In any event, my father and my mother were Democrats. My father was especially concerned about the little guy. Now, I was keenly interested in the 1960 presidential election, because the Massachusetts Senator John F. Kennedy (1917-1963) was an Irish American and a Roman Catholic. I tended to be idealistic -- and President Kennedy's inaugural address in 1961 appealed to my youthful idealism.
Now, over the years, my entire formal education was in Catholic educational institutions. In the fall semester of 1964, I transferred as a junior English major to Saint Louis University, the Jesuit university of the City of St. Louis, Missouri. There, I took my first course (of five eventually) from Father Ong. However, even though I was deeply impressed with Ong as a teacher, and with his work, I cannot say exactly what about him and his work impressed me so deeply at that time.
On October 12, 1964, I heard the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929-1968), speak in the gym at Saint Louis University, and on March 25, 1965, I also heard him speak in Montgomery, Alabama. Just as President Kennedy's inaugural address in 1961 had appealed to my youthful idealism, so too Dr. King's black civil rights advocacy appealed to my youthful idealism.
As a result, I devoted ten years of my life to teaching writing to black inner-city youth in the City of St. Louis and in New York City (in 1975-1976) in the context of open admissions in higher education. In that context, I taught writing to about one thousand black inner-city youth and to about one thousand white youth. At that time, open admissions was somewhat publicized - perhaps most notably in connection with the expensive experiment with open admissions at the campuses of the City University of New York (CUNY).
Briefly, I was able to align the black inner-city youth I taught writing to in the City of St. Louis and in New York City in the context of open admissions as coming from what Ong refers to as a residually oral culture, and I was also able to align the white youth I taught writing to in the City of St. Louis and in New York City with what Ong refers to as a literate culture. Because nobody else had made those two respective alignments in print, not even Ong himself, those two respective alignments gave me something to write about - and so I did write about them in the 1970s and 1980s. And I have never tired of writing about his work since then, as the listing of certain professional publications of mine below shows. When I went up for promotion to Full Professor at the University of Minnesota Duluth, one external reviewer credited me with starting the field of Ong studies. I agree with him that Ong studies is an apt way to characterize many of my professional publications.
In any event, as a result of one of my early Ong-related articles about open admissions, I was invited to teach at the City College of the City University of New York in 1975-1976. In part because of the expensive experiment with open admissions at the CUNY campuses, New York City declared bankruptcy in the spring of 1976. We did not receive our May paychecks until many years later.
However, 1976 was the bicentennial. On July 4, 1976, I walked from my apartment in the then-new Chelsea Mews Apartments in Manhattan over to the banks of the Hudson River and watched the Tall Ships sailing up and down the river.
CERTAIN PROFESSIONAL PUBLICATIONS OF THOMAS J. FARRELL
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