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First Person Reflections
Jeffrey Ruthizer ’62
My Lafayette Experience
CONNECTING
My Life After Lafayette
He was a freshman with us in the fall
of 1958. We wore beanies to signify
we were freshmen and of course he
did not, since he was the college president, but he also had just arrived that September on the Lafayette campus. K. Roald Bergethon had an influence on all of us in so many
ways, then and still now, as did a number of memorable
faculty members.
President Bergethon, or “Bergie,” as we called him when talking among ourselves and complaining about
his rumored antifraternity sentiments, was growing
and learning just as we were.
He was always very fond of the Class of ’62, and
I am certain our common freshman and four years’ experience explains a big part of this. Lafayette, of course, was about to go through some major changes under him, and we were there as witnesses to the beginning of this transformation. Our class invited him frequently to our milestone reunions, and he would
give little speeches at our dinners about entering with
us that fall of 1958 and those years together.
“Johannes was one of those professors so close to his students that he would gladly take us on personal guided tours
of the Metropolitan
Museum of Art.”
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Before the College tore it down for expansion, Professor Johannes Gaertner’s house was located
near the president’s residence and fraternity houses.
I remember how he would laugh at what the fraternity boys had done, in the same quiet, shaking laughter he would have when he marveled at the antics of his own boys across campus—the DKE’s, for whom he was faculty adviser. It was an interesting match with this very proper, German-born and educated professor of Latin and fine arts. Of course we over at the Alpha Chi Rho house had our own faculty adviser, economics professor Morrison Handsaker.
Johannes, who died just about ten years ago, was very proud of the fact that he was, as he used to tell those of us privileged to serve on his “Presidium” in his heavily accented speech, the first faculty member who brought culture to the Lafayette campus when he joined the faculty in the late 1940s. He did this through the Fine Arts Society and of course the legendary art history courses that he introduced to the curriculum.
Johannes was one of those professors so close to his students that he would gladly offer to meet us in New York City over Thanksgiving and Christmas breaks and take us on personal guided tours of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The geographic proximity of Easton to New York City made this possible, as well as the fact that a large number of undergraduates lived in the tri-state area. One of the advantages that Lafayette has always had is being this close to both New York and Philadelphia and their cultural richness.
What an experience it was to have Dr. Gaertner
walk us through the museum’s collections and explain
in intimate detail paintings we had seen before during
his famous slide lectures.
Inspirations from him in class were endless. “Don’t you realize,” he once said, “that the curse of the 20th century is the internal combustion engine and the automobile, and we will see this turn very bad in our lifetimes.” What is this man talking about? Is not the automobile the greatest invention that ever happened and one that would help mankind enormously and indefinitely, not hurt us? A curse? I totally rejected this concept, but as the years and decades passed and we began to experience serious air pollution problems, traffic congestion, the earth’s warming, oil spills at sea, gasoline shortages, astronomical fuel pump prices, and the rise in political tension over Mideast oil, I recalled Johannes’ prophecy and the sheer genius of the man.
My Lafayette Experience and life afterward were also influenced by other great professors. Mostly my close contacts and experiences were in the very strong history department, where I took the vast majority of my courses, and the English and government departments. Giants come to mind: Coddington, Gendebien, Welch, Heath, Coleman from history, and English department faculty Watt, McCluskey, and Magnus, who left in our junior year for the Philadelphia Art Museum after some departmental politics, or so said Dr. Gaertner. My freshman adviser from the government department, himself a freshman with us, Woodford Howard, who later wrote some well-received books, including one on Supreme Court Justice Frank Murphy, was a strong influence on my later career path into the law after I took a course with him on constitutional law.
Now take Dr. Coddington, Edwin C. Jr., to be precise. Those among us who have not walked the battlefields of Gettysburg National Military Park in the company of this great man, on the occasion of his annual History 13-14 class tour, captivated by his vivid descriptions of the unfolding action, have truly not lived a full life. He was writing this definitive history of the battle at the time we were undergraduates, a prize-winning account that turned out to be his life’s major work. It is still in print, published by Scribner’s after his premature death.
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Jeffrey Ruthizer ’62
President of his class for the past ten years,
Jeff Ruthizer ’62 graduated with honors in
history and served as president of Alpha Chi Rho fraternity. He graduated from Columbia Law School in 1965 and spent his early career with the National Labor Relations Board before joining ABC as a lawyer in 1968.
After some time at ABC and intervening years in labor law and labor relations with NBC and then RKO, he returned to ABC as head of labor relations in 1987 when Capital Cities acquired it, and is now senior vice president of labor relations for ABC/Disney.
A resident of White Plains, N.Y., Ruthizer
and his wife, Monica, have two sons,
Joshua ’00 and Alex. (He also has a brother,
Ted Ruthizer ’69.)
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“The challenging intellectual world we
were introduced to by our professors and
the rigorous work and study we were required
to perform in this learning experience
set the foundation for our lives.”
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How many of us have had a fender bender with one’s faculty adviser on the way to class and lived to tell the tale? It happened one morning my senior year as I was driving to campus from the AXP house on Hamilton Street. Said Dr. Coddington, after we both got out of our cars and recognized each other, “Jeff, don’t worry about a thing. Just a scratch, I’ll just have it fixed, it can’t be much.” I later gave him $25 to fix the damage. Remember, this was 1961, when tuition was only a couple thousand dollars and the whole year cost my parents around $3,000, as I recall. This is the same
man who had just introduced his history honors students a week or two earlier to the famous Yale historian
C. Vann Woodward, who was a visiting lecturer that
year at Lafayette.
At the time we were there, Lafayette had a former British prime minister and several members of royalty visit. We were privileged to have a lord, a duke, a count, and even a king drop by. Prime Minister Lord Clement Atlee visited the College in the fall of 1958 as a guest of the Kirby Government and Law Society, and we were introduced to him afterward at a reception. Duke Ellington, Count Basie, and the King himself, Louis Armstrong, all performed on the Lafayette campus at different times during our time there, and we could
walk up to them and exchange a few words during breaks. We loved doing this. Years later I reminded the Count of this when he and I were on the same checkout line at a hotel in Beverly Hills, California. He spoke very highly of his memories of his Lafayette jazz concert.
And so it seems that this Lafayette College connection follows us wherever we go.
Like the time in 1984 when I was in a small town in western Brittany in France, rummaging through a pile of old magazines from the 1930s called L’Ilustration, their equivalent of Life magazine. The issue I was leafing through just happened to open to an article about the 100th anniversary of the death of the Marquis de
Lafayette. There were photographs and words staring
me in the face of the gala celebration that had taken place in 1932 at Rockefeller Center in New York City, attended by no less an assemblage of dignitaries than
the French ambassador to the United States and the president of Lafayette College at the time, William Mather Lewis.
Or the time in Paris in the mid 1990s when my wife, Monica, and I visited, by special invitation, the gravesite of the Marquis de Lafayette. He is buried in American soil from Virginia, with the American flag flying over his grave each day since his burial in 1832, in a hidden cemetery kept secret even from the German army occupying Paris during World War II. This was long before Bob Morse ’57 made going there fashionable and into a cottage industry of sorts. We stood there
in awe, with me wearing my Lafayette College jacket
and wristwatch.
Or the time my son Josh ’00 and I arrived too
late in the day to gain entry to one of the remaining fortresses on the famous Maginot line in France on our trip to the WWI battlefields around Verdun in the late 1990s. We just happened to be there on June 6, the
date of the American-led Normandy invasion in 1944. All I had to do was show the woman in charge the profile of Lafayette on the face of my Lafayette College wristwatch, and his name, and not only did she allow
us late entry, she also gave a personal guided tour of
the fortress itself.
Occasionally, I have been invited back to campus to talk about my legal and labor relations experiences in the entertainment industry. The challenging intellectual world we were introduced to by our professors and
the rigorous work and study we were required to perform in this learning experience set the foundation for our lives. The spirits of Gaertner, Coddington, Bergethon, and many others, both for their inspiring personalities and intellectual encouragement as well as the substantive knowledge of what they taught us, have remained with us. The wonderful party times and social atmosphere—enabled through a rewarding if slightly less than disciplined fraternity-based experience that
has since largely crumbled—were also a very strong
part of our overall Lafayette Experience.
A bronze plaque on the front of Pardee Hall was donated by the Ruthizers to commemorate the 120th anniversary
of the only visit to Lafayette by a sitting U.S. president, Rutherford B. Hayes.
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The Ruthizer Study Room, part of the modernization
of Skillman Library, is named in honor of Jeffrey ’62
and Monica Ruthizer P’00, shown here at the library
dedication with Neil McElroy, director of libraries and information technology services.
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Connecting inaugurates a new series of articles by Lafayette alumni as a regular
feature in upcoming issues of Lafayette Alumni News. Written in the first person, these articles focus on connecting the student experiences at Lafayette with life’s experiences after graduation. Submissions by alumni are welcomed, as well as suggestions for potential writers.
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