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From Where the Lion Roars: The Hunt for an American Education in Binghamton

Dr. Kitonyi’s grandmother took him to a school run by missionaries at the age of 9 and it was then that he began to view education as key to his future.

A library friend of mine asked if I were familiar with a book called From Where the Lion Roars: the hunt for an American education in Binghamton by Peter N. Kitonyi. It is in the Local History room of the Albany Public Library. From the book information, Kitonyi attended Binghamton North High School, the “other” public high school besides Central in my hometown, back in the 1960s.

I was not familiar with the surname or the book. But I posted the information on a few Binghamton-based Facebook pages, and while no one remembered him, one person found an article in the Ithaca Journal, Ithaca being a small city about 50 miles from Binghamton, about how the American Civic Association helped him, as it has assisted immigrants for many years.

The ACA was familiar to me. My late father spent time volunteering there, and sometimes the family would be with him. My 16th birthday party was at that venue. And unfortunately, it was the site of one of those terrible mass killings in 2009.

The article read:

Kitonyi…was a teenager living in Kenya when he came across a letter in a magazine from a Binghamton resident, a letter that discussed the need for better education programs for disadvantaged children.

Kitonyi wrote to the author, expressing his desire for an American education. The ACA, along with the Rotary and Lions clubs and local churches, rallied around the cause, and Kitonyi came to the United States in 1961 at age 17.

The ACA worked with Kitonyi even while he was still in Kenya to find a host family for him.

“The ACA was instrumental; they really played a role,” said Kitonyi, who works in Albany in correctional education. “Because of their experience in knowing how to place families or children or refugees, they were in a position to help the Rotary Club and Lions Club to determine what neighborhood was good for me, what family would be good for me.”

Once he arrived in New York, the ACA continued to assist, helping with his paperwork and providing a social environment where he could meet other immigrants coping with adapting to life in the United States.

“Being an immigrant, it doesn’t matter what nationality you are – we were all undergoing the same assimilation process,” he said.

Even though Kitonyi dived into his studies, that process of assimilation wasn’t always easy. About a year after he arrived, he felt homesick; he missed his parents. Sometimes when he was feeling down, he’d go to the ACA. There, he’d talk with a volunteer – the same woman who signed the very first letter he’d received from the organization, back when he lived in Africa.

“It was a place to go if my chips were down,” he said. “I could go there and say what was going on. The door was open … and everybody knew I was Peter.”

I Googled the book title, and found several references to it, apparently out of print. But then I came across a RESOLUTION COMMEMORATING BLACK HISTORY MONTH 2013 AND HONORING THE EXTRAORDINARY CONTRIBUTIONS OF AFRICAN-AMERICANS TO THE NATION AND THE CITY OF ALBANY. This is something that has happened annually here, though I don’t know for how many years. On page 17, I come across this:
***
WHEREAS, residents of the 7th Ward are proud to nominate and honor Dr. Kitonyi during Black History Month for his many years of exemplary community service. Dr. Kitonyi’s remarkable story begins with his childhood in the 1950’s and early 1960’s in Kenya, Africa. During this period, Kenya was a British colony that practiced racial discrimination. Many Africans worked on coffee and sisal plantations in deplorable conditions.

A civil war, the Mau Mau Rebellion, was underway in the 1950’s and according to Dr. Kitonyi, many innocent people were unjustly incarcerated or killed. He and his family lived in fear for their safety. Dr. Kitonyi’s grandmother took him to a school run by
missionaries at the age of 9 and it was then that Dr. Kitonyi began to view education as key to his future. Child labor was the norm in Kenya, however, and Dr. Kitonyi was working full time by the time he was a young teen.

He would stop at a U.S. Information Service Library in Nairobi on his lunch break from work and it was then, browsing American publications, that he learned about life in America. Dr. Kitonyi’s native language is Swahili and, though his English was limited, he began corresponding with individuals from Binghamton, N.Y….

Though Dr. Kitonyi only had the equivalent of a fifth grade education and spoke limited English, he persevered, graduating from high school in Binghamton and then, college, at the State University of N.Y. at Delhi. Dr. Kitonyi studied agriculture while in college and after completing his associate’s degree went back to Kenya for five years to assist people in his homeland by teaching basic, subsistence farming skills in rural areas.

Dr. Kitonyi returned to the United States, to work and go back to school. He received a bachelor’s degree from the State University of New York at Oneonta and pursued both master’s and doctorate degrees at the State University of New York at Albany. Dr. Kitonyi’s long career in public service in New York State included years at the Division for Youth, the Department of Education, and the Department of Corrections, retiring in 2012. During his years of public service, Dr. Kitonyi taught vocational skills to incarcerated youth and adults, and administered numerous educational programs…

Dr. Kitonyi continues to assist people in his homeland through programs such as Eyes for East Africa, a program that helps destitute individuals with various medical afflictions to their eyes, and programs that improve access to water in impoverished and drought-stricken areas of Africa.

Dr. Kitonyi and his wife Yolanda are proud parents of four adult children. Their two sons are police officers in the Albany Police Department. Residents of the 7th Ward are grateful for Dr. Peter Kitonyi’s many years of service to our community and believe he is most deserving of this honor…
***
OK, so this guy spent time in Binghamton; maybe my father even knew him. He’s lived in Albany for a number of years, which explains why the book is in the ALBANY collection, but, despite his accomplishments, I was totally unaware of him.

I’ve reached out to this man through some Africans in the area; it’s a tight-knit community, even though they came from a number of countries, to see if anyone knows him. Whether or not I meet him, I need to read that book.

Craven, Dyer, Sacks

I lived in four different cities, in two states, in 1977 alone.

If there is a more descriptive title than The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, by Oliver Sacks, M.D., it’s not coming to mind. I know both The Daughter and I, on separate occasions, have mistaken a coat rack that was placed in a different part of the hallway, for The Wife.

I never read any of Oliver Sacks’ books, but I did peruse some of his articles in the New Yorker magazine, where he wrote about people “coping with and adapting to neurological conditions or injuries” this illuminating “the ways in which the normal brain deals with perception, memory and individuality.”

My distant recollection of the 1990 movie Awakenings, based on Sacks’ book, is quite positive, especially the performance of the late Robin Williams, who played a character drawn from Sacks’ life.

Oliver Sacks died on August 30 at the age of 82.
***
I’ve never seen a Wes Craven film, none of the Scream films or Nightmare on Elm Street. Wait a minute- he directed Music of the Heart with Meryl Streep? I DID see that.

Back in my FantaCo days, I became aware of his popularity through all the books and magazines we sold. Moreover, there were those annoying popular Freddy Krueger masks and gloves, the latter complete with plastic “blades”, that were primarily purchased by our mail order customers in disturbingly large quantities. It was one of the reasons I eventually quit the job.

Wes Craven died on August 30 at the age of 76.
***
After I finished college in 1976, I bounced around a lot, without any focus, or particular goals. I lived in four different cities, in two states, in 1977 alone. While I was crashing with Uthaclena and his then-wife in early 1978, I read the best-selling book Your Erroneous Zones by Dr. Wayne Dyer.

If you’re plagued by guilt or worry and find yourself falling unwittingly into the same old self-destructive patterns, then you have ‘erroneous zones’ — whole facets of your approach to life that act as barriers to your success and happiness. Dr. Wayne W. Dyer can now help you break free!

If you believe that you have no control over your feeling and reactions, Dyer reveals how much you can take charge of yourself and manage how much you let difficult situations affect you. If you spend more time worrying what others think than working on what you want and need, Dyer points the way to true self-reliance. From self-image problems to over-dependence upon others, Dyer gives you the tools you need to enjoy life to the fullest

Yeah, that sounded like me, a lot. But you know how newly born-again Christians, or alcoholics who are now sober, get a tad carried away with the message? That was also me after reading the book, where I went from directionless and dysfunctional to a bit too cocky and perhaps arrogant, before I was able to regulate the emotional thermostat.

Still, reading Dyer, at that critical moment, at least turned the thermostat ON, and that was a very good thing.

Dr. Wayne Dyer died on August 29 at the age of 75.
***
Dean Jones died at the age of 84 on September 1. Saw him in lots of Disney fare, such as That Darn Cat! and The Love Bug, as well as a slew of TV appearances.

Thoughts on the book Marriage: Voices from a Forty-Year Labor of Love by Matt Baume

“On February 27, 2004, Mayor Jason West married 25 same-sex couples before a cheering crowd in front of the New Paltz Village Hall.”

Arthur introduced me, electronically speaking, to Matt Baume, whose regular Marriage News Watch video he often linked to. Now Baume has written a “book based on his experiences in the fight for marriage equality in the USA.”

I should note that I was able to download it for free during the promotional week. Also, I HATE reading on my Android device, or on the computer; it’s just not my thing. That said, the book does have the “easy-to-read, breezy style” Arthur promised, and I learned a lot.

What I really wanted to write about, though, was my own evolution about same-sex couples getting married, based on the confirmation Baume provided, and, to a lesser extent, Arthur’s observations about a question I asked him.

If someone had asked me in 1990 whether gay people should be able to get married, my answer would have been, “Wha?” While there had been couples who had attempted matrimony even 15 years earlier, as explained by Baume, none of the gay people I knew had ever mentioned it.

Then I started hearing about a case out in Hawaii, where, in 1993, “the court ruled that while the right to privacy in the Hawaii state constitution does not include a fundamental right to same-sex marriage, denying marriage to same-sex couples constituted discrimination based on sex in violation of the right to equal protection guaranteed by the state’s constitution.” And that got me to start thinking about the issue seriously for the first time.

By then, though, some, probably most, of my gay friends noted that they OPPOSED the idea of marriage, much in the same way Baume describes the attitudes of some of his friends and allies. They believed marriage was a heterosexist hegemony that was not consistent with their lives.

And though they didn’t say so at the time, it would have required them to be “out” as a gay couple. And not just out to their friends and family, but OUT out to the whole society when that was considered risky in terms of employment, child custody, and even personal safety. Since there seemed to be no consensus on the issue, either in my circle or, as far as I could tell, nationally, I let the issue go.

Then Bill Clinton was elected, and Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell in December 1993, which, while prohibiting “military personnel from discriminating against or harassing closeted homosexual or bisexual service members or applicants,” barred “openly gay, lesbian, or bisexual persons from military service.” For me, it was the worst of both worlds, DIRECTING people to live a lie, and I did not like it at all. It was finally repealed in 2011.

Worse, the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) (Pub.L. 104–199) was passed in September 1996, “defining marriage for federal purposes as the union of one man and one woman.” Even though no one I knew was clamoring for same-sex unions, this seemed preemptively bigoted and more than vaguely unconstitutional.

Around this time, or somewhat thereafter, there were laws passed around the country allowing for “domestic partnerships” or “civil unions.” There was a certain logic to this. Marriage, or this marriage-lite variation, as some derisively put it, may deal with issues of who’s covered under someone else’s insurance, who could visit someone in the ICU of a hospital, inheritance taxes, and the like.

There was a strategy in terms of letting other people see gay couples as “marriageish” pairs, something Baume touched on. Still, I didn’t much take to it, though I surely understood it. If I had been in that situation, I might well have opted to use the provision, which tended to vary by jurisdiction, but it seemed to be weak tea.

(It also likely generated my disdain for the term “partner” for romantic relations, a term this business librarian usually used for entrepreneurial relations.)

The year 2004 proved to be pivotal in my thinking. Baume mentions Gavin Newsom, who was mayor of San Francisco, who “gained national attention when he directed the San Francisco city–county clerk to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples, in violation of the state law passed in 2000…The…weddings took place between February 12 and March 11, 2004.”

Much closer to home, I was surprised, and impressed, and delighted, and thought that he was crazy when the mayor of New Paltz, NY, my college town, did essentially the same thing.

On February 27, 2004, Mayor Jason West married 25 same-sex couples before a cheering crowd in front of the New Paltz Village Hall. Not long thereafter, the Ulster County District Attorney charged West with nineteen misdemeanors in connection with these marriages. A court later dismissed the charges against West, a ruling which the state appealed. [A judge reinstated] the charges against West, arguing that this criminal case did not concern whether the state constitution mandates same-sex marriage, but rather whether West violated his oath of office in performing illegal marriages… These were dropped by the prosecutor on July 12…A state court judge issued a permanent injunction barring West from solemnizing same-sex marriages.

Then “same-sex marriages began in Massachusetts on May 17, 2004, as a result of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court (SJC) ruling in Goodridge v. Department of Public Health that it was unconstitutional under the Massachusetts constitution to allow only opposite-sex couples to marry.” This convergence of events moved the needle for me in terms of my support for marriage equality, not that it SHOULD happen, which I guess I had decided pretty much as a direct result of seeing the effect of DOMA, but that it COULD.

A bill supporting same-sex marriage in the New York State legislature failed in 2009, as reported by Baume, I felt a tad sad, but unsurprised by the Republican state senate. But I was watching the state legislative proceedings, on live television, when marriage equality was approved by the NYS legislature in June 2011, and I engaged in an unusual bit of fist-pumping, which I hadn’t done since Super Bowl XLII, when the New York Giants beat the previously unbeaten New England Patriots back in February 2008.

When Section 3 of DOMA was declared unconstitutional, it seemed correct, based less on the rightness of the broader same-sex marriage issue than on the unequal protection of the law that Edith Windsor was experiencing. She was slammed with hundreds of thousands of dollars in estate tax, whereas, if she had been married to a man who had died, she would have owed NOTHING.

The complete death of DOMA in 2015 seemed to me to be the only reasonable conclusion, lest the nation suffer a patchwork quilt of competing laws, where someone could visit their hospitalized spouse in state A but not in state B. I thought that was becoming a totally unworkable system. Maybe I was less excited by that ruling than other milestones because it just made sense, and the converse did not.

Anyway, there you have some musings based on Matt Baume’s useful book.

Flinching from the “new” Atticus Finch

I found myself watching the movie To Kill a Mockingbird in the context of the release of the new book by Harper Lee, Go Set a Watchman.

The family went to the Madison Theatre in Albany last Wednesday night to see the classic movie To Kill a Mockingbird. I had never watched it before at a cinema, only on TV. The Wife had viewed only bits of it, and The Daughter had not seen it at all. It is a fine film, of course, and I need not review it here.

The great music of Elmer Bernstein made The Daughter nervous, especially around the storyline of Boo Radley. And she was confused by the scene in the woods near the end as to what really happened, given the subsequent dialogue.

While I appreciate the timeliness of the showing, I should note that the experience was lessened somewhat by a large amount of sound “bleed” from the adjoining theater. In fact, it got SO loud that I could almost not hear the film I was watching. What the heck was playing over there, anyway? It turned out to be the earthquake disaster film, San Andreas.

I found myself watching Mockingbird in the context of the release of the new book by Harper Lee, Go Set a Watchman. This novel has been mired in controversy. First, the argument was that the author was “increasingly blind and deaf,” and that the book’s release was somehow contrary to her real wishes.

More importantly, the new tome redefines Atticus Finch, the practically saintly protagonist of Mockingbird, so well played by Gregory Peck in the movie, and is so popular that children have been increasingly named after him. Watchmen suggests that Atticus, was, in his later years, a racist on the wrong side of history.

Some folks, like my buddy Chuck Miller, have chosen to ignore Watchman, considering it not part of the canon. I used to read comic books, so I recognize that writers are often mucking up beloved characters in ways we do not recognize. We often pick and choose what we will choose to accept. (Hey, kind of like the Bible!)

As someone who participated in a marathon of To Kill a Mockingbird reading a few years back, I’m excited to read Go Set a Watchman, even if it’s less compelling than its predecessor. Because, as NPR put it: Harper Lee’s ‘Watchman’ Is A Mess That Makes Us Reconsider A Masterpiece.

The screenplay for the movie To Kill a Mockingbird was written by the late Horton Foote. His third cousin, the late writer Shelby Foote, was an apologist for the Confederate flag. I have a feeling that the “new” Atticus is more complicated than we want to accept.

Joseph E. Persico, 1930-2014

As a speechwriter for the former New York State Governor and US Vice-President, Joseph Persico had unusual access to Nelson Rockefeller.

I went to see the author Joseph E. Persico on Saturday afternoon, May 21, 2005, at the Albany Public Library. Persico had been writing for over a quarter-century at that point.

His then-current book was Eleventh Month, Eleventh Day, Eleventh Hour: Armistice Day, 1918, World War I and Its Violent Climax. He stated that more people died on that last half-day of the Great War, for no particular strategic purpose, than died on D-Day (June 6, 1944) in World War II.

Persico talked about the process of researching and writing his books, which I found instructive in writing this blog.

While working on My Enemy, My Brother: Men and Days of Gettysburg (1996), he sought to pin down who fired the first shot in this pivotal Civil War battle. He believed he’d finally found the answer. He brought this to a gentleman at the Gettysburg Memorial who had provided invaluable assistance. The gentleman replied, “That’s one version.”

Persico interviewed Charles Collingsworth, one of “Murrow’s Boys” for Edward R. Murrow: An American Original (1988). At one point Collingsworth asked him to shut off the tape recorder, which Persico did. Collingsworth then told of Murrow’s affair with Winston Churchill’s daughter-in-law, Pamela Churchill (later Pamela Harriman), which almost wrecked Murrow’s marriage. Persico decided that Collingsworth wanted him to have the story, but didn’t want people to know that the information came from the now late newsman. Persico used the information in the book.

As a speechwriter for the former New York State Governor and US Vice-President, Persico had unusual access to Nelson Rockefeller. The author was waiting for Rocky to finish a lengthy meeting with black housing leaders. Finally, the exhausted official collapsed into a chair, looking haggard, and exclaimed, “Amos ‘n’ Andy got it right.” (For those of you too young to understand the reference, Amos ‘n’ Andy was a controversial radio and television program in the 1940s and 1950s.) Persico wrote this comment down at the time. He put it in the first draft of his book The Imperial Rockefeller: A Biography of Nelson A. Rockefeller, then took it out, then put it back in, ultimately leaving it out. He decided that the then-governor lashed out in frustration that was out of character, and would provide a distorted view of the man.

In that same book, he had to deal with how Rocky died. He was with a 22-year old assistant that Persico knew. Not to mention it would have made it “look like the book was authorized by the Rockefeller Foundation.” He told the tale succinctly, never mentioning the woman’s name (nor did he mention Megan Marshack by name in his talk.)

Persico co-authored Colin Powell’s autobiography, My American Journey. He believes his most important jobs were to keep in what was interesting to a broad audience and to delete what was not. In Powell’s case, the general wanted to put in a few sentences about his two tours of Vietnam. Persico found this not practical, given its import in American life. Conversely, Powell was a policy wonk, very proud of a report he had made. Persico argued that the audience would not be as interested in this story as he was, and the story was excised.

I enjoyed the talk, though I was troubled briefly that he thought I was there ONLY because I was on the Friends board. I do wish that more folks were present. It WAS a lovely Saturday afternoon outside, though, and that is tough competition in a spring that has been unseasonably cool and wet.

Joseph Persico died on August 30, 2014. He would have been 85 today.

This was an edited version of my post of May 27, 2005.