By MATT MENDELSOHN ’85

The mile marker on I-81 read ‘Binghamton 40’ and I knew it wouldn’t be much longer before Delaware Hall, that frumpy cell block masquerading as a dorm, rose up to greet me. Or would it? Someone said they were tearing it down. A half-hearted ‘you can’t go home again’ tumbled from my lips and I smiled.

You can’t go home again.

Thomas Wolfe, the guy who first wrote those words, couldn’t go home. His relationship with his birthplace, Asheville, North Carolina, was never the same after the 1929 publication of his masterwork, Look Homeward, Angel, a novel that could barely contain the real identity of its characters. I know this, and perhaps more importantly I remember this, because thirty years ago I was fortunate enough to sit in a small classroom and listen to a bow tie wearing, horn-rimmed bespectacled professor named John Hagan speak lovingly ‘ reverentially, even ‘ about all things Wolfe.

Well, the fortunate part wouldn’t come for a few more years. In 1980, I was an unserious man ‘ immature and clueless as I wandered a campus where Lynyrd Skynyrd’s ‘Freebird’ blared nonstop from every window. Newing’s bathtubs held more kegs than bathers (remember, the drinking age was 18 then), the Village Chef featured a menu that curiously offered chicken salad ‘in season’ and I was slowly warming to the realization that my school’s overriding architectural aesthetic was a far cry from, say, William and Mary, where I was hopelessly waitlisted. If that weren’t enough, this SUNY-B freshman overcompensated by taking an upper level lit class he was unprepared for.

Moby Dick, Portrait of a Lady, Faulkner. We read all the important stuff, though mostly we alternated between nodding off and poking fun at professor Hagan’s peculiar speech. Until, that is, the day we began reading Look Homeward, Angel. As it turned out, our teacher was an expert, a former editor of the Thomas Wolfe Quarterly. And when he began to recall his days of sitting on the porch of Wolfe’s boyhood home, sipping iced tea with the author’s then-surviving brother, the oddest of odd things happened, something my fresh-out-of-Plainview mind couldn’t process. I looked up and saw a tear running down Hagan’s cheek.

Hamlet famously asks, ‘What’s Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba, that he should weep for her?’ when he can’t understand how an actor could work himself to tears just for a part in a play. I knew how he felt. But with one teardrop my life’s orbit changed trajectory. I never slept in that class again, not a wink. And a year later, when another lit professor, Richard Pindell, slammed his copy of Absalom, Absalom! down on his desk and sighed, ‘My mamma always told me not to teach anything you love, ’cause your students won’t love it as much as you and it’ll break your heart,’ I already understood what he meant. Professor Hagan’s unwitting lesson on dedication, sense of place ‘ even memory itself ‘ had already begun its meandering journey.

These were the things rattling around my head as I made the five-hour drive up to Vestal, back to a campus that still looks like it’s primed to host the 1958 World’s Fair, back to a university still picking up the pieces of last year’s devastating athletics scandal, and, humorously, back to an Anderson Center hosting not the Central Ballet of China (they opened the place in 1985) but rather Snooki, from MTV’s Jersey Shore. As Flock of Seagulls sang, ‘And I ran, I ran so far away.’

There’s a beautiful new Events Center, which seems to be a good thing, though College in the Woods has less woods around it, which is probably a bad thing. There’s some funky clock tower, which is an iffy thing, unless you like erector set clock towers, and there are a lot of people wearing shirts that say ‘Bearcats,’ which is just downright silly, considering we are the Colonials. School spirit seems high, but then the current issue of the alumni magazine features a glowing cover story on the legacy of the former university president without a single mention of her role in Binghamton’s annus horribilis.

But I was most anxious about seeing Newing College, my home for three years, now being torn down dorm by dorm. Coming back for a reunion of the Pipe Dream staff, I had offered to write a piece on the seeming lunacy of a campus with so little history tearing down its oldest buildings. Now, sitting here outside Delaware Hall, thinking the words ‘nondescript’ might actually be a compliment, I’m not so sure.

‘I’m pretty sure they’re going to knock this down next year,’ sophomore Alec Staszewski told me. ‘The bathrooms are always broken, everything breaks down all the time.’ But would he miss it? ‘It’s just a dorm.’

Delaware’s Amanda Kohn sounded more wistful. ‘It’ll be a little depressing; It won’t be here when I come back, but my memories won’t be based on where I lived but who I was with.’ As she spoke, Michelle Hanley, who lived in Delaware from 1976 to 1978, wandered in, trying in vain to find the pay phone that was a lobby fixture in a pre-cell phone world.

Last year, a Newing alum from my era organized a Facebook ‘buy-a-brick’ campaign, which I was lukewarm to until I saw a news story that made me grin: ‘Originally, [Newing] bricks were considered to be good memorabilia items, but they did not meet the Environmental Protection Agency standards due to traces of asbestos on their undersides.’

Ah, good old Bingo! Just when you try and get all weepy and nostalgic, the reality hits you: the campus has all the charm of a psychiatric facility. Between the State Office Building downtown, closed for years in the wake of a massive PCB contamination, and the possibility that my own dorm had as much asbestos as it did flowing beer, it seems we had our own Chernobyl thing going on here. Good riddance.

And why stop at Newing? Maybe if I slip the bulldozer driver a twenty, he can accidentally demolish the Administration Building. For a hundred, maybe he’ll knock down the Library Tower and the campus would finally be rid of the most unfortunate era in American construction. (We can’t blame everything on the Fifties: the new Union, with its exposed cinder block construction, feels decidedly low rent.)

What I took away from Binghamton was never set in stone anyway. My memories lie in the lessons of those quirky professors, the pages of those amazing books, the laughter of those late nights at Pipe Dream. They’re in the clackety-clack of the Delaware lounge, where last-minute papers were written at 2:00 a.m. on Smith-Corona typewriters; they’re in an empty West Gym, rooting for a neglected Division III basketball team; they’re in a group of us singing ‘Imagine’ on a sad December day in 1980.

There’s a scene in Look Homeward, Angel where Eugene’s dead brother Ben comes back to life amidst the angels in their father’s stone carving shop. Ben asks his brother, ‘What do you want to remember?’ and Eugene replies, ‘A stone, a leaf, an unfound door. And the forgotten faces.’

I came back to SUNY-B thinking I’d find something of value in the rubble of Newing College. But as I stand here, I’m just looking at buildings. I’ll take forgotten faces over souvenir bricks. As for the unfound door, John Hagan unlocked that one 30 years earlier.