is what brings them all together, what they all have in common. Anytime that happens, you have potential for a dialogue that isn’t divided along party lines or political lines, a dialogue that really exists along human lines. And I think that’s pretty significant.

Professor Emeritus Marvin Druger and Thomas Vo watch as Jaysin Earl Lord tugs a rope that opens a gate in the roof of Holden Observatory.

, the second-oldest building on the Syracuse University campus, will open its doors at 9:30 p.m. today for a Valentine’s Day tour. If you’re lucky, if the gray clouds of February roll away for a few hours, you might be able to look through a magnificent 19^th-century telescope and catch a glimpse of the rings of Saturn.

The restored building, in itself, is a tale for Valentine’s Day. It represents a widower’s gesture of devotion to his wife, an example of all that can be done through love and faith.

That is also a truth lived out by Thomas Vo, a physics graduate student in the , and Jaysin Earl Lord, a senior physics major in the College of Arts and Sciences—two of the students who help in caring for the place.

They’ll be there tonight with Professor Emeritus , who led the drive to restore the observatory. Marvin is a legendary professor of biology at Syracuse. His wife, Pat, a longtime administrator at the University, died in 2014 from lung cancer. She loved the stars. She was fascinated by the observatory, a quirky little landmark built in 1878.

For years, the building was used for storage or offices, without public access. Pat used to wish out loud that someone would fix a gear on the broken wooden dome atop the observatory, so students could again look toward the heavens after dusk.

In her memory, Marvin made it happen. After Pat’s death, he made a donation toward doing those repairs. Chancellor Kent Syverud gave his support to restoring the entire building. , the Charles Brightman Professor of Physics in the College of Arts and Sciences, embraced the idea.

Brown has played a role in groundbreaking research about the universe. He was part of a staggering global revelation in 2015, when an international Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) group proved the existence of gravitational waves—thus confirming a prediction made by Albert Einstein in 1915.

Yet Brown also appreciates the meaning and heritage of the Holden Observatory, built in memory of Charles Demarest Holden in 1878 by his father, Erastus. The ground floor of the observatory is now called the Patricia Meyers Druger Astronomy Learning Center. First-year astronomy students gather there.

Visitors are greeted by a striking portrait of Pat, and Marvin says the building represents his greatest wish:

“Her name,” he says, “has been inscribed on this University.”

Marvin often tells this story about his wife. When they were young, in New York City, he met her a party. Afterward, out of courtesy, he decided to walk her home. He took her to the door of her apartment, then headed back to the elevator. He hadn’t asked for her phone number, or said that he might call her. If he’d gotten on the elevator, everything in his life might be different.

Instead, something told him to go back to the door. Pat was still looking for her keys. He asked if he could see her again.

She agreed. To Marvin, it was fate: They were married for 56 years.

Lord and Vo, with their shared passion for math and science, were glad to hear Marvin’s tales. They are two of the many students and researchers from around the world who participated in the gravitational waves discovery. They are also among the student caretakers assigned by the physics department to the Holden Observatory.

While they’d heard about the tale of Marvin and Pat–a tale they often shared with visitors who tour the building–they had never met Marvin face-to-face, until last week.

To no one’s surprise, they hit it off.

Marvin, as a biology professor, was famous for throwing answer keys out a classroom window to his students after final exams. He writes books that include his wry reflections on life. In an especially famous incident, he once rode a donkey across campus. At 82, he is a character, a beloved throwback, a keeper of Syracuse lore.

“The story is,” Marvin says, “that there was a line a mile long outside this building in 1939, when people lined up to get a glimpse of Mars.”

As for Vo and Lord, they are 21^st-century students who revere a 19^th-century telescope. Climb a spiral stairway to the top of the observatory, and they will show you how to tug a rope to open a gate that allows for viewing the night sky. They will pull a wooden lever, set against the wall, that causes the roof itself to move in circles. It provides room for the gleaming Alvan Clark telescope–the best technology available in the 1870s–to follow the path of a planet, or the moon.

There are fundamental relationships, Vo and Lord often explain, between the old observatory and the science behind gravitational waves. They speak of mathematics that provide the same core, the same foundation. Maybe the greatest link is the sheer wonder that brought Lord to a sidewalk in Flint, Mich., almost 20 years ago. He was a little boy, thrilled because his father gave him a new telescope.

Lord set it up. He took a look. He saw a burning white ball.

“I thought it was the moon,” he says.

Instead, it was a city streetlight.

“From there on out,” Lord says, “I never stopped looking up.”

As a teenager, he lost too many friends to violence, to despair on city streets. Lord found a way to make it out. He says the greatest single factor was the devotion of his father, Earl Greene, an electrical engineer “who put me in front of books, right away.”

Lord graduated from high school. He took a job in a General Motors plant. It was good work. He could have stayed there for the rest of his life.

“I knew there was something more I wanted to do,” he says.

He decided to go to college at Syracuse University, where the awestruck child raised in Flint is now a young man involved in a great astronomical discovery, where he is preparing to seek work in quantitative analysis on Wall Street.

Someday, he hopes to again play a role in his hometown, to offer the kind of bridge to city children that his father gave to him.

Lord describes the entire saga as “a dream,” a confluence of years of hard work and good luck. It is the same formula embraced by Thomas Vo, a doctoral student whose specialty is astrophysics. Vo was also part of the gravitational waves breakthrough; he spent two years at Hanford Observatory in Washington, where the discovery would actually occur, before he joined the physics program at Syracuse.

When he allows himself to contemplate what it means, the idea overwhelms him: The LIGO team was hunting down proof of black holes more than a billion light years away. Vo says he found his way to such a quest because his parents believed in him, because they “wanted me to chase the dream.”

Vo grew up in Seattle. As a teenager, he spent much of his time helping his mother and father run a restaurant. They were refugees. His father was a South Vietnamese soldier who fought alongside American troops. After South Vietnam fell, his parents fled and eventually made their way to America, where they set one central example for their children:

You put others first and you work, relentlessly.

“They expected me to learn,” Vo says. “They expected me to go to college.”

He honored that wish. He took a childhood passion for “Star Wars” and other movies about space and transformed that passion into a pursuit of wonder. He attended the University of Washington, became involved in LIGO, then came to Syracuse to finish his doctoral studies. He describes himself as one tiny part of the operation at Hanford, involved with “the advance hardware” that eventually helped in detecting the gravitational waves.

As for his goal in life, he frames it in this way:

“I just want to be out there, solving cool problems.”

In other words, Vo shares his dream with Jaysin Lord and Marvin Druger, a dream they’ll live out tonight at the Holden Observatory:

Every day, in all conditions, they keep looking toward the stars.

Professor Charles Willie, left, with Martin Luther King Jr.

In 1965, not so far from where Fern stood, Martin Luther King Jr. gave a speech on inequities in American education that brought more than 1,000 women and men to their feet.

Durand paused and closed his eyes. Born in Haiti, he came to this nation as a 3-year-old. He was raised in Rockland County. At Syracuse University, he nurtures dreams of building a career as both a writer and a voice actor, in animation.

He is also a young man of color, passionate about the suffering and struggle at the foundation of the American civil rights movement. The idea that King once stood in that same space, he said, left him searching to find the right words.

“I can imagine Dr. King right there, standing at a podium, waving his arms, giving his speech,” Durand said. He spoke of the riveting power of that great voice, how transcendent moments in history never really vanish.

“The memory will live on,” Durand said, “because it happened here.”

The 1965 speech is taking on renewed meaning at Syracuse University. It played a significant role in Sunday’s 32^nd annual Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. celebration at the Carrier Dome. Chancellor Kent Syverud intertwined his remarks with audio portions of the speech, the first time they were heard by a large audience in almost 51 years, since the day King himself offered those thoughts.

The chancellor spoke of the imperative of remembering the ideals of compassion, humanity and tolerance that King laid out in the address. He also praised Charles Willie, a faculty member who introduced King at the time. King was an old friend of Willie’s, who became chairman of the Department of Sociology before leaving Syracuse to join the faculty at Harvard University.

The audience at the Dome heard Willie’s haunting description of his guest: In a powerful voice, Willie said King was a “suffering servant” whose raw courage in the face of injustice made him a “marked man.”

Less than three years later, King would be killed by an assassin.

King spoke on campus twice, in 1961 and 1965. For years, the University archives had a recording of the 1961 speech, at Sadler Hall, in which King used many of the elements that he would make immortal in his 1963 speech from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.

Yet any audio record of the 1965 speech seemed lost. At the old Sims Hall dining hall, in an address that retains painful relevance, King warned his audience not to become complacent about public education in Northern cities. He spoke of how de facto segregation created “Jim Crow schools” that hurled countless African-American children onto a “human slag heap.”

Unless you are committed to changing those realities—and studies a half-century later show a pattern of deep segregation in many Northern cities—you condemn generations to lives of grief and poverty, King said.

An original transcript seemed to be the only surviving record of that speech. But two years ago, unexpectedly, researchers discovered two new recordings of the event. That 1965 visit was organized by William Wayson, a member of the University faculty at the time. In 2015, when the Syracuse Post-Standard contacted Wayson, 80, at his Ohio home, he said he still had a complete reel-to-reel tape of the speech.

Shortly afterward, Ed Galvin—now retired as the University archivist—found another copy stored in a collection of tapes transferred years ago to the archives, from Bird Library. Adding to the importance of the discovery: It turned out that King did not stick to the transcript. In the speech, he provided an unforgettable surprise.

At the end of his prepared remarks, he veered into a kind of spontaneous encore, setting aside his written remarks and building into many of the themes from his immortal speech in Washington. He ended with a line he’d already engraved in history:

“Free at last, free at last, thank God almighty, we are free at last.”

Newspaper reports say the crowd, swept away, rose and applauded.

All of that happened not far from where Fern Durand stopped last week in awe, in the area now used for gallery space. The original building, however, was known as the Sims dining hall, attached to nearby Sims Hall. Built in 1946, it was described by the Post-Standard as “probably the largest dining hall in the country and one of the largest open floors in Syracuse.”

The hall could accommodate crowds of more than 1,000. It allowed the University to stage large balls and dances on campus, events that for years had been held in halls in downtown Syracuse.

On July 15, 1965, that dining hall became a place of lasting history when King—a Nobel Peace Prize recipient who was only a few months past the landmark march at Selma—was the guest speaker during the summer session.

The dining hill still exists, but in vastly different form. By the late 1960s, Sims Hall was no longer a dormitory, and the dining hall was no longer needed. “In the early ‘70s, SU shuttered the dining hall and repurposed it as the Lowe Art Gallery,” wrote Christopher Danek, the University’s assistant director for academic facilities, in an email.

“The footprint of the Lowe’s main exhibition space is that of the original dining room,” Danek wrote. “In 1989, SU constructed the Shaffer Art Building directly abutting the west and north faces of the Lowe, ostensibly burying the former dining hall behind Shaffer’s façade.”

The actual building, then, remains connected to Sims Hall, now the home of the University’s Department of African American Studies. And the department library in Sims—“small but mighty,” in the words of librarian Angela Williams—is named in King’s honor.

She said it is “humbling” to work in a complex where King once spoke. She marveled at how his words must have echoed through the halls, how “the pitch of his voice was so captivating, the eloquence of his speech such that African-Americans feel such pride and dignity whenever you hear one of his speeches played.”

Remembering King’s presence, his command of a room, “is a timely thought,” Williams said, “when so many things can alienate us.”

As for the students who paused last week near the place where King spoke? Lark Allen, a senior studying just outside the SUArtGalleries, called the speech “an incredibly important” event that ought to be remembered.

Fern Durand was almost overwhelmed by the revelation. He said King’s life and death provide a reminder of “how sometimes you need sacrifice to make a change in humanity.” He was stunned to learn King once spoke in a place Durand has walked past countless times, without a second thought.

Andra Brown shook her head, astounded at the coincidence of being told about the speech,at that moment. The 20-year-old senior is focused on psychology and child and family studies, with a minor in African American Studies. She said the long disappearance of the tape fits the theme of a paper she held in her lap:

Too often, she said, great achievements by those with “black or brown bodies” are overlooked or set aside, historically, by the larger culture.

Yes, she said, looking toward the gallery: It’s important that people know what King said here.

To Wheatly, the photo captures the best of Syracuse.

Young men, Syracuse University students, surround Dr. Fletcher Derrick Jr. and his wife, Martha, in St. Petersburg, Russia.

“It’s a great example,” she says, “of how people are inherently good, our students are inherently kind, and that even when they’re traveling around the world, learning about the world, they have an opportunity to make a difference.”

That she came into the photograph at all was an act of utter chance. Wheatly, who arrived at the University last spring, traveled to only one away football game this year. She went to Clemson because she is the longtime friend and former colleague of president James Clements and provost and executive vice president Bob Jones—and because she wanted a first-hand look at some of that university’s groundbreaking initiatives.

She also wanted to see the football game. As she walked into the president’s box at Clemson Memorial Stadium before kickoff, she was approached by Dr. Fletcher Derrick Jr. and his wife, Martha, who uses a wheelchair. Derrick introduced himself, then handed Wheatly a copy of “Surgeon/Spy,” a book he’d written about his life. The photo served as a bookmark, on page 109.

Derrick, 83, is a trustee emeritus at Clemson. He released his book last September, he says, “and I had sort of planned that when someone from Syracuse came to Clemson, I would hand it to them in the president’s box.”

He’d waited almost a decade to share the story he told Wheatly.

Derrick is a urologist in Charleston, S.C. He is a man of high energy who routinely shows up at his office. He and Martha also love to travel. That passion is not deterred by Martha’s wheelchair, which she uses because of a serious back condition.

In June 2007—while on a trip to Estonia, Poland, Finland and Russia—they stopped in St. Petersburg to see a concert by Russian Cossacks in what Derrick describes in his book as a “gorgeous castle or manor house.”

The problem: the performance was on the top floor. To get there meant climbing a towering stairway. There was no lift or elevator for Martha to use.

There was, however, a group of young men from Syracuse University, who happened to be there for the same concert.

They noticed the couple’s plight. They told the Derricks they were studying abroad for the summer, and they offered to help in the most fundamental way. “They were young kids, strong as oxen,” Derrick says. They lifted Martha, chair and all, and carried her to the top.

When the concert was over—a memorable one, as Derrick recalls—he and his wife faced the same challenge in trying to descend.

The students saw them, and volunteered again. “They made going down very easy,” Derrick says. They carried Martha to the ground floor, where they had a brief conversation with the couple. Then they left, almost certainly unaware of the impression they had made.

“It stuck in our minds,” Derrick says. “We told the story many times.”

He made a vow: Someday, he would thank someone from Syracuse University. The chance came in November, just before the football game. Clemson’s Tigers were the winners on the field, 54-0. But the Derricks and Wheatly, the new provost, had a moment of communion.

Wheatly returned to Central New York with a copy of the book and a photo of the students. At this point, no one has been able to identify them or their particular program. If you recognize the young men in the image, or if you happened to be there that day, feel free to send an email to seanpeterkirst@gmail.com. We’ll try to put the final touch on this story. Even if, in a way, the real meaning was written at the instant it came together, in St. Petersburg.

“We’re living in very difficult times,” Wheatly says, “and sometimes one tends to get overwhelmed, to wonder about what the world is coming to.”

It is reassuring, she says, is to know that people still respond with fundamental decency at moments when it matters, at moments when others are in need. That’s what happened during a concert in Russia nine years ago, and it made an unforgettable impression on a couple from South Carolina.

Sure, Wheatly would love to learn the names of the young men in the photo. But in a way, she knows them already.

They are Syracuse.

Nanny Mary Poppins arrives in the Banks household in the musical running through Jan. 8 at Syracuse Stage (Photo by Michael Davis).

Peter Amster figures he heard the word for the first time when he was 14 or 15, a teenager in the darkness of a Long Island movie theater. He was a serious kid, already reading Sarte and Kierkegaard, but even he couldn’t resist the silliness of the whole idea:

Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.

“The song sticks to you like gum to the bottom of your shoe,” Amster says. More than a half-century later, the 34-letter word is part of the jubilant foundation of “Mary Poppins,” an Amster-directed musical that draws upon the music of the Disney film of the same name.

That production has almost sold out its six-week run at Syracuse Stage, according to Communications Director Joseph Whelan. The cast is an ensemble of professional actors and Syracuse University students, a youthful presence that in this case is especially fitting.

It turns out the first established use of the word “supercalifragilisticexpialidocious”—or at least a word that comes extremely close—was not in London, by a mysterious nanny or a chimney sweep.

Helen Herman in a 1932 Syracuse University yearbook photo (Photo courtesy of SU Archives)

It came from Helen Herman, a student at Syracuse University in 1931.

She was a student writer. She used a version of the word in a sketch for the Daily Orange, where she wrote that she created it herself. To the best knowledge of legal and linguistic experts, it is the first time the word appeared anywhere in print.

“We can’t give coinage rights to anyone,” says Ben Zimmer, a linguist and lexicographer who serves as language columnist for The Wall Street Journal. “But the first printed use of the word? That is clear.”

The credit, he says, goes to Herman.

Amster is a veteran director. As he vividly recalls, “supercal” exploded into the American consciousness in the mid-1960s. The Disney film, “Mary Poppins,” won five Academy Awards in 1965, including best music score. While “Chim Chim Cher-ee” was voted best song, the melody from the film that stuck in countless heads involved Julie Andrews and Dick Van Dyke singing about a nonsense word:

Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.

“What I came to love about it,” Amster says, “was its playfulness.” He says he approaches the song as “Sesame Street on steroids” at Syracuse Stage, a professional theater-in-residence at the University. And he has a simple reaction to the idea that a fabled word at the heart of “Mary Poppins” was used officially, for the first time, on this campus.

“Way cool,” Amster writes in an email.

If most people hear the song, smile and move on, “supercal”—and its origins—remain part of an ongoing quest for Zimmer. His passion is the genesis of words. He was curious about the provenance of “supercal,” and questions raised by his research only stoked his curiosity.

Several years ago, Zimmer spoke with Richard Sherman, now 88. Sherman co-wrote the song with his brother Robert, whose death in 2012 rekindled Zimmer’s sense that it was time to nail down the history. Richard says he and his brother heard the word for the first time in the 1930s, as children attending a camp in Pennsylvania.

Yet songwriters Barney Young and Gloria Parker sued Disney in 1965, contending they invented the word when they used a similar version in their own songs in 1949 and 1951.

They lost the case. The court essentially upheld the argument of the Sherman brothers. “It’s an American tradition to graft together different versions of many words to get longer, funny-sounding words,” says Zimmer, who believes variations of “supercal” may have floated up and down the East Coast.

Three years ago, Zimmer told the Syracuse Post-Standard about a key discovery. An archivist with the Merriam-Webster dictionary supplied him with a file on the background of “supercal,” a word that has yet to find its way into the pages of that dictionary. The file included a clipping supplied in 1965 by Harvey Fortier, a Disney librarian.

It was the 1931 piece written in Syracuse by Helen Herman, for a Daily Orange column called “A-muse-ings.” In the column, she offered a whimsical reflection about the small number of male writers at the paper.

“The general atmosphere,” she wrote, “puts me in mind of one of my pet phrases. Several years ago, I concocted an expression which, to me, includes all words in the category of something wonderful.”

A section of Helen Herman’s Daily Orange article from March 10, 1931, in which she mentions the word “Supercaliflawjalisticexpialadoshus.” (Courtesy of SU Archives)

The word, she wrote, was “supercaliflawjalisticeexpialadoshus.”

There it is. Her version was slightly different than the one used in the movie.

But for the purposes of Disney, trying to prove that “supercal” had been around long before 1949, it was close enough.

Zimmer wrote a piece about that discovery for the Boston Globe. It was spotted by Beth Hanson-Galvin, whose husband Ed, now retired, was then director of archives and record management for Syracuse University. The column offered a resolution to a long search on the top floor at Bird Library.

Both Galvin and Mary O’Brien, a reference assistant in archives and records management, say they’d heard rumors for years that “supercal” originated at Syracuse. The stories were so persistent they’d sometimes page through old University publications, in fruitless search of it.

They were delighted to learn about Herman, who graduated from the University in 1933 with a degree in speech and, appropriately, dramatic arts. She married Vincent Lawkins, a professional golfer who died 24 years ago. They had no children. When Herman died in 1988, nothing was made of her role in the evolution, if not creation, of a word that was, well …

Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.

Zimmer remains intrigued by the tale. He’d love to know more about Helen Herman Lawkins and her life. In a 2014 piece for Vocabulary.com, “The Joy of Making Up Long Words,” Zimmer noted how the notion of meshing together long and silly-sounding words—such as “supergobosnoptious”—is an American tradition.

He’s also the kind of guy who enjoys dropping in to see his friends in the archives at Merriam-Webster, which has yet to to officially add “supercal” to its dictionary. Not long ago, on one of those stops, archivists pulled the file on “supercal.” It included correspondence between Fortier, the Disney librarian, and Philip Babcock Gove, a legendary editor with Merriam-Webster.

Written amid the legal battle over the word’s genesis, those documents made several references to a student named Helen Herman, beginning with this note from Fortier:

“The head of our Legal Department tells me that they have found the word in print in an issue of the Syracuse University humor magazine from the Thirties.”

Herman wrote in 1931 that she invented the word, and no one has brought forth any evidence to challenge her claim. In that sense, then, “Mary Poppins” is bringing one of the most beloved words in American theater back to Syracuse, the place where it began.

“How nice,” writes Peter Amster, “that it’s getting such a bang-up homecoming at Syracuse Stage.”

By chance, Andrew Cisternino was on watch on the morning that six of his crewmates drowned, rather than in the boat with them. (Photos by Mike Roy)

Harsh winds had raised Lake Ontario into a fury. Andrew Cisternino happened to be on watch that morning, in the tower of the Coast Guard station in Oswego. Typically, he would have joined the crew on the picket boat that was being sent to the lighthouse in the Oswego harbor.

But nothing was typical about Dec. 4, 1942.

“I was there, watching with binoculars, and then all of a sudden [Irving Ginsburg] is at the bottom of the stairs,” recalls Cisternino, who turned 95 last week. “And [Irving] says, ‘Andy, I can’t find my boots. Can I use your boots?’”

Ginsburg and Cisternino, both from Syracuse, were close friends. The rubber boots were under a chair by Cisternino’s bunk. Ginsburg threw them on. He jumped onto a picket boat with eight others from the Coast Guard. A gale some called the “storm of the century” was blowing across the lake. Dark green waves smashed into a breakwall and collided with the lighthouse.

Six men, including Ginsburg, died trying to defy that storm.

They were attempting to rescue Karl Jackson, a Coast Guard lighthouse keeper, who’d been marooned in the lighthouse by the churning lake. The station commander, Lt. Alton Wilson, decided to send a powerful picket boat across the harbor. The storm had finally started to subside, and the lighthouse was only a few minutes away.

Cisternino—who would earn both his business and law degrees from Syracuse University—usually served with the crew as a cook. By utter coincidence, he was assigned that morning to the watch at the station. He says that at any other time, on any other day: “I would have been on that boat.”

After 74 years, he still contemplates everything that means.

The crew made it to the lighthouse. A weary Jackson got on board. Two men took his place in the lighthouse, leaving eight from the Coast Guard on the picket boat, ready to return to shore.

The storm was too much. The boat had barely left the lighthouse when the engine died. The churning water pulled the boat into the open lake, then threw it against the breakwall, slinging the crew into the lake. Two men—Fred Ruff and John Mixon—managed to claw their way to safety on the ice-covered wall.

They could do nothing but watch as their six friends were carried away by the frigid water. Even Ginsburg, a strong swimmer, had no chance. Ruff once told The Syracuse Post-Standard of what he saw, of a sense of utter helplessness:

“They were fighting to beat the devil, trying to stay up.”

Ginsburg died in the lake. So did Wilson, the commanding officer; Jackson, the lighthouse keeper; and three others who served at the Coast Guard station: Leslie Holdsworth, Ralph Sprau and Eugene Sisson.

At 95, Cisternino lives in quiet retirement in King Ferry, in Cayuga County. Last week, he wept when he spoke of the six men killed that day. He is among the last witnesses. He said their courage should never be forgotten.

“They’re still in my mind,” Cisternino says.

His own life, too, was put at risk. While Cisternino downplays the nature of his role, he was described as a hero in newspaper accounts of the disaster.

Cisternino, 95, talks about the long-ago incident about which he still thinks often.

As soon as Coast Guard officers realized the picket boat had overturned, a second crew of rescuers was sent out from the station. They understood there was scant chance of finding survivors. Cisternino was on that boat, with a rope tied around his waist.

He hoped to recover the bodies of his friends.

They quickly spotted the body of Wilson, the station commander, caught in the violent lake. He “had a rain coat on and the air got under the rain coat and kept him afloat,” Cisternino says. He recalls Wilson as “a very respectful person, a very wonderful guy,” who had a kind of father-like demeanor at the station.

Cisternino jumped into the freezing water and tried to retrieve his drowned commander.

“I had my arm around him at one time,” says Cisternino, who was not wearing a wetsuit. His only protection against the bitter storm was a life jacket. The temperatures were frigid. His limbs began going numb. The waves tore Wilson’s body from his grasp.

Cisternino, by that point, was in trouble. His friends pulled him to the boat, then had to lift him in. “Once I got in the picket boat, once the reaction set in, I got afraid,” Cisternino says. He was suffering from exposure. The Coast Guard rushed him to a hospital, where he stayed for a night.

Back in Syracuse, when his family received a telegraph about Cisternino’s condition, his mother saw the deliveryman and “went berserk,” Cisternino says.

She had heard about the tragedy. She thought her son, like his friends at the lighthouse, had been killed.

Dec. 4, 1942. Cisternino does not forget. So much of his life was against the odds, an uphill struggle. His parents were immigrants from Italy. When he enlisted in the Coast Guard, he needed their approval. His mother, who could not speak English, signed the form with an “X.”

He didn’t remain at Oswego for long after the disaster. The nation was barely a year into World War II. Cisternino was sent to radio school. He spent much of the war in the North Atlantic and the Mediterranean, serving on Coast Guard vessels that escorted military convoys. They came under fire. He eventually made it home.

It is never lost on him that everything good that happened in his long life might be gone if he had not been on watch in the tower.

Cisternino attended the old Blodgett Vocational High School, in Syracuse. He met Julia “Judy” Jordan, a student at nearby St. Lucy’s High, at a high school party. They hit it off. They began dating. In 1943, they were married. Cisternino wore his Coast Guard uniform for the ceremony.

After the war, he enrolled in Syracuse University. The young couple rented an attic flat and began raising their children.

“Nobody (else) in my family went to college,” he says. He was part of the surge of veterans who arrived on campus in the late 1940s. His name is on the wall right now at Bird Library, where the University Archives has an exhibit called “Our Doors Opened Wide,” recalling the years following the war.

To provide more space, the University erected many Quonset huts. The most striking was a vast dining hall at Comstock and West Colvin avenues. A contest was held on campus, to name the building. The exhibit mentions the winner: Cisternino.

He called the structure “The Quonsoteria.”

In those years, he and Judy did their best with little money. Cisternino made it through his undergraduate classes on the GI Bill, tending bar and doing odd jobs to help feed his family. Then he went straight on to earn a law degree.

He figured, correctly, the degree was an investment. Cisternino became a counsel for Allstate Insurance. He worked for a time on Long Island, then returned to Central New York in retirement. Cisternino, father of five children, is now a great-grandfather. The greatest loss of his life occurred seven years ago, when Judy died after 66 years of marriage.

In conversation, he is philosophical, usually upbeat. Still, his thoughts often return to the lighthouse. He and Ginsburg both grew up in Syracuse. They used to play catch with a football in Oswego, on autumn days outside the station.

They were together until the morning when Ginsburg asked about the boots.

At the station, the tragedy became a tale of such power that some claimed the lighthouse was haunted. Finally, in 1996, Coast Guard officials honored the six men killed on the picket boat. They invited Cisternino to the ceremony.

Twenty years ago this month, the Coast Guard sent a boat to the lighthouse. Cisternino, who stood with Ginsburg’s father, threw a life preserver and some flowers in the water.

Then as now, he reflected on how a lifetime can come down to utter chance, how one friend is ordered to stand watch while one gets on a boat.

“He was just a young man like myself,” Cisternino says of Irving Ginsburg. “He was just a prize.”

from on .

The cover of “The Muckers”

In one of the first ones he opened, in a kind of archival miracle, there it was:

A child’s life, caught on paper, that had seemed forever lost.

“The manuscripts were just lying on top of each other, not organized in any way,” Register says. “They were beyond yellow-brown, and very brittle.”

They represented an extraordinary historic find, the first-person account of a young 19^th century gang member in New York City. William Osborne Dapping would become a respected Central New York journalist, a voter in the Electoral College, a man who won a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of a 1929 prison riot for The Auburn, N.Y., Citizen-Advertiser.

When Dapping died at 89 in 1969, the Harvard graduate was eulogized by the New York Times as “an ardent Democrat and a leader in conservation and community activities.”

What went unsaid was the harsh forge in which he was raised: Dapping was a child of poverty in Yorkville, an Upper East Side neighborhood in Manhattan. His father, chronically unemployed and alcoholic, was a disabled Civil War veteran. His mother, a seamstress, took on the scraps of work that she could find, while their son learned to survive in the alleys of New York.

It was a “city of children,” Register writes, the streets packed with youths who were working, playing, struggling—and often joined together by street gangs. While adult writers and reporters gave the gangs a certain literary notoriety, few records exist of how those children themselves saw the world.

That is the value of Register’s new work, “The Muckers: A Narrative of the Crapshooters Club,” published by the Syracuse University Press. Register reintroduces Dapping’s 117-year-old narrative, in which the main characters—boys with such nicknames as Spike, Butts, Blinkey and Riley—cook up their plans in a damp basement clubhouse where an intruder might receive “a brick against his noodle.”

Dapping’s rise to journalistic prominence was an unlikely achievement, success in the face of overwhelming odds. It happened in an era, Register says, “when the idea that Americans celebrated social mobility, the rise from nothing to something more, was questionable.”

The tenements of Yorkville on Manhattan’s Upper East Side

So Dapping hid his origins. As a teenager, hardened by the streets, he accepted the chance to take part in a program called “The George Junior Republic,” an effort by reformers to save children who seemed doomed to lives of crime, neglect or addiction. Dapping was initially influenced by William George, founder of the republic.

Yet the great turn in Dapping’s life was meeting Thomas Mott Osborne, a wealthy young social crusader from Auburn. Osborne went on to gain national fame for his passion for prison reform. He’d sometimes masquerade as a homeless man, Register says, a chance to keep company with those who lived hard lives.

That behavior intrigued Register, an American history professor and department chair at Sewanee, the University of the South, in Tennessee. His initial research at Syracuse University, in 2008, centered around Osborne, whose papers are also part of Special Collections.

Through that research, Register began reading accounts of four boys—including Dapping—whose lives were transformed by meeting Osborne and George. Their struggles seemed far more compelling, to Register, than the tale of any wealthy benefactor.

Register says he felt “a gravitational pull” toward the narratives of children trying to escape from a bitter place. What he realized, reading of their lives as adults, was how they came to see any revelation of their true stories as a threat—rather than a monument—to their success.

“They never wanted people to know they came from the slums,” Register says.

That book remains a work in process. Yet as Register read through thousands of letters in the Osborne collection, he grew fascinated by Dapping, who was so close to the older man that he took “Osborne” as his middle name.

Register learned how Dapping, as a former street kid on the brink of attending Harvard, wrote a series of intimate sketches that described gang life in New York, although he took pains to make sure no one realized the tales came from his own experience.

The language is irreverent, direct, sometimes crude. It is offered by a character called “Spike,” clearly modeled on the author. For years, Dapping tried to get that work into print. Except for a sampling in the New York Evening Post—a result of direct intervention by Osborne—Dapping never found a publisher for his narratives. Today, they are seen as a precious account of gang life from a young eyewitness.

Yet Register says no editor saw that value in Dapping’s work, more than a century ago.

William O. Dapping, former gang leader turned Ivy League man, around the age of 20

“I think it was a book about children that really wasn’t written for children, that didn’t fit into any particular genre,” Register says. “It was suitable for adults but didn’t fit the [morality of the] times: It didn’t wag a finger at the boys. It celebrated their resourcefulness, their ability to hoodwink adults.”

Dapping finally gave up on publishing the book. Through Osborne, he found a job with the Auburn newspaper, where he won a Pulitzer and built a long career. Register suspects that Dapping, as he grew older, had no wish to share or reveal the grittier elements of his life.

When he died, his papers, like Osborne’s, were donated to Special Collections at the University. As Register read through the Osborne-Dapping correspondence, he realized an unusually accurate account of gang life in New York City had once been written, rejected, wrongfully ignored, and in all probability tossed away in defeat.

In 2012, Register returned to the sixth floor at Bird Library, home to Special Collections, with his attention turned entirely toward Dapping. Still, he assumed the long-forgotten manuscript had been destroyed.

“I deliberately delayed looking for it because I didn’t want to get my hopes up,” Register says.

Finally, he asked the staff to bring out the boxes. Register began opening them, bracing for disappointment.

In an instant that he’ll never forget, there were the sketches—still intact and fragile to the touch, fulfilling his best hopes.

Lucy Mulroney, senior director of Special Collections, says Register’s work in Syracuse had already helped him win a research grant from the Central New York Humanities Corridor, a consortium of regional universities. Thrilled by his discovery, the Special Collections staff helped Register make a connection with Syracuse University Press.

Suzanne Guiod, a senior editor there, quickly saw the potential.

Dapping’s manuscript, Guiod says, “is a rare primary document from the Reform Era, one that could be taught alongside classics like ‘Maggie: A Girl of the Streets.’ … It makes a significant and wholly unique contribution to New York State and New York City Progressive-Era history and writing.”

It took a few more years for the book to come together. Register needed to assemble the full manuscript and write a detailed introduction. He stuck with Dapping’s title for the narrative; Register realized the power of calling the book “The Muckers,” a reference to the filth and dung scattered around the streets of New York.

The book was published this autumn. Register plans on returning to the University for a signing at some point in the coming months. He also intends to complete another book on the collective journey of the four city boys whose narratives captured his attention, at Bird Library.

As for “The Muckers,” the joy of finding the manuscript remains deeply satisfying. During the years of research, Register developed a kind of spiritual loyalty to the narrator, this indomitable child of poverty in New York City.

Dapping faced suffocating obstacles as a boy, survived them and died believing that no one would ever know the full triumph of his story. To Register, this new book is more than history. For forgotten children of the street, it serves as testament and validation.

“It feels very good,” Register said, “to bring ‘The Muckers’ into the light.”

Fred and Jane Talbot

Fred Talbot wrote the poem seven years ago. A friend of his in the DeWitt Rotary Club, Mel Rubenstein, was working on a book called “The Peacetime Draft During the Cold War.” He asked Talbot, a World War II veteran, to read through it.

The manuscript triggered something passionate in Fred, who was about to turn 90. When he handed the pages back to Rubenstein, he also gave him a short poem the work inspired.

Fred called it “Our Sworn Duty.” Rubenstein loved it. He put it in his book, where it was embraced by readers. Fred never expected his little poem to generate such emotion that in 2013 it would end up on a main wall of the Syracuse Veterans Affairs Medical Center, on a plaque presented by the DeWitt Rotary.

On Rubenstein’s suggestion, “Our Sworn Duty” will also be part of today’s Syracuse University Veterans Day remembrance ceremonies, at 11 a.m. at Hendricks Chapel. These brief lines will be read by Jordan Robinson, a Marine Corps veteran and a graduate student in the Newhouse School of Public Communications:

Whether the sky is dark or gloomy gray

Or blue and full of warming sun

The eagle soars not only for prey

But to protect its helpless young

As faithful soldiers with steady nerve

We stand ready to shield our own

Our sworn duty is to protect and serve

Wherever seeds of hate are sown
“There’s something about it,” Rubenstein said. “Every time you read it, you think about every word he wrote. It’s taken on a life of its own.”

Rubenstein ’57 asked a year ago if University organizers would include the poem in the Veterans Day ceremonies. They embraced the idea. Robinson said she learned of “Sworn Duty” from Ron Novack, a retired Army colonel and executive director of the Syracuse University Office of Veteran & Military Affairs.

“The poem inspires me,” Robinson wrote in an email, “because I feel that it resonates with all who have taken the oath��to defend our nation.”

Her response carries deep meaning for Talbot, 97, a native of Beacon, N.Y., and a 1949 graduate of the School of Architecture. When Chancellor William Pearson Tolley opened the doors to veterans in the years after World War II, Talbot used the GI Bill to take advantage of the opportunity. He and his wife, Jane, moved into an attic flat on Redfield Place, within walking distance of campus.

Fred recalled showing up for class, at 27, as a combat veteran. He encountered some teenagers, students who weren’t long out of high school. They asked him if he had a girlfriend. He told them he’d been married since 1943.

They were stunned. Fred went home that day and told Jane: “I think I’m back in kindergarten.”

He shared that story this week from Maple Downs, the senior living facility in Fayetteville where he and Jane have an apartment. He is 97. She is 95. Their longevity is astounding to them both, but they never allow themselves to get lost in the past. Fred embraced the digital world. Until a few years ago, the couple stayed busy in the community.

That ended when Fred began struggling with a progressive swallowing disorder. He will not be able to attend today’s ceremonies with Chancellor Kent Syverud and other university dignitaries. But he said it is gratifying to know Robinson will read his poem, and he is pleased by the University’s appreciation for the veteran experience.

“When you’re young, you can take a lot,” Fred said. “But when you get older, and you’re in a different circumstance. …”

You remember, vividly, everything that you survived.

Maybe, he said, you remember running across a field, totally exposed to German guns, fully expecting to be killed as the soil was torn to bits. You threw yourself into a ditch. You waited, for what felt like forever. In what seemed to be a miracle, the shooting died away. You went on.

Maybe you remember coming upon on an American truck stopped on a mountain road, how you stuck your head through an opening in the back, how you realized it was filled with the bodies of young soldiers, just like you.

Maybe you remember the starving farmer whose pet dog killed one of his sheep, and how the desperate farmer said to you: “Please, you have to shoot my dog.” It was a good dog, a loyal dog. You told the farmer you didn’t want to do it, but he begged you.

You took the dog out back and raised your gun and it was looking at you, and now you are 97 and when you try to sleep, those eyes are still wide open.

There was no choice. You had to pull the trigger.

“That’s war,” Fred said, pushing down the memory.

He grew up near the Hudson River. He was the son of a plumber, a guy who ran a Prohibition “speakeasy,” an underground drinking establishment. Jane remembers Fred’s father as “a gentleman,” an immigrant from Great Britain who never swore, who was always dignified.

The couple met at the Rochester Institute of Technology, before Fred was drafted. They were in two different groups of students, young men and women who had a chance encounter at a street corner. Amid the laughter and the stories, Fred and Jane caught each other’s eye.

That was pretty much it.

In the way magic happens, they both knew.

Jane remembers the day Fred’s train pulled away, as he left for the war. She remembers how she’d write to him every day, and her fear during the long periods when she’d hear nothing at all. Fred was injured in 1945, as the Americans pushed into Germany. Once the war ended, he was sent home on a hospital ship. The couple was reunited during a snowstorm, at a hospital in Utica.

For the 71 years since that moment, they have rarely been apart.

Fred became an architect. He designed the house they lived in for 65 years on Vincent Street, not far from campus, where they raised two children. Fred had many passions: He painted. He made jewelry. He wrote books about his life, or his experience with the 14^th Armored Division, during the war. When his friends wanted to reach him, they’d send him an email or contact him on Facebook.

It was only in the last year or two, as his throat problems grew worse, that it became all but impossible for him to move around the city.

Although he and Jane cannot be at the ceremony today, they are glad “Sworn Duty” will be a part of the celebration. “It’s important that our young people think about it, about everything they went through over there,” Jane said of Fred and his fellow veterans.

She and Fred used to get together routinely with five other couples, all close friends. The others�� are all gone. It is just Fred and Jane. They could lose themselves in an avalanche of wistfulness. Instead, they see themselves as lucky.

What a blessing: Every day, the first face they both see is a best friend.

“There’s no particular joy in growing old,” Fred said. “The joy is doing it with someone you love.”

Fourteen students in the McNair Research Symposium summarized their research for the McNair summer academy earlier this week in Shemin Auditorium.

Roshad Meeks is a self-described “military brat.” His father served in the U.S. Army, and Meeks spent much of his childhood in Germany. He was 11 or 12 when his family returned to Columbus, a little Mississippi city of about 23,000 people where the Meeks family had lived for generations.

Roshad’s dad, almost immediately, taught his son a quiet lesson about the meaning of being home:

“If you want to learn to be a man of the community,” the father said, “you go to the barber shop.”

Roshad became a regular at Jordan’s, in a building “right next to a grocery store, across the street from the middle school.” He’d sit quietly and listen as older men talked about sports or politics. He’d watch as men of standing in the community—the mayor, the district attorney, the minister of a nearby church—settled comfortably into Bobby Jordan’s chair.

It was a place of comfort, of security. Yet as the years went by, Meeks—who’ll be a senior at Syracuse University this autumn—witnessed how the struggles of the city began taking a quiet toll on the fabric of the shop.

He offered his observations Tuesday at Shemin Auditorium in Schaffer Hall, where 14 students in the McNair Research Symposium summarized their early research for the McNair summer academy. They will continue that work for the coming year, until they unveil their results at next summer’s academy.

Chancellor Kent Syverud, Vice Chancellor and Provost Michele G. Wheatly and Bea Gonzalez, dean of University College and special assistant to the Chancellor, greeted the McNair scholars Wednesday, the second day of their presentations. The initiative is part of a federal TRIO program named for Ronald McNair, an astronaut killed in the 1986 explosion of the space shuttle Challenger.

Ronald McNair

McNair was the second African-American astronaut to travel in space; he also earned his Ph.D., at 26, in laser physics. Lauren Malloy, McNair program coordinator at Syracuse, said the initiative is intended to assist high-achieving young women and men from struggling and marginalized communities, students who aspire to doctoral studies.

At a large university, surrounded by students from an entirely different experience, it can be easy to feel lost.

“This fosters a community,” Malloy said, “a safe place to execute your dreams.”

Meeks called his presentation, “Leaving the ‘Hood: A cost analysis of migration on Jordan’s Barbershop.” His work speaks to the statistical realities of departure in Columbus, how a lack of jobs and opportunity causes families to leave the city, how too many young men, stripped of hope, end up in prison, how that absence puts a strain on a fragile neighborhood—and how that struggle wounded Jordan’s, the soul of a community.

“I talk to a lot of people back home and they’re always talking about how boring it is, how they want to get out,” Meeks said. What they are missing, he said, is the quality that held together Jordan’s. His research caused him to reflect on the consequences of his own departure—why he left for Syracuse, why he remains spiritually intertwined with the place where he came of age.

“That’s what I hope to establish,” he said. “With impoverished families in impoverished neighborhoods, you see the decline not only of the economy, but of cultural centers.”

More than a dozen students brought similar passion to their presentations. Taylor Robinson, born at the Six Nations territory in Ontario and raised at the Onondaga Nation, is exploring why so many native children feel estranged from traditional education, why suicide rates for native young people remain unbearably high.

A student listens to presentations.

Genesis Felizola spoke of the struggles faced by Latino families raising children born with developmental disabilities, how barriers of language and culture can amplify the struggle of finding the best and most effective support and services.

Felicia Campbell went to the heart of national trauma: Her research, titled “I can’t breathe,” looks at the way high-profile and repetitive media images of police violence against African-American men affects the self-image and world view of that community.

As for Meeks, his goal is a Ph.D. in history. He is also a keen observer who intends to spend much of his life writing. Jordan’s Barbershop, he said, has been an institution in Columbus for almost 80 years. Amid great change, the owner is doing what he can to survive: He sells snacks and puts growing emphasis on hair care products.

It remains hard to compensate for the power and meaning of all that’s being lost.

That struggle, Meeks said, is a result of “outmigration”—not only of people, but of the qualities that define community. He remembers, powerfully, the sense of belonging he always felt in the barber shop. He said too many city neighborhoods are losing that kind of warmth and cohesion.

Take it away, and what you risk is the true sense of being home.