My Life
in Review: Have I been Lucky or What?
My Life
in Review: Have I been Lucky or What?
I approached the return to the classroom with some ambivalent feelings. My friends had told me that I had a very romantic view of teaching and that students were different than they were ten years before, warning me that I would be disappointed if not disillusioned. Their assessment did not turn out to be accurate. I found the students to be as responsive as I had remembered, if not more so. My course, "The Social History of American Sports," turned out to be a real hit. The next semester I offered two sections and still had to turn students away as both sections were oversubscribed. In the subsequent years the average enrollments in those classes totaled over two hundred per annum.
That course happily combined my background in social history with my life-long interest in sports. Teaching it brought me undiluted pleasure. I felt like "I had died and gone to heaven." Before leaving the subject of the sports course I feel constrained to deal with the natural assumption that it would tend to attract mental and/or intellectual lightweights—"Jocks" looking for a mickey-mouse offering with easygoing bull sessions and easily-obtained credit. Anticipating that possibility I made every effort to make the course intellectually demanding with strong doses of social history, considerable required reading, written reports and rigorous tests. I made my expectations clear at the first meeting, handing out an extensive bibliography, a comprehensive outline and a list of the specific requirements. The first couple of times I offered the course some students dropped out when confronted with its rigorous demands but the student grapevine functioned well. The students "got the word" before enrolling and I encountered very few would be "free-loaders" over the years. On the other hand the large majority proved to be good to excellent.
The sports course yielded four by-products: (1) A paper, "Sports and the Intellectuals" presented to the Philosophers' Club of Rochester at President Brown's request (2) An article, "Sports Cheers and Jeers Through the Years", published in the Sunday magazine, section of the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle (3) A lecture, "Sports as a Political Football", presented in the College's Academic Lecture Series (4) Participation in a TV debate on the 1980 Olympic boycott on The New York Magazine program of Rochester's PBS channel.
Thus teaching that course led to considerable visibility beyond the classroom. Fortuitously it gave me the opportunity to tell my Dad's "Billy Sunday story" which elicited the most spirited and lasting student response of any illustrative tale I ever used. That too spread beyond the classroom as students passed the word to other students and to teachers. Most of the students who sent letters for my Memory Book when I retired cited the "Billy Sunday story" as one of their vivid and lasting memories of yours truly. I began to refer to it as my "Sunday punch" and used it to conclude my final lecture at Brockport before my colleagues in the History Department and the students in "America Since 1960."
Viewers and listeners were always startled by my attempted histrionics and display of athletic agility as I played the role of the popular turn-of-the-century evangelist and ex-Chicago White Sox base-stealer, Billy Sunday. This very popular revivalist, capitalizing on his reputation as a star base-stealer, always used the baseball metaphors hopping around the platform, urging the audience to "play hard for Jesus" and "hit homeruns for God." He concluded his sermon with a dazzling display of kinetic energy as he exhorted the crowd to escape the clutches of The Devil by coming down "the sawdust trail" to the altar. At that point of the story I would break into a simulated replay of Billy's performance. In Billy's role I would jump out in front of the desk and start to circle the bases with the invisible devil in hot pursuit. As I rounded the imaginary third base I would shout, "There comes the Devil but here goes Billy." Then I would launch into a spread-eagle slide into home plate with a triumphant bellow, "Home Safe to Jesus."
That performance always produced startled gasps, ripples of nervous laughter, spontaneous applause and often at a standing ovation. It marked the high point of my pedagogical theatrics.
The other course with which I was mainly concerned, "History of Recreation and Leisure," did not match the sports course in pleasure and popularity but did bring considerable satisfaction. It also generated a by-product. I was invited to give public lectures on "Mass Leisure: Bane or Blessing" at The Rochester Public Library and one of its branches.
In 1978 I added another offering to my repertoire, "Popular Culture" for students in the MAP program. This involved an analysis of our mass mediated cultures, the impact of TV, the movies, sports etc. It elicited a favorable response and contributed to my pedagogical pleasure.
I trust that I have presented enough detailed evidence—perhaps too much—in my effort to demonstrate the felicific nature of those years following my return to the classroom. Perhaps the crowning event of that period—the late seventies—took place in the spring of 1979 when I received The Chancellor's Award for Excellence in Teaching. I was one of four Brockport recipients of that coveted honor that year. Incidentally, Brockport College has won more Chancellor's Awards than any other college in the SUNY system.
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