Care Packages
Lori Clune
Lecturer, History
Growing up on Long Island, New York, in the village of Patchogue, I was nine years-old the first time my Italian grandfather, Anthony Scimeca, told me that education was important. Grandpa had an eighth grade education. He worked as a New York City cab driver and later a factory worker. Frustrated by working conditions and low wages, he spent most of his life as a labor organizer for the United Shoe Workers union. He worked hard to help shoe workers make a decent wage so they could put their children through college instead of sending them to work in the factories. “You can do anything,” he told us grandchildren, “especially graduate from high school and go on to college. With an education,” he would say, “come choices.”
Supportive as my parents were of my education, when I decided to go to graduate school, they were skeptical. “Why?” they asked. “What more do you need to learn?”
My parents graduated from high school in the mid 1950s. My father chose to go directly into business, banking and later real estate. My mother, certainly intelligent enough to do well in college, chose instead to work as a legal secretary and get married. “Women from my neighborhood in Brooklyn just didn’t go to college,” she explained. “We married and worked until we had babies.”
When I did well in high school, many teachers, especially my history teachers, encouraged me to continue my education. Going to college away from home sounded like a dream, and my parents were supportive. I only applied to state universities, since I knew private school tuition would be too expensive for them. Even at a state school, I took out loans and my parents struggled to make it.
My first college roommate was a daughter of two surgeons. Molly arrived on campus completely prepared, with all the right supplies and books, since she was the third child in her family to go to college. I felt like I had brought all the wrong things and was jealous of her. Yet, when her dad dropped her off, he wished her luck and never visited again. My mom cried when she left me in the dorm, and called five hours later when they arrived in Patchogue. My parents visited, sent letters, and prepared the best care packages, full of Oreos, Pringles, Entenmanns’s doughnuts and coffee cakes, and even kosher salami!
The day I graduated from college, my parents were there, beaming. My grandfather had died a few years before, but he was the subject of my bachelor’s thesis on labor history. I knew, somehow, that he was proud of me.
Supportive as my parents were of my education, when I decided to go to graduate school, they were skeptical. “Why?” they asked. “What more do you need to learn?” Continuing to graduate school was a learning experience for them and me.
I am hesitant to give advice, since I tend not to follow anyone else’s, but I do have two suggestions. Find role models among your professors, counselors, and peers. I was as influenced by the brave, returning students in my classes as I was by my professors. And try not to assume that everyone else had an easier time in college. As this project highlights, many in academe did not have a direct road to or through higher education. We didn’t always have parents and grandparents who could show us the way.
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