Ithaca Odyssey
Nothing is more central to a classic education than the study of the Classics, and, of course at the center of classical literature is Homer and his epic poems of the Iliad and the Odyssey. Both are written in 24 books and done in Dactylic Hexameter, which is rhythmic form of writing with a specific cadence, which the Greeks thought of as heroic in nature. The Iliad is all about the Greek conquest and occupation of Troy with all its references to Achilles and Agamemnon. The Odyssey is about one particular Greek hero named Odysseus, who was considered very smart and cunning, but was not so smart as to go straight home after his business in Troy was done. Instead of wending his way through the Aegean Sea and through the passage between mainland Greece and the Peloponnesus to his home island kingdom, he spent ten years wandering around the southern Mediterranean as far as Africa and even Sicily. He was astonished to hear that his wife Penelope was entertaining other suitors while he cavorted around from one adventure to another. Finally, he got homesick (or perhaps was running low on cash) and started his real journey home to his island of Ithaca.
The middle to late Nineteenth Century was a time when lots of Greek immigrants found there way to the promised land of America and a bunch of them went upstate from New York City and decided that the Finger Lakes area was a nice place to settle. This area is rife with classical Greek names for towns. There is Homer, Ovid, Aurelius, Brutus, Cato, Junius, Milo, Seneca and, yes, Ithaca. I don’t know that Ezra Cornell chose to endow Cornell University with his $400,000 ($7.7 million in today’s dollars) grant in 1865 in Ithaca because the name Ithaca seemed like an educated man’s place to find his way home, but it makes for a logical story as such. When I bought (technically bought a leasehold) a home in Ithaca in 1996, I called it Homeward Bound, which seemed like an overeducated man’s way of hitting on the Homeric legend, the College Homecoming theme and the fact that it faced the 18th hole of the Cornell Robert Trent Jones Golf Course, where one would hit “home” at the end of one’s round of golf.
I have returned to Ithaca for several days to attend a dedication for my favorite Cornellian, Joe Thomas, my professor, my Dean and my friend. But I am not going on campus and reengaging with Cornell University after a dust-up with them a few years ago until tomorrow. Yesterday and today I am visiting Ithaca, not Cornell. Ithaca is where my grandfather immigrated to from the Slovak side of Czechoslovakia in the late Nineteenth Century. Technically, he lived in Myers, which is part of Lansing and close to Ludlowville, just six miles or so up the eastern side of Cayuga Lake from Ithaca, but Ithaca was the closest thing to a nearby city, so we always just said he lived in Ithaca. He did what sturdy, short and well-muscled Slovaks did in those days, which was to work in the rock salt mines along the lake. As a native beer drinker, he would make his own brew, which led to him making his fortune running booze out of Canada for consumption by the Cornell frat boys during Prohibition. That lucrative run of the Volstead Act from 1920 to 1933 allowed a small-time bootlegger to make enough money to buy up a large farm and start a few businesses like a gas station and road house along the road up along Cayuga Lake. My mother used that moment in 1933 to graduate from Ludlowville High School, where she was a star basketball player and tennis player and enroll at nearby Cornell University, from which she graduated in 1937. So you see, Ithaca and its surroundings are a very big part of my family fabric with or without consideration of Cornell University and the two degrees and decade of professorship that connect me personally to the school.
The verdant rolling hills, the long and deep glacial lake and the almost prehistoric geological formations that produce amazing gorges and waterfalls are the signature of this Finger Lakes region around Ithaca. Even the t-shirts read “Ithaca is Gorges” and it is for good reason. I am staying with my cousin (technically first cousin, once removed) Pete Massicci and his lovely wife, Nancy. Pete and Nancy are part of the bedrock of Ithaca with him running a local watering hole in the center of town and she being head of development of the community foundation. They literally know everyone in town and in turn, everyone knows and loves them since they are such active and pleasant folks. Since I was coming for six days on this visit, Nancy has planned out a survey for us to visit as many local waterfalls as we can. Yesterday we went around rainy Ithaca, but we managed to get two at Treman State Park, the lower falls and the upper falls. The classic sedimentary rock formations along the gorge were an inspiring start to our odyssey. Then we went to the grandmother of local falls, Taughannock Falls, about seven miles up the western side of the lake. This is the highest plunge falls in the Eastern United States as it falls 215 feet from a 400 foot high slate rock cliff, all set, ironically, in the town of Ulysses, which is the Latin version of the Greek name Odysseus. Here I was, being taken to these epic falls in a Homeric region by my Italian cousin, whose ancestors were undoubtedly part of the Roman Empire in millennia past, and it seems only appropriate that the blending of Greek and Latin should all take place in that spectacular, albeit soggy, gorge.
Last night I was invited to dinner by an old business school pal, John and his wife Elaine, who have a lovely estate about 14 miles up the eastern shore of the lake, past my ancestral stomping grounds in Myers. I drove down South Hill through the center of downtown Ithaca, past the old site of my aunt Aggie and uncle Art’s IGA grocery story (now a Scandinavian furniture store) out past Fall Creek. The falls there are where the original Tarzan movies were filmed in the silent movie era (Ithaca was the original Hollywood then). I remember taking a girl I dated during college to that romantic spot at the base of the falls late in the evening…but I digress. Was that like turning on the faucet to induce peeing? I then drove up along the lake past the old North Forty barn, another favorite college party haunt to the Rogues Harbor Inn, where my mother had taken her first job and first learned about the seedier side of the life of traveling salesmen. Then it was down the hill past all the property that my grandfather had owned, 17 acres of which to the left my sisters Kathy and Barbara, just sold at long last, and the land to the right of the road where the Lansing school complex sits on land sold to the town by my grandfather. The superintendent’s office along the road used to be another roadhouse called Agnes’s Joint. Bawdy, cigarette-dangling Agnes Kowalski lived next door to my grandfather on Myers Road. Then I crossed over Myers Road and saw my grandfather’s old gas station and where his roadhouse used to be and where I flipped burgers one summer during college. On the left there is All Saints Church on land that my grandfather donated to them and then my mother sold the rest of the parcel to them years later. I negotiated that sale with my old business school professor Gerry Haas, who was a deacon of that church. Then it was over Salmon Creek, which flooded in 1910 and washed away my grandfather’s first house and took the life of my aunt Josephine in her childhood. That’s where my memory faded into the few miles further up the lake to John and Elaines’ for a fine evening of reminiscences and tall tales. I am sure my Ithaca Odyssey does not end there and that I am only on chapter 18 of my 24 chapter story, but to me, it is a fine and epic poem that flows deeply through my veins.