BRATTON: So you went into the Marines when the war broke out? Were you married then?
JENKINS: Yes, I enlisted, believe it or not, I enlisted the day after our honeymoon. We were in the Hotel Pennsylvania in New York and then we moved up to the Hotel Taft the next day just to take a variety of hotels. By the way, a room for two in the Hotel Pennsylvania, the bridal suite then, was a terrific amount of money, $9.00 a night. I surprised Lillian quite a bit. I came back, I went to get a paper and I came back, I said, "You might not like this, what I did." She said, "What did you do?" I said, "I enlisted in the Marines." She wasn't too enthusiastic.
BRATTON: Had the war started?
JENKINS: Oh yes. This was in 1942.
BRATTON: in '42, well.
JENKINS: I enlisted in the Marines and they told me I would have to report whenever they sent me a notice. Unfortunately, I had to report Christmas Eve, which was rather difficult. Well, I wasn't the only one. We had a trainful of people. We arrived on December 24th at boot camp in Parris Island. It was probably the most miserable Christmas I can ever remember having in my life, because boot camp is not a pleasant situation. It is vulgar as can be and it's brutal. That's a better way of putting it. It's extremely brutal and savage, almost uncivilized. That was part of the strategy of trying to make a typical young fellow in three or four or five months, whatever it was, trying to make him feel he's Superman. That was the whole thing, you know. It started right from the beginning. I don't regret it, I'd never want to do it again. I wouldn't want my children to do it, but it didn't kill me obviously.
Now, between that time and Christmas, I had time on my hands, so I batted around as a substitute teacher. I taught elementary grades. I taught everything when a teacher didn't go to school, in many towns around there.
Then when the war was over, I came back and went again to agencies looking for jobs. I went to NYU and they sent me to Albright College, which is a denominational college in Pennsylvania. I think it was run by the Brethren. I came there and they wanted my wife to teach Sunday School and she was getting paid for nothing. But they had a list of assignments for her and they had a list of assignments for me. And I think they were going to pay me the grand sum of $2500. So I said, "Well, I don't need this after the war." So I didn't accept that position. I said, "I am going to take a job where I do the work and not tie in with the wife." So Montclair Teachers College in New Jersey was considered at that time, there was an agency that rated them, was considered America's number one teachers' college. I don't know if you have heard of it before, but it's called Montclair State Teachers College. Tuition was free to anybody in New Jersey, but he must or she must prove that they were capable of going there. So the very brightest youngsters went there seeking a free education.
BRATTON: It was highly competitive, I guess.
JENKINS: Oh my goodness, yes. We had many, many more applicants than we did people that we admitted, they admitted. I taught Political Science there.
Then the State Department of Public Instruction in the capital of Trenton wanted an assistant to the Commissioner for Higher Education. So lightning struck and the gentleman who was in that department had met me at Montclair and he knew me as a high school boy, knew of me, and he recommended that I go there.
It was a time when having a Marine officer looked good. You see what I'm trying to say? It was the "in" thing to do. When I got the job, it was put in the paper rather prominently that a Marine officer is now assistant commissioner. You know, that kind of stuff. So I enjoyed it very much. And there I met Dr. Messick, who was the Dean at this school.
I went up there. The system at that time was run with a very strict central control. The Commissioner for Higher Education controlled, controlled right down to the curriculum. A school would not be able to put in a minor in French unless the commissioner said so. They would call down and ask, and it would be my job to go up and see what it was all about and discuss it and recommend back. And he'd go along with it. Or he wouldn't go along with it. It was that simple. IN doing this, I met many of the deans along with the president and if they wanted a pet thing and I saw that I could do them some good, I would do them some good. I recommended some things for Montclair that I thought were worthwhile and Messick would explain them to me because it was his job as dean to explain them to me.
My boss was a very sagacious fellow. He knew that I visited Princeton, I visited Rutgers. I sat in on a Board of Trustees meeting at Rutgers. And I went to Stevens Institute in Hoboken, which is a very distinguished engineering school. He said, "You know, one of these days some of these people are going to doubt your genius. You've never run a college before. You've never worked in one except a little bit up here." He said, "If I were you," he said, "if you can work it out, I'd take a leave of absence and go away for about a year and do something and come back." He said, "I'll hold the job for you." And it made sense, because here I was popping in on Rutgers and, you know, telling them different things.
So Messick got the job here at East Carolina and his dean fortunately, had retired, so it wasn't a question of firing anyone, taking anyone's place. It was a vacancy. He never said so, but I think that he wanted a chance to maybe to look around for awhile and I could be of. He knew my problem, because I told him that Dr. Morrison had suggested that I have some experience and, of course, anybody with any sense agreed to that. I got a letter from him which said the deanship is going to be open if you'd like to come down. So I talked to Lillian and we agreed in our own little planning to come down for a year.
BRATTON: [laughs] For a year?
JENKINS: She said, "We might not like the South. They might not like you." I said, "Well, I've been down at Duke and people were nice to me when I was at Duke. There was never a problem." She said, "Well, all right, we'll take a crack at it." She came down and she cried for about a week. She had company, because Mrs. Messick cried for about a week. She didn't want to come down here, because Montclair was such a delightful city.
I mean, so many things existed there that didn't exist here. You'd go across the bridge and New York theaters, you'd go across the bridge and there'd be Sax Fifth Avenue and Macy's for shopping and all those things that you didn't have here. Even little things such as the bulldog edition of the newspaper. We could get the next day's paper the night before on the streets and everywhere.
They didn't have such things here. There were no supermarkets were here at all. The A & P would wrap up your stuff so you couldn't go and pick it yourself. You had to take it, the man would take it from the counter and bring it to the counter and then he would wrap it up in brown paper and give it to you. It was that kind of thin. No one had a supermarket. It was a dreary situation. The streets became absolutely uninhabited at 5:30 in the evening. That was the end of civilization almost, at 5:30 or so. And it was a different type of life. And we said that we would endure it for a year and then go back.
But then we began to learn there really was a genuine difference here. Except one, not unfortunate, but one humorous situation. I walked out to watch the boys practice some football. A department head, I don't want to name his name, but a department head came up to me and he said, "Are you the new dean?" I said, "Yes." He said, "You're a Yankee, aren't you?" I said, "Yes." He said, "I'll give you about six months." So I went home and I told my wife, and she said, "Is it going to be that bad?" I said, "No. He's just an exception to the rule, I'm sure." And sure enough, about four or five days later, they invited me to join the Kiwanis Club, which I did. I thought that they wouldn't be inviting me to join the Kiwanis Club if they didn't want me here. Then I was, I was voted president of the Kiwanis Club rather early, so I began to feel. Then, of course, everything was so, real nice. Where I went, people were extremely courteous.
Then I noticed a difference. I began to feel, "Is this real?" Because I never experienced that in the big city. I'd go in the store to ask for something and if he didn't have it, he would say, "Wait up, I'm going to call so-and-so and see if they have it." And he would call his competitor for me to see if he had what I was after. I said, "I've never seen anything like that in my life." Because you know, we didn't have that. You'd go in and they'd talk awhile and "Incidentally, what do you want?" It wouldn't be, "Hey, what do you want?" It wasn't the fact that they knew I worked at the university, it was just the person. They were extremely kind and courteous and that began to be a pattern almost.
Then I got the real shock. Because in New Jersey you would jokingly say, if one were to say he was going to Trenton, which is the capital, people would jokingly say, "Well, say hello to the governor." Well, that's not a joke here, because people say, "Oh! Do you want me to tell him something?" He is very accessible here. There it would be a joke, like saying to say hello to the President of the United States.
I was sitting in my office. I didn't even get up from my chair and a fellow came in, "Hello, how are you? How's everything?" I said, "Just fine." I thought it was some parent. I didn't get up or anything. I didn't say, "Can I do anything for you?" He went over and talked to the secretary for awhile and then went out and went to the next door. She said, "Do you know who that was?" I said, "No, I don't know who in the world that was." She said, "That's Governor Cherry." Geez, you know, normally, the governor comes to your office, you would jump up and shake his hand and everything. But he was so, he didn't make a fuss over the fact that he was governor, just walked around. And I went home and told my wife, "Can you believe a thing like that?" My goodness, if Governor Driscoll had walked in my office in New Jersey, you know, somebody would have been there with a horn saying, "Attention everybody!" We'd get a two hour warning that he was on his way. So that was the type of contrast that was . . .
