Waiting 45 years To Meet!

Stephen (right) and I enjoy meeting – 45 years delayed!

In September of 1972, I was part of a group of eleven St. John’s students and one faculty member, Graham Watson, who left these shores to visit Keene State College in New Hampshire, USA for five weeks. There we stayed with local families, worked in local schools, and took in much of the regional culture. It was a wonderful exchange experience and as I’ve written elsewhere, it shaped my career and life for the next forty-plus years. As well as participating in the visit to Keene, I also helped to host two reciprocal exchanges from Keene State to St. John’s in Januaries of 1972 and 1973, and got to know several of the Keene students.

Since that exchange visit, occasional “small world” incidents have cropped up, such as the time my first wife and I were apartment-hunting in Keene in 1976. We had met with the apartment complex manager and he was home that night talking to his wife about references for  a couple with a weird last name and the guy had a British accent. “Monether?” exclaimed the wife, “I know him! He was in York when I was there in 1972!” We were approved for the apartment and saw them socially many times while we were in Keene.

One exchange group I didn’t meet was the one that visited during the summer of 1972. So I didn’t meet Stephen Pinzari back then. I had to wait 45 years until he walked into the Heritage Room the other day! Stephen and his wife were visiting York and had been directed to Billy Jones in the Alumni office. When he heard the year of Stephen’s student exchange, Billy said, “There’s someone here you might have met before. Follow me!” And so the nearly-but-not-quite meeting, unfulfilled for half a lifetime, finally happened!

During our Heritage Room meeting, we exchanged notes and experiences, and recalled people associated with the exchange program, such as Graham Watson, George Kramer, Joe Rousseau, and Dave Costin. Stephen was emphatic that his exchange experience in 1972 changed his life and the course of his life’s work. Graham Watson even helped Stephen become accepted into the Master’s program at Leeds University. However, marriage plans took precedent and his studies continued in the U.S.A.

Following graduation from Keene State, Stephen had remained in the New England area, attended the University of Maine for his Master’s, then taught for UMaine, University of Vermont, and Loyola University. He is now an Associate Professor of Education at Stonehill College in Easton, Massachusetts – less than two hours drive from where I had been living and working in Peterborough, NH for 38 years! The parallel lives had one further component – I also taught in an Education Department in higher ed – as an associate faculty member at Antioch University New England, the graduate school that shares the city of Keene as its home with Keene State College! Small worlds and parallel lives are so intriguing! I wonder who’s going to walk through the Heritage Room next!