Interview with Arthur Cooper and Nancy Cooper

Interview with Arthur Cooper and Nancy Cooper

Cooper, Arthur ; Cooper, Nancy ; Gashurov, Irene

Harpur College – Sixties alumni; Harpur College – Alumni in publishing; Harpur College – Alumni from New York City; Harpur College – Alumni living in the New York City area

Arthur Cooper is a writer, self-employed. Art started out working for Gale publishing, but he made his name as a direct mail writer.

2018-03-09

In Copyright

Art and Nancy Cooper.mp3

2018-03-09

Oral Histories from 60's Binghamton Alumni

77:38 minutes

Alumni Interviews
Interview with: Arthur and Nancy Cooper
Interviewed by: Irene Gashurov
Transcriber: Oral History Lab
Date of interview: 9 March 2018
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(Start of Interview)

IG: 00:00
Interview. So for the purposes of the interview, please state your names, that when you were born, when you went to Harpur, the years that you went to Harpur, and when we and where we are at present.

AC: 00:19
My name is Arthur Cooper. I was born on February 9, 1943 in Brooklyn, New York. I went to Harpur in 1959 graduated in (19)63. What is the other question?

IG: 00:37
Where we are physically.

AC: 00:38
And we are physically in my apartment in Manhattan, 79 West 12th Street, and it is March, 11.

NC: 00:47
Wrong.

AC: 00:48
March 9, 2017.

NC: 00:51
Nope.

IG: 00:52
2018.

AC: 00:54
2018. Oh, okay. And Franklin D. Roosevelt is president of the United States.

NC: 01:00
Count backwards by seven from 100. Go ahead. Oh, Jesus.

IG: 01:03
And what we're doing?

AC: 01:05
And we are having an interview for some Harpur Oral History Project.

IG: 01:09
Yes.

NC: 01:10
My name is Nancy Thompson Cooper. I was born on January 11, 1945 in Manhattan, New York, and went to Harpur in September of 1962 graduated in June of 1966 and we are in our apartment at 79 West Hill Street getting interviewed.

IG: 01:31
Okay, very good. So I would like to know where you grew up and who your parents were, whether your parents went to college.

NC: 01:44
My mother went- Okay. I grew up in Greenwich Village in New York. I grew up on the borderline of Greenwich Village in Chelsea, so I had an interesting life. It was interesting as a kid, but I went to Catholic school, which was very confining.

IG: 01:59
Yes.

NC: 02:00
Also not very smart. The teachers were not so smart. They were not well-educated women. I had fun anyway, and somehow, I got into Harpur. I always thought I was the last person in my class to be accepted. I was on the waiting list because I got in on July 6, but I did find out that somebody else got in in August, on August 29 so I felt better. I was not the last person let in. My father was a display man at Abraham and Strauss department store in Brooklyn. My mother was a New York City public school teacher. She did go to college, graduated from Hunter in 1928 and how I ended up at Harpur, I do not know, but I feel so happy that I did. We could afford it for one thing, and Catholic schools kept giving me unasked full scholarships, and I did not want to go there, and I did not, had not even applied there, but they would call our- the school would say, and the nuns would call me and say, "Hey, want to go to Our Lady of the bleeding blood." I do not know, whatever they would call them. "No, I do not." I want at the time, I thought I would end up in Syracuse, and they warned me that Syracuse girls do not wear bathrobes in the hallway. And this is scandalous. It was scandalous. But anyway, be that as it may, I finally got into Harpur. And I was very pleased. Everybody was pleased, especially money wise, because in those days, if you had a regent scholarship, it covered all your tuition.

IG: 03:37
Right.

NC: 03:37
The whole, the whole thing,

IG: 03:39
Yeah.

NC: 03:39
And-

IG: 03:40
Room and board as well?

AC: 03:41
No.

NC: 03:41
No-no, just-just your tuition. My final two years that I was there, I was what they called something, a dorm resident, dorm counselor. Other places had other names for it, which paid all your room and half your board. And I think it cost my parents $279 a semester to send me to college, which was holy crap, really. It was a- I still worked. I worked all the time there. I was a waitress. I was a- I babysat. I worked in a coffee shop. I worked often anyway.

IG: 04:20
So-so, I mean, that is so interesting on so many fronts, not-not least that you grew up in Chelsea and the village at the time that you did, but we're the focus for now is on Harpur College. So why did you- so were there are expectations for you of going on to college from in your family?

NC: 04:44
Oh, yeah, yes.

IG: 04:45
Yeah, because-

NC: 04:47
My mother had gone to college, but she was the only one in both sides of the family who had ever gone to college. You know, my father had had not gone, and he had four sisters who did not go. And you know, nobody else did. She just lucked out.

IG: 05:03
Right.

NC: 05:03
Too long a story, but she did luck out. And so it was expected that, and I expected to go to college.

NC: 05:11
I was an only child.

IG: 05:11
You were the only child. And what-what was the reputation of Harpur College at the time?

IG: 05:11
Were you the only-

NC: 05:18
I knew nothing.

IG: 05:19
You knew- So why did you decide on that rather than-

NC: 05:22
[crosstalk] had a daughter, Ellen, who went to Harpur College and told her about it.

IG: 05:26
Yeah.

NC: 05:27
When I finally met Ellen [inaudible], I said [making a sound] that she was, she belonged to, there were not sororities, but there were things like that.

IG: 05:35
Right.

NC: 05:35
And she belonged to one of those things.

IG: 05:37
Right.

AC: 05:38
See, now she is going to be in this oral history, and-

NC: 05:40
I use her name.

AC: 05:42
Used her name.

IG: 05:44
I do not know her, but we know we may not ever get to-

AC: 05:48
But you have insulted a Harpur student just now.

NC: 05:52
[crosstalk] to insult our Harpur students.

AC: 05:54
Oh! Okay.

NC: 05:55
Back it up. No, it was just she was a very different person than I was and I was she wore skirts, and I never did. I have not since, but sorry, I insulted another person. But anyway, no, I did nothing about it, except that it was not a Teacher's College, and I did not want to go to a Teacher's College, pretty much. And I did know this, that Harpur was the, just about the only liberal arts school, I think just around that time, Buffalo and Albany were becoming more liberal arts, but every other state school was teachers. And not that I did not become a teacher, which I did at some point, but I did not want to just focus on one thing that is all. Is that all?

IG: 06:46
Yeah, or-for now, that is fine. All right, so-so you, it is your turn. So where did you grow up?

AC: 06:56
I was born and bred in Brooklyn, yes, of kind of far out towards Sheepshead Bay in Flatbush. And my father was an immigrant from Poland, came to this country in 1925 and worked in the garment industry as a sweater cutter. My mother was born in New York and went to college. In fact, went to Brooklyn College and became a teacher. Was a public-school teacher. I went to kind of boring local elementary schools and junior high schools in Brooklyn. I went to Brooklyn Technical High School, which I liked a lot. Why did I go to Harpur?

NC: 07:44
You have to tell the truth.

AC: 07:46
Because my friend, who was also we thought we would go to college together, and he was researching colleges that we could afford, and through their catalogs, and he found a college that had no gym requirement. It was Harpur College, and so we both immediately went to Harpur College. And of course, when we got there, they had a gym.

NC: 08:10
They did not have a requirement because they did not have a gym.

AC: 08:12
They had just built the new campus in Vestal, or they were building the campus in Vestal, and by the time we got there, there was a gym requirement. But as long as I was there, I stayed.

AC: 08:12
And so and so. That is interesting. So that was the only reason there must be- ,

AC: 08:29
No, well, I had it in terms of what my family could afford. It was a choice of Brooklyn College or Harpur College,

IG: 08:37
I see. And why Harpur College rather than, you know, SUNY Albany or some other SUNY?

AC: 08:42
Oh, I did not. Harpur College at that time had a very exclusive reputation for being a hard to get into high quality academic liberal arts college that was part of the State University of New York, and it was almost free. Albany was the Teachers College.

IG: 09:04
I see I did, I did. So, and what was your, what was your first impression when you arrived? Were you, you know, you grew up as a city kid? Had you ever gone to the country, to upstate New York before visiting?

AC: 09:24
Well, I went to summer camp, and we took vacations and things my when I got to Harpur, it was a construction site. It was, this was just what they were still holding classes in Endicott, New York, which is no eight miles away or 10 miles away, and then, but they had built a few dormitories on this hill in Vestal. And in those days, there was nothing around it. There was not a shopping mall right down the road. It was a deserted mud dump.

NC: 09:58
It was mud.

AC: 09:58
It was mud for-

NC: 09:59
Mud with boardwalks to get across.

AC: 10:04
But I was happy. I mean, I was I did not want it. I wanted to leave home. I wanted to go to a real college where with a, you know, dormitory life and so on. And I had several friends whom I knew from high school, and I was happy as a pig.

IG: 10:20
Several-several kids from your high school went there and, uh-

AC: 10:25
Yes-yes.

NC: 10:27
I knew nobody.

IG: 10:28
Yeah.

NC: 10:29
Well, and I knew nothing about and, but I had seen it. My parents took the driving trip one summer and showed me different colleges that we could not afford. Went including, we visited Harpur. It was closed. It was the summer, but we saw it and but I knew what to expect. So I had seen it. I was thrilled to leave the city to go to a school like that.

IG: 10:55
So it was a-

NC: 10:57
Sea of mud.

IG: 10:58
It was a sea of mud.

NC: 10:59
And there were no trees. There were no bushes. During my freshman year, Nelson Rockefeller came to make a speech, and they planted a whole bunch of trees one day.

IG: 11:12
What that is what year was that?

NC: 11:14
It would have been 1960 it would either been the fall of (19)62 or the spring of (19)63 and he came and they planted all the trees, and then after he left, they dug them all up and took them away.

IG: 11:26
Was this the time- that is that is incredible. Was this a time that he ignored the anti-war protesters on campus?

NC: 11:36
No, this is way before that. Way before that. This is, and this is when he, we did not know in those days that he was dyslexic, but I believe he turned out that he was, when he called our president, Dr. Bartlett, repeatedly, and his name was Dr. Bartle, but-but, and, but, somebody who was up there said he had big head cards with big block letters, which would you know- What- we did not know about these things in those days. I do not think many did, but he came to made a speech about something I have no idea we-we may have gone or may not have gone, but they took the trees.

IG: 12:12
Reminds me of another person who has cue cards for-

NC: 12:17
Oh yes-yes. Listen, I hear you.

IG: 12:23
It is just off the record. Okay, so we know what were. Yeah.

NC: 12:32
I was a freshman in a dormitory that was all double rooms, but was so crowded we were triples. It was very so every room there should have been two girls, was three bunk bed. It was very crowded, and it was all freshmen. And it was the only year, to the best of my knowledge, they ever made in all freshmen dormitory, which isn't a good idea. It just is nobody to tell you things, right, except your dorm residence. And my dorm resident said, one of the very first meetings said there are people you should there are three crazy people on this campus. Absolutely do not go near them and name two, and the third she named was Arthur Cooper. So there was that, but-

IG: 13:16
And why did, why did Art Cooper have that reputation.

NC: 13:16
It was [crosstalk]

IG: 13:20
So, were you intrigued?

NC: 13:22
No, I was afraid.

IG: 13:23
You were afraid. So how did-

NC: 13:25
But he was a senior. I was a freshman. I did not know, really.

IG: 13:28
So how did you make your acquaintance with Art Cooper in [crosstalk]

NC: 13:33
-small place.

IG: 13:34
Yes, it was a very small place.

AC: 13:37
One of the things that was so special about Harpur is that it was so isolated, just a few 100 kids living in dorms in a mud heap in the middle of nowhere, nobody had cars, nobody had money, that we got to know each other much better than

NC: 13:58
One might have.

AC: 13:59
One might in a normal university where-where there was a world outside the dormitory, and we- many of, I mean, we are still friends 50 years later, with lots of people [crosstalk] we knew from Harpur or from Harpur. And this is, I think this is unusual compared to other people I know.

NC: 14:21
And really a lot like, like, a lot of us.

AC: 14:24
Because we were, I mean, we were, we had classes, you know, 12 hours a week, but we were there 24 hours a day with nothing to do except get into trouble or get into mischief or fool around.

IG: 14:37
So tell us [crosstalk]

NC: 14:38
In freshman year, in freshman year, one girl came with a car, one.

IG: 14:42
Right.

NC: 14:42
And she was called Michelle Buick. I do not know her name, and she only, and she had to be. She did not last. She was gone after a fresh- she transferred out. We were too-

IG: 14:52
Because [crosstalk] she was [inaudible], she-she was giving rise to two minutes.

NC: 14:56
No-no-no-no-no. We were not high class enough. We were, sounds silly, but we're all really smart and pretty poor, a lot of a lot of my friends who lived in Manhattan at that time, it changed over time we lived in tenements. We did not if this was- I liked the food. Nobody likes the food in college, but I had spent summers in a different place where the food was so awful that the food in college seemed fabulous to me.

IG: 15:29
And it was all very plain fare, right?

AC: 15:31
It was a meal plan that you were obliged to be on.

NC: 15:31
It was relatively plain, and you could not have, like, you could not have a piece of pie and an apple. So you have, you were forced to steal if you wanted to have an apple later, you had to, like, steal the apple, because [crosstalk] No, [crosstalk]

NC: 15:49
You had to.

AC: 15:50
And it was pretty mediocre food.

NC: 15:53
It was, it was fine with me, except for the no two desserts.

IG: 16:00
So how did you spend your free time? You said that you had a lot of time to get into trouble. And how did you get into trouble? What were the occasions for-

NC: 16:11
It was the (19)60s.

IG: 16:12
It was the (19)60s, but it was the early (19)60s.

NC: 16:15
We were-

AC: 16:16
We were very precautious.

IG: 16:19
You were precautious.

AC: 16:20
There was a lot of drinking. In those days 18 was the age of consent for drinking in bars in New York-

NC: 16:29
But I have been drinking since 16.

AC: 16:32
Many of us were not even 18 when we were freshmen at Harpur, I was 16, but the bars did not really care. They would be happy to sell you a 10-cent glass of beer.

NC: 16:44
Broome County issued what was called a sheriff's card. Broome County would come onto the campus and the police would take your picture and make it official ID so that if you wanted to drink, you would have your sheriff's card. I lost mine. I found my Harpur ID card from 1962 but I do not have my sheriff's card, but that nobody looks that you drank everywhere.

AC: 17:06
The Triple City Traction Corporation ran a bunch of busses on schedule into Binghamton or into Johnson City or into Endicott. So you could, you could take a bus or but mostly, we hitchhiked a lot. I hitchhiked. I mean, I lived off campus for years that I hitchhiked back and forth.

NC: 17:25
We had parietal rules for the women. It was we had to be in a dorm at 10:30. On Friday and Saturday night, I think it was midnight.

IG: 17:34
Right.

NC: 17:35
And you could have two extra 12 o'clock this semester. It was insane, but when you think about it now, you could your parents had a sign of consent form of when you could stay off campus, like, can she go to religious retreats? Yes, can she stay with a friend in town? Yes. Well, everybody stayed in other place. The boys were allowed to live off campus, but they were not allowed to have a kitchen.

AC: 18:05
Depends which year you're talking about. The rules kept changing.

NC: 18:09
But they were allowed to have a kitchen because they were not supposed to be on the meal plan.

IG: 18:12
Right.

NC: 18:13
And so they would build like fake walls to cover the kitchen.

AC: 18:18
Be respected by somebody from Harpur.

NC: 18:20
And you could not have a kitchen sometimes.

IG: 18:23
So you built a wall?

AC: 18:25
I personally never you never-

NC: 18:27
You never had it, but I know people who did have to do that in Floral Avenue.

AC: 18:31
They put up a piece of sheetrock.

NC: 18:36
But girls, but when you were a senior, you could have a key. The dorms were locked. There was bed checks. You had to sign in every night. Somebody had to sit in the office. That would have been a job of someone like me. But when you were a senior, you got a key, and you could use the senior key. And I was on the senior key committee in my senior year, and that was when we finally got them to agree that girls could live off campus and but I did not go because it was for the last semester of college that just seemed insane, although a few people I know did immediately leave, but I did not. But-but-

IG: 19:15
Did these restrictions seem ludicrous harsh to you at the time?

NC: 19:21
Yeah, they did. They seemed absolutely ludicrous.

AC: 19:24
You could have, you could not have the opposite sex in your dormitory ever, except maybe four Sundays a semester. And the rule was four feet on the floor.

NC: 19:35
And doors open, four feet on the floor. That was, that was the rule.

IG: 19:39
Who would enforce these who would-

NC: 19:41
There was like, it was not called a Dean of Women, but it was like the director of women's housing, was the enforcer. And then the-

NC: 19:46
How would she know? Would she be patrolling? The-

NC: 19:53
[crosstalk] would devolve down to someone like me, a dorm counselor.

IG: 19:57
I see, I see, I see. But would you yell on infractions or-

NC: 20:01
No, I never, I never reported anybody for anything. But, and there was absolutely no alcohol on campus. And yet, I remember somebody running down to my room saying, your friend needed a drink. And did I have a bottle of alcohol? Of course I did, and so she gave it to him. But just anyways, no, it was very, very strict, but, but then we hang, what did we do? We talked, we talked.

IG: 20:33
What did they talking about?

NC: 20:34
Everything. We were very interested in civil rights, really. Before-before Vietnam was, there were people who were sophisticated enough to know about the war, but we were much more interested in civil rights and the Civil Rights Club, but it was a really big deal. There was one television down in what they called something. It was not the it was, it was on the bottom through

AC: 20:59
The basement of the dormitory.

NC: 21:00
Yeah, there was a TV, but nobody ever watched TV except the night the Beatles were first in America, and then there was, there was a television in the student center. There was a TV room where we what we will ran when we heard the President had been shot, and then we went up to watch Walter Cronkite. But we talked, we talked, we talked and talked, and then what else we played. I played cards. I played cards. If anybody said, "Where were you when the Cuban Missile Crisis," I was playing cards in the snack bar. And where were you when Kennedy was shot, I was playing cards in the snack bar. Then we ran when we heard-

AC: 21:42
The snack, the snack bar was the living room for the whole the whole college.

IG: 21:50
So how many people could fit in? I mean-

AC: 21:53
Hundreds. I mean, there were only 800 students total in the college, [crosstalk] and some of them were locals, but so there was plenty of room in the snack bar, and people cut classes and set the snack bar all day.

NC: 22:08
I graduated in the bottom 10 of my class, not the bottom 10 percent , the bottom 10.

IG: 22:16
What did you, what did you study? You said liberal arts.

NC: 22:19
History.

NC: 22:20
I studied more or less medieval history, and I still like it, and [crosstalk] but I you know anyway,

IG: 22:21
History.

NC: 22:22
Was that the Catholic girls education-

NC: 22:33
I know why, what it would have I would have been better off studying English, because in those days, the kind of criticism they did really was-was a lot about symbolism. And man, if you were Catholic, you could have them like that. However, you needed to know a language, and I that meant you had to go to a class and actually study French or something. And I did not.

AC: 22:53
Harpur had a very strong English department in the early days, much stronger than most of the other

NC: 22:59
It was really it was famous.

AC: 23:01
I mean, a lot of serious Ivy League PhD scholars.

IG: 23:06
So is that what you studied?

AC: 23:07
Yeah, I majored in English.

IG: 23:09
So who-who did you study with? Do you remember-

AC: 23:13
The most famous professor was Bernard Huppe, who taught the Chaucer and Middle English in those days to be an English major. It was so rigorous you were obliged to take old English. Can you imagine that you have to actually take old English and Chaucer and not only shake it, of course, in shakes, you had to take Milton. Can you imagine a whole semester of Milton.

NC: 23:41
You did not have to take the Bible.

NC: 23:41
And the Bible.

NC: 23:43
But It was available.

AC: 23:45
But it was a very it was as rig- I mean, they were trying to out Harvard-Harvard in terms of rigor for the English department. And they all, they-they were largely Catholic, the professors, or they were certainly, they-

AC: 24:01
They certainly had a Christian-

AC: 24:02
-Had a Christian, [crosstalk] A great professor was Weld, John Weld, who taught Milton, because nobody else would teach Milton, although Milton's beautiful. Francis X Newman was-

NC: 24:26
Taught medieval literature as well as and I recently went to a not that recently, but in the last 15 years or so, an alumni event where he was giving a speech, and I had had him for a few classes. And what was he speaking? He was speaking about Alger, Horatio Alger, who's the who's the rugged dick. But it was not, it was Horatio Alger books. That is what he was teaching now. And I said, Wow, that is what, you know, I later in my life, I sold rare books and things, and.

AC: 24:59
No, there were no fun courses nowadays. And you look at a college catalog, there are courses you actually might want to take, price novels about price fighting or movies about, [crosstalk] And those days-

NC: 25:15
Now be a English major and never read anything written before 1920 say, whereas-

IG: 25:20
That is unfortunate.

NC: 25:22
Well, it is, but we-we really had a rigorous education.

IG: 25:31
Your classmate, Ron Bayer said that the Harpur educational system was built on the University of Chicago-

AC: 25:44
Yes-

IG: 25:46
-liberal arts model-

AC: 25:48
first year freshmen, or maybe freshmen, sophomores had to take literature [crosstalk]

NC: 25:54
And 104, social sciences 101, 102.

AC: 25:59
They were like core-core courses assured that you knew something about the entire history of the world.

IG: 26:07
Did you find your classes enlightening? Did you enjoy them?

NC: 26:15
Not so much.

AC: 26:16
It depends.

IG: 26:18
Tell us what you enjoyed, what did you like, and what made an impression, positive or negative?

AC: 26:33
There were a lot of very-

NC: 26:34
Different then, for example, in the snack bar, there was a kind of a wall, and the professors would go get because it was the only place you get something deep. They was eight in the other side of the wall. They never mingled. They did not chat with you. They did not talk to you. I did do some babysitting for various professors kids. So then they would pick me up in a car and take me to their house and then bring me home. So you might have a few words with them, but they were not friendly, and both of my children, who are not children, but one is 46 and the other is 38 but when they were in college, they were invited to tea, to the house, or come over for a party. It was a very different social scene than we had. Our professors did not- were not friendly, and did not really know who you were. For the most part.

IG: 27:28
Was that your experience?

AC: 27:31
Certainly for the freshman and sophomore years, it got much better as you were a junior or senior and majoring in something-

NC: 27:40
So you might have had the same guy more than one time.

AC: 27:44
But they fared. A lot of them were very mediocre. I mean, when I started out, they were teachers in the Triple- in the Triple Cities Community College branch of Syracuse University. I mean, that is what Harpur was. Harpur was a two year it was founded by Syracuse to accommodate veterans coming back after World War Two.

IG: 28:06
Oh, I did not know.

AC: 28:07
And it was in Endicott in in huts, right? I mean, in shabby-shabby.

IG: 28:15
But yet it had this-this reputation of being well,

NC: 28:19
Not that, not quite then.

AC: 28:23
Then the state bought it, turned it into a full year liberal arts college, and made it good. But a lot of the professors were-were there since-since before they were, there were a lot of mediocre people around.

IG: 28:40
Were there any outstanding ones that you remember?

NC: 28:43
There was some very interesting ones.

IG: 28:45
Interesting. Okay, so interesting. Let us do interesting.

NC: 28:48
Amy Gilbert-

IG: 28:49
Yes.

NC: 28:50
Amy Gilbert, who was quite old. Now I do not know, because now I am old. I believe she was older than that I am now because she had been a journalist. She had been at the signing of the Treaty of Versailles. She was talking, she had been in France, and she heard they were going to sign the treaty. We jumped on our bicycles and we raced out to Versailles. I mean, what is the first thing a historian does? What is the first thing? What is the first thing? Write it down.

IG: 29:19
Yes.

NC: 29:20
And I mean, but she-she really taught things that were kind of meaningful. She was not boring.

IG: 29:26
No, [inaudible]

AC: 29:28
Who was the art-art professor?

NC: 29:32
Was it Ferber?

AC: 29:34
No-no.

NC: 29:35
Lindsay. Lindsay.

AC: 29:36
Lindsay. Kenneth Lindsay was [crosstalk] was famous because in world, he was part of the American army that was recapturing stolen German art. There was movies about a railroad [crosstalk]

IG: 29:55
Yes.

AC: 29:55
Well, he was one of them.

NC: 29:57
Oh, he is dead now.

IG: 29:58
How interesting.

AC: 29:58
Yes.

IG: 29:59
How interesting. Yeah, so-so you had these, you think that these professors were the exception, rather than the rule that they-

AC: 30:11
The school was growing so rapidly. It was doubling in size every year or two, and the faculty was doubling in size, and the more the new faculty were, had higher-

NC: 30:25
I honestly did not- [inaudible] went to class [crosstalk] do anything [inaudible]

IG: 30:33
So it was -

NC: 30:34
Every semester I got [inaudible].

IG: 30:36
Well, it was what they say now, of MFA program that the-the hard part is getting in, but when once you're there, you can-

AC: 30:47
Well, you have to be good enough to have a keep up a C average.

NC: 30:50
I did not want to flunk out, so I did the minimum that I had to do. I was not sure. I always kind of thought I would be a teacher, but I would go to Bank Street, and Bank Street did not care about your marks. I had two or three personal interviews,

AC: 31:11
[inaudible] submit finger prints.

NC: 31:13
Shut up. I had personal interviews. I had to write 1000-word essays about myself. I could do that like that. It did not and Bank Street, but I had my best friend in senior year, Carol. I can say her name, she did, but she would go to the office about every two or three weeks to check her standing in class because she was applying to law school. And-and she said, "You want to know you?" I said, "No, I do not want to know." And I got through my whole senior year not knowing until they gave me my diploma, and I opened it up to see it was the right one. And there was a transcript and said, standing in class like 496 out of 506 kids, I was the bottom 10.

AC: 32:01
No, I got good grades.

IG: 32:02
Did you care or?

NC: 32:04
No, I think it is hilarious.

IG: 32:05
You thought it was hilarious because it was.

NC: 32:08
It was not that the important, the I thought the best thing that ever happened to me still was that I went to Harpur. How lucky I was. I made friends, lifelong friends. I got a husband. I was exposed to the whole world. I had huge amounts of fun. I- it was, it was just the best thing that ever happened to me. But the going to school part was not that part.

AC: 32:35
I took school more seriously than you did. I do not remember where I graduated, very high. Like in the top-

NC: 32:43
Yeah, you graduated the 20th or the 13th or the sixth,

AC: 32:47
I had lots of A's.

NC: 32:48
Yeah, no A's, but, um, but it was it-it changed a lot. Now, Arthur is he graduated in (19)63 I graduated in (19)66 Ronnie graduated in (19)64 so each of us would have had a different kind of somewhat experience.

IG: 33:06
So, how did you actually meet? You know, you met at college, and then how did you-

IG: 33:13
You kept meeting. So you kept visiting. Nancy or-

NC: 33:13
We kept meeting.

AC: 33:17
No-no, I had another wife.

NC: 33:19
He had another wife, was also Harpur- he only marries Harpur girl and-

AC: 33:26
But it was a, it was a small crowd. We had parties together.

NC: 33:30
You lived in Johnson City. Yeah, you were a teacher at Johnson City High School.

AC: 33:34
Right.

NC: 33:34
And then I had friends and, but then I just got, I met you.

AC: 33:40
Right after I graduated, I went to graduate school in Florida for a year, and then I came back and lived in Johnson City. [crosstalk]I lived in Binghamton and taught high school in Johnson City, high-

IG: 33:52
So what did you get your graduate degree in?

AC: 33:53
I never got a graduate degree in anything. But I was, I was studying for a master's in English.

IG: 34:01
I see, I see, so you returned after that year.

AC: 34:05
Because my wife was still an under mighty first wife was still an undergraduate.

IG: 34:11
I see.

AC: 34:12
Two more years to go, I think.

NC: 34:13
But then years, you know, then-

AC: 34:16
And it was great living. And it was somewhat expensive. I had a five-room apartment with a front and a back deck for $75 a month. You could buy a whole pizza for 75 cents. My first job for teaching in Johnson City High School, I made $5,200 a year. I was rich. I could buy a new I bought a new Volvo, and lived for a year on that it was, was a great place to live.

IG: 34:44
It is, it probably was a different city. It was not economically depressed.

AC: 34:44
Oh yes, it was always [crosstalk]

IG: 34:48
It was prosperous. It was a prosperous city, the city of IBM. No?

IG: 34:56
It was already depressed. It was already beginning to be depressed.

NC: 34:56
IBM was, was IBM was in the process of leaving. Johnson Endicott, Johnson Shoe Company was already pretty much over. And that was huge. It was called, it was a really big company, EJ, but that no, it was, it was kind of depressed city.

AC: 35:19
But that was good because rents were cheap. Food was cheap. I mean, you could buy pierogies for a nickel at the Russian church every Friday.

AC: 35:24
Supermarket and-

AC: 35:32
Get bologna three pounds for $1 [laughs]

NC: 35:39
It was all it was cheap with cheap-cheap living.

IG: 35:41
So-so you know you- let us talk about what you know politics were in the air. You- did you fear being drafted.

AC: 35:57
You did. It depends what year, but yes, politics were very much in the air, and I was one of the more in one of the more left-wing noise making crowds. There was a club called the progressive Socialist Society, founded by a couple of unrepentant Stalinists. And, among other things, we- Herbert Aptheker. We-we arranged for an actual communist. Herbert W Aptheker. He was a PhD in history, and he was really an expert on slave rebellions. But that was not important. What was important was he was a communist, and we invited him up to campus to speak. And this created such a brouhaha in the Binghamton press and in the pen, in the Sun Bulletin and town gown. Relations were very low at that time anyway, because Harpur kids were beatniks and so on. Not yet hippies, they were just beatniks.

IG: 37:20
Were you at that? Did you-

NC: 37:22
There were two kinds of people on campus. Well, sort of there were the upstate and the downstairs, and then they were called the sickies that would be downstate people, or people of that, who might like that from the upstate and clubbies who would might belong to a social club we did not have, we did not have fraternities, but there were social clubs that-that mostly boys belong to girls, but-

IG: 37:52
You did not, you did not.

AC: 37:54
I did not know. And to its credit, the college allowed Aptheker to speak, and it was a big deal. It was surrounded by policemen and everything. And-

NC: 38:03
This is before my time.

IG: 38:05
Yeah.

AC: 38:05
And he came and he spoke and he went.

NC: 38:07
And but so did. But also Eleanor Roosevelt came, right?

IG: 38:11
Right.

AC: 38:12
Yes.

NC: 38:14
And [crosstalk]

AC: 38:17
There were a lot, and it was also the era of the beginning of civil rights. It was- (19)63 was the, you know, the year of taking busses down to register people to vote.

IG: 38:29
And did you?

AC: 38:30
I did not. But people we knew did. Joined [crosstalk]

NC: 38:38
[inaudible] and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.

IG: 38:42
Were there any students of color that you remember from-

AC: 38:46
Almost none.

NC: 38:47
Two.

AC: 38:47
Who were they?

NC: 38:49
Julius Mangi, who, for some reason, came from Africa. And he thought he was, I think he thought he was going to go to NYU, but he ended up in SUNY.

AC: 38:57
And Krishna.

AC: 38:57
Right. He thought he was going to State University of New York. He thought he would be in New York, and he was in Vestal and he was the only black person in Vestal. [laughs]

AC: 39:00
He was an Indian.

NC: 39:12
And then there was a Margot, something, Margot, oh, Yvonne Yancey, I mean-

AC: 39:18
But very few. If they were five in the whole campus. [crosstalk] professors.

NC: 39:24
But there were, that is true there. But it was very active civil rights club, very active. And also going up to picket HUAC is House Un-American Activities Committee. They were they were resurgent in Buffalo. We took busses up to picket. I have pictures of me picketing outside of someplace I do not know. I go to work.

IG: 39:53
Were you protesting against the house of Un-American Activities? Could you tell us about that?

NC: 39:58
I can I. Forgot.

IG: 40:00
You forgot. Okay,

NC: 40:05
I thought about it, but, uh,

IG: 40:06
Well, maybe, maybe you will remember in the course of this conversation, so you were active in this sort-

NC: 40:16
[crosstalk] civil rights this did happen to me in Binghamton, and I do not even know why I did nothing about it at the time, there was a Conklin Avenue. Was a street near the river, was like right along the river, and there was an apartment building, and being with an apartment building might have only been two or three stories right. that refused to rent an apartment to a black dentist who had moved to Binghamton. So the Civil Rights Club decided they would picket this building, and I do not even remember what the outcome was, but we kept a picket line going in front of that building for a while. We all had shifts, and I had a shift with somebody whose name I forgot. His first name was Fred. I remember the rest of his name. Just the two of us on a Sunday morning, and we were on the sidewalk. There was a low a low brick wall and some hedges, and a car pulls up and like three guys jump out, pull out a long gun, like a rifle, aim it at us. We both leaped over the wall and lay down, and they laughed and got back in the car and drove away. And we have not told anybody. And I just think that all of that is very surprising when I think about it. And I was a freshman, then that was surprising.

IG: 41:36
And-and, so do you remember approximately when this happened?

NC: 41:41
I thinking it must have been in the spring of (19)63 in that it was not raining and we were not freezing, but I do not know.

IG: 41:51
Did you tell anybody?

NC: 41:53
Well, we may have told other friends, but we never told anybody in authority or the police or anything.

IG: 41:58
Because?

NC: 41:59
It never occurred to us.

IG: 42:00
It never occurred because you were afraid that you were in some way-

NC: 42:04
No.

IG: 42:05
Breaking-

NC: 42:05
No. It just did not occur to us.

IG: 42:08
Did not occur to you.

AC: 42:09
Because the place where the pigs-

NC: 42:11
We did not think that then, I did not think that then, but anyway, but that would that was one thing that happened, another crazy thing that happened with the Civil Rights Club that was insane, and we had to get special permission from the head of women's housing. There was a department store called Brits, and it was in a shopping mall rather small, just a mile or so from the campus called Vestal Plaza and on George Washington's birthday, for reasons I do not know what they were going to have a- they were going to give silver dollars away for the first 200 people who got to the store. So the whole Civil Rights Club went there. 430 in the morning. We had to get permission for the girls to leave the campus and walk over there and get there when we all line up, we all got the silver dollars to donate to some civil rights organization you might have been there.

IG: 43:13
So what, you know, I am just interested what took place at this in this kind of you said unrepentant. There were unrepentant Stalinists.

AC: 43:24
It was more [crosstalk] Nothing serious. Nothing took place. Just to piss off the administration was like the [crosstalk]

NC: 43:33
That was the goal of everything.

AC: 43:36
-to see what you could do to make Dean Belniak's blood pressure go through the roof.

NC: 43:41
Or just to see what you could get away with. Could you really sneak out and not get caught? Or could you really have had three bottles of brandy in your room and not get caught or, or could you have a boy in your room and not get caught? And-

IG: 43:57
It is just testing the boundaries.

NC: 44:00
It may have been something like that. That would not have been me, exactly, but-but I know that people did that.

AC: 44:07
I was on the convocations committee that was which was [crosstalk] one of the highlights of my career at Harpur, the convocations committee had an annual but it was students, faculty and administration met [crosstalk]I do not know how often to plan the year's convocations, and-

NC: 44:28
Meaning who you invite to the meeting.

AC: 44:30
Meaning what-

IG: 44:32
Right.

AC: 44:35
Placido Domingo came up before anybody ever heard of Placido Domingo. It was, he looked like this. I thought he was a Mexican. He was not Mexican. Dispatched a Mexican. Came by bus.

IG: 44:47
By bus?

AC: 44:48
By bus from New York to Binghamton to sing for right, $100 maybe $150- we had a-

IG: 44:55
Where was he then? Who? What opera was he in?

NC: 44:58
[crosstalk] Our son, Michael, who is a reporter right now, is a, it is not a critic. He is a reporter for music, classical music, dance. And he knows Placido pretty well after all these years. And he once said, my father and mother saw you in Binghamton because it was early, ugly. But we, but no, you had the best thing I ever saw. There was Jose Contreras, Circle in the Square, Production of Under Milk Wood that you and W. H. Auden came. I mean we-

IG: 45:22
[crosstalk] serious?

AC: 45:24
No, I was his escort. I spent-

IG: 45:29
Of whom?

AC: 45:33
W. H. Auden. [crosstalk]

NC: 45:38
He wore slippers, he wore orange bedroom slippers.

AC: 45:45
And he somewhat disgraced himself. [crosstalk] I was a senior and we had the convocations committee, I guess, through an agent or through his publisher. You know, once you're holding convocations, they come to you asking for gigs. And he came up to give a speech. He came up the day before there was a little like a motel unit apartment for celebrities upstairs from in the snack bar building.

IG: 46:08
How glamorous.

AC: 46:20
And I was a senior, and I was at the time, I thought I was going to go to Africa to join the Peace Corps. And so he and I had a long talk about Isk Dinesen and Kenya and Africa, and-

IG: 46:34
Had he been to those parts?

AC: 46:36
He or me? I do not know if he had. I certainly had not, but he knew he was like innocent or and we I picked him up for breakfast. We went to the stack well for breakfast, we sat around and had breakfast.

IG: 46:52
So how did you he strike you? What did he was? What? How did he look like [crosstalk]

AC: 46:58
He was, he was a drunk. He was a pathetic drunk.

NC: 47:04
But he still read his poetry and he was charming and he was neat.

IG: 47:09
Do you remember what he read?

AC: 47:11
No.

IG: 47:11
No, you do not remember. Would it be on record what he read?

NC: 47:15
It might be in the if they have the Annals of the newspapers.

AC: 47:19
I do not know.

NC: 47:21
There was still called the Colonial News.

IG: 47:25
-is in the process of working [crosstalk]

AC: 47:29
It have been in the spring of (19)63.

IG: 47:36
So he was, he was already drunk.

AC: 47:39
No, he was not.

IG: 47:40
In the morning?

AC: 47:41
No-no. But by the time he read at the auditorium or the theater in the evening,

IG: 47:49
After he read?

AC: 47:50
No, before, during he was kind of, his teeth were kind of falling out of his mouth, a little, sloshing around, but, but it was brilliant. I mean, I am not trying to [crosstalk]

IG: 48:05
Were, you know, all of the English faculty kind [crosstalk]

NC: 48:08
I think everybody was, look, yeah, as we have said, there was nothing to do. We had this theater that really the convocations committee.

AC: 48:17
Then they hired the Guarneri Quartet for several years, the Guarneri Quartet was artist in residence at Harpur.

NC: 48:27
And they were phenomenal. And you could go to the free rehearsals. It was free.

AC: 48:31
And their performances, artists in residence, mean they gave four or five performances a year, or-

NC: 48:39
At least.

AC: 48:40
-maybe more than that. And you could go to them, and they were all 27 years old at that time also.

NC: 48:48
One of them was, it was David Sawyer, I believe, who-

AC: 48:52
The cellist.

NC: 48:54
-who could not record because he was a heavy breather. And in those days, they did not know how to get that sound out. But, of course, later on he was, they were making recordings. But we had the Pearl Lang Dance Company. We had, we had amazing shows.

NC: 49:11
And Peter and [crosstalk]

NC: 49:13
Peter Wood was-was-was the outstanding thing in my mind, but-but that we saw lots of things- are just people who-

AC: 49:22
There was also a lot of student produced theater. We had a really pretty high quality.

NC: 49:28
[crosstalk] matches.

AC: 49:29
Okay, there you go.

NC: 49:31
You and you were in the sandbox.

AC: 49:33
I played daddy in the sandbox.

NC: 49:36
No, and you played Uncle Tom in Uncle Tom's Cabin, right?

AC: 49:40
That was different. But, yeah.

IG: 49:41
Why is it different?

AC: 49:44
It was not a real it was not, was not a real theatrical production, on the stage with an audience.

NC: 49:51
It was in the coffee house.

AC: 49:53
Yeah.

NC: 49:53
But they tried to, I mean, we had a good time.

IG: 49:57
You had a good time. And I think sounds like you were exposed to really kind of a deep culture with some really important cultural and-

AC: 50:07
The prevailing attitude was Marx Brothers, Looney Tunes.

IG: 50:13
Yeah.

AC: 50:13
I mean, at least

IG: 50:17
In America, and kind [crosstalk]

AC: 50:19
No, the attitude among my friends and fellow students. We were wise guys.

NC: 50:26
Funniest people I ever met in my life. I and I do not think you can be really funny unless you're really smart. And I could not believe my good fortune to be in this place with people. I hope we're just hysterical now, even now on Facebook, we're old and that sort of we do Facebook, and there are a group of horrible people, and sometimes you will get a thread of things that will just have me laughing, and it is exactly they are exactly the same as they were, even though I have not seen them in 40 years, these the repartee is very-very-very clever and funny and smart, but-

AC: 51:07
There was Binghamton radio disc jockey or call and talk show host.

IG: 51:17
I Think I interviewed somebody who [crosstalk]

AC: 51:20
For months, a couple of students, whom we will not name, would call him up with funny accents and engage him in the most ludicrous conversation.

NC: 51:34
I have a magic act, and I cannot get hired any man in Binghamton. [laughter] [inaudible] the tip of my tongue, but I want to say I cannot remember the name of the show.

AC: 51:48
Okay.

NC: 51:50
Speak for yourself. I think that is what. It was cool. Speak for yourself. Ultimately, they caught us.

NC: 51:56
So what happened? [crosstalk]

NC: 51:59
They just hanging their phone calls. But it was truly hilarious.

IG: 52:05
So how did, how did the talk show host feel these answers?

AC: 52:12
He was blindsided. He was taking this seriously.

NC: 52:16
And then other people would call in to respond. But the people there were so really-really funny and clever in ways and outrageous, and it made it a lot of fun.

AC: 52:34
A highlight of my four years there was when the Aunt Jemima Pancakes House, Pancake House opened down the highway,

NC: 52:42
Right across the from campus [crosstalk]

AC: 52:49
Um, for their opening month or three months-

NC: 52:52
Was not that long.

IG: 52:53
[inaudible] on site?

AC: 52:53
Yes.

NC: 52:53
But then there was the great- there were a lot of along Vestal Highway. I do not know if it is still called vessel highway. There was a number of steak houses. And then there was the weekend of the great steak stealing contest. Many different, many different students worked in kitchens or waiters, and the idea was, who could steal the best, the most steak. It was relatively harmless, stealing steaks from the restaurant that underpaid you.

IG: 52:53
But what kind of music were you listening to at the time? Do you remember?

AC: 52:53
Folk.

AC: 52:53
I do not know what it was. It was all you could eat for dollar 25 right across the highway from a campus with a bad meal plan, so we drove them crazy. I mean, waitresses are crying and quitting. I mean, we come in and say, I would like two large glasses of fresh orange juice and eight orders of bacon, please.

NC: 53:01
In the beginning, was folk, but, but by the time it was I was really heavy stones. And you know, the more druggy we became, the more less folky we became.

AC: 54:09
No drugs in my early years.

NC: 54:11
There were no drugs and, well, there were drugs in my early years, but I did not have the good sense to use them. Ultimately, I and some of these things stay with you for the rest of your life. And here we are, of course, more than a half a century later. And-

IG: 54:27
So how different were these, were this experience of theater, of Guarneri String Quartet, from your family upbringing? Was this a different world, or was this a continuation-

NC: 54:40
Totally different.

AC: 54:42
Oh, yeah, this was getting cultured, that you go to college to get cultured.

NC: 54:46
My family was half Spanish, and so what we, if we-we would go see flamenco dancing, sometimes in Carmen and Maya, but once I was sent to the Metropolitan Opera. And I thought, kill me now, but now, anytime I can go, I am so thrilled, and I get to go quite often. I did get to Broadway plays when I was a kid because they were affordable, unlike now, if there was a blizzard in New York, my mother would say, "Quick, get on the subway, go up and get tickets," and there would be cancelation So, but they were cheap. They were truly cheap, not now anyway. But no, this was all new. It was funny. I grew up in the village, and I was walking out of my school singing, "Oh, Mary, we crown thee with blossoms today." Bob Dylan was probably across the street singing, but I never saw him. I was doing something other than, you know, I did not well. I hung around the streets. And very interesting.

IG: 55:51
You were also young.

NC: 55:52
Yes, but-but we were also out all the time and [crosstalk]

AC: 55:56
A lot of movies. This was in the day before there were VCRs or DVDs or anything. And so-

NC: 56:04
That is right, movies.

AC: 56:07
And it was a- the convocations committee showed some movies, but in the private or student clubs, as a fundraising event, would rent, uh-

NC: 56:22
I do not know about that, Mondo Connie. I remember going to the movies in Binghamton. It was cheap. Movies were cheap.

AC: 56:29
But like, we would rent a movie, you get it in reels of 16-millimeter film from Janus, and you charge 50 cents admission, and you would show an Ingrid Bergman, Ingmar Bergman, or some of the European you know, high class post World War Two movies.

NC: 56:53
For lots of us-

AC: 56:55
Because there was almost always a movie somebody was showing on the weekend.

NC: 56:59
For all of our friends, even, who are my friends now, none of their parents went to college. None of them did such cultural things. We learned it in college. We had- it was a lot of fun.

IG: 57:13
So tell me about you know, just give me kind of a general kind of trajectory of your lives after you graduated, you went to Bank, Street School, you at some point-

NC: 57:27
I went to Bank, married, I became a teacher, and he ultimately became a teacher. He was still avoiding the draft.

AC: 57:42
I spent several years of avoiding the draft. I went to graduate school in Florida.

NC: 57:48
They would not let him into Peace Corps.

AC: 57:50
[crosstalk] the draft. I could not get into the Peace Corps because of my left-wing background. This was the very earliest years of the Peace Corps. Kennedy was president, Sergeant Shriver was head of the Peace Corps, and they were very nervous about hiring communists. I was not a communist.

IG: 58:09
But you were, I mean, [crosstalk]. How did they know that you were a communist?

AC: 58:13
The FBI was- they really did background checks on every Peace Corps applicant. I mean, they were interviewing my neighbors in Brooklyn, my parents, neighbors in Brooklyn.

NC: 58:25
From where you moved out when you were two or something even.

AC: 58:29
So, but anyway, the Peace Corps would not have me, but they got me into graduate school in Florida, after which I got a teaching job, which was defer draft deferrable. And I also married somebody which was also draft deferrable, somebody not Nancy. And I taught there for three years.

NC: 58:51
Then-then, she went to graduate school in the city, and so you moved to the city, and I was already teaching in the city, and this was in the late (19)60s, and there was this enormous teachers strike. Albert Shanker, I do not remember these names, and it was a huge-huge strike. And they were, I am making the numbers up here, but something like 35,000 striking teachers and 100 scabs-scabs. It was political at that time. At this time, I was saying it was it was it probably incorrect position, but days it seemed like the correct position. And there were meetings and I-

NC: 59:32
Teachers teaching for the community.

NC: 59:32
Teachers teaching for the community.

IG: 59:36
Tell us, what are scabs for the purpose of this?

AC: 59:40
Scabs are teachers who cross the picket line to go into work

NC: 59:44
Scab, you know, and I had to walk past my coworkers who would spit on me as I walked into my school in East Harlem, which I had to open with a crowbar to get the chains off the door because the schools had been locked and we slept there in. In sleeping bags, but, and there were people who to this day, if I said they would not speak to me, but I do not care.

AC: 1:00:09
And I was teaching at the time in Brooklyn and Sheepshead Bay High School, which had probably 200 faculty and six scabs. And it was unpleasant.

AC: 1:00:09
It was unpleasant. Yes.

IG: 1:00:21
So how did you-

NC: 1:00:24
There were meetings for the people who were the teachers, and since the only 100 and all city.

IG: 1:00:30
Right.

NC: 1:00:31
We-we met, and I do not know.

AC: 1:00:35
And we had mutual friends all from Harpur.

NC: 1:00:38
Over the years, we had been at parties at the same time.

AC: 1:00:42
But this time I was not married.

NC: 1:00:43
This time he was not married, and I was, you know, loose ends, and they kept buying the same records,

AC: 1:00:50
And she had an apartment with an air conditioner.

NC: 1:00:54
And I had a dental plan, and that was it. I do not forget why I married you, because I thought you were handy.

AC: 1:01:04
I was handy. I put down a new floor in your kitchen.

NC: 1:01:07
Yeah, it was six tiles.

AC: 1:01:08
The kitchen was so small that it took nine tiles.

NC: 1:01:13
But then you never did it again.

IG: 1:01:17
So how did you-you know, and how did you end up in this beautiful apartment? And from being, from being in that small space with six tiles to-

NC: 1:01:28
Arthur, he was very successful, but he did.

AC: 1:01:34
After my second-year teaching, and Sheepshead Bay, I quit teaching.

NC: 1:01:40
That is when we got married.

NC: 1:01:42
She might have heard. Do you know the Gale research company?

AC: 1:01:42
And that is when we got married. I was able to quit teaching, because I by that time, I was 26 and not draftable. And we got married, and I looked for jobs. I got jobs writing-

IG: 1:01:59
Yes.

AC: 1:02:00
I worked for writing advertisements to librarians for the- their various series, The Encyclopedia of Associations, contemporary authors.

IG: 1:02:11
Of course, I know, I know that series very well.

AC: 1:02:14
Okay, well, I had nothing to do with the series except selling it. They had an office in New York where we wrote junk mail, catalogs and brochures and mailings to librarians to get them to buy Gale products.

IG: 1:02:30
I remember the hard copy version of Gale, the contemporary authors, the various kinds of-

AC: 1:02:37
I only knew the hard copy version.

NC: 1:02:39
I am going to walk away [crosstalk]

AC: 1:02:46
That was a good job, because I was in a two-person office, and I learned everything from my boss, not just in writing the copy, but in cutting out the proof, the-the print. Prints and pasting them down on the mechanicals and wrapping the boards and taking them to the post office to send to the printer. And I learned the whole direct mail industry.

IG: 1:03:14
Did you interact with the authors at all, or editors?

AC: 1:03:18
No, the editor's slides- most of what Gail was selling were so called scholarly reprints of Victor of out of print, and therefore public domain, Victorian studies of folklore and stuff like that. It was really happened to be the interest of the guy who owned the company.

IG: 1:03:41
But I remember, you know, I remember 20th century Russian authors in that series, and contemporary author, I remember, I remember using that encyclopedia myself for, you know, my-my studies.

AC: 1:03:58
Well, do you know better than I.

IG: 1:04:00
My Russian literature, yeah.

AC: 1:04:02
And by that time we had a baby, and I was making very little money, but my boss at Gale connected me to his friend at an advertising agency called R. L. Polk, and they hired me just a few blocks away, and suddenly I was making much more money, and I became a direct mail advertising creator, creative director, writer, copywriter, mostly for magazines and books and book clubs and also insurance companies and fundraisers, and I did that for them, for well, there was [crosstalk] back and forth, few jobs in here and there, but I ultimately left that to go freelance and. From 1986 until now. Well, I am now retired, but I was self-employed as a direct mail freelance writer and designer, and that that is [crosstalk] I bought this apartment.

IG: 1:05:22
And you?

NC: 1:05:24
I taught for a couple of years. Had baby. Always thought I would go right back to work, as my mother did. She went back to work before I was two, but then I realized do not want to do that. I was very-very different from women my age. They all wanted to fulfill themselves and go to work and-and they needed the money, but we were able to pare back our lives in a way that I did not go back to work. I stayed home with Michael, and then I had a second child a number of years later, but I did not go back to work till Eddie was 29 I did not be but I volunteered all the time. What did I do? I-I volunteered, doing two things, playing the guitar in nursery schools, music with little kids, because I am pretty good at that. But I also learned the used book business, and first, as a volunteer, sold books for a nonprofit called the Hudson Guild on north side in Chelsea, they would have a book fair every year, and I would work on that, and ultimately run that. And then they decided not to do that anymore, and I began working for a group called Housing Works. And Housing Works is a pretty big aids homeless group, but they have a bookstore in on Crosby Street in Soho, and I worked there for 13 years, selling rare books online and in the store.

IG: 1:06:57
As a volunteer?

NC: 1:06:58
No-no employee. And I still, I was there Monday. I still do that. I like a lot.

IG: 1:07:07
That is nice.

NC: 1:07:08
So I am fun, and I know a lot about books. And it is, you know, this weekend is-

AC: 1:07:14
Yes, the Park Avenue -

NC: 1:07:15
-is the biggest.

IG: 1:07:17
Armory?

AC: 1:07:18
Yeah.

IG: 1:07:19
Big wood.

NC: 1:07:19
Big book fair.

IG: 1:07:21
Book fair. Oh.

AC: 1:07:21
This is the classiest, largest book fair anywhere.

IG: 1:07:25
Rare books.

NC: 1:07:26
Yes, this will happen. You know what they call elephant folios of order by Princeton [crosstalk]

AC: 1:07:32
You can get in for $25.

NC: 1:07:35
I do not- is it that I did not, I am not going. I cannot walk, so I am done with that for the moment.

IG: 1:07:41
Okay, well, you know, I think that maybe you know the concluding questions are that I usually ask at the conclusion of the interview is, what lessons, what life lessons did you learn that you think would help current students at Binghamton University, or, you know, future, future students that are listening to these tapes. What really got you through the-

NC: 1:08:15
Trends. But I cannot imagine it so large now it is just one of our nieces went there. It is huge. It is just, I have not been back in a number of years. I went to a few reunions, but it is really far, really far, and I had a fabulous time.

AC: 1:08:35
Not as far as it used to be.

NC: 1:08:36
No.

AC: 1:08:37
When I started going there, it was seven hours to drive there from New York City, because there was a route 17 ended in about in Monticello, in the Catskills. We're living somewhere. And from-from there to Binghamton was a narrow, winding two lane road in you would invariably be stuck behind a milk truck going uphill and with no passing possibilities. And it took seven hours to drive from New York to Binghamton. Now it takes three.

IG: 1:09:10
That is terrible.

NC: 1:09:11
It was five and a half the first time my parents took me there.

IG: 1:09:14
As it is now, three and a half hours is pretty exhausting.

NC: 1:09:17
Yeah. It got better when we could go through Pennsylvania.

AC: 1:09:20
The fastest way still, is through Scranton. [crosstalk]

NC: 1:09:24
And that was also very scenic, but, so I do not it was just friends that that have meant everything to me, and here I am still. I mean, we have a house on [inaudible] because my college roommate has a house one walk away from me. We still, yeah, we're friends forever. We have a number of couples who are still married in the time when so many people are not still married. Okay. We're married 49 years. Yeah. A tip for you. You always had your marriage on, but we- what was a lot of fun in early years after college was that everybody came back to New York to see their parents, and they would come see us now, their parents were all dead, so we do not see them so much they stay in California.

AC: 1:10:22
Being a Harpurites, Harpur graduate who lived in Manhattan, you would get a lot of company from other Harpurites who were coming to the city to visit for Christmas week or whatever.

IG: 1:10:35
So for you, what do you have any message to convey to the future.

AC: 1:10:43
I guess be cynical, I guess is my most important point. Be questioning. Be negative.

NC: 1:10:53
I am nothing like that.

AC: 1:10:57
Do not believe anything they tell you.

IG: 1:10:59
So it is a good lesson. Any concluding remarks.

NC: 1:11:10
It was very pretty. There was the country. It is not so much anymore. I mean, I have seen it. They used to be, could just walk up behind the dorms.

AC: 1:11:17
We had a tree house. I mean, one of the reasons. One of the reasons they thought I was a bad example was a couple of friends and I just walking. There was probably buildings there by now. Keep going up the hill, uphill from the campus, and you were in the woods. And it was, it was complete woods. I mean, you could not see anything in any direction, and we built a tree house and would go there and sit around. We never smoked anything there, maybe not in the early years.

IG: 1:11:52
Why do you think that you have the reputation of being inspiring person? Do you-

NC: 1:12:02
[crosstalk] Zany.

AC: 1:12:05
Yeah, there was a lot of zaniness involved. And this was also the age of Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin. And for example, in my freshman year, living in Hinman dormitory on the second floor, I collected 10 cents from every kid on the floor every month, and bought comic books and bought and so that there would be about eight there were three toilet stalls in the bathroom, and each in each toilet stall, I had about eight comic books on a string tied in. And this was, one was adventureland, one was fantasy, yeah, and one was and every month I put in 8-24, fresh comic books. That is just an example.

IG: 1:12:05
Oh, Zany.

IG: 1:12:55
[crosstalk] material, yeah, yeah, but that is kind of an inventive idea.

NC: 1:12:58
It is funny. I did not know you did that. I did that too when I was a dorm counselor, but it was not comic books. It was all girls, yeah, girls dorms. And I did that. I did that too. I must see it. It was, it was a very great time for me those four years, and I did learn things, despite the fact I am so sorry that I did not learn that I should have majored in art history. I did not discover Art History till maybe the first semester of my junior year, and I thought I died and gone to heaven, but in those days, you did. Nobody stayed in college more than four years. You knew you went for four years, and nobody had the money for the extra year, so you could not make all your requirements if you did that. But-but I-I would always like history, but art history was even better, because it was everything. It was history and sociology and philosophy and politics, and-

IG: 1:14:05
It had, from what I know, it had a tremendous Art History and Art Department.

NC: 1:14:11
It did, but I never had Lindsay. I well, I did a little bit, but there was a guy who was in art. I wish I could think of his name. He was a curator at the Morgan.

IG: 1:14:26
I know him. Wolfley.

NC: 1:14:29
That is it. I have gone on tour there with him.

IG: 1:14:33
I bought tours with him too.

NC: 1:14:40
But there was a lot of- I wish. I wished that I had known about art history, but just it was something, and I wish they had not made me take Bio, Sci or geology, although, in fact, Geology has, even though I got a D. Shut up, it stood me in good stead. I still know a little bit about what I am looking at when I am out in the world. But I wish I could have taken it a little more cultured. I would have been better off had majored in art history.

AC: 1:15:11
I would like to learn something about Charles Eldred, who was he was a senior when I was a freshman, and the artist, correct. I will find out. And he died, yes, young, and I do not know how, although he smoked [inaudible] nonstop.

NC: 1:15:38
He had a wife. His wife, wife's name [inaudible] and his son's name is Charles, and Chuck is-is an architect, because I once Googled Charles Eldred and I have got Chuck.

AC: 1:15:47
There is a museum in Binghamton called the Roberson gallery. They had a show there. In fact, we have a poster of it in the bathroom. [crosstalk] And he was an extremely aside from being a talented artist, he was zany and crazy and wonderful. I mean, he was, he was built, he built an ornithopter.

IG: 1:16:11
What is that?

AC: 1:16:18
If you imagine a something Leonardo da Vinci, a helicopter built by Leonardo da Vinci out of wood with thick wings, that flap. I mean, it did not work, but it was a built it out of wood. Months building an ornithopter, and with a very good sense of humor.

IG: 1:16:40
He actually built it, yeah, did it work?

AC: 1:16:43
No, he did not. I mean, he never tried to, never took it on the roof and tried to fly. No, it would definitely not work. it was a joke. And Lindsay, after he graduated, Lindsay hired him to stay on, to teach art. And there is a whole lot of Harpur alumni who studied art, from-from Doc, from Professor Eldred.

AC: 1:17:13
But he was an outstanding considering an unknown artist, he was totally unknown in the world of art, and we great.

NC: 1:17:13
And who have, we have a number of friends who have an Eldred or two in their house. We have more than an Eldred or two.

NC: 1:17:31
We think he is good.

AC: 1:17:34
That concludes our meeting for today.

(End of Interview)

2018-03-09

Irene Gashurov

1963 and 1966

Arthur Cooper and Nancy Cooper

Arthur Cooper is a writer, self-employed. Art started out working for Gale publishing, but he made his name as a direct mail writer.

Audio

Harpur College – Sixties alumni; Harpur College – Alumni in publishing; Harpur College – Alumni from New York City; Harpur College – Alumni living in the New York City area

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Harpur College – Sixties alumni; Harpur College – Alumni in publishing; Harpur College – Alumni from New York City; Harpur College – Alumni living in the New York City area