By Lee Manchester
What did you want to be when you grew up? A firefighter? A doctor? A space explorer?
Me, I wanted to be an archaeologist.
As a kid, my favorite reads were about Heinrich Schliemann’s excavation of the nine buried cities of Homer’s Troy, and Hiram Bingham’s rediscovery of Machu Picchu.
My favorite vacation trips? The Anasazi cliff dwellings of the desert southwest, and the ancient Mayan temple complex of Chichen Itza on the Yucatan peninsula.
So it’s probably no surprise that, when I became a community journalist — first in central California, then in New York’s Adirondacks — I did a lot of writing about local history. In fact, I may have written more about Lake Placid-area history than about its present-day schools, politics, sport and economy.
A region’s history can tell you a lot about how the world you see around you, right now, was created — the heartbreak it embodies, the conflicts it has resolved, the people whose tragedies and triumphs it reflects. A day spent researching and writing about regional history never seemed like a wasted day.
Imagine my happy surprise when I took a job in the Communications Office at Wagner College in 2007 and learned that the following year would be the school’s 125th anniversary.
I started digging in to the college’s creation story, looking for angles that would help us explain how Wagner had become such a special place. I didn’t have far to dig, and the surprises were both thrilling and abundant.
We were able to reconnect Wagner College with the original Wagner family, uncovering both school and family records long forgotten — including the only known photograph of the young man for whom the college had been named, all those years ago: J. George Wagner Jr. With President Guarasci, we travelled to Rochester, New York, the college’s original hometown, and laid a memorial wreath on young George’s gravestone. We learned that typhus had killed that son of German immigrants before he could realize his dream of going to college and becoming a pastor — a tragedy that had motivated his father, a well-to-do contractor, to buy our college’s first campus as a gift to his own pastor, one of the school’s two cofounders.
The research on Wagner College’s roots, begun in 2007, continued to bear fruit over the years. In the Fall 2014 issue of this magazine, biology professor Horst Onken helped us learn more about the rich, natural life on Wagner College’s parklike Staten Island campus in a story, “Rooted in Grymes Hill,” that connected horticulture to history. (Onken, by the way, has a new contribution to the natural history of our campus that you can read about elsewhere in this issue of Wagner Magazine, “On the Wing at Wagner.”)
And then, of course, there was the three-part “Wagner College History Tour,” published in 2016-17, where we literally walked through the genesis and development of the college. Just as in Schliemann’s Troy, our history comes in layers, each with its own buildings, its own actors, its own drama. We looked at the way our campus had evolved, from the buildings left by a summer resort colony in 1918 to a modern liberal arts college with thousands of students, ranked in the top 25% percent in its region.
To me, that multi-stage tour felt a little miraculous: walking through time, seeing things around us as they had been a hundred years earlier and learning to appreciate them as they are today all the more for it.
I had similar experiences with the work that led to a couple of other historical stories. In one of them, we looked into the campus rumors about a wildly creative — and, let’s face it, just plain wild — English professor and his wife, an avant-garde filmmaker, who were supposedly Edward Albee’s inspiration for his unforgettable early masterwork, “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” I dug and I dug, talking to former colleagues, students and collaborators of Professor Willard Maas until I was sure: The stories were true! In the process, we were able to bring back to life a particularly creative episode in the history of Wagner College.
A second story looked into a troubling chapter in the college’s evolution: the conflict between our historically segregated, virtually all-White campus culture and the influx of Black and Latinx students in the 1960s. At the center of this conflict were two incidents orchestrated in the spring of 1970 by Black Concern, a new student advocacy organization: the occupation of Cunard Hall, and a confrontation with Dean Harold Haas after the college reneged on promises it had made to end the Cunard occupation. The details of the conflict had never been told in their entirety … and the personal story of the student leader behind the incidents, alumnus Lonnie Brandon, was unknown to most of his fellow alums. We were able to recover this history, both institutional and personal — and bring you along for the ride.
So, with my retirement beginning just as this issue hits the mail, how have things worked out for me?
The boy who wanted to become an archaeologist — has he been satisfied?
The answer is, yes.
Everything hasn’t been perfect, either in my career as a journalist or in my communications job at Wagner College — but through all the years, I’ve been able to travel in time, back and forth, with the support of the people I work for and the folks I write for: you. I’ve seen how simple, hopeful plans have been nurtured over the years into a substantial, enduring institution of higher learning, equipping generation upon generation of civic scholars and community leaders. And I’ve seen new classes of graduating students shepherded into the worlds of responsible, fruitful business, scientific exploration and artistic expression by those who went before them: you, their predecessors, the Wagner alumni community.
Thank you, Seahawk alums, for the past 16 years. Given a hundred other choices, I wouldn’t have spent them anywhere but on Grymes Hill — with you.
Former journalist Lee Manchester has written for Wagner Magazine since 2007. He is retiring this summer.
