Having finished high school, I was encouraged by my family to go to college. I was somewhat drawn toward studying chemistry, but finally was attracted more to forestry, so I applied to the New York State College of Forestry at Syracuse University, only three hours from home and tuition free. It began with a freshmen camp at Barber’s Point, Cranberry Lake, in the Adirondacks.  I surely loved it with the rough outdoor ventures.

Then came the academic routine and my first extended time away from home.  Was I ever homesick!  Some evenings I would walk out east to Route 20, the Cherry Valley Turnpike which was the route toward home.  Finally the opportunity came and after school one Friday I walked to Rt. 20 and did my first thumbing down the turnpike, 120 miles to Duanesburg; from there I climbed the hill in the dark to dear Uncle Anton’s farm to stay till morning, when I could phone home for someone to come to pick me up.  I think that it was on this first trip home, as John or Howard picked me up, that I found out that our honey house with 10 tons of honey and hundreds of supers of combs plus thousands of memories had just gone up in flames. When I arrived at the scene, I  just had to take a walk down into the sanctuary of the good old unchanged woods and over through the pine plantation on “The Flat” to alleviate the brokenness of my heart.

Starting college at age sixteen, I was just a kid, weighing less than one hundred pounds. After the first semester with PE, I chose wrestling as my extra curricular sport and, along with the meals at the Home Ec. Cafeteria at $3.50 for a week (6 days), I grew like a weed and added about thirty pounds.  So the following summer I was ready to help Dad working in the bee yards and in the new honey house extracting honey.  During that summer, “The Boys” (John and Howard) were State Bee Inspectors helping to quell the American Foul Brood epidemic.

During that first or second year I recall being called to the College financial office one day to receive notice that I had been awarded a scholarship ($100 a year) for the remainder of the college course because of my academic record at Amsterdam High School.  That was a very pleasant surprise, as I had not even been aware that such scholarships existed.  I kept close account of all my expenditures and Dad financed my schooling.  My expenditures for the 4 years of college were just about $1600, or $400 per year including school fees.  It was a N.Y. State college and therefore tuition free.

The second summer I attended the ten week summer camp at Cranberry Lake – great life in the outdoors learning the practical side of such skills as surveying, map making, cruising timber, canoeing, exploring, etc.  This complemented and augmented the college formal academics with their hands-on labs and field trips in botany, zoology, Dendrology, entomology, plant pathology, along with some liberal arts courses like English literature, speech, physics, chemistry, geology, etc. During my Junior year I joined with two car loads of fellow students for the Christmas – New Year’s vacation on a Forestry tour under Prof. Ed McCarthy toward the South as far as the Carolinas.

At college, I boarded with a few other Forestry students in “Ma Pennington’s” Boarding House on Clarendon St.  I was pretty much of a bashful country boy in college, diligently participating in the academic and practical learning, but with minimum participation in anything of a social nature.  I did attend a local Methodist church and also the University Chapel (Hendricks Chapel), even volunteering once to try to teach a boys’ S.S. Class, but for one Sunday only.

I enjoyed Forestry study, worked hard, got good grades and graduated magna cum laude, second in the 1936 class of about a hundred and with a B.S. in Forestry degree.  I was offered a $500 fellowship for one year which I chose to take in the Department of Silviculture and Forest Management under the guidance of Professor Svend Olaf Heiberg, who truly helped shape my mind.  He was Danish and a pioneer in some phases of forestry research where I assisted him.  His productive thinking and decisive pursuit of truth were a telling example to me of seeking for truth and pursuing it, without being discouraged by the mocking or criticism of others who do not, will not, or perhaps cannot agree. Though his English had not been perfected, his mind was clear of many erroneous concepts in matters of science and economics regarding forestry.  It was under his guidance that I assisted him in the Spring Southern Tour of a month for two and a half truckloads of students to cardinal points of interest as far south as a logging operation in a cypress swamp in the Osceola National Forest in Florida.

Before that last year I acquired my first car, a used 1932 Model A Ford coupe, for $200.  This car served magnificently for two years.  My wife, Kathy remarks that her first car was a 1940 Ford coupe.

After graduation I applied to take the U.S. Forest Service Junior Forester Civil Service Exam, which was scheduled one day during the summer at Syracuse.  So I took that day off from working with Dad in the bee yards to go to Syracuse to write the exam.  The day before my going for the all-day exam, Dad had to prepare to fill a rush order for some honey, so onthat day we had to go to a bee yard to “take off” supers of honey.  It was a dismally cloudy day, the kind of day when the bees are “hanging around home” and not wanting to be bothered.  As we invaded their privacy with this “hurry-up order,” the bees didn’t welcome us, and it’s the only time that I recall of both of us being literally driven out of the bee yard to the refuge of tall weeds and bushes to escape some stings.  That evening I estimated that I had gotten around two hundred stings, the most concentrated dose of bee venom in my experience.  I surely was thankful that my resistance had been built up to the point that it did not seriously hinder my taking the Civil Service exam the next day, on which I got the rating ofnumber 26 in the U.S.A.

In my fifth year at Forestry College I assisted Prof. Heiberg and worked on my Master’s studies.  Much of my work with him dealt with the study of forest soils.  The subject of my thesis for M.F. (1937) was titled The Economic Status of Farm Woodlots in Onondaga County.  I still have a bound copy somewhere in my stuff and there may be a copy or two in the college library or archives.