A Portable Record Player

Hal Cody, FCRH ’58, started out in Queens Court. “Then later I moved to Martyrs’ Court, where they had the suites—it was fabulous,” he says. Cody came to Fordham from Stamford, Connecticut, and went home on weekends.

“My father dropped me off with a suitcase carrying a week’s worth of clothes. I brought one sports jacket and a couple of ties and shirts,” he says, noting that his mother would do his laundry at the end of each week.

“I brought a radio and my portable record player with my LPs—33-and-a-third RPMs! I brought old country-and-western records—Hank Snow, Hank Williams—and maybe a show tunes record. And I brought the table I built in shop in junior high for the living room. That’s all we needed.” Posting things on the walls was not allowed, he says.

Later on, Cody shared a suite with seven other guys. “I checked around off campus and I found out that for 88 dollars we could buy a TV. Eleven dollars each! We had it in our common living room for three years,” he says. “As we were finishing school, we drew lots for it. A guy who was getting married real soon got it.”

After freshman year, Cody also brought his car—a ’52 Ford convertible. “It was maroon—go Rams! I parked it by the tennis courts,” he says. “But those of us that had cars, we didn’t really use them during the week. If you went anywhere you took the el (the elevated train) or the subway.”

Sports Coats and Ties

In fall 1961, David Langdon, FCRH ’65, was part of a small group of students moving to Fordham from outside the Northeast.

The Joliet, Illinois, native says packing was a challenge since he would only be going home once before his freshman year ended, during the winter break. “Knowing that I had to wear a suit or a sport coat and tie to class,” he says, “most of my packing was dictated by those simple facts.”

Langdon says he left his athletics gear at home.

“I was intent on becoming an intellectual. Funny,” he says, “since I later became the captain of the rugby team and the coach of the return-to-football team in the fall of 1964. My mother had to mail my cleats. My dreams of being an intellectual had already been compromised and I made room for some jock time.”

Langdon’s roommate for all four years, John Stevens, was another talented athlete. “He was Fordham’s best basketball player during those years,” Langdon says of his friend. For his part, Stevens made sure to bring his record player with 78s and 45s, a briefcase, and a typewriter. When the roommates moved into a suite, Stevens also brought the TV and antenna.

Langdon says there were only four dorms on campus at the time—three for freshmen and Martyrs’ Court for upperclassmen (now there are 14 at Rose Hill and two at Lincoln Center). The prospect of living in the suite-style rooms at Martyrs’ was one of the things he was most excited about when he came to Fordham. “I loved the sound of the word ‘suite’.”

Flora and Fauna

Following a growing trend on the campus, Lori O’Connor, FCRH ’79, brought several plants and flowers to her dorm room. “I’ve kept plants since I was four years old,” she told FORDHAM magazine in spring 1976.

Her college collection included hanging flowers, creeping ferns, and even an impressively tall rubber plant in an antique vase that once belonged to her grandmother.

In fact, O’Connor’s assortment was so impressive that many of her fellow students knew her as “the plant lady,” including some male students who would stop outside her blooming window in the early morning to serenade her.

Other students, like Gigi Cidino, FCRH ’78, kept their plants in less conspicuous locations—like the women’s bathroom. Cidino told the magazine she was inspired to keep her plants in the unlikely location by “the heavy moisture buildup in the showers; it’s better than misting and spraying all the time.” 

Glitter and Safety Pins 

Sally Benner, FCRH ’84, who came to Fordham from Buffalo, New York, says she packed just a little too light for her first year, in Queen’s Court’s Robert’s Hall.

“I think I brought enough for a week,” she says. “I thought I could stretch it for an academic year, forgetting about season changes. So a winter coat was shipped to me.”

Once she arrived on campus, Benner says she and her mother went to Courtesy drugstore on Fordham Road to buy an electric kettle and an iron. “That was really important to my mother. I was going to college and I needed to look like a crisp college student.”

Benner also brought items to decorate her room, including photos of her family and her cat, and a Beatles poster, “even though it wasn’t a group of my era,” she says. “It just seemed to me that it was something a college student should put on their walls. And I loved John Lennon. He was alive during the first part of my freshman year. My dream was that maybe I’d someday cross paths with John Lennon in New York City.”

Lennon was shot and killed during reading week in December of her freshman year. “We were all sitting vigil,” Benner says, “listening to the radio.”

Anticipating that she would get involved in theater, Benner packed some items that could be transformed into costumes, like a princess skirt and a tiara. “It was the punk era, so lots of glitter makeup and safety pins for looking tough.”

A Big, Bulky Desktop

“I started college in 1999, before [everyone had] cell phones,” says Kristin Schwab, D.O., FCLC ’03, GSE ’06. But the natural sciences major brought plenty of other electronics with her when she moved into McMahon Hall.

“I started out with a VCR but then ended up getting a DVD player. Everyone had their own digital alarm clocks. Most people had computers too—it was before laptops, so pretty much everyone had a big, bulky desktop,” Schwab says.

“And I made sure I had my CD player,” she says. “I was a big 98 Degrees fan. My part of the room was plastered with 98 degrees posters.”

Schwab, originally from Ozone Park, Queens, was also very big into New Kids on the Block and Dirty Dancing. “My room was a shrine to 80s pop culture,” she says.

Schwab also brought another throwback with her to college. “I had straight hair—to give it a curl, I used hot rollers every day,” she says. “That’s what everyone knew me for was the hot rollers. I still use them to this day.”

A Blender, a Steamer, and a Coffee Machine

Kate Carney is one of 1,344 freshmen who moved onto the Rose Hill campus this past Sunday. “I severely overpacked,” she says. “I needed about 100 little hangers for my clothes.”

Carney’s priority was making sure she felt comfortable in her room right away. “My room at home is really decorated, so I didn’t want the walls here to be empty at all.”

So Command hooks were essential. Carney immediately hung up a garland, string lights (with built-in Bluetooth speakers), and a sign above her bed that reads “The City Never Sleeps.” She also brought framed pictures of her home on Long Island and of her family and friends.

“A lot of my room is New York-themed too,” Carney says, “to keep me reminded of where I am and all the things I can do here. To keep me ready to go and explore.”

Carney also brought some household appliances, including a vacuum, a mini steamer, a smoothie maker, and her Keurig coffee machine. Her roommate, a friend from high school, brought the printer.

Carney is already settling in. She says she loves her residence hall and how spacious the rooms are. “And my roommate and I didn’t coordinate the decorations, but our beds look really good together anyway.”

—Nicole LaRosa contributed reporting to this story. 

“We bonded over a love of science,” Rog says of the night they met at a gathering of fellow resident assistants. “There was a magnetic force between us after that first chat, and we never left each other’s side.”

They spent hours together that fall, setting up bulletin boards in Martyrs’ Court and Walsh Hall, walking the campus between classes, and stopping for marathon chat sessions, including one in front of Collins Hall that lasted nearly eight hours.

“Had we not been RAs, we would not have crossed paths,” Rog says. “We learned that we have different interests and strengths, but we use those to be a strong team.”

The couple also developed a lasting bond with a Fordham Jesuit—Joseph A. Currie, S.J., JES ’61, GSAS ’63—who, Rog says, gave them “meaningful trainings on social justice.”

Father Currie, who died last March at the age of 80, was Fordham’s associate vice president for mission and ministry at the time. Lucas got to know him when the two lived in Tierney Hall, where Lucas was an RA, and Rog was impressed by Father Currie’s patience and understanding when she came to him with questions about her faith. “We both love this man,” she says they soon realized.

Like their love for each other, their friendship with Father Currie would continue beyond graduation and influence their lives in many ways.

Lucas graduated in 2008 with a degree in finance and began working in New York City. The following year, after Rog completed her degree in psychology, the two moved to Queens, where she enrolled in a doctoral program in psychology at St. John’s University. But each year, as summer drew to a close, they returned to Rose Hill for a romantic picnic on Eddies Parade.

Lucas proposed to Rog in Central Park on All Saints’ Day, 2010. In homage to the back-to-school season in which they met, the two were married on August 27, 2011, with Father Currie presiding at a ceremony in Buffalo, where Rog grew up.

“Father Currie continued to be a close friend and mentor to both of us,” Rog says, noting that every summer he would host her and Lucas at the Jesuit retreat house in Wernersville, Pennsylvania. “We were grateful to have gotten even more time with him when he moved to Philly shortly after we did.”

Rog, who earned her doctorate in 2014, is now a pediatric psychologist at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, where she specializes in treating children with pain disorders, and Lucas is a financial services technologist at TD Bank. The couple also makes time for service work. “We want to focus on the life Fordham and its culture inspired,” says Lucas, who is a regular volunteer with Habitat for Humanity in Philadelphia and recently traveled to China to work on a homebuilding project.

This past summer, he and Rog trekked to Zambia to help residents in a rural village establish a small school for children in what Rog described as a “repurposed chicken coop.”

“We hope to return one day and continue to provide educational and psychosocial services, along with some infrastructure improvements,” she says.

Closer to home, Rog and Lucas are house parents at the Milton Hershey School, a private, cost-free boarding school in Hershey, Pennsylvania, that serves more than 2,000 children who meet criteria in financial need and potential to learn. Rog and Lucas spend every other weekend living with a group of middle-school girls on the campus.

It’s a familiar role for the couple who met as Fordham RAs. They find themselves using techniques they learned on campus, like suggesting “ice breakers” to get the girls talking and more engaged with each other.

“We offer a lot to these kids, being an adult guiding force in their lives,” Rog says. “But we are also learning so much from them.”

—Maja Tarateta