When I was a boy, my mother visited NYC two or three times and ever since then it has been a mysterious mecca for me. I finally went to NYC in the fall of 1957 to study at the Biblical Seminary of New York. For the first two years I commuted on the Long Island Railroad. We lived and worked at the Stoney Brook Preparatory School in Stony Brook Long Island. Learning about the Long Island Railroad system first hand was a rather tricky and initially a somewhat scary experience. The train ride took one and half hours each way, and the subway added another half hour. I caught the 6:20 train in the morning and barely made my 8:30 class.
Several times I got confused about which way I was supposed to go, but other travelers quickly set me straight. The signing system was often abbreviated and the doorways and ticket systems were not always clearly marked. The first time through the turnstile I put the coin in the lefthand side rather than the righthand side, and really hurt my leg trying to force my way through the turnstile. The man behind me, fortunately, put another coin in for me and showed me what I done wrong. There were several levels of platforms and you had to be sure to get the right one.
I studied on the way into the City, but was usually too tired to study much on the return trip. When the weather changed toward winter, the trip was much colder and the walking was slippery. The first real snow storm forced me to stay home for a couple of days. We were doing this adventure on a shoestring, so I never had any money to spare. I brought a sack lunch and ate it on the subway going home. People starred at me as I ate. Everyone stayed to themselves as we rode and it was too noisy for any conversation. I never saw anyone picking on anyone else, but everyone was always in a great hurry.
For my last year of Seminary we obtained an apartment on the six-floor walk-up building the seminary had recently acquired. It had several rooms in addition to the bathroom, and something of a view of the Chrysler Building and the nearby United Nations Buildings. We had little money, but found that in the summer we could sit through two showings of a double feature at the nearby air-conditioned movie theater. We also found a YMCA which had a free swimming pool. There was a supermarket just two blocks away. It was nice there.
We visited the United Nations a few times, and went skating at Rockefeller Plaza twice. We even went to see the Rockettes at Radio Center Music Hall. Most of the time however, I went to classes next door during the day and studied at home in the evening. For me the biggest “extra” thrill was the chance to see the New York Knicks play basketball against the Boston Celtics at Madison Square Garden. Sometimes the Broadway Theaters would drop off free tickets at the front desk for their current shows. We got to see Sidney Poitier in “Raisin in the Sun.”
Katherine Hepburn had a home directly across from the Seminary and one day as I walked out of the Seminary, there she was putting things into her car. I took a chance and walked across the street to tell her how we very much enjoyed her work. She looked directly at me and said: “Thank you very much.” Then she went back to packing her car. When she drove away, I saw that her Connecticut License plate read KH1.
In some ways my biggest thrill about that last year in NYC was that I got a chance to broad jump in the famous Milrose games in Madison Square Garden. I had been something of a track star in college and a friend of mine at the Stony Brook School had been a real star on the NYU track team, and since his club, The New York Athletic Club did not have a long jumper he arranged for me to jump in the Milrose Games for the New York Athletic Club. I did not do much but I was not last. It was a great experience walking around on the Garden’s indoor track before 8,000 people and watching the real stars do their stuff.
I have always held a special place in my heart for NYC because of those years, we spent living in New York, especially for the last one which we spent in the City. During my last year of seminary, I served as Interim Pastor for a church which was located just ten blocks from the seminary. It was a Swedish Covenant congregation and the people were extremely kind to me and my young family. I preached my way through the Bible for that year and like to think I was of some real help to some of the folks. It was a wonderful year that we spent living and working in NYC

Technically Ken Monroe was not my first college professor, but he was by the far the best professor I had while an undergraduate student. He had come to Westmont a few years before me after a long career at a well-known Bible Institute, with a doctorate from Pittsburg Theological Seminary. He taught Bible and Theology, as well as Introduction to Philosophy.
Ken Monroe was a quiet, thoughtful and gentle fellow, with wry sense of humor. When he spoke in Chapel he often began with a joke. Once he held up a book saying simply: “I have in my hand a book”. We did not know whether to laugh, but soon from the look on his face we realized that this was his idea of a joke. Another time he announced that when he and his wife went to the Holy Land, they went Third Class because there was no Fourth Class.
Ken Monroe was respected by faculty and students alike as the only real scholar on the faculty. He had read widely and still walked from his near bye home to the college every morning reading a book.
I took several classes from Ken Monroe and always found them interesting and mind-stretching. He invited his students to his home each semester for an evening of fellowship, partly so we could get to know each other, but mostly so he could get to know us. He and his wife were the only faculty members of this fundamentalist college who became members of the local Golf and Country Club and who joined the First Presbyterian Church.
When my wife and I snuck into the movie theater to see “King of Kings”, about Jesus’ life and death, because the college forbade seeing movies, we were heartened to see Ken and his wife walk down the aisle in the dark after the film had started. They obviously had a broader view of things than the college stood for. Incidentally, Ken ‘s and his first wife had been divorced and this raised a lot of eyebrows among the college community.
Indeed, after I had finished my Master’s degree I loaned a copy of thesis on Reinhold Niebuhr’s view of the relationship between reason and faith to Ken. After reading it he asked me if I now thought Niebuhr was a Christian, an absolutely ridiculous question for anyone not knowing the fundamentalist mindset, since Niebuhr was a thinker whom everyone else thought to be a paragon of the Christian faith. I answered that I do think Niebuhr is a Christian. Ken paused a bit, and then replied, “That’s what worries me about the college.” Our college, Westmont, was still then a fundamentalist school. It is now a broadminded evangelical college.
I kept in touch with Ken over the years until his death at 81 years of age. In the context of a Fundamentalist school seeking to become an Evangelical school he was a guiding light. He opened my mind toward a posture that embraced both reason and faith simultaneously. I have spent the past 70 years striving to affirm and live this broader posture toward life.