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149 CHAPTER SIX Becoming a Historian: Graduate School Years in North Florida, Illinois, New York City, and Long Island, 1965-1970 O n my way down to Florida, I stopped at Duke to thank Professor Durden for inspiring me to go into teaching. At our meeting, he seemed pleased at first, but then turned somber when I told him I was entering the school of education rather than the history department in the college of arts and sciences. He urged me to do everything I could to transfer into history. I would then have a much better chance of getting a good position teaching history full time (as distinct from general social sciences or humanities) at a junior college, where certification of teaching ability was not required, as well as possibly going on for a history Ph.D. at a later time. With this new information, I drove south the whole time worried that the history department wouldn’t take me, and then I’d be in a kind of limbo, not knowing what my next step should be. As it turned out, I had cause for worry. When the chair of the history department, John K. Mahon, accepted my request for a meeting, I found him to be a distinguished, no-nonsense individual who intimidated me without even trying. From the start, he was less than enthusiastic about my chances of entering the program. After all, I was applying at the eleventh hour and had bypassed the admissions committee. In addition, he was not the least bit impressed by the fact that I had been admitted to the school of education, stating that in his opinion its standards were far below those of the history department. He also took Escaping into Nature 150 hold of the Duke transcript I had given him, and with a great flourish, circled the many grades below a B and told me that these were not the kind of grades he would have expected from an individual hoping to enter graduate school! Professor Mahon then leaned back in his chair behind a very big desk and waited for my response. By this time in the meeting, I was more determined than ever to get into the history department, especially after his disdainful remark about the standards of the school of education. It would, I thought, be like accepting an inferior product when the superior one was right at hand. So I decided to go for broke. Leaning forward in my little chair in front of his desk, I told Mahon that if I could get Cs at a school like Duke in courses I wasn’t particularly interested in, I could certainly get Bs and As at the University of Florida in courses on a subject that I loved and wanted to teach for the rest of my life. I ended my passionate plea with a pledge. If he would take a chance on me, I would sign a kind of contract before I left his office stating that if I didn’t have good grades at the end of the first term, I would immediately leave the University of Florida and never look back. For a moment, Mahon said nothing. Then, a small smile appeared on his face, and he gave me the answer I wanted to hear. He told me he admired my determination, and okay, he would give me a chance. No, I didn’t have to sign anything, but he would be watching me like a hawk, and if I didn’t do well the first trimester, there wouldn’t be a second one, and I’d be out. As at a number of other critical times in my life, the right person was there at the right moment to move me along the path of success. If Professor Mahon had been a different kind of individual, inflexible and obsessed with following the “correct” procedures for admission to the graduate program, my future career as a teacher-scholar might never have gotten off the ground. I felt lucky and grateful, and immediately set out to prove to him that I would do what I said I would. Despite a heavy course load and the writing of a thesis that would soon be published in its entirety in three articles in the Florida Historical Quarterly, I managed to complete the requirements for the Master of Arts degree in three trimesters, from August 1965 to August 1966. But once again, there were...

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