JA: Can you tell me a little about your parents, their names and occupations?

GN: Yes, my father is Michael he is deceased about thirty years now. He was born in 1896 and died in 1971 or 1972. He was a taxi cab driver during the Depression years and then he got a job he was an auto mechanic and he worked for the City of New York and the Police Department, so he did the monitoring and mechanical work to keep the New York City police cars on the road, he and his group. My mother, Ann a little bit younger. They both came from the same town in Ireland, a place called Ballygar, and they knew each other as children growing up and they married here in the early twenty’s. She was a nurse by profession but a home raiser for the eight kids growing up. And then was the local nurse for accidents, stitches and taking care of cuts and bruises, and temperatures, and medicines in the neighborhood.

JA: That’s great. You started taking about your education as a child. Can you talk a bit more about that, as young man maybe?

GN: Yes, I did what we would call the traditional youth of that day growing up in a Parish school. A place was called Our Lady of the Assumption. It was a little grammar school in a country like area. We had one class on each level, first grade, second grade, third grade, there was no “A” or “B” it was just one class; And when I started there were seventy in my first year and by the time I graduated I guess we were down to about fifty-five or so, in the eighth grade. Following those eight years I happened to run into a young man, at that time, Brother Aidan Francis who was a recruiter for the Marist Brothers; and they had opened a school on the banks of the Hudson in Esopus, New York called Marist Preparatory. I entered Marist Preparatory in September, September 1st, 1944. And I had three delightful years in Esopus, in high school. Following that, I crossed over the river and came to the Poughkeepsie property in 1947 to start my novitiate and my last year of high school, and then my college.

JA: Were any other students from your elementary school recruited?

GN: No, no I took a liking to this order, to the Marist Brothers because my older brother John, who I mentioned earlier, who was an Air Force Colonel, had gotten a scholarship to high school. A place called St. Ann’s Academy, which was in mid- town New York. That school has recently well has been replaced and is now Archbishop Molloy High School in Queens.

JA:  Now you mentioned that recruiters, a recruiter came to your school and that’s what brought you into the Marist community, but what drew you into it? Why did you decide that was the course you wanted to take?

GN:  It was…I used to look at the pictures of the high school where my brother went and I saw these teachers, who were the brothers; they were not priests, they were religious men who were very active with high school in the yards, playing ball, playing handball on their little courts, basketball courts and I was just attractive. What a life that would be, I said to myself if that could ever be. And then somebody came along and said would you like to be one of these guys and I said sure.

JA: [Laughing] And after you finished your high school education, where did you go from there?

GN: I just crossed the road here and came to Marist College, which was Marian College then. This would be September of forty-nine, and I became a college freshman, as a young brother. The word scholastic was used in those days so I was a scholastic, and I majored in English the other option was Biology, we had two choices. [Laughter] It was like a bakery we have vanilla or chocolate, you don’t like chocolate take vanilla. I didn’t like Biology so I took English. So I became an English teacher and I studied here for three years and then I graduated in 1952 from the college and we did the four years college in three years, it was three years and three summers so that we were able to do our college work in that time. And then I was assigned to that school that I made mention of, where my brother went, St Anne’s Academy and that was my first teaching assignment. So now I had gone full circle. I was one of those in the yard playing with the kids.

JA: Did you live on campus that whole time you where at the college?

GN: Yes I did, yes.

JA: What was the life like, as a scholastic?

GN: Very humble [Laughter] things were so regulated and they were so officially done. Showering was a privilege we had once a week whether we needed it or not, we had time slots. Sometimes the water was hot and sometimes it wasn’t. Sometimes we got dry-cleaned; the water was hardly dripping out at all but we managed. Sickness was a rarity among us, we were well fed, we were well exercised we had opportunities to play sports, we had work assignments. We were up at the break of dawn and before five- thirty in the morning and we were in bed by nine o’clock at night. So we had a wholesome life for those two, three, five years on this campus. We were well fed. But again meagerly we had some things we didn’t like; we had cows of course who grazed in the field. You probably never had this experience but, in the springtime when the grass first begins to break through, scallions and onions break through along with the grass. The cows don’t seem to mind eating onions and scallions. But the taste of the milk, when it has an onion flavor, is not very attractive. [Laughter] But you grin and bare it, so that was one little sidepiece of this. The other thing I should say is that because we were so independent we had a wonderful system here of making the schedule fit our needs and purposes. For instant, through the high school years we would be off every Wednesday afternoon for sports but we would go to school Saturday morning. And then we would work Saturday afternoon in manual things, raking, cutting wood, washing and waxing floors; the whole range of things that you’d need do to keep the house up or an estate, because now this is an estate that we were living on. But if it rained on Wednesday that was all right, we just cancelled it and went to school Wednesday afternoon and we took off Thursday afternoon. So you know, it was a marvelous kind of fluid way in which we could operate our lives. And if it snowed very heavily we wouldn’t get up in the morning we would have what we called a sleep in, we couldn’t go anywhere, we had no religious exercises, the priests couldn’t come so we had what we called a button. I don’t know where the word, expression button comes from but, it was the expression that we were staying in, we weren’t going to get up in the morning. It must come from the French; I have no idea where it came from.

JA: It’s certainly different than today’s schedule.

GN:  Oh indeed, indeed.

JA: Now how many brothers were here at the time, that must have made a difference in being able to arrange your schedules like that?

GN: Well, there were about a hundred in the college. There would be three classes of about thirty each, and it would roughly be a hundred. And then there were some workers, brothers who were assigned, they didn’t go to school that year they were assigned to do the laundry, do the cooking, or do the driving, or do the farming, or do the whatever.

JA: When did you officially become a brother in the Marist Order?

GN: Okay, the period of training goes through an introductory as high school and your just learning about the brotherhood, but you have no obligations. Then in the period called the novitiate is divided into two parts. The first year is called the postulant in which you are in a much more astringent religious observation. You’re being looked at and you’re looking at where you’re going. You study the rules and constitutions and the obligations that would be involved. And then one year after being a postulant ship, so for me in July 1948 I became a novice. And that’s, I became a member of the Marist Brothers. I was just beginning but I had to have it and I had a new name. I had no vows yet so I could still have use of money. I could leave at any time. A year after taking the habit and becoming a novice then you took your first vows. And now you’re a full-fledged member of the community. You had no money, you got no money, any money you got was part of a… you could have a private will, but you had no use of the money. That’s the money, you’re under obedience so you could be reassigned to study or to teach or to work, and you take it gladly, this is what you wanted. And the third one, chastity is just that you are not to marry while in this state. Not that you don’t see pretty women, but you decide that you’re not going to live with them. [Laughter]

JA: I’m going to jump back to life on Marist campus; it sounded like you were self sufficient, were you completely self-sufficient?

GN: Oh no way, no spiritually we weren’t priests had to come for our spiritual exercises in the morning, we call that mass and Eucharist, and then there’s counseling and confession. Not that we were big sinners, but we sometimes thought we were and so we had to… we didn’t have to the opportunity for receiving what we call the sacrament of penance was once a week also. So that’s the spiritual. On the other lines, a meat trucks came in delivery and we had butchery and once a week they did slaughter something. But no way did it really cover what the needs were. The vegetables as well, we did get food by delivery, we needed breads, we didn’t make our own bread; we didn’t have ovens to do any of the bakery kinds of things. We had chefs who could make cakes and apple goodies, and different kinds of treats as it were. Ice cream was delivered we had that maybe once a week if we were good [Laughter].

JA: Now you had all these people coming to make deliveries on campus, but was there a lot of interaction?

GN: No, not much with them. And not much interaction with anyone, we would talk to them, but they didn’t come and stay for dinner or stay for lunch. They were just making these deliveries as it were. The family visited once a month, so we did have, on Sundays, and it was pretty restricted to once a month that your family would be here. They weren’t even invited to dinner though they were allowed to come visit you and you had lunch with them, a picnic kind of thing. But we were kind of on a strict budget and we didn’t have money to be able to entertain families on a regular basis, on extraordinary situations there were, but no. So far as other interaction, limited. The other seminaries that are around would occasionally visit and would participate in sports. In Esopus for instance, Mount Saint Alphonsus is a big castle that’s about two miles above Esopus property, well they had a big contention of young men and we had a fine gym, so they came to play in our gym. We had hockey games, on the ice and there would be competition and the winter sports we had some skiing on the premises, not as advanced as we’d take it today if we said it but there were hills and we had skis, and we had snow.

JA: That’s all you need.

GN: Yes

JA: Now, you received your undergraduate degree from Marian College.

GN: Correct

JA: What other degrees have you received?

GN: Okay, while I was at St. Ann’s Academy the first teaching assignments, after the second year… maybe the first two years you’re suppose to focus on getting your lesson plans together and being equipped to teach whenever they think you can teach or more pointedly whatever they need you to teach and then you would learn how to teach as the case would develop. I taught General Science with very meager background in Science. English I did a lot of English, but I had a good background in English. History, I became a historian just by pure seat of the pants operation. Of course they needed a History teacher. That’s for the teaching experience and me becoming and then getting the advise of others and having these sessions where methodologies of teaching where shared by different members of the community. They were always very insightful, very helpful. For graduate study, I went from Saint Anne’s Academy to Saint John’s, Saint John’s University to continue a Master’s Degree in English and I completed that in the next four years I guess, because with one or two courses a semester and I forget the number of courses and writing the dissertation, a Master’s thesis, was I guess another year on that, so I did a thesis on Eugene O’Neill in 1954-55. At the end of that first five years, I got the call to come and become a member of the teaching staff back in Esopus where I had gone to High school. And that was kind of a feather in my cap I didn’t think I deserved that kind of recognition. But I was a good teacher. I decided since that I must have been a good teacher. But then they made me become a teacher of teachers so I did come back to teach here. But that is leading into the second degree then, the second degree was since I was going to be involved in the teaching of Brothers’ I should know more Religion than I had. So I had the basic Religious understanding, but it was still fitting that should get a Master’s Degree in Theology. So I went over to a place called Collegeville, Minnesota and that’s the Benedictine Monastery my brother had been at. My brother wasn’t there; he had gone to Munich for a doctorial degree and then, I don’t know where he went after that but he was around doing different things. But I knew of the Benedictine Monastery and I knew of the quality of their education and I thought it would be good to do that. So I became a theologian, semi-theologian as much, as I had a Master’s Degree now in Theology. That was to help me in working with the novices and the training of the Marist Brothers for the next five or six years. Then, I came to Marist College, I was transferred from the novitiate, from the Esopus training school to become a member of the Marist faculty here in about 1964 or 1965 I came on campus.

JA:  And you remained a professor or instructor on campus?

GN:  I became an instructor on campus and did so for the next thirty some odd years. One little note there, while I was in the Esopus, assigned there, one small change had developed and as much as they were not admitting students anymore for the high school experience and they were coming only for the novitiate. To come to the novitiate, you had to be a high school graduate, so it changed that stop a little bit. The first year now were for college students, so the portion of the first year that I taught about in ’48 when I was here, now this becomes a strictly college year, so I in point of fact was the college representative teaching these young Marist Brothers to be in Esopus. We would come over here for use of the library. So I came to Marist College really on the yellow school bus and I was the driver [Laughter], giving those students good use of the library. A second function that I had was that, St. Francis Hospital had the School of Nursing and the nurses needed some academic courses besides their medical ones and so I was assigned to teach the nurses literature and writing. I would have to make my way up to the hospital to the nurses to teach them, that was my assignment. Marist had no women on campus yet. So, when the nurses would come down here for assignments in the library or something, we got a lot of attention. [Laughter]

JA: There’s always been a strong relationship with St. Francis, hasn’t there?

GN: There has always been a strong relationship with St. Francis, right. From the earliest years, because of the wide variety of people that we had here in terms of where they had come from across the country and really across the world. Because eventually we started to have, there were Chinese Brothers in my class who had come from China to get their education and degree in the States and some from South America and some from Europe. So, all of these gave us a wide spread of individuals who had very interesting blood. We became the instant blood bank for St. Francis, anytime there was a crisis, they would come and pick up four or five people. And they had us typed and they knew where we were and who they were after, what kind of blood they wanted so they would come and bring us to the hospital.

JA: I’ll jump back just for a moment. I was interested in knowing how many students were in your graduating class from Marian College.

GN: About twenty-five. We were roughly a hundred, so about thirty a group, but some would drop out in the course for one reason or another. They needed a teacher in St. Ann’s Academy or Mt. St. Michael’s or St. Agnes’ or something, so somebody who had not quite finished their course of studies might be asked to go out for a semester and teach. And then while out, they might complete their courses at Fordham or St. John’s, some other place like that.

JA: Was the graduation ceremony a formal event?

GN: No, very very humble. We got letters from the President of the United States congratulating us because every college student does. We were an official college, had an official kind of graduating class, so we got these notices. We got invitations for interviews to do different things because our names were somewhat in the public arena because we had signed on to vote or whatever. So they knew we were here and we were people. One interesting thing, few would know it, but it would be good at this time to bring it up. As I was in Esopus and the delicate for Marist College there as the teacher in place, one of the teachers in place, I would come to faculty meetings here in the English Department or general meetings that would be had. The time came then that we had our first Middle State Evaluation. Now, Middle State is a rather significant experience. The accreditation by this association gives you the wherewithal to make a number of claims. You are a legitimate four-year college, with this accreditation you can apply for federal grants and you can apply for any of a number other kind of institutional things. So to get that stamp is rather important. The first time we went for it, it was rather difficult because we had a meeker library, we had a small teaching staff, but we had great possibilities and great growth dimensions. When they came, the individual decided he’d like to see Esopus and what was going on over there came over and I gave him the tour there. He was amazed the Marist College elected to develop a campus in Poughkeepsie rather in Esopus. He thought that the Esopus campus would have been a more college place to put the college rather than on the outskirts of a small town like Poughkeepsie, where it is more industrial. The only thing is, there’s no train station in Esopus that works there’s one there, but it’s not operative. There’s very limited transportation, so the college really had to stay in Poughkeepsie.

JA: I’d like to have you elaborate on that a little bit. I know the campus has gone through a tremendous growth in the past few decades. If you could talk about the facilities a little bit more, how many buildings were on campus and the fact that you were dealing with a small library and a small staff and how you were able to cope.

GN:  Ok. Well, let’s focus on the library. The library, when I was a student at Marist College was the first floor of Greystone and the second floor of Greystone. The first floor was the reference area and the second floor was where the books were. So, if you have been up to Dennis Murray’s office, you know the size of the library. That’s where it was. Now you’re across the way to what we have in the Cannavino Library and I think any of the rooms are probably bigger than the room that we had for our library in those days. But, interesting enough, we had some rather interesting collections. They started early to get various kinds of revues. So the library was a very functional library. Something like PMLA, the Periodical for Modern Language Association. We had the whole from the beginning we had all of the volumes many libraries don’t. Fordham didn’t, Manhattan didn’t, and yet we were able, no one stole them from here. [Laughter] Other places are subject, or they were in those days and they’re very hard to replace. So, that would be one feature of it. The chemistry lab was on the bottom of the Greystone building, so that’s where I learned chemistry. A small little lab, but we were only twelve students; maybe, taking chemistry so that was it was quite suitable. We got almost individual attention so we were able to manage that nicely. The classroom building was a meager building that’s been taken down since and we would have pictures of that in the archives if you sometime want to go back and look at it. The other south end of the campus is where the novitiate was that was one humble, I forget now; I think it was the Beck Mansion. It contained a kitchen, dining room area, and study hall and then the dormitories were upstairs. The safety was always an issue. So, we had, what we would, actually were fire drills periodically and the fire drills involved coming down a pipe such as firemen have in a firehouse. We had to step outside onto a metal landing and then grab this pipe and slide down the pipe. We had these drills and some who didn’t want to do it, for nervousness or whatever, eventually just had to bite the bullet and go to it. The other side of the campus, where the MacPherson estate is, according to the pictures now, would be past the swimming pool and up on that edge there. The northern end of Lowell Thomas is actually where the building would have been. That was a bigger wooden structure. It contained principally the dormitory and the dining room and the small chapel was in that building. In later years, that was such a threat to the safety that the diocese insisted we had a night watchman. So every week, or every other day, there would be a new person on to supervise and just walk the building through the night for fear of fire. And then, eventually, we abandoned that with the other structures that went up and we gave it to a contractor to take down and he burnt it down.

JA: Really?

GN: One amazing blaze. Yeah. We have pictures of that again in the archives.

JA: That would be interesting to add to this interview. How many of the buildings did the brothers construct?

GN: Well, they really didn’t start building until I left here. We were living in these humble abodes for those five years that I was on campus. But the second year I was out, the first building to go up would’ve been the chapel. Then, after the chapel was built, there was a refectory with the study hall attached to it. And the new dormitories went up, that was Fontaine. So that’s all Marist Brother construction through that area. Just last year they tried to take it down to put up the library, or two years ago and they had an awesome job taking it down because they were built with reinforced rods and it was done with great care and attention and taking it down was a difficult project. The other major building that the brothers constructed would be the Donnelly Building. That’s that round building, the classroom building. It’s almost right; it just missed here and there. If you look through sometimes you will see there’s little blocks that catch the beams and we, someone doing the transcript was a hair off and a hair off over a hundred feet is about four inches. So, we had to kind of fill in blocks here and there to balance it so the roof could go on without having dips in it. But, if we didn’t do it, it wouldn’t be there. If we weren’t there, we wouldn’t be here, so I mean it’s all part of process by which the growth process I think took place. So those four or five, ‘cause the other small building in here called Adrian, which has since been demolished, only last year was it taken down, which served as a kind of, it was used for advancement and for Lee Miringoff’s public opinion in later years. It was used as kind of a cafeteria for the Sunday visitors for the parents coming up. It was used as the advancement office, where people met who wanted to give donations or we thought they should give donations, we invited them in there to talk with them. And so that’s what went on in that building.

JA: You mentioned a couple of dormitories on campus. Were the Brothers housed in one large room or were there any separate rooms?

GN: Separate rooms and maybe twenty beds in a large room and then there’d be five or six large rooms spaced around where those beds were. Through this big mansion that we had, the MacPherson mansion, that became our dormitories. We made them large rooms. We took down; I mean people before I came did that. So, Adrian Perou for instance, he would’ve mocked the original work to do the renovations. The renovation means ripping down the walls and making the one big room so that it would be used as a large dormitory.

JA: Did the Brothers, any of the Brothers have a background in construction or did you learn as you went along?

GN: No, nobody had a degree or actually studied it, but we did learn that through various kinds of, various experiences we had. Brother Nilus, who had been working with, well let me go back a little bit. One of the buildings we did put up here was the gym, which has since become the Marian Building as a freshman dormitory now I believe. It has been done over but the essential inside part of it was the gym. The brothers built that under the direction of Brother Francis Xavier. He just learned it as he went.

JA: You also mentioned there was a pool on campus. Was that an outdoor pool?

GN: Yes it was. It was an outdoor pool that is now in the basement of Lowell Thomas and it happened that this area was noted for the fact it was always muddy. So, they decided the reason it was muddy is because there was an underground spring there. So what they did was, physically by hand, dug out a huge hole and put reinforced concrete around it and left an area in the middle of it to allow the water to come up. It would be, actually filled by this natural spring that was making its way from the upper areas down towards the Hudson. Annually we emptied it and whitewashed it and prepared it for the next season. Then, through the summer it naturally cleaned itself because of its own natural flow.

JA: Did members of the outside community use the pool?

GN: In later years, yes, the faculty and parents and we would probably have pictures in the archives again of some of the young people at the time. Tony Campilli, who is our CFO and his wife with little children, came and used it and as a student you would’ve used it. And it was used by some of the outside people, not with our consent in off hours when we had gone to bed or whatever. We’d hear some splashing in the pool and it wasn’t us that were there. That same pool would freeze over in the winter and was a wonderful ice skating rink. It had a natural, like foot curve around it, so the puck could bounce off the sides of it. Some of the Brothers that came from Canada and New England were excellent skaters. So we had a semi-pro operation going here for a number of years.

JA: When did they destroy the pool?

GN: They destroyed the pool the year after McCann was up. We were allowed to continue it only because we could show that there was light at the end of the tunnel. That there were no bath houses here, there were no sanitary connections of testing the water to see if all the levels of acid etc. were right levels. There was just natural water coming through and sometimes it should’ve been cleaner than it was, but that’s the way it was.

JA:  Now, I’m gonna change subjects.

GN:  Before you, one last thing. We had experiences because of the natural flow and there were farms up there and there were occasional butcherings. We used to have miraculous waters turning red here, which was the blood of the animals. When that happened, it meant that we really had to drain the pool again and start all over. We were never happy to see that, but I can’t help make reference to the play by “Enemy of the People.” Their similar story takes place in the natural springs and they’re contaminated. This pool would’ve been contaminated. We had to empty it and start over when the waters weren’t clean.

JA: I’m going to pause it for a little bit.

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JA: O.K. I ‘m going to pick up our conservation I wanted to ask you about the introduation of lay students to campus.