By Lauren Zazzara
Features Editor
In high school, Lauren Matz, read Thomas Merton’s autobiography “The Seven Storey Mountain.”
Matz, Ph.D, an English professor who attended St. Bonaventure, said she knew Merton had taught at Bonaventure.
“I was interested in connecting up my recollections of St. Bonaventure University with what he was saying in his autobiography,” she said.
Matz said high school primed her to come to Bonaventure.
“I went to a Catholic high school near Buffalo, so I had pretty much found out from my teachers there about the different Catholic universities in the area,” she said. “I had come to St. Bonaventure a few times when I was in high school for Press Day, and I liked the campus very much when I visited for Press Day and also for language day; they had a modern languages day.”
These events brought high school students to Bonaventure for workshops.
Matz said she enjoyed being an undergraduate at Bonaventure, except for when the time came for the Merry Christmas Melody Marathon.
“It was a fundraiser run by the radio station, and people would dare other people to do certain kinds of pranks or stunts over the radio,” Matz said. “And if you didn’t want to do it, you had to pay money as the fundraiser.”
Matz recalled that pranks included daring others to dance on the tables in the dining hall singing “Oh My Darling, Clementine” and stealing all of the shower curtains in Falconio Hall.
She said that the money from the fundraiser went to a children’s charity, but it got out of hand.
“It kind of degenerated over the years into people stealing each other’s belongings and delivering them to the radio station, and in order to ransom your belongings, you had to go to the radio station and pay the ransom,” she said. “It always happened right before finals week, which was not good time for a serious student to get distracted by this kind of fun, crazy nonsense.”
But otherwise, Matz said through a four-year program she was able to receive her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in English. She said she completed the degrees in eight semesters and two summers.
“I was a really dedicated student. I loved being a student. I was good at being a student,” she said. “I wanted to set myself all kinds of academic challenges.”
Matz said she decided to come back to Bonaventure in 1988 to teach.
“Because I’d had such a good experience as a student at St. Bonaventure and I had had such outstanding professors, I was able to imagine myself fitting in really well in this environment again.”
She noted that only a few things have changed since she was a student. For example, there was not a mall until her sophomore year, and the Allegheny River Valley Trail didn’t exist.
“I can’t say that the campus has changed a whole lot. New buildings, but that’s not what is important,” she said. “What’s important is the people. And the people have not changed a lot. We still have wonderful faculty, wonderful staff people and wonderful students.”
This is the third installment in the “Professors from Bonaventure” series. Check out future issues for more!
zazzarlm13@bonaventure.edu
