Kingsborough Community College Memories

Text © Robert Barry Francos / FFanzeen, 2021
Images from the Internet

Kingsborough Community College Memories

While I started this blog in 2008, the notebook in which it was handwritten was packed up when I moved. Recently I found the first draft, finishing it in June 2021. This is the first time it is being published.

Thanks to my being truant for my Sophomore year at Lafayette High School, in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, due to bullying, I was granted a year-long Grade Point Average (GPA) of 47; that was the public school system’s “Scarlet Letter” notification that marked me as truant, as surely as if it were branded on my forehead. Due to this, my overall GPA when I graduated was 73. That is two points lower than most four-year CUNY (City University of New York) and SUNY (State University of New York) schools would accept. Brooklyn College turned me down flat, due to those two points. That is how I ended up attending Kingsborough Community College (KCC).

Campus then

Kingsborough was on the eastern peninsula tip of the same “island” that contained Brighton Beach in the center and Coney Island to the west, in a neighborhood called Oriental Beach (just past Manhattan Beach Park). It was an old military base, and was built as a series of bland barracks that were long, low, and squat buildings. Soon after I started attending the school, they started construction of the beautiful campus it is now. At the time, the parking lot was outside the school campus, about a quarter mile away; now it is on-campus. We were in classes through all the noise and, of course, the formation was completed the end of the semester after I graduated.

While I will not say that KCC was a party school back then, I will admit that drugs and alcohol were rampant, because in 1974, many who ended up in KCC were never expected to go any further in an educational facility. The college was full of early vestiges of the disco “Tony Manero” mentality, prog and what is now known as classic rockers, often wearing tee-shirts with the likes of Yes, Kansas, and especially CSNY, and having a contingent of heavy metal fans (in fact, the first time I heard “Stairway to Heaven” was on a jukebox in their annex cafeteria; I was a folkie, and was not impressed). While I was there, I was getting into Sparks’ Kimono My House, and just started seeing The Ramones and Talking Heads at CBGB in 1975, starting my immersion in the New York “punk” scene.

Towards the end of my freshman semester, I was playing 500 Rummy with the first pal I made there, Hoi Wan John Louis (I called him Louie; though I haven’t seen him since we graduated, we are still Facebook friends). We played the same game for two years and I eventually lost by a couple of thousand by the time the score had reached into the twenty- thousands (somewhere in a box, I still have the scoresheet). Louie and I were talking about how we did not want the space under our photos in the yearbook to be blank when we graduated, as I never got the yearbook in high school; technically, I graduated from a Junior class since I had to repeat my Sophomore year, which also meant no prom and no graduation ceremony; I was not heartbroken, so after some thought, I decided to join the school’s newspaper, The Scepter. It seemed like a good thing to have listed in the book.

On the following Thursday, I walked into The Scepter office, and explained my purpose to write for them to the first person I met, which was to hopefully do some film reviews; again, this is pre-seeing the Ramones, which developed my interest in music substantially. I was ushered into the high office of the Faculty Advisor, English professor John Manbeck. He remained there in that position until 1999, during which my Master’s school mate and good friend Thom Harkins also worked there while he attended KCC, and would go on to write the book, Woodstock FAQ: All That's Left to Know About the Fabled Garden.

When I told Prof. Manbeck that I wanted to write for the paper, he asked in what position was I interested. I jokingly said, “Arts Editor,” knowing I was a novice writer. As soon as I said it, I realized that I was probably overstating my bounds, stepping on someone’s toes. One does not walk into a job and say, “I want my boss’s position.”

But Manbeck said, without missing a beat, “Editorial Board elections are on Tuesday, and we currently have no Arts Editor.” I put my name on the ballot, and after running unopposed, I started off as the head of an entire section of the paper, arguably the most read part; there was no deep political investigative reporting going on, and honestly, in my tenure, it was frowned upon by the administration. I did not realize the commitment it would take yet, nor the doors it would open for me.

This being pre-computers, the articles were placed into cold type. This meant that every line of text was made by huge machines that used melted lead to form it letter-by-letter (luckily, not by us). We received huge yellow proof sheets that we have to correct, and they would only make the revisions for misspellings. The linotypers were not going to retype everything for text changes.

The paper came out every three weeks, and the days before were long, getting ready for publication. We had to cut and paste on blue graph boards to give to the printer. And I learned layout the hard way. If I did something foolish like “tombstone” the headlines (two headlines that were side-by-side, making it confusing to read), Manbeck would correct me, after literally smacking me on the back of the head.

When the boards were all laid out, they were given to the printers, who made negatives, which were used to make metal plates, and then run off on newsprint. It was also this process that was used for issues four through fifteen of my fanzine, FFanzeen, which ran from 1977-’88. Learning how this procedure worked helped me understand how to create a newsprint publication. I used to create FFanzeen by using computer typesetting, which I learned to do myself, and it became a career for me in the late 1970s through late 1980s. Computerized layouts ended my profession, which was fine as it gave me a leg up on learning computer software.

While I was at The Scepter, it gave me the opportunity to see multiple films before they were released, and to see some exciting live performances and plays (such as Yentl with Tovah Feldshuh in the lead, and the one-man show Diversion and Delights with Vincent Price as Oscar Wilde). It also led me to interview the likes of Tom Petty (the article was eventually published in the first issue of FFanzeen), Marcel Marceau, Rod Steiger (promoting WC and Me), Lynyrd Skynyrd (pre-crash), the Mael Brothers (Sparks), Jim Dandy from Black Oak Arkansas, and Lady Flash, who were Barry Manilow’s back-up singers and had a solo album out; my regret is that I was kind of ignorant, and did not realize that the lead, Reparata, was from Reparata and the Delrons, or I would have chose a bunch of different questions. I also met Jack Nicholson, Jeff Bridges, Walter Matthau, George Burns, Jack Nietzsche, and Milos Foreman, among others at various screenings.

During my tenure at the paper, I did get into a heated argument with another English professor, whose name I will leave out here. He put together a theater production put on at KCC called The Bite of Irish Laughter. This was scenes from a bunch of Irish plays, such as The Importance of Being Earnest. The problem was most of it was done with the actors reading the scripts while stationary on the KCC stage. This took a lot of the humor away as body language was muted, and the audience was obviously both not prepared having never seen this style before, and seemed uncomfortable in the process. I mentioned this reaction in the review, titled “Readers’” Theater Strikes Out: The Bite of Irish Laughter. Apparently, I was the first to pan a production put on by a KCC professor, and he was not having it. He wrote an editorial (that was published) admonishing me, that I did not understand the process, nor that the audience reaction should be considered when discussing what is on the stage. I published my own editorial in the following issue, answering the complaint step-by-step. I became a bit infamous among the faculty for that. Luckily, I never had him as one of my professors, or I definitely would have failed that class. This taught me, however, to not be swayed by my not liking something that I am expected to enjoy, which I would carry over to FFanzeen, and to this day.

Campus now

Sadly, while I was there, one of my classmates, 22-year-old Kim Jarvis, was murdered on campus between classes by an ex-boyfriend. This made headline news in New York, including a write-up in The New York Times.  She was an English Major, but I knew her best as a DJ on the campus radio station, WKCC. While I did not really know her well, it was a shocking event for the entire campus.

Speaking of WKCC, I applied for a job as a DJ at the station, and the record they wanted me to introduce was a Tower of Power song that I was not familiar with (heck, I had never even heard of them before that), nor had any knowledge of the genre, and because of that I had no spiel to describe it. I stuttered and stammered, and naturally did not get the position. But then again, with the time I was spending at The Scepter, it was already affecting my study time, so it was probably best that happened the way it did.

There were two other campus organizations that I joined. One was a Jewish-based one that was pretty well disorganized, so that lasted less than a semester. The other was an Irish Catholic group, the Newman Club, because I had a mild and short-lived crush on one of the members. There was no future for a connexion as she had a rock-steady relationship with a jock who was a football player. A senior in high school, he was her younger man. But she was in my Sexual Health class, which we students referred to, in short hand, as “the Sex class.” One day she did not show up, so when I arrived at the Newman Club the next day, I said to her, “I missed having “Sex” with you yesterday,” referring to the class with absolutely no innuendo intended, and that’s exactly how she heard it; however, sitting next to her, unbeknownst to me, was that boyfriend. He heard it as literal, and took a lunge at me, held back by the other members (nearly all women). I smartly got the hell out of there. The next class she apologized, but I knew I had to leave the club, which I did.

One of the outcomes of my being a member of both the Newman Club and the Jewish groups is that I started to be hounded by the Jews for Jesus on the campus, believing that because I was in these two organizations, I must be of like mind with them. I was not.  Often while walking across campus, they would stop me and try to pressure me to join, or would leave flyers in my The Scepter mailbox. It came to a conclusion when I was invited to an on-campus showing of a ridiculous and cringy heavy-Christian rip-off of The Exorcist called The Enemy (starring Judith Ivey in her very first film!). Even if I was a believer, it was a really bad film; and I slammed it in my review. Rightfully harshly. They stopped bothering me after that.

Don Imus

I had a Sociology professor who was young and cool, who taught me some things that I still remember now, such as that trends tend to start in the poorer demographics, then get copied by the rich demographic trying to appear “cool,” and then by the Middle Class, who are emulating the rich, with the goal to also fit in.

But her claim to fame was when she brought Don Imus (d. 2019) to perform/talk in the auditorium. It was going to go out over the radio (again, WKCC), so she asked him not to curse because they could lose their licence. Since he was a radio DJ himself, he said he understood and agreed to it. He came onto stage to great applause and a full house. There were two microphones taped together in the center of the stage. As he strode up and said hello, he asked, which one was for the radio. Someone told him, and he leaned over it and said, “Fuck all of you.” He then continued on a long, profanity-filled bit which got a positive reaction from the crowd, but you could see the panic on the faces of the administrators, and especially on the Sociology professor, as Imus was her responsibility. Honestly, I never forgave him for destroying that trust. Luckily, at that time, the range of the radio station was essentially two blocks past the front gates, so it went unheard by the FCC. The professor received a reprimand, but was not fired. She was also subdued for the rest of the class.

Towards the end of my tenure at the paper, I received a service award from the College for my contributions, which included a third of the paper. Even my dust-up with the English professor did not stand in the way. However, my grades had started to slip; because I spent so much time at The Scepter and going to free films and theater, I had less time to study. In my last semester, I cut back my non-scholastic extra-curricular activities. I buckled down, and was placed on the Dean’s List. I graduated from KCC in February 1976.

From there, I went to Queens College; Brooklyn College accepted me, but since they turned me down the first time, now it was my turn to do the same. I graduated Queens in 1979. From 1991 until 1994, while working full time, I went to New York University where I aced a Master’s degree in Media Ecology (media theory). For a guy who was truant in high school and graduated with a 73 GPA, I think I exonerated myself and did pretty well.