SUNY Brockport history depicted in photographs

SUNY Brockport history depicted in photographs

In an old sun-bleached photograph from 1947, a rugged group of football players gaze admiringly at their coach who stares off frame, maybe sizing up a defense or looking for inspiration further afield. The photograph is one of over a hundred culled for the newly published history of SUNY Brockport, State University of New York at Brockport by Mary Jo Gigliotti, W. Bruce Leslie and Kenneth P. O'Brien.

The dapper, neck-tied gentleman in the photograph is former head coach Robert Ellsworth Boozer, founder of the university football team, and namesake of both the team mascot (Ellsworth the Golden Eagle) and the field where they played. Boozer expressed great interest in the book and helped the historians wherever he could, Leslie said. When he was hospitalized with cancer earlier in the year, the authors sent him a copy of what would become page 56 of the book, which featured that picture of Boozer in his "one for the Gipper" moment of glory. His daughter told them that he loved the photograph and wondered if they could secure a copy of the original for him.

Gigliotti, college archivist at Brockport, first discovered the photograph in a much more tattered state than it appears in the book, and they were afraid that it wouldn't survive the trip from the archive to the hospital. With the assistance of the campus photographer and the best digital restoration equipment the school had to offer, Gigliotti cleaned, polished and reprinted the picture, and an enlarged version was sent to the hospital where it was tacked to the wall at Boozer's bedside.

Leslie and O'Brien, both professors of history at the college, have drawn on over a decade of mutual study into the rich history of SUNY Brockport. In the past 10 years, they have directed more than 50 student research papers and 30 oral histories about the university.

O'Brien has also served as a county historian, and Gigliotti is at the gates of the college archive to collect materials for such a project.

"Like many state colleges, the archive is relatively new and we're just coming to grips with our identity and heritage," says Leslie. Thanks to the various roles of the co-authors, the book represents a synthesis of the two types of history, textual and pictorial, without subsuming one into the other. "A lot of these projects work from the pictures to the text," says Leslie. "The school finds a selection of their best pictures and then attempts to thread a story through captions."

State University of New York at Brockport works in the opposite direction. A brief introduction prefaces each chapter with the specifics that cannot be related through pictures, which sets the mood for the historical drift and theme of that chapter. From there, the story is told through the pictures fished from the school's archive by Gigliotti, which illustrate a segment of the narrative as previously sketched by Leslie and O'Brien.

Although for Leslie and O'Brien the written history of SUNY Brockport has been a project in-the-works for close to a decade, the actual composition and publication took about one year from the initial brainstorming to the book launch.

Leslie and O'Brien first conceived the project as a full-color, hardcover coffee table book with thick black type, sepia-toned portraits of the university's founders and technicolor snapshots of students in motion. Unfortunately, the cost for a project of that scale exceeded the funds which were available. In the autumn of 2005, Leslie happened across the Princeton University installment of The Campus History Series, released by Arcadia Publishing. He felt the sleek paperback with its quality gloss pages in a simple yet classical black and white was the perfect compromise. From there it was only a matter of months before Gigliotti joined the two professors and the rest became history.

Wayne Dedman wrote the first history of SUNY Brockport, Cherishing This Heritage, in 1968, which provides a detailed account of the school from the events which led to its founding in 1835 up through its centennial in 1935. "Dedman's Cherishing This Heritage has been mentioned as a national model for a book that wove town and gown together," says Leslie. "But he felt that he couldn't write a good history of the college after he arrived, in 1945, and thus our research begins with the postwar college and the dramatic transformation then."

From Brockway to Boozer to Bottom of the Bucket, the new history spans the century-and-a-half that witnessed an upstart Baptist college grow into a model state institution.

The book is available at the Brockport campus bookstore and at several local booksellers including Lift Bridge Books, 45 Main Street, Brockport. Proceeds from book sales benefit the SUNY Brockport College Scholarship Fund.