Genesis -- and some revelations

There is a history to this book.  A couple of years ago, I had been talking with Paul Lyons (another of those classic Paul hallway conversations) and during our conversation he mentioned both that he was planning to write a history of Stockton and that the President, Herman Saatkamp, was interested in supporting the project.  It seemed to me a worthwhile endeavor, but as a member of one of the younger cohorts (I came to RSC in 1996), I didn’t think it likely that I would be heavily involved in it. 

 

That was as much as I knew about the situation until, very sadly, Paul died suddenly at the beginning of 2009.  With his death, it seemed to me, the project was no longer likely to move forward as most faculty members are very committed to their own teaching and research agendas, and finding time to pull something like this together is difficult.  Interestingly, Paul hadn’t been the first person to begin working on this project.  Two earlier attempts had been made by Ingie LaFleur, a former dean, and Bill Gilmore-Lehne, a history professor, and both had died suddenly before the project had really taken off.  This too might deter someone who was mildly superstitious from wanting to take on this project.

 

The idea of the project came back into my consciousness when, out of the blue, Herman Saatkamp summoned me to his office.  After some friendly banter he got down to business.  A book focusing on Stockton needed to be written, he said, and it would be great if it could be done in time to celebrate the 40^th anniversary of the college – or at least of teaching at the Pomona campus – in 2011.  He believed that I would be able to accomplish this, and he sugarcoated his suggestions in this regard with several compliments about my writing ability and my publication record.  He thought it would be a difficult project, but he believed that if I could find someone else to co-edit with me, and we drew on members of the community for essays and other contributions, that we would be able to accomplish the task. 

 

Internally I groaned, while maintaining a smile on the outside.  This would be a big job just trying to cover the history of the college, and that was if we kept it simple.  But Herman wanted something more than just a basic history.  It should not cover only the early days; it should be a serious volume, with some scholarly and intellectual heft; it should look attractive and be engaging, so that it could also be used for fundraising purposes; it needed to be positive, but not a white wash of real issues and difficult topics; in short, the editors would need to be able to dance on a pin – and all within a fairly tight timeline.  No problem. 

 

Herman also suggested names of some potential co-editors, but none of them appealed to me particularly.   This wasn’t because they weren’t worthy people in their own right – they were all people who write well and have a track record of publication.  But there were several problems with them in my mind: they were from the same cohort of faculty to which I belonged, and I didn’t feel that having someone with similar perspectives to myself, or representing a particular faction of the faculty, would be optimal.  How would we be able to solicit the ideas and contributions from the earliest Stockton cohort, the Mayflower faculty?  Moreover, as I knew from my time as a co-editor of an encyclopedia, writing monographs wasn’t necessarily the best preparation for creating a work of this kind.  I needed someone altogether different from the folks being suggested – someone who was able to bring together vast amounts of information, who already knew where bodies and facts were buried, and who was a player in the early days of the college.  I also felt that, while I was going to be important to the project, that person should also be the first author of this volume.

 

I hadn’t decided on whom that person should be, even though I had a couple of ideas, when I happened to have a meeting with Ken Tompkins, about some entirely different matter.  Ken started to talk about the early deans and how it was truly unfortunate that they haven’t been given full credit for what they accomplished and that it is a great shame (though the language may have been stronger than this) that the history of Stockton and all that had been attempted at the college over the years had never been written.  I won’t say that I felt like Saul of Tarsus on the road to Damascus, but having Ken as the other co-editor struck me instantly as being an excellent idea.  As a faculty member in transition to retirement (so having some time to devote to the work), with a commitment to the topic unmatched by any person on campus, Ken was the obvious choice.  Did I think we could work together?  It seemed to me that we were sufficiently different that there would be an interesting creative tension that could only be productive.  Ken will always speak his mind, and while I felt his view of the college was sometimes more pessimistic than my own, I felt we could work together to make this a success. 

 

So I mentioned the topic to him and he responded extremely positively once I had laid out what it was that the President was asking of us.  It is still early days yet, but it is safe to say that for me what seemed to be a project almost impossible to accomplish, no longer seems quite so insurmountable.  And the material that we are finding and the information that we have been unearthing has been interesting – at times even very amusing.

Rob