Today’s Project 100 memory comes from Kerry O’Rourke Conley.  She was born in New York City at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital and grew up in the Bronx in an Irish Catholic family in a neighborhood that was a sheltered haven for Irish, Italian, and Jewish families. Her paternal grandparents and several of their siblings and marriage partners emigrated from Ireland through Ellis Island to the United States in the 1920’s. Kerry’s father was born in New York City in 1930 and grew up in the Bronx, New York.  He served in the Korean War and after his service was employed as a lineman for New York Telephone and became a supervisor of installations by the time of his passing in 1982.  Her maternal grandfather was born in New York City of Irish/English Catholic background; her maternal grandmother was born in the Bronx, New York from a Quaker mother.  Kerry’s parents had a total of seven children.  Kerry and her identical twin sister, Susan, were second born after her older brother.  Kerry went to a Catholic grammar school in the Bronx.  When she was ten years old, the family – wanting to live in a more rural area – moved to the community of Englishtown, New Jersey, as did so many other families from the New York boroughs and tri-state area at the time.  As the community grew, its name became Manalapan, New Jersey.  Kerry was part of the first graduating class of Manalapan High School as the Freehold Regional High School District grew.  That class actually had far fewer graduates that were native to New Jersey because so many of them were like her family, absconders from New York’s five boroughs.  It was a rural place at the time, nothing they had known prior. They had to drive twenty minutes to go to a grocery store and had their milk and bread products delivered by the local dairy.  She was very active in high school.  Kerry, her siblings, and her first cousins were the first generation in their extended family to attend and graduate from colleges.  Her family struggled to be able to afford college as there were four siblings ready to attend within than a three-year period. She received a scholarship from Seton Hall University but it was still too expensive for her to attend.  Her counselors recommended that she attend a state college.  Both she and her identical twin sister, Susan, wanted to study history. (Her older brother of one year, John, was also a history major at Western Kentucky University).  It made sense that Kerry and Susan decided to attend different state schools as to not have to compete with one another in their interests. Her sister, Susan, chose Trenton State College (now the College of New Jersey) and Kerry chose Glassboro State College (now Rowan University, of course).  Kerry graduated with a history degree in the Spring of 1977 as President of the Student History Association while receiving the Medallion for Excellence in History.  She had hoped to attend graduate school at GSC after being nominated by the History Department as their graduate assistant nominee.  However, that position was offered to the Political Science Department instead of History.  Instead, Kerry pursued her “Plan B,” which was to apply for jobs within the publishing industry in New York City.   Kerry was sought after because of her Liberal Arts degree in history and she got a job at the Swiss-based Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishing Company Marcel Dekker, Inc.  She loved her work in Editorial and Production Operations and remained in this field her entire career, retiring from the large Anglo-Dutch corporation, Elsevier Science (aka Reed Elsevier), now RELX. She was responsible for Production/Manufacturing Operations for US; then Global Supply Management with dual reporting to the US and UK offices. She enjoyed domestic travel around the US and international travel to the Netherlands and UK throughout her career. She was instrumental in transitioning from print production to dual print/digital production during its inception.  Kerry also represented Elsevier while active in the Association of American Publishers, Professional Scholarly Publisher division.

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I became involved with the Student History Association (SHA) right from my earliest days at Glassboro State.  It was easy for me to be involved because I already worked in the history department as part of my federal work study scholarship.  Robert Harper was the SHA advisor.  He had a great sense of humor, and he had a wonderful, conversational style of lecturing.  One of my favorite courses at Glassboro State was his course on historiography, which encouraged debate and discussion.  Like many of the history faculty, he encouraged critical thinking without revealing his own interpretation or opinion.  From him and other faculty, I learned how to do research and how to present content in such a way that the evidence conveyed my conclusions without my having to tell the audience what to think.

The SHA organized a wide range of activities.  I remember well Dr. Harper assisting us to plan a beautification project for a tiny 17^th century cemetery nearby the College area, which had long been neglected.  During our weeding and hacking of the underbrush, Dr. Harper enthusiastically discussed the historical value of the site.  SHA had regular meetings, usually every other week on Thursday. We held them at 3pm so commuters could more easily attend.  At these meetings, we discussed what was happening on campus and in all of our courses.  We shared, in particular, what courses we were taking in the History Department and how they might fit together to develop a concentration in a particular area.  During my time in SHA, Gary Hunter received formal permission from the History Department to begin developing a concentration in African American Studies.  College approval, I later learned, took many more years to secure.

In 1975, during the summer of my sophomore year, I had one of the great adventures of my undergraduate years.  About fifteen fellow students and I joined a study abroad trip to Mexico sponsored by the History and Foreign Languages Departments and led by Dr. Lee Kress of History and Dr. Enrique Pujales of Foreign Languages.  One of the unplanned moments that I remember well from the trip was, on our flight from Philadelphia to Mexico City, meeting a Mexican student attending college in Pennsylvania returning home.  He ended up inviting my roommate and me to visit his family, which added greatly to our experience.  Of course, we had also wonderful visits to the Museum of Anthropology and several other urban sites.  Upon leaving Mexico City, I was stunned by the arid and pastoral environment as a person who had grown up in New York City.  On our personal time, we often took local busses to explore and our fellow passengers routinely carried live chickens!  On our way to Guadalajara, we stopped in Oaxaca, I believe, for the night.  The place that we stayed that night was more like an open barn.  The room we slept in had no windows or screens, and many animals – goats, cows, sheep, and chickens – wandered about right outside of our room.  Although the smell was not at all pleasant, the worst thing was the noise made by the animals, which made it very difficult to sleep, even after a long day travelling by bus to the location.  Those of us who were students did not know how to respond, wanting to be polite.  Dr. Kress attempted to find another location, but there was no other place to sleep, so we made the best of it.  This may be my most humorous memory of the trip, but we had many more great educational experiences.  Dr. Kress and Dr. Pujales always provided great historical and sociological context at each of the stops.  After we returned, all students had to complete the course/credit requirements approved by their program advisor prior to the trip.  I opted for, and was approved for, the maximum of 12 credits; six in history and six in foreign language.  The work that I had agreed to complete included four substantial papers, two in English and two in Spanish.  The research and writing for these papers took me much of the rest of the summer, but I thoroughly enjoyed the experience. 

When I arrived in 1973, I was not aware of any honors society for history majors.  During my senior year, I discovered during my weekly call with my twin sister that she had been elected President of Phi Alpha Theta.  I had never heard of the organization, but she told me that it was a history honor society.  As the President of the Student History Association, I decided that I would investigate why Glassboro State did not have a chapter.  I talked to Marie Wanek, the chairperson at the time, who said that they had looked into starting a chapter, but that the amount of work required to get approved had proven too daunting.  Being young and full of energy, I decided to take on the task.  It did prove to be a great amount of work, as one had to collect Curriculum Vitae from all of the faculty in an age without computers or photocopiers.  Dr. Kress provided me with a handwritten one to type up!  We also had to fill out paperwork outlining the history of the Department and various other characteristics of the major, all of which had to be acquired through correspondence with other units on campus.  Phi Alpha Theta also required a sponsoring institution, and my sister helped make sure that Trenton State served in that role.  With the help of Dr. Wanek and others in the Department, we finally compiled all of the materials at the very end of my senior year.  Because I graduated and moved back home, I never heard that our application received formal approval from the national office and had begun inducting members in the Fall of 1977.  In fact, I did not know that I became a founding member of the Glassboro State chapter, Psi Iota, until 2022 when Dr. Carrigan contacted me for this project. 

One of the most memorable things that happened during my four years at Glassboro State was the College’s hosting of a three-day conference focused on international terrorism that took place April 26-28, 1976, nine years after the even more famous summit at Glassboro State between President Lyndon Johnson and Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin.  All these years later I have kept a memory album I created shortly after the event, in which I placed various handouts, letters, programs, and newspaper clippings.  There were over 150 participants at the conference, and they hailed from all over the world, including experts from Belgium, Britain, Canada, Hungary, Israel, Italy, Japan, Liberia, Nigeria, Sweden, and West Germany.  American universities represented by speakers included Columbia University, Northwestern University, the University of Florida, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Wisconsin, Wesleyan University, Yale University, and dozens more.  There were many non-academic speakers as well, including government officials, staff directors of think tanks and non-governmental organizations, retired military officers, lawyers, magazine editors, a reporter for The Times of London, two members of Congress, and the sitting Governor of New Jersey.

This conference was the brainchild of Prof. Marius Livingston, chair of the History Department.  I was an active member of the Student History Association (SHA), and I was a student worker in the History Department.  These two roles insured that I was heavily involved in both the extensive preparations for the conference and the actual running of the conference. The History Department was the lead organizer of the conference and the SHA was an official co-sponsor.  The student volunteers did so many tasks to help with this event.  We wrote letters to the many speakers and helped with information coordinating their travels.  We had to find hosts for many of these guests, as there were no nearby hotels at the time.  My roommates and I vacated our apartment at The Crossings to allow one speaker, Professor Joseph Dowling of Lehigh University to stay in our place.  He left us a bottle of red wine and a nice note.  Many other students and faculty also shared their housing in this way.  The students helped coordinate during the conference itself, running errands and handling all manner of logistics.  Those of my fellow students who owned cars assisted in local travel for some speakers. 

The conference received extensive media coverage.  One sign of the conference’s prominence was that a group of over a dozen socialists came to campus to protest the event and accuse many of the conference participants of being terrorists themselves.  One attendee ended up getting in a swinging fight with a socialist before security escorted both of them out of the room with the panel.

I graduated in the Spring of 1977, and I learned the sad news of Professor Livingston’s passing in December of that year.  Livingston was a brilliant man with a wry sense of humor, and I attended his memorial service in Pitman, New Jersey.  I later learned that Lee Kress and Marie Wanek, also great mentors to me, helped with the final element of the conference, which was the compilation, editing, and publication of selected essays.  The volume appeared nine months after his death and was entitled International Terrorism in the Modern World (Westport, Conn., and London, England, Greenwood Press, 1978).

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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:  alumni.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.