Thomas Lowe

Thomas Lowe

“I Loved to Learn, and I Learned So Much”: Tom Lowe Remembers the Quality of the Faculty in the Department -- Memory #35 of 100  

 

Today’s Project 100 memory comes from Thomas Lowe.  He was born in Philadelphia, but he was raised in Camden, New Jersey.  His father was a civil engineer, and his mother was a housewife.  She began working as a bookkeeper after she had her tenth child.  Raised Catholic, he is a descendent of many different ethnic groups and is a full tribal member of the Seneca (Iroquois) tribe thanks to his great-great-grandmother.  Tom was the fourth of those ten children.  He went to St. Joseph’s Pro-Cathedral School through eighth grade and then graduated from Camden Catholic in 1973.  Twelve days after graduation, he joined the United States Navy.  He went to boot camp and then radar school in Great Lakes, north of Chicago, Illinois.  He served for four years, and he was on the U.S.S. Nitro, an ammunitions ship, that travelled all over the world.  He did three tours in the Mediterranean and one in the Caribbean, during which they delivered nuclear weapons to aircraft carriers and other locations that might have needed them.  He worked in the ship’s Combat Information Center (CIC).  He entered Glassboro State College in the Fall of 1977, thanks to the GI Bill.  After graduating in 1981, with training in history and secondary education, he began teaching history at Edgewood High School in Winslow Township, Camden County.  Colleagues with fellow GSC alum, Mary Gillespie, he taught there for twenty years, until 2001 when the district dissolved.  He then transferred to Overbrook High School in Pine Hill, New Jersey.  He taught history there until 2015.  In addition to teaching history courses of all types, including AP history courses, he was the advisor for the World Affairs Council at Edgewood.  At Overbook, he was the Advisor for the American Indian club and the Astronomy club, one of his other passions.  In 2008, the Rowan Magazine published an article on him, focusing on his environmentalism.  For many years, he canoed on Big Timber Creek, picking up trash and other debris.  During his last years of teaching, he published two children’s books, both on loons.  Since retiring, he has been a substitute teacher for the Lenape School District while continuing to do research on his family history.  In 2019, he published an extensive book (over 600 pages) on his mother’s side of his family entitled Berdine and Snodgrass: An American Pioneer Family (Robertson Publishing).  In addition to his writing, he has continued travelling during retirement.  He has now visited all fifty US states.  He plans to travel to Greece this October and will be unable to make the reunion as a result.  Finally, he now is a George Washington reenactor in Philadelphia, spurred by the Betsy Ross reenactor urging him to do so.  He had his Washington uniform made by the same person who made the costumes for the motion picture The Patriot.  He gives tours regularly.

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When I got out of the US Navy, I wanted to be a teacher.  Four years earlier, I had no idea what I wanted to do.  I was not a good student.  Camden Catholic was a great school, but I needed time to mature. I did so in the military.  My travels through Europe exposed to me to so many cool awesome historic sites such as the Parthenon, the Colosseum, and the Pantheon.  I remember thinking then that history was the subject that I wanted to teach.  My love for history, however, was actually older than this.  It went all the way back to kindergarten when I attended the Thomas H. Dudley School in East Camden.  Mrs. Warren, my teacher, an older woman with white hair, had color portraits of all the US Presidents hanging, in a horizontal row, all around the classroom, in chronological order.  When I told my grandmother (“Granny” as a I called her) about these pictures, she taught me about the Constitution, and the Presidency.  That led me to be excited about John F. Kennedy’s election even at that young age, and I can remember walking the three blocks to school after watching the first part of his inaugural address on television.  I still remember vividly the day, three years later, when he was assassinated. I was also one of those watching television live when Jack Ruby shot Lee Harvey Oswald.  Other moments in my youth that helped grow my love of history included learning about the revolutionary war battles fought near where I grew up and my visits to the Liberty Bell and Independence Hall as a teenager.  I also remember many days spent at the wonderful Camden Free Public Library.

In any event, I didn’t think about actually teaching history until I was in the Mediterranean thanks to the United States government.  Once I made that decision, Glassboro State College was a natural choice.  It had a good reputation for training teachers, and I liked the location.  I was the first of my siblings to attend college, thanks to the GI Bill.  Otherwise, college would not have been affordable for me or my family. 

I remember my first week of college very well, better than I remember later semesters because it was all so new.  On my very first day of college classes, I took Dr. Taney’s class on ancient history in Robinson Hall. I thought it was so wonderful.  I just enjoyed learning in that class.  Another class that first semester was British history with Dr. Richard Porterfield.  I also had Dr. Marie Wanek for the first half of United States history.  I also had a great British literature class with Dr. Edward Wolfe.  I loved his approach to teaching.  He went into detail and was able to quote parts just out of his head.  It was like he was on stage.  He clearly enjoyed what he was doing, and his passion was contagious to those of us who were his students.  My fifth class was American literature with Dr. John Roch.  He was great too. I was almost convinced to become an English teacher by Drs. Wolfe and Roch, but I stuck with history. 

I had Dr. Applebaum for Western Civilization.  Other faculty members were more traditional, and I really appreciated and enjoyed that style.  Dr. Applebaum, howefer, was very different.  I remember our studying the role of women in history in his class.  In any event, I found that I really appreciated his unusual approach. I have specific memories that I greatly value from that class, including a discussion of the Iroquois.  Another was a small comment he made on my writing that I never forgot, and I think it helped me become a much better writer.

I had Lee Kress for Latin American history.  He was one of the traditionalists, but he was very funny.  He was always smiling, and I really liked his class.  Dr. Kress was very friendly, and he made his classroom a warm and inviting place to learn.  It contrasted, in my mind, very much with the strict, somber classrooms of early education at St. Joseph’s.  I did research with him in 1979 and 1980.  He had a research grant to do research on the U.S.S. New Jersey.  He wanted a veteran to help with him with his project.  We took an overnight trip to the Washington Navy Yard in the District of Columbia.  We took another overnight trip to visit the museum on the U.S.S. Massachusetts in Fall River, Massachusetts.  We took a day trip to the Philadelphia Navy Yard and visited the U.S.S. Iowa.  As a navy veteran, it was like old times on some of those ships.  I was 23 or 24 years old, and I learned a lot of research skills on that trip.

I took two classes with Dr. Robert Hewsen.  He had a reputation as a hard grader, but I took him anyway.  He gave me the only B that I ever got in a history class in Russian History I.  Despite that, I took him again for Senior Seminar, and this time I got an A.  He was very thorough and a good professor.

I also had Robert Harper for colonial American history.  He was great.  He had an influence on me for sure.  He was from New England, and he loved southern New Jersey.  He wrote a book about John Fenwick, and I remember meeting him one Saturday morning.  He took us on a tour of some fantastic sites in southern New Jersey, including a log cabin in Gibbstown and the Salem Oak. He might have been the oldest person in the Department.  He was warm and folksy, and we loved him for his grandfatherly style.

I had Richard Porterfield for four classes, two classes on British history, one on historiography, and one on Western Civilization. He loved British history, and you could feel his passion when he was teaching that subject.  I am certain he would have been a Loyalist if he had been alive at the time of the American Revolution.  I remember that one of his papers required us to answer whether or not the War for American Independence was necessary.  I wrote in the affirmative.  In his comments, he wrote that he disagreed but that I still deserved an A for how well I laid out the argument.  He was a character.  He had a temper.  During my time, he ascended to the role of chairperson.  I remember one time that we heard yelling coming from his office.  We weren’t that surprised.

Ed Miszczak was the advisor for the history club. I never had him as a professor, but he was a very nice person. We had wine and cheese parties to recruit members.  The history club took two separate bus trips to see historic sites in Washington, D.C.  Even though I had been in the Navy, I had never been to DC before.  We also took a bus trip to the Museum of Natural History in New York City.  It was my first time seeing that Museum.  I was president of the history club during my junior year.

Phi Alpha Theta met separately.  Dr. Taney was the advisor for this group.  I took over as President midway through my junior year, so I was president of both clubs for that semester.  During my senior year, I was just President of Phi Alpha Theta.  One of my main memories of PAT was a dinner and event in Hollybush Mansion that featured a keynote address by a visiting politician and official from Losotho. This was 1980 or 1981.

Dr. Wood was another great professor.  He was an astronomy professor, and he was a standout faculty member.  I learned a lot in that class, and astronomy was probably my second favorite subject. 

I loved my time at Glassboro State.  I tell everyone, including my students as they graduated, that I had a great time at Glassboro State.  My professors were awesome.  They took the time to get to know you and knew all of us on a first-name basis.  I loved to learn, and I learned so much. I have not one bad thing to say. I liked every single one of the professors that I had.

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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.