White Doves Ascending

On Tuesday, March 17^th, Ken and I drove down to Cape May to visit Joan Bjork.  Joan was the wife of Stockton’s first President, Richard Bjork, and so was a witness to many of the events and developments occurring in the early years of the college. She now resides in a beautiful bed and breakfast, the White Dove Inn, which she runs with her daughter.

It was a very pleasant visit. We sat in her dining room and went through pictures and articles that she had kept, and listened to some of the stories that these inspired Joan to recall. At least, I largely listened. Ken and Joan seemed to have a great time reminding each other of many different and sometimes odd (to my ear at least) events that had gone on.

I will give one example. There was an article (which somehow did not make its way back with us in the folder of documents we returned bearing) about Richard Bjork’s participation, along with a few of his administrators, in a trip to Camden, New Jersey. The idea of this venture was to leave administrators to their own devices with a couple of dollars in their pocket in an urban center. Apparently this was frequently done also with undergraduate students at the time until, I learned yesterday, an Antioch student was killed and the program was terminated. The intention, I suppose, was to teach survival skills and to have one learn how “the other half” lived, or in some cases just survived from day to day.

Ken, it turned out, was one of the three administrators who joined Dick Bjork on this trip and he had vivid memories of his own experiences, which, had Orwell not already been dead, might have ended up as a sequel to Down and Out in Paris and London. He also remembered that the President fared rather better than he and seemed to master the dismal terrain quite capably. While Ken and his partner in grime were sleeping, virtually huddled together on the sidewalk throughout the cold night of October, simply because they hadn’t generated enough funds to do anything else, Dick had survived fairly handsomely. He had spent the first night in the warmth of a bus station, went to Manpower the next day and found a day job moving office furniture, and spent the second night at the YMCA. Ken remembered him turning up at one of the meeting points whistling away happily and carrying a bottle of wine. Whether he shared this with his down and out friends wasn’t related.

This was a humanizing story, for me. It was matched by a reaction that Joan had to a picture of her and Dick at the first basketball game held in the Stockton gym. “Oh, look how young we were!” she exclaimed. And it is true, Dick was only 38 when he began as Stockton’s President, astonishingly young for a head administrator. But he also seemed to be harboring some of his youthful idealism, and Joan’s comments gave one a sense of how much he was trying to accomplish.

Now every person in a position of power, no matter how good, has his or her detractors (and as I said in the previous post, there were competing idealisms vying for notice in the Pomona marshes, and Dick’s was only one of them), so it isn’t surprising that the first President had some. But what is sometimes lost in the disagreement over the divergent objectives held by contending forces is the intentions, the vision, and sometimes even the humanity of those with whom one disagrees.

For me, at least, our visit to the White Dove Inn provided a very pleasant reminder that President Bjork was certainly a man of great accomplishment and a person with a sense of a vision for Stockton. To what extent he managed to achieve that vision and whether it was the best vision for the college, I am not in a position to say at the moment; but I came away from our meeting feeling very positive about him.