This column appears in the 2007 edition of The Sun's annual Freshman Issue.
I’m not going to tell you about how to get along with your roommate or pick classes or decide which set of plastic drawers to get at Wal Mart. I’m not going to tell you anything any other college freshman in the country would understand. These are small sketches — of characters and places, well-known and obscure — that aim to illuminate some small parts of our university on a hill.
The Hidden Cinema
Downtown, about half way down the Commons, a sign beckons from its perch on an alley wall.
Cinema →
Follow it, if you dare, and open the huge industrial steel doors, following the concrete-block stairwell down a few flights until you reach it: Cinemapolis, its name the grandest thing about it. This is how they watched art films behind the Iron Curtain. Dingy barely begins to describe: A once-red carpet, two tiny theaters, the big bearded Hagrid of a man sitting behind a folding table and a steel cashbox in his flannel shirt. Across the lobby, behind another table: the old man with the shakes, the second-hand popcorn machine, the ancient candy. When he breathes, his cheeks inflate and deflate as if his face itself were the proverbial brown paper bag. The setting is creepy, the crowd old, the Milk Duds stale. But the movies? Delicious.
The Politicians
Irene Stein, the little old lady in a purple sweater jumpsuit and black walking shoes, is the chair of the Tompkins County Democratic Committee. It’s people like her who really run this country. They organize the retail politics that can make or break a candidacy. What begins in living rooms and union halls, bit-by-bit, event-by-event, middle school gym by Elks Lodge, changes the direction of the most powerful nation in the world. That’s why Michael Arcuri (D-N.Y.) was here one night last fall, in the sagging Victorian building that serves as the community center in Lansing, N.Y., just northwest of campus.
The night before election day, the soon-to-be-congressman was feeling the wear of the campaign trail.
“Sometimes you’ll be lying in bed at 4:30 a.m., and you want to sleep but you’re lying there and you think, oh God, maybe I should check my e-mail, and then you drink coffee and then you’re up and there’s nothing you can do about it,” he told me. “We drink a lot of coffee.”
The Particle Physicists
Walk down a lonely road, past the hockey rink and the football field to the furthest eastern reaches of campus. The four, vaguely-nationalistic Cold War era obelisks are the entryway to something called the Cornell High Energy Synchrotron Source, a particle accelerator that smashes positrons and electrons together at the speed of light and then bends the energy with a massive electromagnet, creating X-ray beams that can cut through a sheet of steel.
On Tuesdays, the machine — which runs for more than a half mile in a loop underneath the football field — is turned off for maintenance. So the machine was off when I went, but the director, Sol Gruner, gave me a little radiation meter to wear in my shirt pocket anyway. I accepted it, and swallowed the lump in my throat.
You get to Gruner’s office by going into these obelisk buildings, and taking the elevator about six floors down. What you’ll find there looks like it’s out of a NOVA special from the ’70s on tornado chasers or high-end geologists or, well, particle physicists. Dusty equation-covered chalkboards — chalkboards! — line the walls, and wild-looking men in lumberjack shirts, blue jeans, and big full beards sit peering into an enormous bank of computers. Inside is a huge cavern, stories high with little catwalks all over where bald-headed, mustachioed men in pale blue lab coats and goggles tinker with the apparatus.
The President
The first time I met him, President David Skorton was dressed in a red Cornell t-shirt tucked without a belt into Tommy Bahama jeans. He was also wearing, he explained, Columbia river sandals — “in case it floods or something.” Skorton unpacked several small suitcases, a hanger with suit pants, khakis and three ties and his flute: his saxophone, he said, would have been too noisy for the dorm. Also left home were Skorton’s two dogs: huge Newfoundlands, Billie and Miles, after jazz legends Billie Holiday and Miles Davis. As a publicity stunt during his first days at Cornell, Skorton was living in Mary Donlon Hall for a week.
Amid flashbulbs, a handler led Skorton down the hall to his suite.
“Hey, check it out — this is way nicer than UCLA when I was a freshman,” Skorton said. “It was just me and my roommate fighting over space in the closet. It was a very crushing experience, but I’ve finally gotten over it.”
The Cricketers
“Around! Around!” The bowler shouted as he ran toward his wicket, and then, in something between a leap and what in baseball is called a crow hop, whirled his right arm exactly 180 degrees over his head and sent the ball hurtling to the pitch where it skittered and then bounced up towards the heavily armored batsman’s mask. And then — thunk! This is the Cornell Cricket Club, a diversely international group of Cornellians who cannot get enough of the sport they grew up with in Britain and the Commonwealth countries. At 9:30 p.m. most Monday nights, the cricketers fill Bartels Hall’s cavernous Ramin Room with thunks and shouts and the smack of the red cricket balls as they land in stinging bare hands.
“[Cricket] was one of my criteria,” said Husain Bengali ’09. “I e-mailed them before I even decided on Cornell.”
Bengali has broken his jaw and shattered his thumb at cricket, yet he says he still looks forward to each opportunity to play. “In India, cricket is like a religion,” he said. “Everyone subscribes to it.”
Abishek Gulati ’07, of New Delhi, said cricket is a reminder of childhood, and of India. “It kind of makes you not feel so homesick sometimes.”
David Wittenberg is a Senior Editor at The Sun. He can be contacted at daw49@cornell.edu. The Scoop will appear weekly this semester.