I hitched north in July 1973, to get my place to live for graduate school which I was starting in the fall. My first stop was to stay with my friend the park ranger in the Smokies (she was one of my nightly visitors to the mission dig sites, tune in for that story!). Then on to western New York State to see friends, Manny and Mia Shargell. He was teaching at Cornell in Ithaca that summer. It was cool to see the gorges and other settings in Richard Farina’s book, Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up From Here. A humorous sidelight occurred while reading the student newspaper. Cornell is on the heights and the town is down in the valley. Small colleges have long been known to suffer from Town and Gown conflicts. Ithaca and Cornell were no exception. While discussing the latest such conflict the college writer said, “It is interesting to note that no matter which way you go from downtown Ithaca is up!”
I graduated with Honors in Anthropology from FSU, which required original research and a bachelor’s thesis. Bruce Grindal, who would eventually be my Best Man at my wedding, was my major professor for this. I was graduating in August and starting graduate school in September. In July I was still in the middle of writing it. I asked Manny if there was a place I could work. We were living with a friend of his who was a physics professor at Cornell. He took me to his department, and we looked for an empty office. We found one with a desk and typewriter, and a couple of long tables covered with colored photographs. He said it did not look like this room was likely to be used anytime soon for classes as there were no chairs. I settled in to work.
I am busy typing away when a tall, thin gentleman pokes his head in the door and asks what I am doing there and who I am. I patiently tell him the whole story including the professor who brought me in. Being who I am, not known to be shy, I then ask him
“And may I ask who you are?”
“I’m Carl Sagan.”
Stopped me dead in my tracks. I do not know if he was as well known then as he was by the end of his life, but I had always been a science student and sci-fi freak, so I well knew who he was. I looked over at the tables with the colored photographs and asked,
“Are those the photos from the Mars mission?”
with sufficient wonder in my voice to get his notice.
“Yes. Would you like to look at them?”
Would I? You’re darn tooting. This wonderful human being spent the next couple of hours showing me the photos, explaining what they were and discussing space exploration with me, a stranger, not even one of his students. Neil DeGrasse Tyson speaks of Dr. Sagan’s generosity to him when he visited Cornell and that he has modeled how he treats on it. Carl Sagan is sorely missed. I choke up thinking what a gap he has left in our greedy, cynical world.
