Rosemary Clooney: “Thanks for the Memory”
The day before my birthday, in 1992, I came back from a job interview in Corpus Christi, TX. The job was an interesting one. MALDEF, the Mexican American Legal Defense Fund, had sued the state of Texas for discrimination in its distribution of funds to the state’s public colleges and universities. An anomaly in the way funds were allocated allowed the state to sideline huge sums of money each year, outside the money voted to fund the University of Texas and Texas A&M systems, then distribute the hidden money to just two schools, the University of Texas at Austin and Texas A&M, aka Texas Tech, in Lubbock. MALDEF pointed to the absence of advanced degrees opportunities in the parts of Texas that housed the largest concentration of Mexican Americans. MALDEF won and the state was ordered to redistribute funds and provide advanced higher education to place-bound students near the border with Mexico.
Thus was born Texas A&M-Corpus Christi. The campus had started out a Baptist college, the University of Corpus Christi, in 1947. In 1971, the state took it over and made it into an upper division college, offering junior, senior and master’s level courses. In 1989, it joined the Texas A&M system. In 1992, the year I visited, the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board authorized the school’s first doctoral degree program. Two years later, in 1994, it was to become a freshman-through-doctoral-students institution with students living on campus for the first time. They were hiring their first ever vice president of student affairs.
I left the interview with mixed feelings. The position looked like a lot of promise with a lot of headaches mixed in and uncertain hope of success. Funding was still a problem. During the school year, lights in the parking lot were turned off at eight pm to save money even classes continued until 9:30. The summer before, to cut down the electric bill, the campus had shut off all non-essential air conditioning, resulting in the loss of over 10,000 books and DVDs in the library, victims of humidity and mold. It would be a great job if everything worked out but if not, I’d be throwing away my last productive decade as senior administrator in a public university. I could end up spinning wheels for the remainder of my professional life.
The interview had taken three days, during which I went from interviews to interview, with no time to recuperate between. I arrived home exhausted. Esther asked how it had gone. I said “well.” aI told her it looked like they;’d be offering me the job, if I wanted it. “Will you take it?” I said, “Probably yes.” “What about the job in California?” I’d been interviewed for a similar job in Turlock CA the month before but I hadn’t heard a word from them since the interview. “If you had your choice of both jobs, which would you take?” “The California job, hands down.” “Why?” I listed the reasons why: a more stable environment; attractive colleagues and students; a wider scope to the job; and much as in Texas, a real chance to help students from under-advantaged families advance their lives. Another plus? Climate. It had been heavenly when I visited Corpus Christi but that was in early April. The summers there were reputed to be brutal. We went to bed. The next day was my birthday. We had plans for the evening.
The next morning California called and offered me the job. I said Yes. I need to start by the end of June. If I didn’t, they’d lose a good part of the funding for the position.
***
My birthday was on April 30. By the end of May, we had been to Turlock to celebrate commencement at my new school, I’d had meetings with my new colleagues and dinner with some of the faculty in the History department, which would be my second lodging place, and we’d found a place to live. A month later, I was on a plane to California me, my clothing, some books and our cat Chili. Esther was still back in Utica, seeing to the sale of our house (purchased two years previous) and overseeing the complicated, frustrating process of moving.
***
I started work at CSU Stanislaus (Stan State) on June 30. Esther, and with her our car and furniture, wouldn’t arrive until the very end of August. Until then, Chili and I lived in a largely empty house with borrowed, minimal furnishings and no pretense to elegance or comfort. One of my new directors loaned me a stained mattress to put on the floor and a worn set of sheets and pillow case to dress it. The dorm director lent me a mini-fridge that made only twelve tiny ice cubes at a time. I had two forks, two table knives and a knife for preparing food, two spoons, a cheap serving spoon set and a measuring cup, a teeny cooking pot that doubled for preparing meals and heating up instant coffee; a beat up easy chair (the word “easy” didn’t match up to the reality of it); a dilapidated side table with a lamp (75 watt bulb) sticking through the middle of it; and one floor lamp that leaned to the side rather than stand up straight.
The week before I flew out to California, Library Journal, for whom I do reviews, sent me the galleys for a 1,170 page monograph, Paul Rahe’s Republics Ancient and Modern. It arrived late: the review was due in two and a half weeks. I finished it in time and sent it off just in time for another packet to arrive: this time, Eiji Yoshikawa’s Taiko, a 926-page novel about samurai jockeying for power in the final years of the Japanese shogunate. It too arrived late and again, I had two and a half weeks to read and review it. But with Esther still back in Utica, I didn’t have a lot to do in the evening anyway.
***
Esther arrived. The academic year started. The skies seemed brighter. The second week of the new school year was La Semana de la Raza, a week long celebration of Mexican-American students’ heritage. On Saturday, there was a dance –Dr. Loco and His Rockin’ Jalapeño Band.
Dr. Loco and His Rockin’ Jalapeño Band: “I Feel Chingon” (adapted from James Brown)
Esther was tired. The week before, she’d seen the movers off from our (still unsold) house in Utica and flown cross country to San Francisco, where I had picked her up in my rented car. A few days later, the movers arrived and we unloaded our furniture and car. We’d spent the past three days unpacking, sorting things out, trying to create some semblance of order inside our walls. A dance at her husband’s new university was not her idea of an evening off. Maybe later, but not then. Driving over, I assured her that we could leave after spending an hour there, but I had to show up. The dance was in the dining hall, at the front end of the university union. I had a pass that allowed us to park in front, fifty feet from the door.
We arrived and I parked. Esther was still reluctant to go. I opened my car door and the music hit us. They were playing a polka –a Mexican polka but a polka is a polka and Esther’s heritage is Slovak and Slovaks do polkas. I was still fussing with the car when Esther surged ahead, yelling back to me that she was going in, she didn’t want to miss the chance to dance to the polka. By the time I entered the hall, she was on the dance floor, polkaing up a storm with Judy Graves, my assistant director of admission and records.
I danced a lot that night. But no polkas. Because I’m horrible at polkas. But I did all kinds of dancing, even the Chicken Dance. Occasionally, though, I would take a break. Not Esther. She never stopped. From the time we got there until the dance was over and the band was packing up to leave, she danced every dance there was. I was ordering a beer at the bar on one of my breaks I was standing next to my new director of recruitment, Jaime.
“That Esther is something,” he said.
Yes, she certainly was.
***
A week later, we took in our first entertainment on the West Coast: a double bill, Rosemary Clooney with combo (John Odo on piano, Warren Vache’ on cornet, and others whose names I don’t remember) and Michael Feinstein, singing and playing piano on his own. It was in San Mateo, south of San Francisco. The stage was circular: people sat on all sides as the stage revolved in front of them.
***
Here we are in California, September 1992. We’d stay there until 2001 and then go back (after three years in Dubai) to stay until 2016.
ADDITIONAL LISTENING
Michael Feinstein: “Make Someone Happy”
Mariachi Nuevo Jalisco: “Cielito Lindo”
MUSIC & ME 