I stole. It’s hard to believe those two little words follow a man around for 28 years like a shadow but they do. Do the right thing and you forget it in a day, do the wrong thing and you regret it for years. And you can try to justify what you did; rationalize it away but the harder you push it away, the more it sticks. I’ve found guilt seldom has anything to do with courtrooms and trials because in the end we are all our own judge and jury. As long as you know what you did there’s no getting away with it.

It was 1984, the fall of my junior year at SUNY Oswego. Like a lot of college kids I took loans, paid my own way and was broke all the time.

John Gray ’85

Money was as rare as free time and as anyone who has ever struggled can tell you there are weeks where you literally have to watch every penny if you want to eat. It was a week like that, that led me down the road to perdition. I had exactly ten dollars in my pocket which had to last me six days. Whenever I was this broke, I’d go to the store in the student center and buy a bagel for fifty cents. The bagels were huge and filling so they were a nice substitute for lunch. I went to the counter, handed the guy my ten dollar bill, took the bagel and change and turned to go. I counted the money before putting it in my pocket and realized the clerk made a mistake in my favor. He gave me change for twenty dollar bill not a ten.

When times are tight and money falls into your lap the voices of your better angels are easily drowned out by the sounds of a growling stomach. You start to talk yourself into doing the wrong thing. I told myself in that moment that this school had overcharged me for so many things. They had fees on top of fees for courses and services I’d never use. Heck even the laundry machines in my dorm must have stolen from me. Soon enough you convince yourself that you are entitled to that extra ten bucks the guy gave you. They won’t even miss it.

I knew it was wrong to keep it but I was young, broke and stupid, so I took it. For the next few days I found myself avoiding that store for fear the guy might realize what he’d done and ask me about it. Even when I did eventually go back I hung my head and found it difficult to meet his eyes when he rang me up at the register. To the casual observer I’d gotten away with it but the truth was I hadn’t. That ten dollars owned me now and wouldn’t let me go.

Long after I graduated from Oswego that ten dollars I took kept turning up in my mind, like a stone in your shoe. I couldn’t understand how such a small stone could cause such a large ripple in the pond that was my conscience. Then in 1994 I went to see the movie Quiz Show and had a moment of clarity. Toward the end of the movie there’s a scene where Rob Morrow tells a story about an uncle who cheated on his wife and never got caught. Many years later he came clean about what he’d done and everyone in the family asked him why in God’s name he confessed, after all he’d gotten away with it. He said, “It was the getting away with it that I couldn’t live with.”

So why am I telling you this story now; confessing to a petty larceny I committed 28 years ago? Same reason I guess. I haven’t been to confession at church in a long time but I do believe you can talk to God and ask for forgiveness whenever you want. So there I was sitting at a red light on Route 9 near Hoffman’s Playland in Latham when I had a short yet long overdue chat with the big guy. I said I know I can’t go back in time and give the money back but please know I’m sorry, I learned from it and I’ll never do something like that again.

The light turned green and then something very odd happened. I put my directional on and pulled into the Stewart’s shop to grab a cup of coffee. I handed the clerk a ten dollar bill, took the change and turned to go. Anyone in the store that day would have seen me stop and smile because for an instant it was 1984 again. In my hand wasn’t change for my ten dollar bill but a twenty. I looked up toward the ceiling and said under my breath, “Thank you for the second chance.”

The manager was pleasantly surprised when I told him of his error and handed back the ten dollars extra he’d given me. “Wow, thanks,” he said. He probably thinks I’m this rare good guy who did the right thing when in reality I’m just the dummy who did the wrong thing 28 years ago and has paid interest on the debt ever since.

I haven’t been back to Oswego since graduation but a part of me will be visiting soon. The store in the campus center will soon receive an envelope with a ten dollar bill attached to a newspaper column telling this tale of avarice and absolution. I’m sure that guy who gave me the wrong change is long gone but when it comes to one’s eternity and passage at the pearly gates, the sheep that got away needs all the help he can get. •

Reprinted with Permission of the Troy Record.

John Gray ’85 is the news anchor at News10 ABC in Albany, N.Y.   He also is an award-winning columnist for the Troy Record newspaper and Capital Region Living Magazine. While he resides in the Albany area  helping raise his three children and his dog Max and has traveled extensively, he still insists he has never seen a sunset prettier than those outside of Onondaga Hall on Lake Ontario.

Ed. note: SUNY Oswego gratefully accepted John’s donation last autumn. 

OSWEGO alumni magazine welcomes submissions for consideration for “The Last Word.” They should be no more than 600 words and should reflect upon the writer’s Oswego experience. Send to alumni@oswego.edu.

Eli Fleurant ’76 is a poet, philosopher, lecturer, inventor and historian. He created Diaphanism, a philosophy of reason, harmonic social-interaction, positive emotion and well-being. He received a master’s at St. John’s University and has taught at CUNY and Hoftsra University.

He lives on Long Island and teaches modern languages at SUNY Farmingdale.

He is working on two books: Toussaint Louverture and the Panorama of Haiti: Before and After the Quake and Diaphanism: The Formula of Happiness.

Eli Fleurant ’76

Sandy and Mr. Mangrove

Neither oaths, nor sciences

Or man’s stratagem

Dared to halt her fury and rancor.

Before her fierce raid,

She rallied the towering of the ocean,

Emboldening her measure,

Inflating her lungs;

Her bloated cheeks

Gusting the wind

Rushing the monster waves to shore.

There she was, Sandy the savage lover

Lingering, wrecking, taunting.

The tide bursted, ripped free.

Flood, deluge, everywhere!

Then came night;

A tenebrous abyss

Filled the latitude.

And souls espoused nothingness,

The unknown and dark spirits of the elements.

Trees and prides hitherto tall and mighty

Thereon surrendered hubris and heightening.

Fear, tears, anger

Simmering in the torments of the night.

Sneers, curses and prayers

Met with deaf ears.

Mayhem reigns everywhere.

The tempest roars with no yield or pity.

Apocalypse seemed impending.

Sandy the furious nymph,

With her veils, her wretched kisses and rough kicks

Shattering pines, oaks and elms …

Abruptly, she veered to court Mr. Mangrove.

Oohh! Mr. Mangrove!!! She mocked.

Mr. Mangrove, a stern and robust timber

With luring brow.

Sandy paused, stared and stormed with vigor.

The Stoic Tree defied the strike.

In time, the fearless lover, tamed and beguiled

Unwinded her fury and lust

At the shrine of the wooden Centaure.

Eli Fleurant ’76
Oct. 29, 2012

Former Oswegonian editor Marc Heller ’90 walks down the Capitol steps. He was the Washington, D.C., correspondent for the Watertown Daily Times for 14 years before the bureau — the smallest in the nation — closed in March.

Much of my early, rough education in journalism came at the ’Gonian, at that time disconnected from any academic department and without a faculty advisor to guide our judgment.

After covering the Student Association Senate and other adventures, I graduated and started working at the The Palladium-Times. I covered City Hall until 1992, spent too many nights and too much money downing Molson beers at Old City Hall.

My sadness is personal when I lose a job. But I’m also sad for Northern New York, which loses the connection that comes with local media representation in Washington. The Times had a long tradition in Washington. Alan Emory was the correspondent from the Eisenhower administration to the Clinton administration. I tried to keep the Times on the radar in D.C., sometimes in a dignified way, and sometimes, well, not.

In 1998, when Charles E. Schumer, then a congressman from Brooklyn, was running for Senate for the first time, I took a trip up to the state to tag along on the campaign. I had to meet him and his staff at National Airport in Washington, and I was running a little late. I came into the terminal for private flights and was told our plane was already on the runway and I should get out there fast. So I lugged my bag onto the tarmac and huffed and puffed up to the plane, a puddle jumper with its propellers already spinning loudly and the door closed.

I yanked the door open, yelled that I was from the Watertown Daily Times, and saw Mr. Schumer and several aides turn their heads at me, stunned.

“You’re in the other plane,” one said — the press plane, it turned out — which wasn’t out there yet. “Sorry,” I said. I waved goodbye, closed the door behind me, and walked back to the terminal.

I’ve had fun stories over the years: the Amish being exempt from the national health insurance mandate; the odd proposal to use the Obama economic stimulus for a dairy herd reduction; breaking the story that Kirsten E. Gillibrand, then a House member, was Gov. David Paterson’s choice to replace U.S. Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton.

I flew on Air Force One with Bill Clinton when he came to Alexandria Bay to campaign for his wife in her Senate race in 2000. And I flew on Air Force Two a few years ago with Vice President Joe Biden, who came to Watertown to campaign for Bill Owens after U.S. Rep. John McHugh became Army secretary.

In 1994, the decision was made to send a reporter and photographer to Haiti with soldiers from Fort Drum who were to replace the Marines who had occupied the country after the coup against President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. When the reporter who was supposed to go realized his passport had expired, I — the reporter on staff with a valid one — got to go instead.

The danger signs for the Times’ Washington bureau started several years ago. We stopped covering the political conventions in 2004; like many small newspapers, the Times decided many hundreds of dollars spent for hotels, meals and flights didn’t justify the feature-type stories.

On the other hand, we carried on where many other papers larger than the Times gave up. When I arrived in 1997, newspapers in Fort Wayne, Ind.; Bangor, Maine; Portland, Maine; New Haven, Conn.; Allentown, Pa.; Norfolk., Va., and other cities all had one-person bureaus here.

The Watertown Daily Times Washington bureau outlived them all and has given me something to be grateful for.

Marc Heller ’90 now covers agriculture policy, legislation and regulation for Bloomberg BNA in Washington, D.C.

Oswego alumni magazine welcomes submissions for consideration for “The Last Word.” They should be no more than 600 words and should reflect upon the writer’s Oswego experience. Send to alumni@oswego.edu.

The television is turned to R News, which is a station that covers news in Rochester twenty-four hours a day. The reports are filled with statistics and there are charts and diagrams and pictures of plows and cars stuck in the snow and of kids building snowmen or skating on the canal.

Jon Chopan ’03, a professor at The Ohio State University, recently earned the Creative Writing Alumni Award from Oswego’s Creative Writing Arts program. His first novel, Pulled from the River, was published in March.

Dave has a lot to say this year and we listen closely.

Still, none of us leave with a fortune. Or it is not the kind one would expect.

We sit there for hours, Dave moving from us to the men at the other end of the bar sitting with the beautiful Ukrainian woman.

This is our fortune, all of it. The people who are there when you walk in and the charts and graphs on the television. The Christmas lights, some of which have burned out, and the three of us: father and sons, sitting here together for another year. That it is snowing and that we each have one pitcher of beer and that my brother and I will watch our father walk slowly, with a slight limp, back into his apartment complex where he will steadily climb those twenty-two flights.

I will stay in Ohio for five years, am still there, and when I drive home I feel like I am headed in the direction I was meant to move: east. It will always be my bearing. Not west to the new cities and prairies, not north or south to the poles. But east, home.

I think about my father and wonder what the world will do with him. The markers pile up, each one drawing me in and propelling me forward: Cleveland, Erie, the rest stop at Angola, Buffalo.

Then the tollbooths and that last stretch of land, where the sky is gray, a kind of gloom that those who are not from here never grow accustomed to. And finally, the skyline: the smoke stacks of Kodak, the three giant tanks of beer in front of the Genesee Brewery, the smell of trash plates, the smell of river water, the High Falls, the Low Falls, the Eastman house, Lake Ave., Park Ave., and lastly my father’s building towering toward the sky, and him in it, taking those stairs one at a time. l

More than 1,500 students, alumni, faculty and staff turned out for the “Oswego Family Portrait” to launch Inspiring Horizons: The Campaign for Oswego Sept. 30, 2005.

The first building he would see, the one in front of which his statue sits, would bear his name. Sheldon Hall also represents the oldest and first building on the college’s current site. The architecture would likely be the most familiar to him, even if the cornerstone was laid in 1911, or 13 years after his death. The hallways themselves would look like the insides of a school he knew, and he may have felt at home in the historic classroom.

Peering inside one of the modern classrooms or offices, however, would prove more startling. Computers, large-screen video boards, all manners of electronic devices would look unfamiliar, though he likely would approve of the benefits they provided to learning.

But since it was a nice day and the sun was shining on his face, let us assume Sheldon instead favored an outdoor stroll to the lakeshore. Walking several strides west would find him meeting an avenue that bears his name. If he took that left, the first thing he would see on his right is the Mackin Complex. This building houses two residence halls, Lonis and Moreland, as well as a full-service dining hall. Home to traditional features of the residential campus, the building houses around 140 students, many of them upperclassmen or graduate students. The magnitude of today’s residential campus with more than 4,300 students living on it may prove a slightly startling development compared to when most students lived off campus when his normal school was downtown.

On his left, he would find Rich Hall, home to the college’s School of Business. Over the years, it also served as the first campus library building and later home of University Police — could he imagine his little normal school having its own police force? The architectural stylings, part of a renovation more than a century after he passed, may have seemed a tad unusual.

He may be surprised that his teacher training institute now included this School of Business in addition to a School of Education, plus a College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and School of Communication, Media and the Arts. The international nature of business, and how people in this building could close deals with a keystroke via the Internet, would perhaps prove mind-boggling. But as a longtime champion of having the most modern and helpful equipment, he would approve of its state-of-the-art nature. And that students learn by doing — the hallmark of the object learning method he helped popularize — would please him greatly.

If he continued to follow Sheldon Avenue toward the lake, he would see a familiar sight: His onetime home, Shady Shore. Today, Shady Shore is the home of the college’s tenth president, Deborah F. Stanley. While the thought of a woman president may have seemed far away for many 19th-century residents, we doubt Sheldon would be too surprised. Many female administrators were key to the college’s foundation, and he made no secret their value to the institution.

But Sheldon’s nostalgia over his homestead would likely be superseded by the sound of hundreds of voices further around the bend on Rudolph Road. There he would see well over 1,000 people, most dressed in yellow T-shirts.

The idea of a $17 million college campaign having its public launch that day may well seem hard to fathom in scope — as could the $23.8 million the campaign would raise before its conclusion. The first building purchased for the campus cost a mere $31,000. The college’s initial state annual funding of $2,128.50 was a lot of money in the 1860s.

But despite all the differences, there would be plenty in the scene the founder would have recognized. The easy camaraderie, the laughing, the grins among the people assembled would have been familiar. The marvelous backdrop, the splendid vista of Lake Ontario, would have looked the same. And maybe, just maybe, he would catch a certain spirit in the air, an affable joie de vivre, that he expected to feel among the community.

One can’t help but imagine Sheldon smiling at the whole scene. How far, yet fruitful, the journey to this place from a dream he had in the middle of the 19th century.

Tim Nekritz M ’05 is SUNY Oswego’s associate director of public affairs/director of web communication. This is an excerpt from his unpublished history of the college, reprinted here with his permission.

Editor’s note: Mark Hutchins ’70 visited campus and sent this piece via email to the Alumni Relations Office. It is reproduced here with his permission.

Five years ago I visited for a few days in the summer. It was a very strange experience. I wandered over the campus in search of my youth. Everywhere I looked, most of it was the same as I remembered. But all my friends were long gone. Only the memories still fresh. Everywhere I looked, ghosts materialized. Events materialized. I drank it in as only an older middle-aged man can. Here had taken place the best years of my life. I grew up here. My mind roared here. Some of the best friendships I have ever known were initiated and cultivated here. Some remain today.

But reality and time intruded. The snack bar at the union did not have vanilla Cokes. Nunzi’s, the Warehouse, Buckland’s … all gone. The town looked a little depressed and worn. A number of buildings gone.

Finally I went into Seneca Hall and up to my old room on the seventh floor. Forty years ago! I lived in Seneca for three years. It was new when I moved in. So was I. Now it is weather-worn … blasted from forty years of storms. So am I. My room, 703 North, was exactly the same, however. Even the same furniture had survived, in good condition, for those forty years.

I sat down on a bed and conversations whispered that I had forgotten. Important discussions on the meaning of life, future plans, goals, and nonsense. I was there for an hour, just lost in the idea of this place in time. I think for a moment or two I could have opened that door and walked right back out into my life then. A mirror hanging above the bureau jolted me back to reality.

I stuck a newly bought Moody Blues CD in my rental car’s stereo and parked along the lake front with a beer and a sunset for company. Lost in remorse at paths not taken and opportunities not recognized. Joy at the threads I’ve kept up to this place. And grateful for all those people, in this place, who contributed to who I am now.

Mark Hutchins ’70 is an architect in Pasadena, Calif.

Gates of the Arctic National Park and Preserve, located in the central Brooks Range of northern Alaska, is one of the last places in North America that is still untrammeled by modern civilization.

It features countless jagged mountains that soar anywhere from 4,000 to 8,000 feet high, numerous wild and scenic rivers, and more than seven million acres of federally designated wilderness.

In the brief period of summer weather from around mid-June through late July, the sun never sets. It allows the Brooks Range to transition from a grim winter wasteland to a vibrant landscape, teeming with vegetation, wildlife … and, of course, mosquitoes.

View from above a glacial lake in the Valley of Aquarius, Gates of the Arctic National Park, Alaska.

From May through September of this year, I worked as a backcountry ranger in this park. While the ranger station and my housing were located in Bettles, a bush town located about 30 miles south of the park, I spent about 60 days backpacking across the tundra and floating down the rivers within the park.

My patrols were far from aimless, so there was a bit of real work involved, but the experience was so astounding.

After nine backcountry patrols and hundreds of photos taken in a place of such inordinate grandeur, the finest memory of the season was a patrol in the Arrigetch Peaks. As a National Natural Landmark, the Arrigetch receives a considerable percentage of the park’s visitors each year.

Some of the prominent peaks of the Arrigetch. Steven Duby ’09 was consistently faced with “utterly horrifying beauty” throughout his summer as a park ranger.

Look at the photographs and it’s easy to see why.

In the Inupiaq language, the word “Arrigetch” is translated as “fingers of the outstretched hand,” and every year a few climbers from around the world try to ascend these fingers. After spending several days among these spires of rock, hiking deep into their glacially eroded valleys, I determined that no words of the English language can accurately describe the utterly horrifying beauty of this place.

You must see for yourself to gain a genuine understanding.

Steven Duby ’09 stands atop Allen Mountain in Gates of the Arctic National Park.

The summer also included an array of wildlife: grizzly bears just 100 yards away, black bears stumbling into camp in the morning and more than 100 Dall sheep grazing in the mountains.

While seeing a grizzly in the wild helps define a wilderness experience, perhaps even greater is the sight and sound of a wolf.

In late June, just after the solstice, I was fortunate to see a lone gray wolf roaming across the tundra, and on my final patrol, further south on the John River, I heard the howling of a dispersed pack late one evening; a perfect end to my season.

Since leaving New York not long after graduating from Oswego State, I have called Alaska my home. Working for Gates of the Arctic National Park and Preserve has allowed me to see a part of this vast state that few people ever visit. I hope to see more as my time here continues.

Former Oswego magazine intern Steven Duby ’09 is a graduate student at Alaska Pacific University in Anchorage, Alaska.