Fond memories: YSU then and now

I went to Fort on the Fifty at Stambaugh Stadium last night to help celebrate Youngstown State University’s Centennial.

Even though I’m writing this Saturday afternoon, I can assure you nothing kept me away. (Late update: Actually, the rain kept everyone away, but I stand by everything else in the column.) It has been the custom over years for my wife Cheryl and I to sit in the stands while thinking about how much nicer it would be if we were at one of the tables down on the field, munching hors d’oeuvres and sipping wine. “Oh, there’s Dan Rivers,” I’d tell her. Or then-Mayor George McKelvey. Or Congressman Tim Ryan. She’s never met Ryan, but she likes what she sees of him on TV. Except those times when he’s got that fashionable two-day stubble on his face: “Tim,” she’ll admonish his on-screen presence, “You have to shave.” I believe she feels free to offer this advice because Ryan is only a couple years older than our elder son.

Which gets me back to my theme — how time flies. It’s something I think about for a minute or two whenever I’m on campus.

From the cheap seats in Stambaugh I can almost see over Beeghly Center to where my first apartment stood, on Elm Street just north of Spring Street (now University Plaza), beside the parking lot of what was Elm Street School (now Fedor Hall) and across from the Elm Gardens (now tennis courts). If I overslept, recess at the school was my alarm clock.

I first came from Pittsburgh to then-Youngstown University in 1961, when my older brother enrolled. We visited him at his “dormitory room” at the downtown YMCA and ate dinner at the Italian Restaurant across the street. YU was something of a destination school for underachievers from Pittsburgh in those days. I don’t know what the percentage was, but it was significant.

I followed my brother to YU in 1964, with two other friends from high school. It was the one college that all three of us had been accepted to, which sealed the deal. Obviously our parents, none of whom had gone to college, were inclined to let us make our own decisions, even if not for the strongest of reasons. I last saw one of those two friends about five years ago, when I stopped in the restaurant he manages in Pittsburgh. I haven’t seen the other in about 35 years. Parents today don’t allow their kids such latitude.

Still around

Not that it was a bad decision. I’m still here, married to a YSU alumnus and father of another. I have friends I met on campus more than 40 years ago and often still meet people who say, “Didn’t you go to YSU in the mid-’60s?”

My friend Mike Lacivita, who writes columns that have been appearing in The Vindicator for 15 years, can date his association with YSU well before mine, back 60 years. All of us have seen YSU grow from a campus that was essentially one-block square, bounded by Lincoln on the south, Wick on the east, Spring on the north and Elm on the west, to what it is today.

We can remember when football games were played at the Rayen School stadium, when gym classes were in the downtown YMCA, when there were still old Army barracks in the center of campus, when plays were performed in the Strouss Auditorium in the Main Building (before it was Jones Hall). Indeed, we can remember Dr. Howard Jones, the first president of Youngstown College and, later, Youngstown University.

In life, you’re lucky to meet a handful of true gentlemen. I met one of my first at YSU, John P. Gillespie, dean of men. During those YSU years, I remember being flat broke more than once, but one of those times somebody suggested I go see The Dean. I did, explained my predicament, and was given a loan for $10 or $20 to tide me over. (Did that happen in other places? Does it happen today?)

On Dean Gillespie’s retirement in 1970, a Vindicator editorialist wrote that Gillespie “will miss the university, but probably not as much as the university will miss him.”

I wish I had written that. But about that time, I was taking what I had learned at YSU, from teachers like Tom Gay and Dr. Robert Hare, and starting out as a reporter at the Niles Daily Times. So I’ll keep it simple: Thanks, Dean Gillespie, and everyone else who made YSU what it was and what it is.

X Mangan is editorial page editor of The Vindicator. Bertram de Souza’s column will return next week.