DOWN BY THE RIVERSIDE

The campus of Stevens Institute provided a playground for Hoboken kids. My alumni magazine carried an article by one of my contemporaries who did not happen to attend the Stute. His recollections of those
days matched mine. Read this story and you will see why. 10/1/2016

DOWN BY THE RIVERSIDE

My alumni magazine, The Stevens Indicator, features stories of its successful graduates that I read with a measure of pride. In recent years, its obituary column commands more of my attention than heretofore. It shocks me to see a classmates name in that dreary listing.

From time to time, an issue will include articles describing the history of the school and its founding family (dating back to Colonial days). The Stevens family pioneered the use of steam engines for both shipping and rail.

The magazine often includes articles describing the rich history of Hoboken, the city the Stevens family created. I never thought to submit one of my reminiscent stories about growing up near the campus for publication, but now it’s too late. In the Number 5, 1996 issue appears an article written by a peer, a non-graduate but fellow townsman, Edward M. Stuart, titled Campus Nostalgia: An Outsider's Perspective.

Mr. Stuart grew up in Hoboken, living in an apartment building located directly across the street from the western edge of the campus. His words echoed my own sentiments, feelings and remembrances. He captured the essence of how I felt while roaming the campus grounds and buildings. Some of his recollections were far more vivid and detailed than my own.

I wondered why our paths had not crossed while we both frolicked on the campus. We shared many, but not all the same boyhood adventures. He took short cuts by walking through some of the school’s buildings and become a pal of Rudy, the gym’s caretaker. Edwin had climbed to the top of the abandoned family homestead, Castle Stevens, to play war games. It never occurred to me to venture there.

He described with accuracy the school’s athletic field, its buildings, and its hidden mysterious paths that ran along the school’s property facing the Hudson River and overlooking the Shore Line Railroad which carried freight to and from the ocean liners berthed below. Stuart and I were like two ships that passed in the night. He lived on Sixth Street, and attended school on Tenth Street. I lived at the corner of Ninth Street, and went to grade school on Fourth Street.  We each traversed the Stevens campus to get to class, often chased by Mike, the dreaded watchman, who chased kids with the intent of doing bodily harm, a relentless but singularly unsuccessful pursuit.

The Naval V-12 training program came to Stevens in 1942, and student/sailors began to appear on campus and in town. The school converted the Castle Stevens into a dormitory to house the military students. He recalls seeing the men line up and then march in formation to dinner. I never saw such a parade. I spent my days in high school while he still pranced around the campus.

He mentions seeing the obstacle course constructed on the athletic field, designed to train the naval students. When I entered Stevens in July 1944, all civilian students were required to take the same physical training as the military. I spent hours going through the obstacle course and learning how to climb shipboard rigging from the gym floor to the oval running track above.

His article included a number of photographs of campus buildings and structures that seemed amazingly familiar to me. His description of the winter sports he played on campus with other Hoboken kids matched my own recollection. He tells of the "tall fence along Hudson Street composed of vertical iron bars topped with pointed tips that faced alternatively inward and outward," which defined my youth in so many ways. It proved a challenge, not a barrier, to the boys from my block. We would shimmy over the fence and roll large rocks down a hill into it, hoping to dislodge one of its vertical bars. If we succeeded, it would allow us to to squirm through  rather than climb over the fence to gain access to our playground. No matter how many times the school fixed one loose bar, we would loosen another one. We treated that fence with impunity.

Although Stuart did not attend Stevens, I share his golden memories of the school’s campus we used as our boyhood playground.

This particular issue of the Indicator featured the remarks given by Stevens' first Nobel Laureate, Dr. Fred Reins '39, last June when honored by the school. Entitled, Who Needs Science?, he stated that science has given humankind an unlimited frontier in an otherwise finite world.

I am proud to have attended a college that graduated people like Dr. Reins. I am equally proud that the college provided an ideal playground for some of Hoboken’s children, like Stuart and me. I am even more proud that Mike, the watchman, never managed to shoot me with his fearsome, though never seen, pepper gun. He gets all the credit for developing my amazing foot speed. I have a ribbon around here somewhere, awarded me for finishing second in a fifty-yard dash conducted on the Stevens cinder track while I was still in grade school. It is not quite on the same par as a Nobel Prize, but it is just as endearing.

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