Ed and Chris Cuneo

Ed and Chris Cuneo

“Many New Things” and “I Now Realized What I Wanted to Do”: Edward (’86) and Chris (‘02) Cuneo Recall Their Growth at Glassboro State College and Rowan University -- Memory #37 of 100  

Today’s Project 100 memory comes for two brothers, Ed and Chris Cuneo.  They were born and raised on the family farm in Winslow Township.  Ed still lives there today, while Chris lives in May’s Landing.  Both of their parents were teachers.  Their father was a history teacher, and their mother was an English teacher who later moved into administration.  They have a third brother, Mike, who started at Glassboro State but transferred to Rutgers. 

Ed attended public schools and graduated from Edgewood High School in 1982.  He began at Glassboro State in the Fall of 1982.  Two years later, while he was still an undergraduate, he landed a job as a sportswriter at the Courier-Post.  He worked there until 1993, doing features his last two years.  He left that job to become an elementary school teacher.  Teaching was a long-honored profession in his family, and the newspaper business was not easy to align with how he wanted to spend time with his new family, as he had just become a father.  His daughter, Alessandra, was two when he became a teacher.  He chose elementary education because he knew that there were few men working in that area.  He taught in the Evesham School District for 29 years, the first twenty at the Marlton Elementary School and the last nine as a librarian at the Beeler Elementary School.  He retired in April of 2022 to focus on the family farm and become a “gentleman farmer,” something that his grandfather had predicted long ago.

Chris graduated from Edgewood High School.  After graduating in 1989, he attended Atlantic Community College, pursuing criminal justice.  He finished his Associate’s degree in 1992.  His progress had been delayed by the death of their mother in 1991 as a result of cancer.  After ACC, he attended Richard Stockton for a time, but he did not enjoy his time there.  He transferred to Glassboro State College in the Fall of 1993.  After a tumultuous period, he finished his degree in history and secondary education in 2002.  His first job after graduating was teaching social studies at Hammonton Middle School.  In 2006, he took his current position, teaching history at Edgewood High School (now Winslow Township High School).  For a number of years, he coached soccer and lacrosse at Edgewood.

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Ed

I applied to Millersville College in Pennsylvania.  I had been a successful soccer player in high school, and I had a friend who played on the soccer team there.  However, I decided not to attend there because I had decided that soccer wasn’t my long-term future.  Instead, I wanted to become a journalist.  The only other school that I considered was Glassboro State because it was close enough that I could commute.  So, I began at Glassboro State College as a journalism major.  I knew Jack and Mary Gillespie because Mary taught in the same school district as my parents.  Jack was working at Glassboro State at this time. I was told that I would likely never get a job in the newspaper business, so I switched to English.  This way I could become a teacher if journalism did not work out.  I took a lot of history classes, some as requirements and some just because I wanted to take those classes.

I had Gary Hunter for a class on the 1960s, and I think a second class on African American history.  Gary was very much in tune with civil rights issues and knew so much about the history of the civil rights movement.  He was ahead of his time as far as I was concerned. He was the first person that I had ever met who really knew the ins and outs of the African American struggle for freedom.  He was laid back, but he also had strong opinions at the same time.  One example of this that I still remember is when I lost an argument with him about a recording of “Blue Suede Shoes.”  I thought the version he referenced had been done by Carl Perkins, whereas he maintained it was Elvis Presley.  We both brought in recordings and played them.  This episode showed his flexibility, his willingness to engage with students, his sense of humor, and also his desire to stand up for his own position.

I had several other history faculty, and all of the full-time history faculty were great.  I took an American history class with Lee Kress.  Everyone in the class wrote down everything he said during his lectures.  I wasn’t writing much down.  He questioned me, and I explained that I only wrote down things that I didn’t know.  This didn’t make him happy, but we remained friendly out of the classroom, bonding over our mutual support for the Orioles.  Dr. Harper used to walk around with a pipe.  He was a really great professor.  I got along well with Ed Miszczak. He wanted his students to think, and he had many students who were just interested in writing down what the professor said.  He actually liked me, as he could tell that I was thinking about what he said.  I remember one time that I mentioned that most people were sheep, and he responded, “yeah, the masses are often asses.”  My father had Robert Hewsen for Russian history, and he liked Hewsen a lot.  Hewsen began at GSC the same year as the famous summit, and I remember that my father said that Hewsen knew Russian history so well that Kosigyn and the Soviets must have left him behind.  I never had Hewsen however.

Every English major was influenced by Edward Wolfe.  He was very knowledgeable, and he challenged me greatly in a course on Expository Writing.  I did not appreciate it at the time, and he failed me the first go around.  I was too young and immature.  Later, I realized that he had actually been quite helpful to me.  In fact, I remember his praising an article that I wrote about Richard Mitchell in the Philadelphia Inquirer.  That resonated with me with quite a bit, as it was ironic given that he had failed me for my writing.  Rose Glassberg influenced me in much the same way, as she failed me for American Grammar.  The two faculty members who I appreciated at the time, as opposed to later, were Nathan Carb and Richard Mitchell. They both influenced me greatly.  Carb was brilliant and invited me over to his house and was generally supportive and warm.  Mitchell could talk about anything, take off on a tangent, and then bring it back to the original topic.  Mitchell said that the only thing worse than a bad English major was a bad English teacher. 

The faculty at Glassboro State, both in history and English, were very willing to get to know you outside of the classroom.  It was one of the things that made GSC special and something I appreciated at the time and even more so as the years have gone by.

There were several important mentors to me outside of the faculty.  One of them was Minerva Ward who worked in the Registrar’s Office and helped me and others with scheduling.  Mrs. Judy Scotton was the secretary in the English Department.  She was essential to the function of that Department.  She was so important to us as students and to the faculty as well.  Dan Gilmore was a third one.  He was the soccer coach when I began at Glassboro State.  We knew each other by reputation, and he invited me to come out for the soccer team.  I appreciated the honor of this invitation because Dan was already a nationally-known soccer coach at this time, and his GSC teams were Division III powerhouses.  I didn’t end up staying on the team, as my heart was still more in journalism.  Still, Dan continued to support me even after this decision.

I came from a rural community, and my time at Glassboro State allowed me to experience many new things in life.  The campus was small, and it was easy to get to know your fellow students.  The faculty were great, and they all seemed to genuinely care about the students.  I got my job at the Courier-Post while I was still an undergraduate.  I remember thinking that I could just drop out of college and focus on the sports writing job.  My mother said that I had to finish my degree, and I am glad that she insisted.  Not only did I learn so much in my time on campus, I needed that degree later when I decided that I wanted to become a teacher.

Chris

 I originally did not want to be a teacher.  My parents had been teachers.  My aunts and uncles were teachers.  However, I actually fell for the profession when I began substitute teaching in the early 1990s.  Despite trying to run from it, I now realized that this is what I wanted to do.  However, before I made this decision, I was still trying, unsuccessfully, to complete the Law and Justice program at Glassboro State.  I left GSC for three years, returning in 1997 this time with a focus on being a social studies teacher.

My first history class was Robert Hewsen’s Russia to 1914. I loved that class.  Hewsen was awesome. The way he taught was so different than any other class that I had ever taken.  He “was Russia” to me.  His knowledge was fantastic.  He caught my attention, and I remember him clearly all these years later.

Lee Kress was good.  Like Ed said, he bonded with us over the Orioles.  More than that, you could tell that he cared about his teaching deeply.  He was also incredibly knowledgeable and his passion for history was clear to his students.  I also really liked Scott Morschauser.  He was very scholarly, which was appealing.  What I mean by this is that he had a reverence for his subject that made all of us in the classroom care about what he was teaching as well.

I have to mention Bill Carrigan.  You were different because you were closer to my age.  I had great respect for the older faculty, but you helped inspire me in a different way.  You cared about history just as much as I did and showed me that one could be the type of teacher that I wanted to be without having to have the decades of experience and learning possessed by some of the others I mentioned.  Even some of the folks like Dr. Morschauser who had not been there as long as the Hewsens of the Department still had a number of years on me.  You, however, were only in your late 20s when we first met, the same as me.

The faculty in the History Department were very good.  They helped me become not only a good teacher but a better person.  I wish that I had become a more serious student earlier in my time at Glassboro State.  Once I finally did, I enjoyed things much more and got more out of it.

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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 100th anniversary of the founding of Glassboro Normal School, later Glassboro State College, and now Rowan University.