Today’s Project 100 memory comes from Christopher Stanwood.  After living his first years in Glassboro, Chris’ family moved to Pitman in 1974, and he has lived there ever since.  He attended public schools and graduated from Pitman High School in 1986.  His mom worked for 32 years at Glassboro State College as a secretary in the Department of Health and Exercise Science, while his dad was a teacher for emotionally disturbed children at Ranch Hope School for Boys in Alloway, NJ.  After graduating from high school, Chris attended Gloucester County College and earned an Associate’s Degree in Criminal Justice in 1988.  He had worked in construction starting in his teens and continued doing so while attending GCC.  In the late 1980s and early 1990s, he continued to work construction and took a new job working nights at Ranch Hope School for Boys where his dad worked.  In 1992, he enrolled at Glassboro State College as a history major.  He graduated Summa Cum Laude from Rowan College of New Jersey in 1994, winning the Medallion Award that year.  That same year, Chris began a Masters Degree in American History and Public History at Rutgers University - Camden. He finished that degree in 1997, completing his thesis on “The Educational Activities of the West Jersey Grange. 1872-1900.”  For this work, he won the Landsbury Prize for Academic Excellence, the first history student to win that award.  After finishing at Rutgers, Chris began working part time at the Atheneum in Philadelphia.  After a year there, he took a job as a Historical Reference Librarian at the College of Physicians of Philadelphia.  In 2000, he enrolled in Drexel’s Masters in Library Science program, finishing that degree in 2001.  A year later, he then began a job at the Chemical Heritage Foundation as a Research Librarian.  In these positions, Chris did a lot of writing as well as the joy of working with rare books, photographs, and other materials.   In 2007, he took a job supporting end-user databases at Thompson Scientific in Philadelphia.  In 2014, he became the Global Manager for Intellectual Property databases, managing teams in Tokyo, Manila, London, Hyderabad, India, and Philadelphia.  He held this position for four years until support services were transferred to India. He bounced around for a time working several other jobs, including a short stint at Dominion Voting Systems as Customer Relations Manager for New Jersey. Since late 2020 Chris has been working in the custom framing department at Michael’s Arts and Crafts in Deptford, which he sometimes enjoys as he has always liked working with his hands and helping customers.

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I decided to go to Glassboro State College because I did not want to work construction or toil nights at Ranch Hope forever. Fortunately, working nights afforded me the flexibility of returning to school during the day.  I decided that this time, I would study what I liked, which was history. I never considered any other college besides GSC.  I lived close by, it was cheap, and so I paid cash for my tuition.

I found Dr. Edward Wang easy to engage in conversation, and recall that Cory Blake was very good at presenting unfamiliar subjects (like Middle Eastern History) in a digestible manner.

Wanting to study European history I took several classes with Joy Wiltenburg (which I thoroughly enjoyed), including my senior seminar, where I think I wrote a paper on the industrial revolution. I remember telling David Applebaum that I was planning to study European history in graduate school. He asked, “do you like to eat?”  I said, “yes.”  He said, “then, don’t study European history.”  I took his advice and switched to American history.

While Glassboro State and Rowan prepared me very well for graduate school, I was not a good test taker.  I did poorly on the Graduate Record Examination and got a phone call from the chair of the Graduate History Department at Rutgers - Camden, Dr. Rodney Carlisle.  He told me that he doubted I would do well in the program due to my low score, and that they were only admitting me on the basis of my work at Rowan.  Three years later, after winning the Landsbury Prize, we revisited that phone call at a party. Dr. Carlisle admitted that he had been wrong, laughing at his error. 

I work with many young people today, and I tell them to “study what they want.”  They might not end up working in the field they studied, but they will have a better time and learn way more.  I certainly loved history and my time at Rowan.  The faculty were encouraging and supportive.  I learned how to write and how to think critically.  Of course, the best thing that happened at Rowan was meeting my future wife, Karen Gager, a double major in Elementary Education and English.  We met in Chet Zimolzak’s World Regional Geography class.  We have continued to be involved with Rowan in some manner ever since, and my daughter Nora is currently a creative writing major at Rowan. ­

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This is part of the Department of History’s “Project 100,” the collection and sharing of one hundred memories by Glassboro State College and Rowan University alumni and staff in celebration of the 100^th anniversary of the founding of Glassboro Normal School, later Glassboro State College, and now Rowan University. 

• Register for the Reunion on October 20^th:  rowan.edu/historyreunion2023.
• Link to Project 100 on the Web: https://chss.rowan.edu/departments/history/alumni_highlights/project_100/
• Link to Facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/251485937221524. 
• Thanks to Laurie Lahey for helping proofread and edit the final versions. Email carrigan@rowan.edu with questions or corrections.