There was also the small facility at Middletown Collegiate Center, which actually preceded Champlain.

On 21 Aug 01, Ben Bisk (48-50) suggested that Geneva was the fifth school; not so's I remember.  Can anyone verify this with documentation?  Ben was in Ticonderoga room 257 with Ted Gramas and Joe Italiano.

The other Champlain College in Burlington, Vermont, is a newer school (by name^#), unrelated in any way to the one in Plattsburgh and neither its, nor SUNY Plattsburgh's, site make mention of the old Champlain or ACUNY.

# - I am happy to note, per a message from the Burlington Champlain's Web Site Manager on 24 Apr 01, that that school was actually founded as Burlington Business School in 1878; it changed its name in 1958 to Champlain College but their lineage can thus be traced back to 1878 and they are therefore technically and institutionally older.

I found yet another Champlain College, part of Trent University in Peterborough, Ontario, Canada (between Toronto and Ottawa), but it's a residential college within the main Symons Campus.

O, mon Dieu; et encore! Il y'a un autre Champlain College à l' Université Bishop's (Bishop's University) à Lennoxville, Québec, Canada (peut être 5km sud-est de Sherbrooke).

Un autre Champlain Québecois est Champlain Regional College, sur les environs de Montréal (actually, it is English-speaking and is just south across the St. Lawrence River in St. Lambert); it appears to include Lennoxville (above) and another campus at St. Lawrence (Québec, not New York), near Québec City.

Neither the old Champlain nor ACUNY came up on searches of the General Education Online (GEO)^@ site's Colleges and Universities - United States Universities^@ page nor on its Colleges and Universities - United States Community Colleges^@ page nor SUNY's nor on Web search engines.

Champlain was closed in 1953 to become SAC's Plattsburgh AFB (it had originally been the rather-cushy U. S. Army Plattsburgh Barracks^*) and vanished without a trace when ACUNY was absorbed into SUNY (the base closed ca. 1995).

Champlain's entire Engineering Department, having been established and staffed by Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, was completely absorbed by RPI; there is no mention of Champlain or ACUNY on RPI's site, either.

Making inquiries about ACUNY, I recalled (28 Feb 00) that all Champlain student records* were sent to the Registrar at Hamilton (i/c/o a Miss Marguerite A. van Bree - what a feat of memory, if correct, eh?  Actually, I am quite sure of my ground here.  Sure wish I could find that old ACUNY or SUNY postcard to this effect.).  Tom Metzner advised (13 Oct 01) that, when Champlain closed in 1953, she transferred to the New York State College of Forestry at Syracuse University and that our records were to go with her; he has no idea happened after that.  That may be so, but I remember that postcard most vividly (I had to get my transcripts).

O.K. - progress - however limited.  Hamilton has no record of her (our last record of her had her living in Jamesville), but a very nice lady at Harpur took the trouble to look in their history of Binghamton University and found this paragraph:

"Jun 1953, Champlain, which had been established in 1946, closed down,
 leaving Harpur College the only liberal arts college in the SUNY system -
 10 of Champlain's faculty and staff members came to work at Harpur that
 fall - we also received the complete contents of the Champlain library
 which included 16,000 non-duplicate volumes."

That's wrong - Champlain was definitely ACUNY, not SUNY (see Note 1), at the time of her closing (I vas dere, Cholly!).

The Clinton County Historical Society in Plattsburgh mounted a temporary exhibit on Champlain College in the late 1990s; an intern who worked on the project reports that she discovered many primary materials both at the Historical Society and at Plattsburgh State's Special Collections.

One of the nicest memories I have of the campus area is of Clare & Carl's "TEXAS RED HOTS" stand, just across Route 9 and slightly south of the main entrance, where Carl (NOT "Tex"), himself, served a hot dog smothered in chili and kraut and American cheese and what-have-you!  My, those dogs were good; so good, in fact, that on 10 May 1975, coming home from the early-morning bicentennial re-enactment of Ethan Allen's successful attack on Fort Ticonderoga, I detoured up to P'burg to take the wife and kids for a treat and, not only was Carl still there, he even recognised me, 23 years and full whiskers later!  I hear they are both gone now but the stand continues in business.  There is also Nitzy's (NOT Nitzie's), which is not far away, diagonally south across on the other side of Route 9, also still in operation, which I truly do NOT remember (I was loyal to a fault to Carl, eh?), which maintains a long tradition of selling "Michigan Hot Dogs" {whatever they might be -I'll have to try one}.

Now, here, courtesy of Strat Simon, are both noble establishments as pictured by Ralph Heineman's wife Mary in Sept 2001:

[Photos Sep 2001 by M. Heineman, from the S. Simon site - all rights reserved;
(C&C-TRH photo enhanced slightly by SB,III)]

Well, I was up there on 19 Jun 2002 on my way up to Québec, stopped for a Red Hot (which wasn't, and that's a good thing), and took the first picture, of the north side of the shack, and then stopped on my way down from Montréal to the Adirondacks on 25 Jun and did it again, this time taking a shot of their '57 {?} Chevy wagon, with (horrors!) Nitzy's in the background, and the south side of the shack, and a shot of McSweeney's (still Nitzy's - see the roof sign):

[Cropped from 19 & 25 Jul 02 photos by and © S. Berliner, III - all rights reserved;]

A grandaughter was working at Clare & Carl's.  They use an "&" (ampersand), not "and", and use an " ' " (apostrophe); and Nitzy's was NOT "Nitzie's" (see the signs).

Also, I took a photo tour of the old campus on 25 Jun 02 and will put those shots up soon.

It seemed a shame that there was no place on the Web (of which I was aware) where this history could be found, so I added this page (et seq.).

Incidentally, I suppose I should have added from the onset that I was a transferred-in Freshman with Advanced Standing (thus accounting for my having a car on campus) in that fateful last year of 1952-53.

Now here is a photo to send you back in time (almost to Champlain days); the main drag, in front of the Union Hotel, courtesy of Stratis (Strat) Simon.  If my memory serves me, this is looking north, and the Monkey Ward's is across the street to the right (east) and behind the camera (south) about a block or less and the ice-cream parlor was on the same side as the camera (west) and on the southwest corner behind it (as I recall).

(Photo ca. 1956* courtesy of S. Simon - all rights reserved)
{* - per Chrysler Corp. car in right foreground, almost certainly
a '56 Dodge Royal Lancer hardtop coupé - $2,693 new.}
Strat confirmed ca. 1956 and says it was actually only $2,681.
It was $2,693 if you opted for the clear vinyl seat covers that
would not turn yellow until the following year!

Gordie Little (not a CC alum.), who came to work on the the construction of PAFB in the '50s and returned in 1961 to work at WEAV and at WIRY, now writes a weekly nostalgia column for the Press-Republican and does a weekly television program on public access called "Our Little Corner."  He's a gold mine of local information and I am indebted to him for much of the Plattsburg(h) color herein.  He advises that the photo shows Margaret Street with Woolworth's and Fishman's and that there was a talking bird, "Butch", in one of the downtown stores (Woolworth's).  Gordie wrote about "us" on Sunday, 17 Sep 00; click here to read the article.

Strat really came through for us!  Here are his pictures of Champlain College; the Quad (the Parade Ground) and the Student Union looking west {?}, Clinton Hall (looking northeast?), the Flying Club's Aeronca Champ^×, and Ticonderoga and Saratoga Halls (looking northeast):

(All photos from the S. Simon collection - all rights reserved)
{the Quad photo was taken by J. Ortner and the Aeronca photo is undated.}

Looking at the pictures and at a map of the campus on page 193 of Dean Gilbert's book, it dawned on me that I lived in Clinton (NOT Ticonderoga) on the second floor in a four-man room all to myself in the rear of the building, looking out between giant trees to Valcour Island and Burlington.  I had to have been in Clinton because it's the only one parallel to, and directly above, the bluff (and RR) and north of the infirmary; also I was in the southeast corner of the rear center of the building, diagonally opposite the entrance, because Jim Decker's room was on the west side but south of my area, which was like the outer end of the middle of an "E", facing the lake.  Also, I remember being opposite an entrance, quite a haul from the classrooms, which must have been the northerly one, across from the Band Stand and between the President's House and the Faculty Club; the southerly one was between the Administration Building (which also housed the Library and Post office) and the Bookstore and much closer to the classrooms, which mostly clustered in the southwest corner of the campus.

× - That Aeronca Champ lives!  Click HERE.

On 23 Jan 2002, I found these pictures from '52-'53; the front door of Clinton and the view from my rear window looking E and from the south window looking SE out to Valcour Island (or a nuclear missile sub or Champ):

(1952-53 photos by and © 2002 S. Berliner, III - all rights reserved.)

For many more pictures, be sure to visit Strat's photo site.

Gordie further advised that the joint was to have been hopping the weekend of 09-10 Sep 00 as they commemorated the Battle of Plattsburgh which happened on September 11, 1814, and that the late Bob Venne, who did a public access TV show before Gordie's, was also a graduate of Champlain College.

Some more Champlain musings and random sightings on the Web {moved to the new Champlain College Continuation Page 1 on 14 Aug 01}.

Note 1. - Benson Schaffer, who graduated "on the Twenty-Second day of June One Thousand Nine Hundred and Fifty-Two" (and now is out in San Diego), got his BA from the "State University of New York - Champlain College" (in Plattsburgh).  There's no mention of ACUNY on his diploma, of which he sent me a xerocopy to prove his point that Champlain WAS, after all, a component of SUNY!  Can't argue with that, but I knows what I knows; I went to an ACUNY school!  Some day I may find my Champlain catalog and then we'll see!  Incidentally, the diploma is signed by Oliver C. Carmichael, Chairman of the University Board of Trustees, William S, Carlson, President of the University, and F. A. Morse, Provost of the College.

As noted above, ACUNY became a part of SUNY in 1948.

Tom France (see Continuation Page 1) got his certificate in Pre-Engineering from ACUNY in Jun 1949!  Hah!  Vindication!

© Copyright S. Berliner, III - 1999, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005 - All rights reserved.