Alumni Bon Voyage Brunch

Another Brick City Weekend comes to a close, this year with the Alumni Bon Voyage Brunch. The turnout was small at first, but gradually increased through the morning. RIT alumni and their families enjoyed a bountiful brunch in the SAU's RITz, looking at the weekend's pictures and reflecting on how RIT has influenced their lives.

Among all the alumni present, three stood out from the crowd. Calvin (Cal) Besore, class of 1958, wore a hat that bore a picture of the Clark Building from RIT's downtown days. Eric Neff, also class of 1958, says, "It wasn't Brick City then. It was Concrete City!" Besore, Neff, and fellow '58er Robert (Bob) Meibaum, all earned degrees in Photographic Science.

"Most of us were veterens," Besore says, "This was a one-time chance at an education." All three spoke of the manner in which they were educated. For their program, classes ran from 9am to 5pm Monday through Friday, with night classes at least once a week. Besore says, "My wife taught me to take short-hand notes, so I took my notes verbatim. She would stay up nights translating my notes onto the typewriter." He went on to explain that the unemployment rate in 1958 was at 6.5% like today, yet all of his fellow graduates were successful finding employment. Many of his friends from other universities couldn't even secure interviews, let alone gain positions within their professional fields.

Cal worked at GAF/Ansco for the twelve years following graduation, until he moved to North Carolina to work in the textile industry for the next twenty-five years. Eric spent thirty-six years as a photographic film emulsion chemist at Ansco, which became a division of GAF Corporation before it became the Anitec Division of International Paper. Bob Meibaum spent thirty-eight years at EG&G as a photographer for nuclear weapons testing facilities.

All graduates of the 1958 Photographic Science class did well in finding employment and furthering their careers. Neff believes their success is due in part to their professors. He says, "We had such a degree of personal contact with our professors that I haven't seen in any institution since." Meibaum believes their success was due to intensity and career-oriented nature of their RIT education. He says, "Our [education] really paid off. We had one of the best educations we could have received at the time."

All of this praise bodes the question: Does modern-day RIT provide students a similar degree of academic excellence and career preparation? Besore answers for all three alumni. "We're delighted with the changes here."