frederick harold long and frederick long and willard long and constableville new york

It dawned on me as we were hearing from a variety of college staff, ranging from deans of student life to deans of the college to associate deans of this or that, why I was paying so much for my son's education. It was simply this: an elite private school may be defined as that place that has resources and staff that will make sure that no one except the biggest morons fall between the cracks. To that end, the staff orchestrated a very nice "cushion the blow of separation" joint presentation for an hour that was skillfully emceed by the director of the counseling services. At times like this we all needed a counselor, it was thought, and he gently, and with due regard to the emotional anxiety he felt as a parent when dropping his daughter off at college, laid out the three "I's" of college life (greater individuation, independence and, gulp, intimacy) that our child would face in the ensuing year(s).

Then, with skill but little wit, a few other staff talked about college life, residence halls, academic counseling and drug and alcohol abuse. A consistent message began to emerge, however, and that is that we ought to expect our precious and precocious children to fail on occasion, that failure is good, and that the best lessons in life are often learned in response to failure. I wondered if the emphasis on failure in 2005 was a peculiar reaction to our times. We who bore these children are baby-boomers. With all respect to a radical past that some of us were supposed to have experienced at some vague period long ago, most of us are achievement-oriented, materially-driven, pleasure-seeking creatures. And, we have communicated that to our children, apparently. So, I suppose the college staff has seen over the years that the issue of getting a bad grade, inability to be "number one" or some such problem has afflicted a number of students with a sense of failure. Hence, the message.

Other Meetings

We gathered in the University Chapel to hear the President and her senior staff talk about our children and the college. The Ionic columns told us that the building was used at times for things classical, but today it was set up for the welcome. Whitewashed in good Puritan fashion, with ample pews and a three-sided balcony, with massive pipe organ and obligatory monuments on the wall commemorating the work of Christian gentlemen like the Rev. Ebenezer Dodge, who holds the record for longevity as President (1862-1890) of Colgate, the Chapel reflects the way that these elite colleges, all founded out of religious motivations, have become secularized over the years. The Chapel is still the largest meeting space on campus (seating 900), and one might think that the 13 Baptist clergy and laymen that founded the college in 1819 would have taken a measure of delight in the fact that many memorable events of the students' lives will happen in this same Chapel, even if the gods acknowledged during these events have little to do with the Holy One of Israel.

The President, Dr. Rebecca Chopp, an energetic and welcoming woman in her mid-50s, spoke on broad themes such as hope and the relevance of the liberal arts even in a highly technological age. Others continued these themes, and commended us for raising such smart and able children. Elite schools may be defined as those colleges that reject the highest percentages of applicants, and we were to take satisfaction in the fact that the 729 new students were the result of 8,000 applicants for admission.

By the time of the third orientation seminar, which featured the chairmen (oops, chairs) of the various divisions of the college, all of us were kind of ready for the ice cream social, but we listened to an interesting collection of senior faculty speak about what Colgate had to offer and why each of their divisions had good reason to be considered the heart of the academic enterprise. You can tell you are with the faculty both by dress and manner of presentation. Not a tie was seen, though the male administrators all wore jackets and ties, and most of the faculty members dispensed their advice from chairs in the front of a room rather than a podium with microphone. After their presentations, we all headed over to the alumni house for a Colgate tradition--the ice cream social.

Thinking About a Place and a Picture

Even though all these impressions and others were on my mind as the day at Colgate ended, I couldn't help think of another image that was much deeper in my mind, and which was foremost in my mind in this picture of my son, taken at 3:59 p.m., just before he entered into the Chapel for his first orientation session.

The picture is of my son, Will, about to start on a new venture of life. It points also to a greater story, a story which he really doesn't know very well. He really is the fourth William Long, though he doesn't have any Roman numerals in his name. His Long ancestors settled an area of New York not too far north of where he now goes to college in the days after the Revolutionary War when new immigrants and people moving from New England were given generous grants of land to try to eke a life out of a sometimes unforgiving soil. Will's first namesake was my great-grandfather, born on the family homestead "Up Mohawk Hill" in Lewis County outside of Constableville in the late 1880s. I never knew my grandfather, as he was killed by an errant driver when I was two-years old while he was trying to earn extra money flagging for the New York State Highway Department. The second William, who was really Willard (but that is close enough) was William's son, my father's brother, who died a single man in his 30s to a leukemia that would also claim my own father when he was but 56. Willard lived and died within a mile of Constableville.

My father, Frederick, whom everyone called Pete, was the only other boy among six children surviving infancy, and left Constableville for good after WWII. He then went to college, married, and moved to a pleasant CT suburb where he and my mother raised four boys. We left CT in 1967 and, except for education, none of us ever returned to the Northeast.

All of these things ran through my mind as I told my son to pose for a picture before the Colgate chapel on that warm August afternoon. For it dawned on me that a William Long had finally returned home, finally decided to try his fortune in an area and at a college that was as close to the family homestead as he could be. This, of course, was the furthest thing from my son's mind as he went to college, but it became a sort of wonderful way for me to think of the truth that life is both a branching out in new and adventurous ways but, maybe even more fundamentally, a way of returning to roots that you didn't even know you had. I am sure that no one in my family would have thought that a William Long would ever again appear in Upstate New York after our family moved West in 1967. But there he is, the next generation, full of the hope that only youth truly knows, sinking down roots in my family's back yard. Blessings on you, Will...

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